"Our imagination is struck only by what is great; but the lover of natural philosophy should reflect equally on little things. We have just seen that winged insects, collected in society, and concealing in their sucker a liquid that irritates the skin, are capable of rendering vast countries almost uninhabitable. Other insects equally small, the termites (comejen), create obstacles to the progress of civilization, in several hot and temperate parts of the equinoctial zone, that are difficult to be surmounted. They devour paper, pasteboard, and parchment with frightful rapidity, utterly destroying records and libraries. Whole provinces of Spanish America do not possess one written document that dates a hundred years back. What improvement can the civilization of nations acquire if nothing link the present with the past; if the depositaries of human knowledge must be repeatedly renewed; if the records of genius and reason cannot be transmitted to posterity?"
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Alexander von Humboldt, Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of America, during the years 1799-1804 (1869) Vol. 2 p. 288.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Natural_philosophy
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Natural philosophy
Natural philosophy or philosophy of nature (from Latin philosophia naturalis) has been described as the philosophical study of nature and the physical universe that was dominant before the development of modern science, and as the precursor to the natural sciences. However, it is described by some below as "a word still used for physics at the Scottish universities" as late as 1949, as the "love of a knowledge of the productions of nature or God," and that the "science of today is in danger of l
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