Classification Quotes

3/16/2019 Classification Quotes - 97 quotes on Classification Science Quotes - Dictionary of Science Quotations and Scientist Quotes
Classification Quotes (97 quotes)
(source)
Branches or types are characterized by the plan of their structure,

Classes, by the manner in which that plan is executed, as far as ways and means are concerned,
Orders, by the degrees of complication of that structure,
Families, by their form, as far as determined by structure,
Genera, by the details of the execution in special parts, and
Species, by the relations of individuals to one another and to the world in which they live, as well as by the
proportions of their parts, their ornamentation, etc.
— Louis Agassiz
Essay on Classification (1857). Contributions to the Natural History of the United States of America (1857), Vol. I, 170.
The classification of facts, the recognition of their sequence and relative significance is the function of science,
and the habit of forming a judgment upon these facts unbiassed by personal feeling is characteristic of what
may be termed the scientific frame of mind.
— Karl Pearson
From The Grammar of Science (1892), 8.
A first step in the study of civilization is to dissect it into details, and to classify these in their proper groups.
Thus, in examining weapons, they are to be classed under spear, club, sling, bow and arrow, and so forth; among
textile arts are to be ranged matting, netting, and several grades of making and weaving threads; myths are
divided under such headings as myths of sunrise and sunset, eclipse-myths, earthquake-myths, local myths which
account for the names of places by some fanciful tale, eponymic myths which account for the parentage of a
tribe by turning its name into the name of an imaginary ancestor; under rites and ceremonies occur such
practices as the various kinds of sacrifice to the ghosts of the dead and to other spiritual beings, the turning to
the east in worship, the purification of ceremonial or moral uncleanness by means of water or fire. Such are a
few miscellaneous examples from a list of hundreds … To the ethnographer, the bow and arrow is the species,
the habit of flattening children’s skulls is a species, the practice of reckoning numbers by tens is a species. The
geographical distribution of these things, and their transmission from region to region, have to be studied as the
naturalist studies the geography of his botanical and zoological species.
— Sir Edward Burnett Tylor
In Primitive Culture (1871), Vol. 1, 7.
A … difference between most system-building in the social sciences and systems of thought and classification of
the natural sciences is to be seen in their evolution. In the natural sciences both theories and descriptive
systems grow by adaptation to the increasing knowledge and experience of the scientists. In the social sciences,
systems often issue fully formed from the mind of one man. Then they may be much discussed if they attract
attention, but progressive adaptive modification as a result of the concerted efforts of great numbers of men is
rare.
— Lawrence Joseph Henderson
The Study of Man (1941), 19-20.
Absorbed in the special investigation, I paid no heed to the edifice which was meanwhile unconsciously building
itself up. Having however completed the comparison of the fossil species in Paris, I wanted, for the sake of an
easy revision of the same, to make a list according to their succession in geological formations, with a view of
determining the characteristics more exactly and bringing them by their enumeration into bolder relief. What
https://todayinsci.com/QuotationsCategories/C_Cat/Classification-Quotations.htm 1/15
was my joy and surprise to find that the simplest enumeration of the fossil fishes according to their geological
succession was also a complete statement of the natural relations of the families among themselves; that one
might therefore read the genetic development of the whole class in the history of creation, the representation
of the genera and species in the several families being therein determined; in one word, that the genetic
succession of the fishes corresponds perfectly with their zoological classification, and with just that
classification proposed by me.
— Louis Agassiz
Quoted in Elizabeth Cary Agassiz (ed.), Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence (1885), Vol. I, 203-4.
And all their botany is Latin names.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson
As an antiquary of a new order, I have been obliged to learn the art of deciphering and restoring these remains,
of discovering and bringing together, in their primitive arrangement, the scattered and mutilated fragments of
which they are composed, of reproducing in all their original proportions and characters, the animals to which
these fragments formerly belonged, and then of comparing them with those animals which still live on the
surface of the earth; an art which is almost unknown, and which presupposes, what had scarcely been obtained
before, an acquaintance with those laws which regulate the coexistence of the forms by which the different
parts of organized being are distinguished.
— Baron Georges Cuvier
'Preliminary discourse', to Recherches sur les Ossemens Fossiles (1812), trans. R. Kerr Essay on the Theory of the Earth (1813), 1-2.
