"Every breath you draw, every accelerated beat of your heart in the emotional periods of your oratory depend upon highly elaborated physical and chemical reactions and mechanisms which nature has been building up through a million centuries. If one of these mechanisms, which you owe entirely to your animal ancestry, were to be stopped for a single instant, you would fall lifeless on the stage. Not only this, but some of your highest ideals of human fellowship and comradeship were not created in a moment, but represent the work of ages."
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Academics from the United StatesPaleontologists from the United StatesPeople from ConnecticutGeologists from the United StatesEugenicists
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As quoted in the closing address by Dr. Henry Sloane Coffin, president of the Union Theological Seminary, New York, at the Memorial Service for Osborn at St. Bartholomew's Church, N.Y. (18 December 1935); published in "Henry Fairfield Osborn", Supplement to Natural History, Vol. 37, no. 2 (February 1936), p. 133
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Henry Fairfield Osborn
Henry Fairfield Osborn (August 8, 1857 – November 6, 1935) was an American geologist, paleontologist, and eugenicist. He described and named the Ornitholestes in 1903, Tyrannosaurus in 1905, the Pentaceratops in 1923, and the Velociraptor in 1924.
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