173 quotes found
"The history of medicine proves that in so far as man seeks to know himself and face his whole nature, he has become free from bewildered fear, despondent shame, or arrant hypocrisy. As long as sex is dealt with in the current confusion of ignorance and sophistication, denial and indulgence, suppression and stimulation, punishment and exploitation, secrecy and display, it will be associated with a duplicity and indecency that lead neither to intellectual honesty nor human dignity."
"Males do not represent two discrete populations, heterosexual and homosexual. The world is not to be divided into sheep and goats. Not all things are black nor all things white. It is a fundamental of taxonomy that nature rarely deals with discrete categories. Only the human mind invents categories and tries to force facts into separated pigeon-holes. The living world is a continuum in each and every one of its aspects. The sooner we learn this concerning human sexual behavior, the sooner we shall reach a sound understanding of the realities of sex."
"The very general occurrence of the homosexual in ancient Greece, and its wide occurrence today in some cultures in which such activity is not taboo suggests that the capacity of an individual to respond erotically to any sort of stimulus, whether it is provided by another person of the same or opposite sex, is basic in the species."
"Some scientists hesitate to continue in a given field of research as soon as its application becomes apparent. This refusal to apply knowledge when it exists seems to us, however, to be as unrealistic as the attempt to apply knowledge before it exists. (page 8)"
"With the right of the scientist to investigate most aspects of the material universe, most persons will agree; but there are some who have questioned the applicability of scientific methods to an investigation of human sexual behavior....It is as though the dietician and biochemist were denied the right to analyze foods and the processes of nutrition, because the cooking and proper serving of food may be rated a fine art, and because the eating of certain foods has been considered a matter for religious regulation. (page 8)."
"There is an honesty in science which demands that the best means be used for the determination of truth. Certainly there are many sorts of truth in the universe, and many aspects of truth must be taken into account if man is to live most effectively in the social organization to which he belongs. But in regard to matter---the stuff of which both non-living materials and living organisms are made---scientists believe that there is no better way of obtaining information than that provided by human sense organs. No theory, no philosophy, no body of theology, no political expediency, no wishful thinking, can provide a satisfactory substitute for the observation of material objects and of the way in which they behave. (page 9)."
"There is an honesty in science which leads to a certain acceptance of reality. There are some who, finding the ocean an impediment to the pursuit of their designs, try to ignore its existence. If they are unable to ignore it because of its size, they try to legislate it out of existence, or try to dry it up with a sponge. They insist that the latter operation would be possible if enough sponges were available, and if enough persons would wield them. There is no ocean of greater magnitude than the sexual function, and there are those who believe that we would do better if we ignored its existence, that we should not try to understand its material origins, and that if we sufficiently ignore it and mop at the flood of sexual activity with new laws, heavier penalties, more pronouncements, and greater intolerances, we may ultimately eliminate the reality. (page 10)."
"It cannot be too frequently emphasized that the behavior of any animal must depend upon on the nature of the stimulus which it meets, its anatomic and physiologic capacities, and its background of previous experience. Unless it has been conditioned by previous experience, an animal should respond identically to identical stimuli, whether they emanate from some part of its own body, from another individual of the same sex, or from an individual of the opposite sex."
"The inherent physiologic capacity of an animal to respond to any sufficient stimulus seems, then, the basic explanation of the fact that some individuals respond to stimuli originating in other individuals of their own sex-and it appears to indicate that every individual could so respond if the opportunity offered and one were not conditioned against making such responses. There is no need of hypothesizing peculiar hormonal factors that make certain individuals especially liable to engage in homosexual activity, and we know of no data which prove the existence of hormonal factors (p. 758). There are no sufficient data to show that specific hereditary factors are involved. Theories of childhood attachments to one or the other parent, theories of fixation at some infantile level of sexual development, interpretations of homosexuality as neurotic or psychopathic behavior or moral degeneracy, and other philosophic interpretations are not supported by scientific research, and are contrary to the specific data on our series of female and male histories."
"The impression that infra-human mammals more or less confine themselves to heterosexual activities is a distortion of the fact which appears to have originated in a man-made philosophy, rather than in specific observations of mammalian behavior. Biologists and psychologists who have accepted the doctrine that the only natural function of sex is reproduction, have simply ignored the existence of sexual activity which is not reproductive. They have assumed that heterosexual responses are a part of an animal's innate, "instinctive" equipment, and that all other types of sexual activity represent "perversions" of the "normal instincts". Such interpretations are, however, mystical. They do not originate in our knowledge of the physiology of sexual response (Chapter 15), and can be maintained only if one assumes that sexual function is in some fashion divorced from the physiologic processes which control other functions of the animal body."
"The mammalian record thus confirms our statement that any animal which is not too strongly conditioned by some special sort of experience is capable of responding to any adequate stimulus. This is what we find in the more uninhibited segments of our human species, and this is what we find among young children who are not too rigorously restrained in their early sex play. Exclusive preferences and patterns of behavior, heterosexual or homosexual, come only with experience, or as a result of social pressures which tend to force an individual into an exclusive pattern of one or the other sort. Psychologists and psychiatrists, reflecting the mores of the culture in which they have been raised, have spent a good deal of time trying explain the origins of homosexual activity; but considering the physiology of sexual response and the mammalian backgrounds of human behavior, it is not so difficult to explain why a human animal does a particular thing sexually. It is more difficult to explain why each and every individual is not involved in every type of sexual activity."
"At the risk of being repetitious, I would remind the group that we have found the highest frequency of induced abortion in the group which, in general, most frequently uses contraceptives."
"If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000"
"In fact, giving society cheap, abundant energy at this point would be the moral equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun. With cheap, abundant energy, the attempt clearly would be made to pave, develop, industrialize, and exploit every last bit of the planet—a trend that would inevitably lead to a collapse of the life-support systems upon which civilization depends."
"Actually, the problem in the world is that there are too many rich people."
"A series of things have come up since then that have made the problem incredibly grimmer…. The ozone hole… acid rain…. Three hundred million people have starved to death since THE POPULATION BOMB was written. The famines weren’t as large as agriculturists thought they would be… due to the spread of… Green Revolution technology into the poor countries…. What makes us nervous right now is that we’re faced with again having to do something desperate to increase our food production greatly.... In 1965 we knew exactly how to do it, the question was could we deploy it fast enough—Today we have nothing left to deploy—that’s very scary.... As a species we’re not able to live on our income; we’re living on our capital, our deep rich agricultural soils are being destroyed, water is being overpumped, and our biodiversity, our life support system—we’re already far beyond what we can support."
"The debate regarding which individual factor, among the three key factors producing the environmental crisis, causes more damage - the size of the human population on the planet, excessive consumption of resources or unequal/ unjust distribution of resources among countries [the wealthier countries consume much more resources than poorer countries] - is like a debate about which contributes more to a triangle, the base or the ribs of the triangle. You can not separate the three factors. If we analyze the numbers over a relatively longer time interval, we will conclude that the size of the population has a bigger impact than consumption. On the other hand, consumption and unequal distribution are also important aspects. If we do not change these three factors all at the same time, the quality of our life will change dramatically. Today humanity is delivering a serious blow to nature, but it is clear that nature will deliver the final blow."
"If everyone consumed resources at the US level – which is what the world aspires to – you will need another four or five Earths."
"As I’ve said many times, ‘perpetual growth is the creed of the cancer cell’."
"To start, make modern contraception and back-up abortion available to all and give women full equal rights, pay and opportunities with men. I hope that would lead to a low enough total fertility rate that the needed shrinkage of population would follow. [But] it will take a very long time to humanely reduce total population to a size that is sustainable."
"The evidence we have is that toxics reduce the intelligence of children, and members of the first heavily influenced generation are now adults. The first empirical evidence we are dumbing down Homo sapiens were the – and the resultant . On the other hand, toxification may solve the population problem, since sperm counts are plunging."
"Too many rich people in the world is a major threat to the human future, and cultural and genetic diversity are great human resources."
"Life has now entered a . This is probably the most serious environmental problem, because the loss of a species is permanent, each of them playing a greater or lesser role in the living systems on which we all depend . The species extinctions that define the current crisis are, in turn, based on the massive disappearance of their component populations, mostly since the 1800s. The massive losses that we are experiencing are being caused, directly or indirectly, by the activities of Homo sapiens. They have almost all occurred since our ancestors developed agriculture, some 11,000 y ago. At that time, we numbered about 1 million people worldwide; now there are 7.7 billion of us, and our numbers are still rapidly growing. As our numbers have grown, humanity has come to pose an unprecedented threat to the vast majority of its living companions."
"Growthmania is the fatal disease of civilisation - it must be replaced by campaigns that make equity and well-being society’s goals - not consuming more junk."
"The idea that we can just keep growing forever on a finite planet is totally imbecilic.... Julian Simon, a professor of junkmail marketing, and his kind, think technology will solve everything.... We can use up the Earth then we can just jump into spaceships and fly somewhere else.... Technology does nothing to solve problems of biodiversity or living space or arable cropland.... Fresh water and arable cropland are finite resources.... We are already far beyond what we can support sustainably.... The provincial view you get from someone living in some wealthy American East Coast city is wildly different from reality. Most of the world is tropical, hungry and poor. Visit the developing world and southern hemisphere and you get a very different view of reality."
"Solving the population problem is not going to solve the problems of racism… of sexism… of religious intolerance… of war… of gross economic inequality—But if you don’t solve the population problem, you’re not going to solve any of those problems. Whatever problem you’re interested in, you’re not going to solve it unless you also solve the population problem. Whatever your cause, it’s a lost cause without population control."
"Overdrafts on aquifers are one reason some of our geologist colleagues are convinced that water shortages will bring the human population explosion to a halt. There are substitutes for oil; there is no substitute for fresh water."
"The key to understanding overpopulation is not population density but the numbers of people in an area relative to its resources and the capacity of the environment to sustain human activities; that is, to the area’s carrying capacity. When is an area overpopulated? When its population can’t be maintained without rapidly depleting nonrenewable resources.... By this standard, the entire planet and virtually every nation is already vastly overpopulated."
"The American biologist Paul Ehrlich likened the loss of species from an ecological community to randomly popping out rivets from the wing of an aeroplane. Remove one or two and the plane will probably be fine. Remove ten, or twenty, or fifty, and at some point there will be a catastrophic failure and the plane will fall from the sky. Insects are the rivets that keep ecosystems functioning...In Paul Ehrlich's analogy we may be close to the point where the wings fall off."
"Without feeling abashed by my ignorance, I confess that I am absolutely unable to say. In the absence of an appearance of learning, my answer has at least one merit, that of perfect sincerity."
"But what is the use of this history, what the use of all this minute research ? I well know that it will not produce a fall in the price of pepper, a rise in that of crates of rotten cabbages, or other serious events of this kind, which cause fleets to be manned and set people face to face intent upon one another's extermination. The insect does not aim at so much glory. It confines itself to showing us life in the inexhaustible variety of its manifestations; it helps us to decipher in some small measure the obscurest book of all, the book of ourselves."
"Do you know the Halicti ? Perhaps not. There is no great harm done: it is quite possible to enjoy the few pleasures of life without knowing the Halicti. Nevertheless, when questioned with persistence, those humble creatures with no history can tell us some very singular things; and their acquaintance is not to be disdained if we desire to enlarge our ideas a little upon the bewildering rabble of this world. Since we have nothing better to do, let us look into these Halicti. They are worth the trouble."
"In many cases, ignorance is a good thing : the mind retains its freedom of investigation and does not stray along roads that lead nowhither, suggested by one's reading. I have experienced this once again. ... Yes, ignorance can have its advantages; the new is found far from the beaten track."
"I have made it a rule to adopt the method of ignorance in my investigations into instincts. I read very little. ... I know nothing. So much the better : my queries will be all the freer, now in this direction, now in the opposite, according to the lights obtained."
"The best thing is to say good-bye, not without a certain regret on my part. One of these days. I will take you and scatter you in your territory, the rock-strewn slope where the sun is so hot. ... There you will learn the hard struggle for life better than you would with me."
"s are ecologically and economically important and, for a variety of reasons, have become ideal subjects for investigating many problems. These include problems of sensory perception during foraging (Spaethe and , 2001); recruitment communication among foragers (Dornhaus and Chittka, 2001; Domhaus and Cameron, 2003; Dornhaus et al., 2003), and the role of parasitism in the evolution of social behavior (Schmid-Hempel, 1998). Recent developments in artificial insemination of bumblebees (Baer and Schmid-Hempel, 2000) provide opportunities for understanding genetic influences on phenotypic traits."
"are attracted to the vigorously growing that follows s and operations, including . People who favor massive clear-cutting often claim that moose thrive in clear-cuts. But what they usually don't mention is that in some clear-cuts they get rid of the moose browse that would normally grow there. They use helicopters to spray s that kill the regenerating young hardwood trees to culture unpalatable and sterile and s."
"When I was a teenage boy in western Maine, I read the books of Jack London, books about a world of rugged people and hardy animals at home in the frozen woods of the north. Dreaming of that world, I ventured out into the forest on s, and if it was in the middle of a storm, all the better. Deep in the forest I would dig a shallow pit in the snow and using the papery bark peeled from a nearby and dead twigs broken from a , I'd start a crackling fire. The splendor of sparks shooting up into the dark sky, the acrid smoke rising through the falling s, and hare or porcupine meat roasting on a stick over the flames, all enhanced the winter romance."
"In my nostalgia for summers past and anticipation of summers to come, I think of swimming, basking in the sun while wiggling into warm sand at the beach, and reveling in the sights, sounds, and smells of flowers, bees, and birds. I think of the dances on balmy nights as we swung and ed our partners and sweated to fiddle at the town hall; and of on Bog Stream, where we d past floating lily pads and big white water lily blossoms. I think of the school year coming to a close. For me, summer used to begin on the first day of school vacation, the season of long days."
"There has been a shift in our attitude toward . Crows are becoming more suburban, and there are reports of crows leaving objects that seem to be thank-yous to people for feeding them. For example, an eight-year-old girl named Gabi Mann regularly received trinkets such as buttons, jewelry, and bits of colored glass. Her online story inspired readers to post details of their own experience with crows and to write comments such as "We love our crows," "I fell in love with this beautiful and intelligent creature," and "I treasure the connection.""
"I do not yet want to form a hypothesis to test, because as soon as you make a hypothesis, you become prejudiced. Your mind slides into a groove, and once it is in that groove, has difficulty noticing anything outside of it. During this time, my sense must be sharp; that is the main thing — to be sharp, yet open."
"Conditions are seldom ideal, and if one waits long enough for ideal conditions one is just making excuses."
"Birds are extraordinary creatures by almost any measure. But they are especially impressive when we are so brash as to compare them to ourselves in their astonishingly diverse ways of becoming parents and of parenting. We need three or four decades to accomplish what birds of many species routinely accomplish in less than a month—court, mate, build a nest, lay from one to about twenty eggs, incubate them, and then feed and protect them to adulthood. In some cases birds also provider their offspring's education. They may have to tens of thousands of miles just to start the nesting season."
"and are not tightly coupled in most birds. In so-called and species there is no apparent male-female bonding. There is instead relatively indiscriminate mating on the part of one sex coupled with often intense discriminating on the other. At the other extreme are apparently permanently bonded couples who mate only in a vary narrow time window (at or slightly before the time of egg laying), during which they may also mate with neighbors, depending on opportunity. In many birds who have successive broods through a season, such as s, for example, a female may be monogamous in the first brood but mate with several males (probably carefully chosen, that is not "promiscuous") in the second, even as she remains with the same original mate to rear their clutch."
"Ravens and magpies may be pure scavengers in the winter, but in the fall they are herbivores eating berries, and in the summer they are predators living on insects and mice and anything else they can kill."
"Cats may scrape leaves and grass over dead prey to conceal it, and some s drag drugged but living insects into previously constructed homes so the wasp larvae can safely feed on fresh meat. But to my knowledge, only one group of animals, beetles belonging to the group ', regularly moves carcasses to a suitable place and then deliberately buries them. Unlike humans, who generally bury only our own species and those pets who have become surrogate humans, these beetles bury a great diversity of birds and mammals but never their own kind. They bury dead animals as a food source for their larvae, and the burying is a central part of their mating and reproductive strategy."
"Heinrich fils, a professor emeritus of biology at the , is best known for his groundbreaking books on raven intelligence (“Ravens in Winter” and “Mind of the Raven”) and for his study of physiological stamina based on his exploits as an er (“Why We Run”). He first made his name, however, as a bug guy. “Bumblebee Economics,” a layman’s guide to insect sociobiology that grew out of his doctoral dissertation, was nominated for a 1979 , cementing his reputation as an uncommonly enlightening for popular audiences."
"In his soul, as in a mirror, were concentrated all the lights radiating from every point of observation — whether human or Divine — and from his soul as from a mirror, these lights were reflected back in every possible combination of beauty and sublimity."
"The Entomologist who broadens the horizon of his observations becomes better able to grasp and comprehend the great problems presented to him."
"The amazing number of species; their curious forms, so infinitely varied, and yet so nearly and gradually approximating through an endless series of transitions from one species to another; the diversity of structure observable in those parts which afford generic characters, added to the wonderful changes in form which they undergo, with their surprising economy - are circumstances which contribute to render them objects of most curious speculation to the philosopher. And although the study of every class of animals is most indisputably attended with peculiar advantages, yet we shall venture to affirm, that is from a knowledge of the characters, metamorphoses, and various modes of life, this little animals are destined to pursue, that [the natural philosopher] will obtain a more intimate acquaintance with the great laws of nature, and veneration for the Great Creator of all, that can be derived from the contemplation of any other class in nature."
"December 2. MockingBird yet with us feeding on Smilax berries"
"Should I say, that the river (in this place) from shore to shore, and perhaps near half a mile above and below me, appeared to be one solid bank of fish, of various kinds, pushing through this narrow pass of San Juan's into the little lake, on their return down the river, and that the alligators were in such incredible numbers, and so close from shore to shore, that it would have easy to have walked across on their heads, had the animals been harmless? What expressions can sufficiently declare the shocking scene that for some minutes continued, whilst this mighty army of fish were forcing the pass? During this attempt, thousands, I may say hundreds of thousands, of them were caught and swallowed by the devouring alligators. I have seen an alligator take up out of the water several great fish at a time, and just squeeze them betwixt his jaws, while the tails of the great trout flapped about his eyes and lips, ere he had swallowed them. The horrid noise of their closing jaws, their plunging amidst the broken banks of fish, and rising with their prey some feet upright above the water, the floods of water and blood rushing out of their mouths, and the clouds of vapor issuing from their wide nostrils, were truly frightful."
"When in my residence in Carolina and Florida, I have seen vast flights of the house swallow (hirundo pelasgia) and bank martin (hirundo riparia) passing onward northward toward Pennsylvania, where they breed in the spring, about the middle of March, and likewise in the autumn in September or October, and large flights on their return southward. And it is observable that they always avail themselves of the advantage of high and favouralbe winds, which likewise do all birds of passage."
"The subjectivity that developed through print culture required that persons give up private identities for public identity. ... The aim of representative men like Benjamin Franklin was to produce themselves as exemplary citizen-subjects who existed primarily in print and in relation to others who also circulated in print. ... Bartram offers a good test case through which we can trace the emergence of a mode of agency that is not equivalent to subjectivity and that developed outside the metropolitan centers associated with print culture."
"His observations of animal behavior are numerous and detailed, and his interpretations merge into a coherent system of thought. The basis of the system is the belief that nature is an emanation of a benevolent God, and that since the animal creation is a part of nature, it therefore, too, is benevolent. Consequently he becomes a champion of the right of animals to be treated humanely."
"I'm like a child who's been brought up inside an institution and has never seen the outside world, the sea, or trees in a wood... Coming here was like being taken out of that box and put into the marvelous real world that there is, and I've simply been standing and gazing in wonder at all of the things that there are in the universe. And I'd just like to live to be 200, because one lifetime isn't enough. ...Of course I shall never retire, I mean when, I'm 65 I hope they'll make me Professor Emeritus, but I also hope that they'll let me go on working. ...I'm writing a book on engineering and biology and the last chapter is called "Gazing Wonder", and that's how I can sum it up."
"A plain steel rod does remarkably well because steel... is a conductor of electricity, as well as of magnetism. This tubular motor is not the most efficient of linear induction machines. ...This amazing force of induction ...appears as almost artificial gravity under our control. Now, as an engineer I must try and put this force to good use, and when I do I must be sure that I'm getting the very best out of my machine. Now one of the advantageous of arrangements appears to be to use two flat machines face to face, forming the outside of a sandwich, with the aluminum sheet as the filling. Now this motor is really a most potent device, but still pretty useless... So if we want continuous motion, we must turn this machine over. Let [it] now be the moving part, and let it sit on a fixed rail and run along that... I'm going to raise the voltage slowly and the motor will climb this very steep incline. ...[I]t doesn't need wheels to grip the rail. There are virtually no moving parts, and the motor is capable of developing a very large force. Taking off. I can control the motor for very low speeds, or stop it when it's moving very fast. When used on the horizontal and made in a much larger size, such a machine is capable of developing a very high acceleration. At the Motor Industry Research Association laboratories at , the linear motor is being used to crash test all kinds of vehicles. ...The linear motor to do this job is very small, It's only about three times as big as our model which climbed the rail. ...Red lights flash, and once the final button is pressed, the forces of induction take over."
"There are all kinds of people thinking about all kinds of things all of the time. That sentence sums up what I would describe as the ultimate deterrent to oppose the urge to invent. It is the feeling that it's all been done. Someone must have done this. I was born too late. All the good pickings are in the last century, and other such rubbish."
"Isaac Newton was right when he declared "If I can see further than others it is because I stand on the shoulders of giants." And you start counting up Newton's giants... Leonardo da Vinci, Galileo, Archimedes. You soon run out of ideas. But Newton knew nothing of Faraday even, and Maxwell, Rutherford, Max Planck, Neils Bohr, Geiger, Einstein, Mach. Our list of giants runs in the hundreds. So the opportunities for new inventions and discoveries... were never greater than they are today. And of one thing we can be sure, they will be... even greater next year."
"I make most of my inventions when I'm talking to other people. ...I drag them from their interest into mine, and then they thank me when they leave, and I feel as if I should pay them a fee, because I feel as if I've used their brain to sort of reflect from."
"When you discover something or observe something for the first time, you... wonder how that works, and then you make one, and you look at it, and you decide you'd better find out how it works. ...[Y]ou set about a detailed series of experiments, and eventually, ...you have to do the sums, it wouldn't be respectable without doing the sums... [Y]ou do the sums and then you publish it as a paper in the learned society journal. ...[Y]ou write it as if it was done from the front, as if on morning one you said "I will now invent the magnetic river..." ...[T]his very unfortunate phrase keeps coming in, "Now it is cleat that..." and "Clearly, obviously..." None of it is obvious. It wasn't the day before you started. No, you do it from the back."
"I was telephoned by a man called Alexander Charles Jones, who asked me if he might bring me a box of apparatus which he said when put on frictionless casters and set in motion inside, would displace itself outside its own dimension. Immediately I knew this man was different. ...Any ordinary crank would have said, "How would you like to see Newton's Laws disobeyed." ...So I said... "Does you box contain anything that might loosely be described as a gyroscope?" ...He said, "In the box, there is a gyroscope." I said, "I think you'd better come and show it to me... because I know enough about gyros to know that they're like electromagnetism, and I've studied electromagnetism for thirty years and I know darn well I don't understand it, and I don't understand gyros either, but I can invent new things in electromagnetism once a year. And if you've got something new about gyroscopes I want to see it." And he brought it, and it did. And that was the start of a new line of research for me. And then, about a year later, I met a second enthusiast called Edwin Rickman who added his own brand of instinct that... improved the ideas we'd already got. Let me say of Alex Jones that since I first met him that I've been convinced both of the validity of his argument, and been impressed with his feel for what I'd call the elements of nature. A thing that the more learned acknowledgement of science and mathematics have seldom had, a natural feel for what goes on..."
"So there is the first message for all of you as potential inventors. Take your own ideas a little further before giving them up. Keep your experience like a sort of treasure house that you can draw on whenever you like. But never, never let it be your master. Be on the lookout for impossible things, the sort the Red Queen dreamed up before breakfast."
"Linear motors can be regarded... as the physical result of splitting and unrolling of rotary machines, and there are therefore at least as many types of linear motor as rotary..."
"[T]here can be no electromagnetic machines before Faraday's discovery of the laws of induction in 1831. To this extent it is surprising that the earliest linear electric motor emerged as early as 1838, for it then took over a century for any linear machine to make a substantial commercial profit."
"[T]he textile men who dabbled in linear motors made a real contribution... and while they were probably unaware of each other's inventions, it seems probable that some of their work was known to later workers in other fields. If only some of the textile men had been aware of the potential for linear motors in those other fields, the 'Second Age of Topology'... might well have started earlier, just as the invention of the induction machine might have occurred in the 1830s had not the inventors of that time been blinded by the demand to generate 'battery-like' current."
"I have been told by different people on separate occasions that the first patent on linear motors was filed by the Mayor of Pittsburgh in 1890, and that it was an induction machine applied to loom shuttle propulsion. ...[T]here is certainly a patent with the same objective in 1895. ...[T]he name [flying] given to James Kay's shuttle of 1733 suggests movement without contact and, as with modern transport in which it is proposed to have ground vehicles 'hovering' clear of the ground, Tesla's invention promised immediate success if it could be applied in linear form. ...The... 70-80 years during which progress in linear motors was extremely slow clearly needs an explanation. ...[T]here are many contributing factors, not least that of the 'amateur' status of the textile inventors in the world of electrical engineers."
"An engineer is first and foremost a scientist. ...an applied scientist ...whose ultimate objective is the profitable manufacture of articles... Academic engineers may argue that they are as concerned with profitable concepts... To this extent they run alongside the pure scientist... with at least half an eye on the profits and with problems many orders of magnitude greater in complexity... In such a no-man's land he is hand-in-hand with his medical colleague, who faced with a malignant disease must let the patient die or try something."
"It is not strange that the engineer fails to produce a unique solution, that his product is seen to be the result of 'art' more than science. ...The product becomes a matter of opinion... and joins the ranks of many other products such as literature, painting and sculpture, and... clothing. It has, in fact, its own history of Fashion."
"A great deal of literature and much pontification have emerged... on the subject of specialization—or rather on its opposite, the 'broadening' of education. Since 1960 I have watched... the inroads which the educationalists, many of which never did any research in science per se, have made into educational institutions and their traditions... Perhaps it had its origins in the 'Science makes War' movement which followed... Hiroshima and Nagasaki... But I think not. [Some] broadeners... felt a need to compete with their University colleagues who were more gifted in the art of research. Others were genuine crusaders with a deep sense of responsibility for the Destiny of Man. ...[T]he broadening process overgrew itself like a neglected greenhouse plant... [A]ny attempt to mingle Sociology and Atomic Physics will spell disaster for those who participate and for the organisations whose members have been so taught. ...I am merely exercising ...the right of a historian... to write his own 'slant' into his train of facts."
"There are so many facets to almost any subject... that to tell the whole in its proper time sequence would be to lose the reader in a sea of facts and details, some related, others not at all."
"Electric motors and generators 'came of age' over almost the same period that engineering was becoming clean and respectable as a profession. Although technology... preceded science, indeed paved the way... scientists were regarded for centuries as belonging to the upper class, the intelligentsia, so closely related to philosophers as to allow overlap. In such a world, technology was not recognised as a subject and engineers... did not appear until there were 'engines' for them to look after. ...Even in the early part of the twentieth century, science as a whole was almost a 'middle class' occupation compared with studies of the classics."
"The universities and the factories were as far apart as the gymnasium and the monastery. ...[T]his watershed inhibited linear motor development for the industrialist would make a linear machine, basing his designs on conventional rotary machine practice, find it to have an efficiency of 20 per cent and a of 0.1, and abandon it for the rest of his career. The reason for the low values of these, in part still fashionable quantities, was not only the lack of theoretical ability but the low speed and small size of applications..."
"[T]he academic tended to dislike the industrialist and the industrialist both distrusted and feared the academic—distrusted because 'theory never works in practice' and feared because the managing director might reveal some chink in his 'armour of experience' when confronted by the academic in the presence of some of his own staff. Had not the 'long-haired Professor' long been a music-hall joke and his caricature the subject of comedy films?"
"Perhaps it was World War II which came to the rescue again when the ridiculous Professor became almost indistinguishable from the 'Back Room Boy'...It reminded me of a young lady who was quite accurately described as 'long and lanky' until she inherited half a million pounds and overnight became 'tall and stately'. The image of a Professor 'stumbling across ideas' was transformed into the Scientist making 'inspired guesses'. 'Men ahead of their time' became a common compliment to those whose ideas were so abstract that they could not be understood."
"Where to begin is obvious—with Michael Faraday... But we must proceed rapidly, jumping 70 to 80 years to [Alfred] Zehden (1902) and to Bachelet, then on to Kemper (1934) (surely the 'father' of Maglev), on again to Bedford, Peer and Tonks (1939) for induction levitation and finally to the Westinghouse 'Electropult' of 1946, the first high-speed linear motor ever to be built."
"[In] the first efforts [1960] of Fred Barwell and myself to try out the feasibility of linear motor drives for railways... we built an 80-foot track in the laboratories of Manchester University... Having put a seat on this vehicle and given rides to daily newspaper reporters (acceleration 0.5 g), we had all the publicity we needed..."
"I built my first linear motor in 1948 and wrote my first paper on the subject in 1954. The Gorton experiment took place in 1962. The first model of a tracked hovercraft was publicly demonstrated at Browndown in the summer of 1966. We... conquered the long pole pitch problem in 1969. We were on the track of very far-reaching experiments with the emergence of a 'magnetic river' following Transpo 72 in May of that year. We were aware of the feedback amplifier type of magnetic suspension and of the cryogenic method (superconductor)."
"[A] world financial recession brought governments into conflict with technological innovation in linear motors in the mid 1970s. Looking back... it will seem amazing that at a time when millions of pounds worth of commercially manufactured linear motors had been sold and had proved their worth, everyone was so slow to appreciate their value in the transport scene, knowing that bigger, faster motors would have enormously superior characteristics to those used for sliding doors, traveling cranes, conveyor belt drives and the like."
"[T]here is still no outright 'winner' in the High-speed Transport Game. Yet Japan Air Lines, Japanese National Railways, Transrapid (in West Germany) and British Rail all made advances in... versions of Maglev and linear motor propulsion in the mid 1970s. ...[E]xciting activities in university departments continued into the 1980s and a great deal of this was an extension of the topological developments of the 1960s. Surely the point of no return was passed..? There could not have been a continuing stream of wrong answers from... research departments... as was forecast by the prophets of doom of the late 1960s."
"The legacy of rotary machine design can be seen, in part, as an inhibition of linear motor experimentation, even as far as the 1970s. In rotary machines, the tangential direction was the thrust direction and the axial direction was simply a means of increasing power output. Three-dimensional thinking was, in some ways, more advanced in the Victorian era... the Second Age of Topology can be seen as having had its beginnings in the demand for high-speed propulsion, the problem of the long pole pitch and the resulting development of the TFM concept."
"The research director of Linear Motors Ltd told me in the late 1970s that he had then listed over one thousand different applications for linear motors. By this he meant that motors had been manufactured and sold for that number of different jobs. The most common applications included sliding doors, traveling cranes and conveyors. The items that were moved varied from 0.1 mg... to over 5 tonnes."
"I shall always believe the force of induction to be sheer magic in its own right!"
"West Germany branched... into... another new topology with a large-scale demonstration of the system... Permanent s were used to provide the lift from the underside of a ground rail. Guide wheels were used to control the gap. The philosophy... better to provide a lifting force of 120 per cent of the vehicle weight and run the wheels on a 'ceiling'..."
"The Jabberwock was a monster with many heads. As such it resembles... the manner in which we divide our science into Physics, Chemistry, Biology, etc., and then Physics into Heat, Light, Sound, Magnetism and Electricity. Often one can spot the various heads as being Laws of Physics, and some of them look into mirrors, see their reflections and think that the total number of their kind is bigger than it really is. Thus they attempt to co-exist with their own shadows and reflections. One of the best examples... is... Laws of Electromagnetic Induction."