As mineralogy constitutes a part of chemistry, it is clear that this arrangement [of minerals] must derive its
principles from chemistry. The most perfect mode of arrangement would certainly be to allow bodies to follow
each other according to the order of their electro-chemical properties, from the most electro-negative, oxygen,
to the most electro-positive, potassium; and to place every compound body according to its most electro-positive
ingredient.
— Jöns Jacob Berzelius
An Attempt to Establish a Pure Scientific System of Mineralogy (1814), trans. J. Black, 48.
But no pursuit at Cambridge was followed with nearly so much eagerness or gave me so much pleasure as
collecting beetles. It was the mere passion for collecting, for I did not dissect them, and rarely compared their
external characters with published descriptions, but got them named anyhow. I will give a proof of my zeal: one
day, on tearing off some old bark, I saw two rare beetles, and seized one in each hand; then I saw a third and
new kind, which I could not bear to lose, so that I popped the one which I held in my right hand into my mouth.
Alas! it ejected some intensely acrid fluid, which burnt my tongue so that I was forced to spit the beetle out,
which was lost, as was the third one.
— Charles Darwin
In Charles Darwin and Francis Darwin (ed.), Charles Darwin: His Life Told in an Autobiographical Chapter, and in a Selected Series of
His Published Letters (1892), 20.
By the classification of any series of objects, is meant the actual or ideal arrangement together of those which
are like and the separation of those which are unlike ; the purpose of this arrangement being to facilitate the
operations of the mind in clearly conceiving and retaining in the memory the characters of the objects in
question.
— Thomas Henry Huxley
In 'Lecture I: On the Classification of Animals', Lectures on the Elements of Comparative Anatomy: On the ... - (1864), 1.
Classification is now a pejorative statement. You know, these classifiers look like “dumb fools.” I’m a classifier.
But I’d like to use a word that includes more than what people consider is encompassed by classification. It is
more than that, and it’s something which can be called phenomenology.
— William Wilson Morgan
'Oral History Transcript: Dr. William Wilson Morgan' (8 Aug 1978) in the Niels Bohr Library & Archives.
Consider the eighth category, which deals with stones. Wilkins divides them into the following classifications:
ordinary (flint, gravel, slate); intermediate (marble, amber, coral); precious (pearl, opal); transparent (amethyst,
sapphire); and insoluble (coal, clay, and arsenic). The ninth category is almost as alarming as the eighth. It
reveals that metals can be imperfect (vermilion, quicksilver); artificial (bronze, brass); recremental (filings,
rust); and natural (gold, tin, copper). The whale appears in the sixteenth category: it is a viviparous, oblong fish.
These ambiguities, redundances, and deficiencies recall those attributed by Dr. Franz Kuhn to a certain Chinese
encyclopedia entitled Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge. On those remote pages it is written that
animals are divided into (a) those that belong to the Emperor, (b) embalmed ones, (c) those that are trained, (d)
suckling pigs, (e) mermaids, (f) fabulous ones, (g) stray dogs, (h) those that are included in this classification, (i)
those that tremble as if they were mad, (j) innumerable ones, (k) those drawn with a very fine camel's hair
brush, (l) others, (m) those that have just broken a flower vase, (n) those that resemble flies from a distance.
— Jorge Luis Borges
Other Inquisitions 1937-1952 (1964), trans. Ruth L. C. Simms, 103.
Embryology furnishes, also, the best measure of true affinities existing between animals.
— Louis Agassiz
Essay on Classification (1857). Contributions to the Natural History of the United States of America (1857), Vol. I, 85.
Ethnologists regard man as the primitive element of tribes, races, and peoples. The anthropologist looks at him
as a member of the fauna of the globe, belonging to a zoölogical classification, and subject to the same laws as
the rest of the animal kingdom. To study him from the last point of view only would be to lose sight of some of
his most interesting and practical relations; but to be confined to the ethnologist’s views is to set aside the
scientific rule which requires us to proceed from the simple to the compound, from the known to the unknown,
from the material and organic fact to the functional phenomenon.
— Paul Broca
'Paul Broca and the French School of Anthropology'. Lecture delivered in the National Museum, Washington, D.C., 15 April 1882, by
Dr. Robert Fletcher. In The Saturday Lectures (1882), 118.
