Donald C. Peattie

Donald Culross Peattie (June 21, 1898 – November 16, 1964) was an American botanist, naturalist and author.

Quotes

• All the great naturalists have been habitual walkers; for no laboratory, no book, car, train or plane takes the place of honest footwork for this calling, be it amateur's or professional's.
  • "The Joy of Walking", in Aaron Sussman and Ruth Goode, The Magic of Walking (1967), p. 295

• I have often started off on a walk in the state called mad — mad in the sense of sore-headed, or mad with tedium or confusion; I have set forth dull, null and even thoroughly discouraged. But I never came back in such a frame of mind, and I never met a human being whose humor was not the better for a walk.
  • "The Joy of Walking", pp. 296–7

An Almanac for Moderns (1935)

New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons

• In Thomas Henry Huxley Darwinism had a champion in invincible armor. For sheer glitter his mind has seldom had an equal in any land or age and he laid waste about him with the weapon of truth. “The cradle of every science,” he chuckled, “is surrounded by dead theologians as that of Hercules was with strangled serpents.”
  • February 13

• The beauty of a butterfly’s wing, the beauty of all things, is not a slave to purpose, a drudge sold to futurity. It is excrescence, superabundance, random ebullience, and sheer delightful waste to be enjoyed in its own high right.
  • March 13

• A thing is either alive or it isn't; there is nothing that is almost alive. There is but the remotest possibility of the origin of life by spontaneous generation, and every likelihood that Arrhenius is right when he dares to claim that life is a cosmic phenomenon, something that drifts between the spheres, like light, and like light transiently descends upon those fit to receive it.
  • March 17

• Life is a phenomenon, sui generis, a primal fact in its own right, like energy. Cut flesh or wood how you like, hack at them in a baffled fury — you cannot find life itself, you can only see what it built out of the lifeless dust.
  • March 17

• Life is adventure in experience, and when you are no longer greedy for the last drop of it, it means no more than that you have set your face, whether you know it or not, to the day when you shall depart without a backward look. Those who look backward longingly to the end die young, at whatever age.
  • March 18

• Futile for science to try to discover what the forces of Nature are; it can only discover how they operate.
  • March 28

• It is Nature herself, as we grow in comprehension of her, who weans us from our early faith.
  • March 30

• Old earth is great with her children, the bulb and the grub, and the sleepy mammal and the seed.
  • April 6

• A bucketful of water may support ten thousand copepods; but a water snake may require a marsh to himself, as a whale needs league upon league of sea, or a bear the half of a mountainside. It is a question if there be any biologic advantage in mastering your environment when you need such a quantity of it to support you.
  • April 16

• In short, evolution is not so much progress as it is simply change. It does not leave all its primitive forms behind. It carries them over from age to age, well knowing that they are the precious base of the pyramid on which the more fantastic and costly experiments must be carried.
  • April 18

• The time to hear bird music is between four and six in the morning. Seven o’clock is not too late, but by eight the fine rapture is over, due, I suspect, to the contentment of the inner man that comes with breakfast; a poet should always be hungry or have a lost love.
  • April 22

• Grant but a single teleological explanation in biology, and you have left the path of scientific thinking. Plan there may be, but only a working plan, a vast experimentation still in course.
  • May 19

• Evolution is not a mere product of life, like starch or blood; it is a part of life itself, just as flow is part of a river.
  • July 18

• Of all the astronomical events, the fall of a meteorite is the most unnerving and yet the most reassuring. Reassuring because it proves to us that the depths of space are inhabited by bodies made of the same elements we have here on earth, that, at rock bottom, a man and a star are built of the same stuff.
  • August 11

• Star-gazing is a common name for harmless futility.
  • August 17

• Not blood nor flesh not hair nor feathers, not the chlorophyll or cellulose of the plants, is stranger than the stuff called chitin.
  • August 21

• It is my contention that specialization should be left to those who are not mentally gifted at generalization.
  • September 21

• The harvest moon has no innocence, like the slim quarter moon of a spring twilight, nor has it the silver penny brilliance of the moon that looks down upon the resorts of summertime. Wise, ripe, and portly, like an old Bacchus, it waxes night after night.
  • September 24

• A tree in its old age is like a bent but mellowed and wise old man; it inspires our respect and tender admiration; it is too noble to need our pity.
  • October 27

• It is natural that women should like the birds whose domestic affairs can be observed under the eaves; they love the sweetest singers, the brightest plumage, the species not too shy to be seen at close range. For them the waders and swimmers, the awkward of leg, the harsh of cry, the wild of soul, have seldom the same appeal. But that which flees from men, that will men have. Women of all people ought to understand this, but they do not, quite.
  • November 9

• No picture of life today is even worth a glance that does not show the bacteria as the foundation of life itself, the broad base of the pyramid on which all the rest is erected.
  • November 27

• The bacteria are only the most primitive, and adaptable-to-the-primitive beings that are at present known. They may have had — may still have — antecedents even more hardy and fitted to digest the raw stuff of the universe, perhaps even the interstellar calcium that is one of the recent discoveries of the watchers of the skies.
  • November 30

Flowering Earth (1939)

New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons

• 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 latticed frond and the seaweed ribbon — perceive the light in a fundamental and constructive sense. ... Their leaves see the light, as my eyes can never do. ... They impound its stellar energy, and with that force they make life out of the elements.
  • Ch. 1, p. 4

• There are always some of us, not a few, in every generation, who go over wholly to the green flag. It is such a passionless fealty, so reticent a love, that neither do trumpets sound for it nor quarrels arise from it. Only, you will find that those who have pledged allegiance are happy about it in quiet.
  • Ch. 1, p. 6

• It is a strange thing, and a wondrous one, that no one can tell you what a plant is. And when you meet with that which is indefinable, then indeed are you in the presence of something great.
  • Ch. 4, p. 38

• The more anyone knows about the two kingdoms, animate and vegetating, the less he perceives any boundary between them, until finally he comes to deny the existence of that boundary. Holding the passport of investigation which is stamped with the one great seal of life itself, a biologist travels unchallenged from one realm to the other.
  • Ch. 4, p. 38

• Weighted in their armor of cellulose, the higher land plants, it is true, have taken up fixed stations in life. So they have rather surrendered to the animal kingdom the proverbially broadening effects of travel. But they have not lost the power of motion. Like a dancing girl who expresses dance without stirring her feet, they too gesticulate.
  • Ch. 4, p. 41

• If the plant, from lack of water, should be allowed to perish, one may watch its dance of death, as it twists in the throes of dehydration, droops its heavy head, and falls.
  • Ch. 4, p. 42

• Species is but the ideal form; within this idea, within each species, is a diversity of individuality to make the stars look monotonous.
  • Ch. 4, p. 47

• The typical animal egg, once fertilized, develops as a unit; the secret fetus slips out of one stage of development into another, each stage geologic eons from the other, as it recapitulates animal evolution.
  • Ch. 4, p. 48

• As plantsmen we are interested in the moment when the first plant began. For there was raised the flag of life.
  • Ch. 6, p. 61

• What is a weed? I have heard it said that there are sixty definitions. For me, a weed is a plant out of place.
  • Ch. 12, p. 156

• When a naturalist is thoroughly comfortable and settled, it is time to uproot him.
  • Ch. 13, p. 162

• The fungi are the underworld of plant life, that lives clandestinely, by its unconscious wits, taking to cover in unfavorable times, rioting at another.
  • Ch. 18, p. 234

• Of our windows on the universe, science is set with the clearest pane; it is not warped or waved to make the images appear to support any dogma; the glass is not rose-tinted, neither is it leaded with a picture that shuts out the sun and, coming between the light of day and you, enforces the credence of the past upon the young present.
  • Ch. 18, p. 244

The Road of a Naturalist (1941)

Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co.

• The Grand Canyon is carven deep by the master hand; it is the gulf of silence, widened in the desert; it is all time inscribing the naked rock; it is the book of earth.
  • Ch. 12, p. 206

American Heartwood (1949)

Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co.

• Wood, if you stop to think of it, has been man’s best friend in the world. It held him in his cradle, went to war as the gunstock in his hand, was the frame of the bed he came to rejoicing, the log upon his hearth when he was cold, and will make him his last long home. It was the murmuring bough above his childhood play, and the roof over the first house he called his own. It is the page he is reading at this moment; it is the forest where he seeks sanctuary from a stony world.
  • Ch. 6, p. 88

A Cup of Sky (1950)

Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co.

• The oldest voice in the world is the wind. When it murmurs in summer’s leaves, it seems an idle trifler. When in the night it goes wandering by, setting the old house faintly to groaning, it sounds like a pilgrim that has lost the road. When you see it fitfully turning the blades of a mill lazily to draw water, you think of it as an unreliable servant of man. But in truth, it is one of our masters, obedient only to the lord sun and the whirling of the great globe itself.

External links

• Encyclopedic article on Donald C. Peattie on Wikipedia