"[T]he mirror really is itself, for it changes hands for you as you go through the mirror and changes the motor to a generator at the same time."
"Circularity is a powerful concept, the idea of a closed loop even more so. In circular motion there is magic, just as there is in electro-magnetism. But it only manifests itself when it is, like (shall we say for the moment, rather than a 'reflection' of) its 'neighboring head', truly three-dimensional. ...We can induce current into the one [coil] from the other by means totally unintelligible to us, but to which we give the name 'electromagnetic induction'. But if I place one coil with its axis at right-angles to that of the other, there is no induced voltage. It is as if the two circuits lived in different worlds... What is the meaning of perspective in a four-dimensional space?"
"The whole idea of modern electrical machine theory... is based on this idea of the two independent axes, co-existing, co-related but nevertheless identifiably separate. We deal with complicated matters when we deal with rates of change of current, matters that require not only the Special Theory of Relativity, but the General Theory (the world of relative accelerations)... Might there not exist a similar complexity also in the , if rates of change of acceleration are involved? ...Work on rates of change of acceleration (American scientists have called it 'surge') is very sparse."
"I know no property of a gyroscope that conflicts... with the conservation of energy. ... is in the same state today that as it was in the fifteenth century when Leonardo da Vinci denounced it so properly. ...If you really want to see perpetual motion, look into the sky on a cloudless night and marvel at the size and movement within the Universe."
"The Royal Institution's Christmas Lectures for Young People were begun in 1826 by Michael Faraday—one of Laithwaite's heroes—and Laithwaite gave the lectures in 1966. ...The 1966 lectures also appeared as a book, The Engineer in Wonderland. The title reflected the author's deep-seated belief that engineering was central to modern life: scientists can explain things, but almost every man-made object is the work of an engineer..."
"He did not invent linear motors, but he made them practical and he believed they would provide the ideal propulsion unit for trains. In his most advanced designs the linear motor would propel the train, carry its weight and steer it without needing wheels. In fact the train would move along a "magnetic river"."
"Eric Laithwaite has been aptly called an evangelist for engineering. Like all true evangelists he combined belief and practice with an ability to inspire and enthuse others. Anyone who met him could expect to be given a lucid explanation of the engineering principles behind his current project."
"I know some people think me crazy, but I am no masochist, and only occasionally am stung on purpose. When it does happen, I initially react as anyone else would – cursing, more than I should admit. Then I get out my notebook and stopwatch, sit down and make notes."
"I don't expect people to become entomologists or even necessarily to love bugs, but at least to think before reflexively stepping on them. They are just capable of the most amazing things, and many of the things that they do we couldn't survive on this planet without them doing."
"The best thing people can do is to stop assuming that insects don’t belong on this planet and that it’s our job to destroy them. Insects have lived on Earth far longer than humans have, in many more different places, and they’ve found at least a million different ways to make a living here—we’re living on their planet, not the other way around. My hope is not that everyone will become an entomologist but that more people will appreciate insects for their amazing diversity and adaptability."
"Scientific knowledge helps people to understand and appreciate the world and all of its complexities; it’s the best insurance against irrational fear."
"Natural history studies are fun, rewarding and an invaluable source of information."
"In recent decades the effects of environmental change on insect populations has been the focus of my research. It is widely recognised that invasive alien species, climate change and habitat destruction are all major players in the declines of many insects. Ladybirds are no exception."
"One theory as to why metamorphosis is such a successful strategy is that it enables the immature stages and the adults to each specialise in different tasks, and to have a body designed for the purpose.‡ ‡Please note that I am not suggesting intelligent design by a supreme being. ‘Design’ is shorthand for the blind tinkering of evolution over millennia."
"Ants alone outnumber us by about one million to one. Until perhaps the last 200 years, an alien looking down on Earth at any time in the last 400 million years would have concluded that this was the kingdom of the insects."
"Why he was asked to comment on a subject on which he has no expertise is unclear, but in these strange times it seems common for the opinions of celebrities to be valued regardless of qualifications or experience."
"Some previous deliberate introductions of non-native species to Australia had gone horribly wrong: for example, cane toads from South America, introduced to help control sugar cane pests, have themselves become a plague, proliferating to the point where there are now estimated to be about 200 million of them, eating everything except the pests they were intended to control."
"For me, the economic value of insects is just a tool with which to bash politicians over the head. They only seem to value money, so I point out to them that insects contribute to the economy. But if I’m honest, their economic worth has nothing whatsoever to do with why I try to champion their cause. I do it because I think they are wonderful."
"So, one can argue that insects are important, practically and economically, and one can argue that they bring us joy, inspiration and wonder, but both arguments are ultimately selfish, for both focus on what insects do for us. There is a final line of reasoning for looking after insects and the rest of the life on our planet, big and small, and it is one that is not focused on human well-being. One can argue that all of the organisms on Earth have as much right to be here as we do. If you are of a religious bent do you really think that God created all of this amazing life just so we could recklessly destroy it? Do you think He or She intended for coral reefs to be bleached and dead, littered with plastic trash? Does it seem plausible that He or She went to the trouble of creating five million species of insect so that we could drive many of them extinct without ever even registering their existence? If on the other hand you are not a believer, and accept the scientific evidence that species evolved over billions of years rather than being created by a supernatural being with a beetle obsession, then you must realize that we are just a particularly intelligent and destructive species of monkey, nothing more than one of the perhaps ten million species of animal and plant on Earth. In that view, nobody granted us dominion over the beasts; we have no God-given moral right to pillage, destroy and exterminate. Religious or not, most humans agree that the rich and powerful should not be allowed to oppress or dispossess the poor and powerless (though of course we do allow it to happen all the time). Similarly, in dozens of sci-fi movies from The War of the Worlds onwards, aliens more intelligent than ourselves arrive, decide that the human race is redundant, and set about wiping us out so they can plunder the Earth for their own ends, or build an interstellar bypass. Of course, in these films we see the aliens as the bad guys, and we root for the inferior humans who usually somehow triumph in the end despite the odds being stacked against them. When will we realise the hypocrisy of our position? On our own planet we are the bad guys, thoughtlessly annihilating life of all kinds for our own convenience. We intuitively grasp that the aliens of the movie Independence Day have no right to take our planet; I wonder what goes through the mind of an orang-utan as it sees its forest home bulldozed to the ground? There should not have to be a ‘point of slugs’ for us to allow them their existence. Do we not have a moral duty to look after our fellow travellers on planet Earth, beautiful or ugly, providing vital ecosystem services or utterly inconsequential, be they penguins, pandas, or silverfish?"
"‘Normal’ is different for every generation."
"We are committing ecocide on a biblical scale. I am in no way religious, but if you are, consider this; do you really think God created wonderful diversity and gave us dominion over it so that we could exterminate it? Do you really think He or She is pleased with what we have done?"
"Insecticides kill all insects, not just the ones that they are aimed at, whatever the doublethinkers who manufacture agrochemicals may ask you to believe."
"These are beneficial creatures, and should be celebrated, not persecuted and poisoned in some misguided psychotic urge to kill anything that dares to thrive."
"It is sometimes said that humanity is at war with nature, but the word ‘war’ implies a two-way conflict. Our chemical onslaught on nature is more akin to genocide."
"Glyphosate is a general-purpose herbicide, killing any plant it touches. It is systemic, which means that it spreads through the tissues of the plant to kill the roots. I hate to admit this now, but I once used to use it quite a lot in my garden, as I believed the manufacturers when they claimed that it was non-toxic to wildlife and broke down very quickly in the environment. I used to be very naïve."
"One man’s weed is another man’s wildflower."
"As with most new technologies, however, our enthusiasm for the benefits blinded us for sometime to the downsides."
"Even today there are deniers, sadly including the previous President of the United States and many of his followers – but then there are also people who argue that the world is flat."
"Countries whose efforts are woefully inadequate, and likely to see us heading towards global warming of 4°C or more (catastrophic for all life on earth), include the USA, Saudi Arabia and Russia. It is perhaps not a coincidence that these three countries happen to be the three biggest oil producers in the world. One might be forgiven for suspecting that their heart is not really in tackling climate change at all. In the case of the USA this was made abundantly clear under the Trump administration."