Experiments on ornamental plants undertaken in previous years had proven that, as a rule, hybrids do not
represent the form exactly intermediate between the parental strains. Although the intermediate form of some
of the more striking traits, such as those relating to shape and size of leaves, pubescence of individual parts,
and so forth, is indeed nearly always seen, in other cases one of the two parental traits is so preponderant that
it is difficult or quite impossible, to detect the other in the hybrid. The same is true for Pisum hybrids. Each of
the seven hybrid traits either resembles so closely one of the two parental traits that the other escapes
detection, or is so similar to it that no certain distinction can be made. This is of great importance to the
definition and classification of the forms in which the offspring of hybrids appear. In the following discussion
those traits that pass into hybrid association entirely or almost entirely unchanged, thus themselves
representing the traits of the hybrid, are termed dominating and those that become latent in the association,
recessive. The word 'recessive' was chosen because the traits so designated recede or disappear entirely in the
hybrids, but reappear unchanged in their progeny, as will be demonstrated later.
— Gregor Mendel
'Experiments on Plant Hybrids' (1865). In Curt Stern and Eva R. Sherwood (eds.), The Origin of Genetics: A Mendel Source Book
(1966), 9.
Extinction has only separated groups: it has by no means made them; for if every form which has ever lived on
this earth were suddenly to reappear, though it would be quite impossible to give definitions by which each group
could be distinguished from other groups, as all would blend together by steps as fine as those between the
finest existing varieties, nevertheless a natural classification, or at least a natural arrangement, would be
possible.
— Charles Darwin
From On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection; or, The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (1860),
431.
Fortunately Nature herself seems to have prepared for us the means of supplying that want which arises from
the impossibility of making certain experiments on living bodies. The different classes of animals exhibit almost
all the possible combinations of organs: we find them united, two and two, three and three, and in all proportions;
while at the same time it may be said that there is no organ of which some class or some genus is not deprived. A
careful examination of the effects which result from these unions and privations is therefore sufficient to
enable us to form probable conclusions respecting the nature and use of each organ, or form of organ. In the
same manner we may proceed to ascertain the use of the different parts of the same organ, and to discover
those which are essential, and separate them from those which are only accessory. It is sufficient to trace the
organ through all the classes which possess it, and to examine what parts constantly exist, and what change is
produced in the respective functions of the organ, by the absence of those parts which are wanting in certain
classes.
— Baron Georges Cuvier
Letter to Jean Claude Mertrud. In Lectures on Comparative Anatomy (1802), Vol. I, xxiii--xxiv.
From whatever I have been able to observe up to this time the series of strata which form the visible crust of
the earth appear to me classified in four general and successive orders. These four orders can be conceived to
be four very large strata, as they really are, so that wherever they are exposed, they are disposed one above
the other, always in the same order.
— Giovanni Arduino
Quoted in Francesco Rodolico, 'Arduino', In Charles Coulston Gillispie (ed.), Dictionary of Scientific Biography (1970), Vol. 1, 234.
Geneticists believe that anthropologists have decided what a race is. Ethnologists assume that their
classifications embody principles which genetic science has proved correct. Politicians believe that their
prejudices have the sanction of genetic laws and the findings of physical anthropology to sustain them.
— Lancelot Hogben
'The Concept of Race.' In Genetic Principles in Medicine and Social Science (1931), 122.
God created, Linnaeus ordered.

— Sten Lindroth
Quoting the witticism current in the late eighteenth century in 'The Two Faces of Linnaeus', in Tore Frängsmyr (ed.), Linnaeus: The Man
and his Work (1983), 22.
Good luck is science not yet classified; just as the supernatural is the natural not yet understood.
— Elbert (Green) Hubbard
In Elbert Hubbard (ed. and publ.), The Philistine (Dec 1907), 26, No. 1, 10.
Half a century ago Oswald (1910) distinguished classicists and romanticists among the scientific investigators:
the former being inclined to design schemes and to use consistently the deductions from working hypotheses;
the latter being more fit for intuitive discoveries of functional relations between phenomena and therefore
more able to open up new fields of study. Examples of both character types are Werner and Hutton. Werner was
a real classicist. At the end of the eighteenth century he postulated the theory of “neptunism,” according to
which all rocks including granites, were deposited in primeval seas. It was an artificial scheme, but, as a
classification system, it worked quite satisfactorily at the time. Hutton, his contemporary and opponent, was
more a romanticist. His concept of “plutonism” supposed continually recurrent circuits of matter, which like
gigantic paddle wheels raise material from various depths of the earth and carry it off again. This is a very
flexible system which opens the mind to accept the possible occurrence in the course of time of a great variety
of interrelated plutonic and tectonic processes.
