No annual training or muster of soldiery, no celebration with its scarfs and banners, could import into the town a hundredth part ...of the annual splendor of our October. We have only to set the trees, or let them stand, and Nature will find the colored drapery,--flags of all her nations, some of whose private signals hardly the botanist can read,--while we walk under the triumphal arches of the elms.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I am more and more convinced that the ant colony is not so much composed of separate individuals as that the colony is a sort of i...ndividual, and each ant like a loose cell in it. Our own blood stream, for instance, contains hosts of white corpuscles which differ little from free-swimming amoebae. When bacteria invade the blood stream, the white corpuscles, like the ants defending the nest, are drawn mechanically to the infected spot, and will die defending the human cell colony. I admit that the comparison is imperfect, but the attempt to liken the individual human warrior to the individual ant in battle is even more inaccurate and misleading. The colony of ants with its component numbers stands half way, as a mechanical, intuitive, and psychical phenomenon, between our bodies as a collection of cells with separate functions and our armies made up of obedient privates. Until one learns both to deny real individual initiative to the single ant, and at the same time to divorce one's mind from the persuasion that the colony has a headquarters which directs activity ... one can make nothing but pretty fallacies out of the polity of the ant heap.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
As the brain of man is the speck of dust in the universe that thinks, so the leaves--the fern and the needled pine and the lattice...d frond and the seaweed ribbon--perceive the light in a fundamental and constructive sense. The flowers looking in from the walled garden through my window do not, it is true, see me. But their leaves see the light, as my eyes can never do. They take it, as it forever spills away radiant into space in a golden waste, to a primal purpose. They impound its stellar energy, and with that force they make life out of the elements. They breathe upon the dust, and it is a rose. Say that this is done with neither thought nor passion, and by something other than will. True that a plant may not think; neither will the profoundest of men ever put forth a flower. Of the use and the beauty of flowering there can be no shade of doubt. It is a rare thought of which as much can be said.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Panoramas are not what they used to be. Claude has been dead a long time... And apostrophes are forbidden on the funicular. Marx has ruined Nature, For the moment.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »