“Love comes even to the plants.” Quoted by Gjertsen, p. 237; and at University of California/UCMP Berkeley website.
“Linnaeus lopped it back to Physalis angulata . . .” Kastner, p. 31.
“The first edition of his great Systema Naturae . . .” Gjertsen, p. 223.
“John Ray’s three-volume Historia Generalis Plantarum . . .” Durant and Durant, p. 519.
“a kind of father figure to British naturalists.” Thomas, Man and the Natural World, p. 65.
“gullibly accepted from seamen and other imaginative travelers.” Schwartz, Sudden Origins, p. 59.
“he saw that whales belonged with cows . . .” Schwartz, p. 59.
“mare’s fart, naked ladies, twitch-ballock . . .” Thomas, pp. 82-85.
. . . “Edward O. Wilson in The Diversity of Life . . .” Wilson, The Diversity of Life, p. 157.
“transferred, amid howls, to the genus Pelargonium.” Elliott, The Potting-Shed Papers, p. 18
“Estimates range from 3 million to 200 million.” Audubon, “Earth’s Catalogue,” January-February 2002, and Wilson, The Diversity of Life, p. 132.
“as much as 97 percent . . .” Economist, “A Golden Age of Discovery,” December 23, 1996, p. 56.
“he estimated the number of known species of all types . . .” Wilson, The Diversity of Life, p. 133.
“Other authorities have put the number . . .” U.S. News and World Report, August 18, 1997, p. 78.
“It took Groves four decades to untangle everything . . .” New Scientist, “Monkey Puzzle,” October 6, 2001, p. 54.
“about fifteen thousand new species of all types . . .” Wall Street Journal, “Taxonomists Unite to Catalog Every Species, Big and Small,” January 22, 2001.
“It’s not a biodiversity crisis, it’s a taxonomist crisis!” Ken Maes, interview with author, National Museum, Nairobi, October 2, 2002.
“many species are being described poorly . . .” Nature, “Challenges for Taxonomy,” May 2, 2002, p. 17.
“an enterprise called the All Species Foundation . . .” The Times (London), “The List of Life on Earth,” July 30, 2001.
“your mattress is home to perhaps two million microscopic mites . . .” Bodanis, The Secret House, p. 16.
“to quote the man who did the measuring . . .” New Scientist, “Bugs Bite Back,” February 17, 2001, p. 48.
“These mites have been with us since time immemorial . . .” Bodanis, The Secret House, p. 15.
“Your sample will also contain perhaps a million plump yeasts . . .” National Geographic, “Bacteria,” August 1993, p. 39.
“If over 9,000 microbial types exist . . .” Wilson, The Diversity of Life, p. 144.
“it could be as high as 400 million.” Tudge, The Variety of Life, p. 8.
“discovered a thousand new species of flowering plant . . .” Wilson, The Diversity of Life, p. 197.
“tropical rain forests cover only about 6 percent . . .” Wilson, The Diversity of Life, p. 197.
“over three and a half billion years of evolution.” Economist, “Biotech’s Secret Garden,” May 30, 1998, p. 75.
“found on the wall of a country pub . . .” Fortey, Life, p. 75.
“about 500 species have been identified . . .” Ridley, The Red Queen, p. 54.
“all the fungi found in a typical acre of meadow . . .” Attenborough, The Private Life of Plants, p. 176.
“the number could be as high as 1.8 million.” National Geographic, “Fungi,” August 2000, p. 60; and Leakey and Lewin, The Sixth Extinction, p. 117.
“The large flightless New Zealand bird . . .” Flannery and Schouten, A Gap in Nature, p. 2.