"The fundamental problem with the Paris Agreement is that it has no teeth at all. It relies entirely on countries choosing to cut their own emissions, with no penalty if they fail. It is very easy for a government to make a long-term promise, knowing that different politicians will be in charge by the time any reckoning is due. One only has to look at the 1992 Rio Convention on Biological Diversity, which was signed by almost exactly the same group of 196 governments as signed the Paris Agreement. In the Rio Convention our governments promised to halt the loss of global biodiversity by 2020. In reality, the period 1992 to 2020 has seen the greatest loss of global biodiversity for at least 65 million years. We cannot rely on the empty promises of our governments to save our planet."
"It took many millions of years for evolution to slowly create unique assemblages of plants and animals in each region of our planet, and only a couple of hundred years for us to muddle them up."
"Supporters of the chemtrail theory are generally dismissed as crackpots, and rightly so, because it is absurd to believe that a conspiracy on the scale they describe could possibly be kept quiet. It is not much more plausible than suggesting that the Earth is flat."
"Personally, I do not think we should dismiss GM technology. However, so far most GM crops have been developed by large corporations, with the clear goal of lining their pockets rather than benefiting people or the environment."
"Truth was defined by those who shouted loudest, or had the money to buy it."
"So far are we from fully appreciating the dire plight of the natural world that it is still regarded as a perfectly normal, acceptable hobby to kill animals for fun. Thirty-five million pheasants are reared and released each year in the UK alone, so that a small number of people can enjoy blasting away at these naïve, semi-tame animals. There are simply too many of us (and soon to be many more) for it to be acceptable to carry on killing animals for amusement. We need to somehow persuade everyone to treat our environment with respect, to teach children growing up that littering, killing, polluting, are just not socially acceptable. How can we do that when the supposedly great and the good slaughter pheasants and grouse just for weekend entertainment?"
"I am not suggesting that petitions are a waste of time – they actually take up very little time – but don’t expect them to achieve much. There is a danger that people feel that the job is done, just because their favoured petition has reached a certain number of signatures. We will not save the planet simply by signing petitions, no matter how many we sign; they are a little more than a displacement activity."
"I have never grasped why some folk are so desperate to have a perfectly uniform, green lawn, unmarred by pretty flowers. The concept of a ‘weed’ is entirely within our heads; one man’s weed is another’s beautiful wildflower. If we could somehow engineer a shift in attitude, so that ‘weeds’ such as daisies or clovers were seen as desirable additions to a lawn, rather than enemies to be battled against, we would save ourselves an awful lot of time, money and stress, while helping nature into the bargain."
"If one looks at the bigger picture, modern farming is part of a staggeringly inefficient, cruel and environmentally damaging food-supply system."
"If one was designing a system from scratch to feed the world with healthy food in a sustainable, environmentally-friendly way, it would look nothing like our current forming system."
"Suppose one were to invent a new wheat variety that gave twice the yield. Would the world’s wheat farmers turn half their land over to nature? Of course not. Wheat prices would collapse, and we would find ever-more-wasteful ways of using the surplus, for example by feeding more to animals or using more for biofuels. The farmers would end up farming harder than ever to make ends meet, and nature would not benefit at all."
"The £3.5 billion a year in farm subsidies currently takes taxpayers’ money and uses it to support an industrial farming system that produces copious greenhouse gases, damages the soil, overgrazes the uplands, employs few people, pollutes rivers with fertilisers and pesticides, drives wildlife declines, and over-produces unhealthy food stuffs while under-producing food that is good for us. Why exactly should we pay our hard-earned taxes to subsidise all of this?"
"Similar issues affect the 211,000 km2 protected by the USA’s sixty-two National Parks. These are supposed to be wilderness areas unaffected by man’s activities, yet many are affected by oil and gas drilling, or by invasive species, while quite a few allow hunting, and climate change is affecting them all. The Everglades National Park, for example, is being damaged by over-extraction of water to irrigate crops, by fertiliser and pesticide pollution, and by no fewer than 1,392 different invasive species, spanning everything from Burmese pythons to spreading spans of Australian tea trees. It is clear that trying to set aside areas for nature has not been adequate as a strategy to prevent biodiversity loss – though nature reserves undoubtedly have value – and that we need to do much more. We do not have to continue headlong towards environmental Armageddon, but to halt this process requires us to recognize that our current strategies are not working, and that we cannot carry on as we have in the past. It is not too late to save our planet, but to do so we need to learn to live alongside nature, to value and cherish it, to respect all life as equal to our own, especially the small creatures."
"Globally, beef provides just 2 per cent of the calories we consume, yet 60 per cent of the world’s agricultural land is used for beef production."
"Mology is the study of insects and other arthropods, including those that cause diseases or spread organisms that infect people or damage crops."
"Insecticide resistance by mosquitoes is a major challenge."
"Several termite species are pests that cause damage to crops and forest products, affect soil productivity and landscape architecture."
"Termites that feed on dead wood, grass, leaf litter and micro epiphytes; termites that consume highly decomposed wood or soil with a high organic content; and termites that feed on soil with a low organic content."
"We have 100 species of termites, belonging to 30 genera and eight subfamilies, and recorded two potentially new species (Amitermes sp. and Eremotermes sp.)."
"The correlation between termite species and soil quality is important in agriculture."
"With few exceptions, luminous insects throughout the world belong, broadly speaking, to one family of Beetles, the , or to give them their popular name, the Fireflies and Glow-worms. The most important exception to this statement is afforded by the Fireflies of the West Indies and Central America, locally known as " Cucujos," which, though still Beetles, belong to quite a different family, the or Skipjacks. ... Though usually present to a greater or lesser degree in both sexes, the luminous property is generally developed much more highly in one sex than in the other. When it is the male beetle that possesses it in the greater degree, the light is shown when the insect is on the wing, and is generally of an intermittent or flashing character, and gives to the insects their popular name of Fireflies. On the other hand, when the power of luminosity is the more highly developed in the female beetle, the character is usually associated with a more or less complete absence of wings, and the insect becomes merely a crawling, unpleasant-looking, worm-like creature, generally known in fact as a Glow-worm, which nobody who is not an entomologist would ever dream of calling a Beetle. The males of these insects are winged, in form closely resembling the Fireflies, and are totally unlike their spouses. The consequence of this utter dissimilarity between the two sexes of one species is, that it is not easy to co-relate them properly in our collections."
"... After a brief period spent in other government offices, he transferred in 1910 to the , being appointed assistant in the Department of Zoology, which then included entomology. Under Dr. , Blair was put in charge of a large section of the comprising principally the , which had perforce been largely neglected for many years. His systematic critical revision of genera and species, the description of new ones, the elucidation of the work of the early authors, a catalogue of the and , and so on. Concurrently he published many papers of faunistic interest, based largely on collections made by various expeditions."
"In 1895 the writer became interested in the study of the . Breeding-cage experiments with some detail later on in this paper early convinced him that is the favorite food of this species. Even in the presence of kitchen garbage, , and , flies in confinement oviposited exclusively on horse manure. In the absence of the latter substance but in the presence of the others, he noted egg-laying on decaying fruit and on cow dung but the resultant larvæ failed to develop. He considered himself warranted in the statement that probably 95 percent of the flies found in cities come from the piles of horse manure everywhere so prevalent, especially in the vicinity of stables."
"As is well known, the mosquito-pest is by no means confined to the tropics or even to temperate regions. The stories which the from and other Alaskan localities tell of the abundance and ferocity of Alaskan mosquitoes, are hardly to be matched by any mosquito story which I have heard, historical or otherwise. Many of my friends in the and the who have formed members of summer parties for survey work in Alaska, have come back to this country with a much stronger idea of the importance of the practical study of insects than they had when they started, their acquaintance with mosquitoes having become so intimate and their knowledge of their ferocity having reached such a pitch that the first question which they ask on returning is: "If I have to go up there next summer, what under the sun can I do to keep from being bled to death by mosquitoes?" They state that they never experienced or even imagined anything in the mosquito line quite equal to those found in Alaska. Mr. W. C. Henderson, of Philadelphia, says, concerning Alaskan mosquitoes, "They existed in countless millions, driving us to the verge of suicide or insanity.""