— Reinout Willem van Bemmelen
In 'The Scientific Character of Geology', The Journal of Geology (Jul 1961), 69, No. 4, 456-7.
I contend that the continued racial classification of Homo sapiens represents an outmoded approach to the
general problem of differentiation within a species. In other words, I reject a racial classification of humans for
the same reasons that I prefer not to divide into subspecies the prodigiously variable West Indian land snails
that form the subject of my own research.
— Stephen Jay Gould
…...
I maintain that the human mystery is incredibly demeaned by scientific reductionism, with its claim in
promissory materialism to account eventually for all of the spiritual world in terms of patterns of neuronal
activity. This belief must be classed as a superstition. ... We have to recognize that we are spiritual beings with
souls existing in a spiritual world as well as material beings with bodies and brains existing in a material world.
— Sir John C. Eccles
In Evolution of the Brain: Creation of the Self (1991), 241.
I pull a flower from the woods,

A monster with a glass
Computes the stamens in a breath,
And has her in a class.
— Emily Elizabeth Dickinson
I was just going to say, when I was interrupted, that one of the many ways of classifying minds is under the
heads of arithmetical and algebraical intellects. All economical and practical wisdom is an extension or variation
of the following arithmetical formula: 2+2=4. Every philosophical proposition has the more general character of
the expression a+b=c. We are mere operatives, empirics, and egotists, until we learn to think in letters instead
of figures.
— Oliver Wendell Holmes
The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table (1858), 1.
I would rather have a mineral ill-classified and well-described, than well-classified and ill-described.
— Abraham Werner
In On the External Characters of Minerals (1774), xxix, trans. Albert V. and Marguerite CaroaL
In arranging the bodies in order of their electrical nature, there is formed an electro-chemical system which, in
my opinion, is more fit than any other to give an idea of chemistry.
— Jöns Jacob Berzelius
Essai sur le théorie des proportions chimiques (1819). Translated in Henry M. Leicester and Herbert S. Klickstein, A Source Book in
Chemistry 1400-1900 (1952), 260.
In early times, when the knowledge of nature was small, little attempt was made to divide science into parts, and
men of science did not specialize. Aristotle was a master of all science known in his day, and wrote indifferently
treatises on physics or animals. As increasing knowledge made it impossible for any one man to grasp all
scientific subjects, lines of division were drawn for convenience of study and of teaching. Besides the broad
distinction into physical and biological science, minute subdivisions arose, and, at a certain stage of development,
much attention was, given to methods of classification, and much emphasis laid on the results, which were
thought to have a significance beyond that of the mere convenience of mankind.
But we have reached the stage when the different streams of knowledge, followed by the different sciences,
are coalescing, and the artificial barriers raised by calling those sciences by different names are breaking down.
Geology uses the methods and data of physics, chemistry and biology; no one can say whether the science of
radioactivity is to be classed as chemistry or physics, or whether sociology is properly grouped with biology or
economics. Indeed, it is often just where this coalescence of two subjects occurs, when some connecting channel
between them is opened suddenly, that the most striking advances in knowledge take place. The accumulated
experience of one department of science, and the special methods which have been developed to deal with its
problems, become suddenly available in the domain of another department, and many questions insoluble before
may find answers in the new light cast upon them. Such considerations show us that science is in reality one,
though we may agree to look on it now from one side and now from another as we approach it from the
standpoint of physics, physiology or psychology.
— Sir William Cecil Dampier
In article 'Science', Encyclopedia Britannica (1911), 402.
In general, the more one augments the number of divisions of the productions of nature, the more one
approaches the truth, since in nature only individuals exist, while genera, orders, and classes only exist in our
imagination.
— Comte Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon
Histoire Naturelle (1749), trans. by John Lyon, The 'Initial Discourse' to Buffon’s Histoire Naturelle: The First Complete English
Translation, Journal of the History of Biology, 9(1), 1976, 164.
In my opinion the separation of the c- and ac-stars is the most important advancement in stellar classification
since the trials by Vogel and Secchi ... To neglect the c-properties in classifying stellar spectra, I think, is nearly
the same thing as if a zoologist, who has detected the deciding differences between a whale and a fish, would
continue classifying them together.
