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"It was always understood that plants and animals, though completely contrasted in their higher representatives, approached each other very closely in their lower and simpler forms. But they were believed not to blend."
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"Evidence indicates that cats were first tamed in Egypt. The Egyptians stored grain, which attracted rodents, which attracted cats. (No evidence that such a thing happened with the Mayans, though a number of wild cats are native to the area.) I don't think this is accurate. It is certainly not the whole story. Cats didn't start as mousers. Weasels and snakes and dogs are more efficient as rodent-control agents. I postulate that cats started as psychic companions, as Familiars, and have never deviated from this function."
"Hunters will tell you that a moose is a wily and ferocious forest creature. Nonsense. A moose is a cow drawn by a three-year-old."
"My parents were very permissive when it came to animals. As long as we earned the money to buy them and built whatever structure it was they were going to live in, we could have any kind of pet we wanted. They would have let us have a rhinoceros if we could have afforded it."
"If animals could speak, the dog would be a blundering outspoken fellow; but the cat would have the rare grace of never saying a word too much."
Explore more quotes by Asa Gray
"We may take it to be the accepted idea that the Mosaic books were not handed down to us for our instruction in scientific knowledge, and that it is our duty to ground our scientific beliefs upon observation and inference, unmixed with considerations of a different order."
"It was implicitly supposed that every living thing was distinctively plant or animal; that there were real and profound differences between the two, if only they could be seized."
"Your candor is worth everything to your cause. It is refreshing to find a person with a new theory who frankly confesses that he finds difficulties, insurmountable, at least for the present."
"This substance, which is manifold in its forms and protean in its transformations, has, in its state of living matter, one physiological name which has become familiar, that of protoplasm."
"We have spoken of beings so low in the scale that the individuals throughout their whole existence are not sufficiently specialized to be distinctively plant or animal: yet these are definite life in simpler shape."
"There is a class, moreover, by whom all these scientific theories, and more are held as ascertained facts, and as the basis of philosophical inferences which strike at the root of theistic beliefs."
"I accept extinction as best explaining disjoined species. I see that the same cause must have reduced many species of great range to small, and that it may have reduced large genera to so small, and of families."
"Is it philosophical, is it quite allowable, to assume without evidence from fossil plants that the family or any of the genera was once larger and wide spread? and occupied a continuous area?"
"I am sufficiently convinced already that the members of a profession know their own calling better than anyone else can know it."
"Why is it not just as likely that there were as many small general nearly at first as now, and as great a disproportion in the number of their species?"
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