"For many centuries humanity has endured the annoyance of mosquitoes without making any intelligent effort to prevent it except in the use of smudges, preparations applied to the skin, and in removal from localities of abundance. And it is only within comparatively recent years that widespread community work against mosquitoes has been undertaken, this having resulted almost directly from the discoveries concerning the carriage of disease by these insects. As obvious a procedure as it might seem to be, the abolition of mosquito-breeding places is a comparatively new idea. The treatment of breeding places with oil to destroy the larval forms is, however, by no means recent. As early as 1812 the writer of a work published in London entitled "Omniana or Horæ Otiosiores" suggested that by pouring oil upon water the number of mosquitoes may be diminished. It is stated that in the middle of the nineteenth century was used in France in this way, while in the French quarter in oil was placed in water tanks before the , the idea having possibly come France to New Orleans or vice versa."
"was a resident of , and was greatly interested in the so-called of that city. The Institute had founded a museum that contained large collections in natural history brought home through the years by the famous Salem ships. Putnam induced his fellow students, , , , and to work at these collections, Morse on the shells, Packard on the , Hyatt on the s and on geology, and Putnam on the vertebrates and ethnology. Whether they went to Salem to live a year or so earlier or later, makes little difference, but, when gave the Institute $140,000 and the well known was founded in 1867, all of them but Verrill (who had gone to , were placed in definite charge of these subjects in the Museum."
"... ... The structure of the female appendages is beautifully adapted to a remarkable habit in the manner of depositing the eggs, which seems not to have been noticed before among . The eggs are deposited in old logs, in the undersides of boards, or in any soft wood lying among the grass which these s inhabit. By the means of the anal appendages the female excavates in the wood a smooth round hole about an eighth of an in diameter. This hole is almost perpendicular at first but is turned rapidly off in the direction of the , and runs nearly parallel with and about three-eighths of an inch from the surface; the whole length of the hole being an inch or an inch and a fourth. A single hole noticed in the end of a log was straight. The eggs, which are about a fourth of an inch in length, quite slender and light brownish yellow, are placed in two rows, one on each side, and inclined so that, beginning at the end of the hole, each egg overlies the next in the same row by about half an inch. The aperture is closed by a little disk of a hard gummy substance."
"P Smith ... ... the dredgings have very greatly extended the bathymetrical range of this species. It had previously been taken in 250 to 640 s. This increased range in depth is apparently accompanied by a change in the kind of carcinœcia inhabited. All the earlier specimens, over four hundred in number, were found in carcinœcia of Epizoanthus paguriphilus Verrill, while the deep-water specimens were either in a very different species of ', in naked shells, or in an n closely resembling, if not identical with, Urticina consors Verrill, which often serves for the carcinœcium of the next species. S Smith."
"Although Professor Smith's systematic work on the freshwater and marine entitles him to a position in the front rank of American systematic zoologists, his studies on the life histories of the crustaceae proved of more general interest. He was the first to interpret correctly the successive stages in the larval life of the (1872, 1873); and his descriptions of the early life of other crustaceans, particulary of (1873), (1877), Pinnixa (1880), and (1883), have found a wide application in interpretation of the relationships of the various groups. For several years prior to 1874 he assisted Professor Verrill in the preparation of the classic "Report on the Invertebrate Animals of Vineyard Sound"; an ecological study that had no parallel in America for more than forty years. Professor Smith prepared all the material relating to the crustaceae and revised other parts of this widely used book."
"The religion of the Malagasies appears to be fundamentally a kind of mixed Monotheism, under the form of a Fetishism which finds expression in numerous superstitious practices of which these people are very tenacious."
"The key to a scientific inquiry into the nature of the animal soul is evidently the soul of man. For we have no immediate insight into the psychic acts of the animal; we can only infer their existence and nature from the exterior actions which our senses perceive. We must compare these manifestations of the activity of the animal soul with the manifestations of our own psychic life, the interior causes of which are known to us from our inner consciousness. Consequently scientific psychology applies the same key as pseudo-psychology, but it follows critical method."
"The only representative of found by the was Temnocephala semperi . This species was first found by on s in and , from the plains up to an altitude of 5000 (1872, p. 307). It has since proved to have a wide distribution in the Oriental Region ... The creatures are extremely contractile and their great activity is most striking—indeed it is apt to be startling the first time living specimens are seen. They live, often in large numbers, on the lower surface of the body and among the basal joints of the legs of their host, which is apparently always a crab of the genus ' ... When separated from its host, T. semperi stands and waves its tentacles around, as though trying to perceive a new one, or crawls rapidly about. Occasionally, when it is greatly irritated, the tentacles are doubled back and tucked away beneath the concave ventral surface of the body."
"The , though they continued the building of immense s, concentrated attention on the s or halls, marvellousily developing the carving of their many rows of monolithic pillars, as may be well seen in and ."
"As the value of the in checking the depredations of s (whiteants) does not seem to be generally known, I should like to call your readers’ attention to it through your columns. My first knowledge of it came from. sleeping on the ground when camping in a compound which proved to be riddled with termite runs. Several of us used water-proof ground-sheets that we had prepared from unbleached by sprinkling grated paraffin wax over it and then running this into the fibre by passing a very hot iron very slowly over it. In the morning the undersides of these ground-sheets were found to be covered wih termite mud, but to be unharmed and to have served as a complete protection to everything upon them, whereas all campers without them had had their blankets and some even their pyjamas badly eaten, some of the blankets having been reduced to rags. At that time termites were a constant menace to the books in the , where almost all the shelves were built into the walls. In view of the above experience, therefore, I tried coating the insides of all the book-cases with paraffin wax. A great improvement resulted immediately, though termites quickly found their way through any small gaps that had inadvertently been left. This incidentally made these easy to locate and to fill in, since when all trouble from termites has ceased, the danger having been completely and apparently finally averted, for it is now a number of years since the treatment was effected. And the same method has subsequently been used with equal success in s and boxes elsewhere."
"I was lucky enough to be mentored by Dr. Botha de Meillon, the doyen of African Anopheles mosquitoes and author of several books on the topic, who encouraged me to embark on post-graduate studies at Wits University."
"Throughout my career, my research has focussed on the mosquitoes that transmit malaria parasites and how to control them. I have studied their morphology, chromosomes, and isoenzymes, cross-mated them, and bred them in huge numbers in the laboratory."
"The project I was involved in, in northern South Africa, looked at the effectiveness of reactive or targeted IRS (responding only when there was a malaria case) versus proactive IRS (the standard IRS blanket spraying program carried out at the beginning of the season) and how much each cost per annum."
"Entomology is quite often neglected but is critically important if real control or elimination is to be achieved. Capacity building in entomology would also be a crucial aspect that could be addressed by the savings made in targeted IRS."
"I ruined Christmas for everyone because I couldn’t figure out how a reindeer could fly. I mean, they just aren’t built for flying, anyone could see that. So I had to reject either the truthfulness of adults or the conclusions of my own mind."
"Because of my family and our community, my childhood was unique. I never learned what I couldn’t do — as a child, as a woman, or as a black person."
"I had to do what I thought was the most important thing."
"A lot of people opposed our civil rights efforts. I had to do what I thought was the most important thing. That’s all there was to it."
"s are most likely to be seen about about old logs and stumps that are red with decay and crumbling, though an old rail fence or a stone wall is often their last resort. It is no accident that we find them oftenest about old stumps; the rusty red of their fur matches the color of the rotten wood, and they escape the notice of their many powerful enemies. Even the conspicuous stripes of black and white fall into place at lights and shadows, and tell no tales of their presence."
"See how the is adapted to . Its s stand erect with s curving inward. The trough-like pollen cavities of the anthers, opening upward, expose their stores to the insect standing on top. So great is the excess of production over actual needs that the little bee wastefully and unwittingly scatters over the is enough for setting the seed. This store of choice food the flower reserves for its proper visitor—chiefly for this little bee. Large bees would have great difficulty in collecting pollen from flowers that hang on such slender stalks. Wingless insects, like ants, which, if gathering pollen, could run only from flower to flower upon the same plant, and which would thus be poor agents in , are rigidly excluded. Should they be able to run out along the slender flower stalk, and round the fringed border of the and get inside, they would still find between themselves and the pollen overhead a barrier of glandular hairs bearing an acrid and offensive secretion which they would choose to avoid contact."