— Ejnar Hertzsprung
Letter to Edward Pickering (22 Jul 1908). In Charles Coulston Gillespie (ed.), Dictionary of Scientific Biography (1974), Vol. 9, 194.
In order that an inventory of plants may be begun and a classification of them correctly established, we must
try to discover criteria of some sort for distinguishing what are called “species”. After a long and considerable
investigation, no surer criterion for determining species had occurred to me than distinguishing features that
perpetuate themselves in propagation from seed. Thus, no matter what variations occur in the individuals or the
species, if they spring from the seed of one and the same plant, they are accidental variations and not such as to
distinguish a species. For these variations do not perpetuate themselves in subsequent seeding. Thus, for
example, we do not regard caryophylli with full or multiple blossoms as a species distinct from caryophylli with
single blossoms, because the former owe their origin to the seed of the latter and if the former are sown from
their own seed, they once more produce single-blossom caryophylli. But variations that never have as their
source seed from one and the same species may finally be regarded as distinct species. Or, if you make a
comparison between any two plants, plants which never spring from each other's seed and never, when their seed
is sown, are transmuted one into the other, these plants finally are distinct species. For it is just as in animals: a
difference in sex is not enough to prove a difference of species, because each sex is derived from the same
seed as far as species is concerned and not infrequently from the same parents; no matter how many and how
striking may be the accidental differences between them; no other proof that bull and cow, man and woman
belong to the same species is required than the fact that both very frequently spring from the same parents or
the same mother. Likewise in the case of plants, there is no surer index of identity of species than that of origin
from the seed of one and the same plant, whether it is a matter of individuals or species. For animals that differ
in species preserve their distinct species permanently; one species never springs from the seed of another nor
vice versa.
— John Ray
Historia Plantarum (1686), Vol. 1, 40. Trans. Edmund Silk. Quoted in Barbara G. Beddall, 'Historical Notes on Avian Classification',
Systematic Zoology (1957), 6, 133-4.
In the real changes which animals undergo during their embryonic growth, in those external transformations as
well as in those structural modifications within the body, we have a natural scale to measure the degree or the
gradation of those full grown animals which corresponds in their external form and in their structure, to those
various degrees in the metamorphoses of animals, as illustrated by embryonic changes, a real foundation for
zoological classification.
— Louis Agassiz
From Lecture 4, collected in Twelve Lectures on Comparative Embryology: Delivered Before the Lowell Institute in Boston: December
and January 1848-9 (1849), 29.
In the year 1902 (while I was attempting to explain to an elementary class in chemistry some of the ideas
involved in the periodic law) becoming interested in the new theory of the electron, and combining this idea with
those which are implied in the periodic classification, I formed an idea of the inner structure of the atom which,
although it contained certain crudities, I have ever since regarded as representing essentially the arrangement
of electrons in the atom ... In accordance with the idea of Mendeleef, that hydrogen is the first member of a
full period, I erroneously assumed helium to have a shell of eight electrons. Regarding the disposition in the
positive charge which balanced the electrons in the neutral atom, my ideas were very vague; I believed I inclined
at that time toward the idea that the positive charge was also made up of discrete particles, the localization of
which determined the localization of the electrons.
— Gilbert Newton Lewis
Valence and the Structure of Atoms and Molecules (1923), 29-30.
Inanimate objects are classified scientifically into three categories—those that don't work, those that break
down, and those that get lost. The goal of all inanimate objects is to resist man and ultimately to defeat him, and
the three major classifications are based on the method each object uses to achieve its purpose
— Russell Wayne Baker
'Observer: The Plot Against People', New York Times (18 Jun 1968), 46.
It is clear, from these considerations, that the three methods of classifying mankind—that according to
physical characters, according to language, and according to culture—all reflect the historical development of
races from different standpoints; and that the results of the three classifications are not comparable, because
the historical facts do not affect the three classes of phenomena equally. A consideration of all these classes of
facts is needed when we endeavour to reconstruct the early history of the races of mankind.
— Franz Boas
'Summary of the Work of the Committee in British Columbia', Report of the Sixty-Eighth Meeting of the British Association for the
Advancement of Science, 1899, 670.
It is the desire for explanations that are at once systematic and controllable by factual evidence that generates
science; and it is the organization and classification of knowledge on the basis of explanatory principles that is
the distinctive goal of the sciences.
— Ernest Nagel
The Structure of Science (1961), 4.