"In the beds of all our larger lakes and streams there exists a vast animal population, dependent, directly of indirectly, upon the rich organic food substances that are bestowed by gravity upon the bottom. Many fishes wander about over the bottom foraging. Many , heavily armored and slow, go pushing their way and leaving tralis through the bottom sand and sediment. And many smaller animals burrow, some by digging their way like moles, as do the and of gomphine dragonflies; some by "worming" their way through the soil, as do the larvae of and many . Among the burrowers none are more abundant or more important than the young of the mayflies. Indeed, there are hardly any aquatic organisms of greater , for they are among the principal herbivores of the waters, and they are all choice food for fishes. How abundant there are in all our large lakes and streams is well attested by the vast hordes of adults that appear in the air at the times of their annual swarming. They issue from the water mainly at night."
"s and frogs and s, scurrying to cover as we approach the shore of a still clear pond, show us that the water has some very lively inhabitants. They swim and dive and paddle in the open until we come, and then they hide from us distrustfully. Theirs is another world than ours. In that world there are strange living creatures in endless variety. ... No one who has lived by clear waters can have failed to see something of their wonderful life: minnows on the shoals; s dragging their cumbersome portable houses over the brook bed ; the clinging to the stones in the riffle, or the adult in their dancing nuptial flight in the air above the stream; and what could be more interesting? To make the knowledge of the whole range of life in ponds and streams a little more easy of access ... is a public service of no small moment. It is all in the interest of a better human environment; better for health, for , for instruction, and for aesthetic pleasures."
"Among Professor Needham’s most distinguished research is his work with the aquatic insects—the , , and . To the damsel flies and dragonflies particularly, he gave much of his time in study of the biology and classification. His outstanding work A Manual of the Dragonflies of North America, revised in 1954 with a former student, Dr. M. J. Westfall, as co-author, was published by the only a few years before his death. During his career Professor Needham published more than 250 scientific articles, educational papers, and textbooks. His writing was clear, concise, and interesting to read."
"... the experience of is well worth relating. While engaged in constructing an electric-light apparatus, he noticed that one of the lamps gave out a constant musical note. One evening he discovered everything near the box below this light was covered with mosquitoes, all males, notwithstanding the fact that the females preponderated in numbers in the vicinity. He found that when the lamps were set in action all male mosquitoes at once faced in the direction of the lamp which gave forth the musical note, and flew straight at it. The buzz of the lamp was practically identical in tone with that of the female mosquito."
"Speaking of their preferring to sit on dark wood, records that appears to be attracted to black clothing rather than to gray or light brown. We have noticed this also with other species. Pearse says that mosquitoes much prefer dark blue and violet to yellow and red."
"It seems that, in the river districts of Alaska, when the ice breaks up and melts in the spring, the hunting of game over the soggy ground and through the melting snow is impossible, while the ice-cakes in the flooded rivers effectually prohibit any fishing. At about this time, the stock of food laid in for the winter by the Indians has run low, and matters would sometimes be rather serious for the tribes did not the mosquitoes fly to the rescue. At this season these insects appear in countless hordes, clouds upon close, all ravenous for their first spring meal. Falling upon the deer and even the bears, they so torment the poor animals that they rush to the rivers to rid themselves of the blood-thirsty energy; thus falling an easy prey to the watching Indians. At times the eyes of the bears, which are by far the easiest points of attack for the mosquitoes, are so swollen that bruin can no longer see, and thus starves or is captured by some hungry hunter, four-footed or otherwise."
"In 1833 discussed at length the etiological relation of mosquitoes to malaria. Michel in 1847 described the ovoid bodies and the pigment, as did also Prof. J. Jones a few years years later. In 1848 Dr. J. E. Nott published his opinions that the mosquitoes transmit this disease. , a French physician, in 1880 finally and conclusively proved the cause of malaria to be the parasite."
"White masses looking like patches thick mold often occur on , especially about pruning wounds or other scars the trunk and branches and upon s. Beneath this substance are colonies of rusty colored or purplish brown plantlice known as "wooly aphids" on account of the appearance of white covering which is, however, really composed of waxen filaments. The species is common in Maine on , , and and some other ."
"Only two species of s of world-wide distribution are at present known which commonly attack the in numbers sufficient to cause serious injury directly due to their feeding operations. These are are the "potato aphid" (' ) and the "green peach aphid" or "spinach aphid" (' ). A third species, apparently also of world-wide distribution, is often present on the potato, frequenting especially the underside of the lower leaves. This is the "buckthorn aphid" (' Patch); which may, under certain conditions, sometimes cause infestations of a serious nature. All three of these species have been proved to be capable of spreading certain s under experimental conditions; and there can be no logical doubt that they function in the same way in the field. Wherever potatoes are grown for seed purposes these three species of aphids may need to be reckoned with."
"In Maine the s deposit their over-wintering eggs on the common garden foxglove (' L.). Egg-laying in this locality begins late in September and extends through October the time varying somewhat with different weather conditions. The eggs hatch in the spring and the aphids of the first generation, wingless forms called "stem-mothers", seek shelter between the folded parts of the growing leaves. The stem-mothers are slow in their development and are about a month in attaining full growth. On reaching maturity they do not lay eggs but produce their young viviparously."
", inseparable from its pronunciation. In the there are eight tones, which can be acquired only from a living teacher."
"The wife may be divorced for ing, , , , to her husband's parents, and thieving; but all these causes are null when her parents are not alive to receive her back again. A man cannot have more than one wife, but he may take s, whose children are legally subject to the authority of the wife, as 's were to . Public opinion does not however justify the taking of a concubine except when the wife has borne no sons. In regions where the people are very poor, it is uncommon for a man to have more than one wife. A husband may beat his wife to death, and go unpunished ; but a wife who strikes her husband a single blow may be divorced, and beaten a hundred blows with the heavy bamboo. As long as a woman is childless, she serves; as soon as she becomes a mother, she begins to rule, and her dominion increases perpetually with the number of her descendants and the diminution of her elders. Married at fifteen, she is often a great-grandmother at sixty, and is the head of a household of some dozens of persons. So greatly does the welfare of the wife depend on her having sons, that it is not strange that they are her greatest desire, and her chief pride. For them she will sacrifice all else. Her daughters leave her and become legally and truly an integral part of another family forever. For domestic service, care in sickness, help in old age, and offerings for the sustenance of her spirit after death, she must rely on her son's wife, while her own daughter performs these services for someone else. The prosperity of a Chinese household is in proportion to the number of its sons."
"In the region probably nine tenths of the men are engaged in agriculture. The farmers live in villages, isolated dwellings being uncommon. The villages are walled, contain no wasted space, and are densely peopled. The wide-spreading, flat fields, lying along the river-banks at the foot of the hills, may be made to yield a constant series of crops without interval on account of winter. Their chief productions are rice, , es, , garden vegetables, s, , , , the , tobacco, and wheat. Rice is the staple food of the people, and in the best years the local product just supplies the local demand. is the principal export. The cane requires less labour than any other crop, and will grow upon unwatered land, which is unsuitable for rice-culture. One crop of cane or two crops of other produce may be grown in the same year upon unwatered land. On the best rice-fields three crops are sometimes raised. The early rice is sowed in April and harvested in July; the late rice is sowed in August and harvested in November, and the field is then sometimes planted with garden vegetables, which are pulled in March. The expense of fertilizing the third crop is so nearly equal to its value that it is never reckoned as a source of profit to the cultivator."
"Worker ants deprived of the sometimes run with great speed, continue to care for the young in the , fight with aliens of their own or other species, and they may for some days behave as if unconscious of loss. A Stenamma fulvum deprived of her abdomen lived thereafter for fourteen days in one of my artificial nests, and was seen to eat. A ‘’’’ worker lived without her abdomen for five days. M. mentions ... an ant that lived nineteen days after decapitation. In experiments made by me, headless ants have continued to walk about for many days."
"Miss Fielde has devised a very useful glass-nest, which is compact and light and has many advantages over the nests of the and patterns."