It needs scarcely be pointed out that in placing Mathematics at the head of Positive Philosophy, we are only
extending the application of the principle which has governed our whole Classification. We are simply carrying
back our principle to its first manifestation. Geometrical and Mechanical phenomena are the most general, the
most simple, the most abstract of all,— the most irreducible to others, the most independent of them; serving,
in fact, as a basis to all others. It follows that the study of them is an indispensable preliminary to that of all
others. Therefore must Mathematics hold the first place in the hierarchy of the sciences, and be the point of
departure of all Education whether general or special.
— Auguste Comte
In Auguste Comte and Harriet Martineau (trans.), The Positive Philosophy (1858), Introduction, Chap. 2, 50.
Know, oh Brother (May God assist thee and us by the Spirit from Him) that God, Exalted Be His Praise, when He
created all creatures and brought all things into being, arranged them and brought them into existence by a
process similar to the process of generation of numbers from one, so that the multiplicity [of numbers] should
be a witness to his Oneness, and their classification and order an indication of the perfection of His wisdom in
creation. And this would be a witness to the fact, too, that they [creatures] are related to Him who created
them, in the same way as the numbers are related to the One which is prior to two, and which is the principle,
origin and source of numbers, as we have shown in our treatise on arithmetic.
— Ikhwan al-Safa
Rasa'il. In Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Science and Civilisation in Islam (1968), 155-6.
Knowledge = relation.
Explanation = classification.
The outward world a hieroglyph.
— Sir William Withey Gull
In Sir William Withey Gull and Theodore Dyke Acland (ed.), A Collection of the Published Writings of William Withey Gull (1896), lii.
Man is a classifying animal: in one sense it may be said that the whole process of speaking is nothing but
distributing phenomena, of which no two are alike in every respect, into different classes on the strength of
perceived similarities and dissimilarities. In the name-giving process we witness the same ineradicable and very
useful tendency to see likenesses and to express similarity in the phenomena through similarity in name.
— Otto Jespersen
Language: Its Nature, Development and Origin (1922), 388-9.
Mathematics is the classification and study of all possible patterns.

— W.W. Sawyer
In Prelude to Mathematics (1955), 12.
Most classifications, whether of inanimate objects or of organisms, are hierarchical. There are “higher” and
“lower” categories, there are higher and lower ranks. What is usually overlooked is that the use of the term
“hierarchy” is ambiguous, and that two fundamentally different kinds of arrangements have been designated as
hierarchical. A hierarchy can be either exclusive or inclusive. Military ranks from private, corporal, sergeant,
lieutenant, captain, up to general are a typical example of an exclusive hierarchy. A lower rank is not a
subdivision of a higher rank; thus, lieutenants are not a subdivision of captains. The scala naturae, which so
strongly dominated thinking from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, is another good illustration of an
exclusive hierarchy. Each level of perfection was considered an advance (or degradation) from the next lower (or
higher) level in the hierarchy, but did not include it.
— Ernst Mayr
The Growth of Biological Thought: Diversity, Evolution and Inheritance (1982), 205-6.
My amateur interest in astronomy brought out the term “magnitude,” which is used for the brightness of a star.
— Charles Richet
From interview with Henry Spall, as in an abridged version of Earthquake Information Bulletin (Jan-Feb 1980), 12, No. 1, that is on the
USGS website.
Natural bodies are divided into three kingdomes of nature: viz. the mineral, vegetable, and animal kingdoms.
Minerals grow, Plants grow and live, Animals grow, live, and have feeling.
— Carolus Linnaeus
'Observations on the Three Kingdoms of Nature', Nos 14-15. Systema Naturae (1735). As quoted (translated) in Étienne Gilson, From
Aristotle to Darwin and Back Again: A Journey in Final Causality (2009), 42-43.
Nature is disordered, powerful and chaotic, and through fear of the chaos we impose system on it. We abhor
complexity, and seek to simplify things whenever we can by whatever means we have at hand. We need to have an
overall explanation of what the universe is and how it functions. In order to achieve this overall view we develop
explanatory theories which will give structure to natural phenomena: we classify nature into a coherent system
which appears to do what we say it does.
— James Burke
In Day the Universe Changed (1985), 11.
Nature progresses by unknown gradations and consequently does not submit to our absolute division when passing
by imperceptible nuances, from one species to another and often from one genus to another. Inevitably there
are a great number of equivocal species and in-between specimens that one does not know where to place and
which throw our general systems into turmoil.
— Comte Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon
Jean Piveteau (ed.), Oeuvres Philosophiques de Buffon (1965), 10. Trans. in Paul Farber, 'Buffon and the Concept of Species', in
Journal of the History of Biology, 1972, 5, 260.
(source)
No occupation is more worthy of an intelligent and enlightened mind, than the study of Nature and natural
objects; and whether we labour to investigate the structure and function of the human system, whether we
direct our attention to the classification and habits of the animal kingdom, or prosecute our researches in the
more pleasing and varied field of vegetable life, we shall constantly find some new object to attract our
attention, some fresh beauties to excite our imagination, and some previously undiscovered source of
gratification and delight.
— Sir Joseph Paxton
In A Practical Treatise on the Cultivation of the Dahlia (1838), 1-2.
Nomenclature, the other foundation of botany, should provide the names as soon as the classification is made...
If the names are unknown knowledge of the things also perishes... For a single genus, a single name.
Philosophia Botanica (1751), aphorism 210. Trans. Frans A. Stafleu, Linnaeus and the Linnaeans: The Spreading of their Ideas in
Systematic Botany, 1735-1789 (1971), 80.
One of the petty ideas of philosophers is to elaborate a classification, a hierarchy of sciences. They all try it,
and they are generally so fond of their favorite scheme that they are prone to attach an absurd importance to
it. We must not let ourselves be misled by this. Classifications are always artificial; none more than this,
however. There is nothing of value to get out of a classification of science; it dissembles more beauty and order
than it can possibly reveal.
— George (Alfred Léon) Sarton
In 'The Teaching of the History of Science', The Scientific Monthly (Sep 1918), 194.
(source)
Rumour has it that the gardens of natural history museums are used for surreptitious burial of those
intermediate forms between species which might disturb the orderly classifications of the taxonomist.
— David L. Lack
Darwin's Finches (1947), 23.
Science has been arranging, classifying, methodizing, simplifying, everything except itself. It has made possible
the tremendous modern development of power of organization which has so multiplied the effective power of
human effort as to make the differences from the past seem to be of kind rather than of degree. It has
organized itself very imperfectly. Scientific men are only recently realizing that the principles which apply to
success on a large scale in transportation and manufacture and general staff work to apply them; that the
difference between a mob and an army does not depend upon occupation or purpose but upon human nature; that
the effective power of a great number of scientific men may be increased by organization just as the effective
power of a great number of laborers may be increased by military discipline.
— Elihu Root
'The Need for Organization in Scientific Research', in Bulletin of the National Research Council: The National Importance of Scientific
and Industrial Research (Oct 1919), Col 1, Part 1, No. 1, 8.
(source)
Science is knowledge arranged and classified according to truth, facts, and the general laws of nature.
— Luther Burbank
Interview in San Francisco Bulletin (22 Jan 1926). As cited in Michael C. and Linda Rose Thomsett, A Speaker's Treasury of
Quotations: Maxims, Witticisms and Quips for Speeches and Presentations (2009), 102-103. Also in 'Science and Civilization', Prescott
Evening Courier (3 Nov 1925), 6.
Science is not, as so many seem to think, something apart, which has to do with telescopes, retorts, and test-
tubes, and especially with nasty smells, but it is a way of searching out by observation, trial and classification;
whether the phenomena investigated be the outcome of human activities, or of the more direct workings of
nature's laws. Its methods admit of nothing untidy or slip-shod; its keynote is accuracy and its goal is truth.
— Archibald Garrod
The University of Utopia (1918), 17.
Science is simply the classification of the common knowledge of the common people. It is bringing together the
things we all know and putting them together so we can use them. This is creation and finds its analogy in
Nature, where the elements are combined in certain ways to give us fruits or flowers or grain.
— Elbert (Green) Hubbard
In Elbert Hubbard (ed. and publ.), The Philistine (Dec 1907), 26, 10.
Click here or image for larger picture

(source)
Science is the systematic classification of experience.

— George Henry Lewes
The Physical Basis of Mind (1877), 4.
Scientists and Drapers. Why should the botanist, geologist or other-ist give himself such airs over the draper’s
assistant? Is it because he names his plants or specimens with Latin names and divides them into genera and
species, whereas the draper does not formulate his classifications, or at any rate only uses his mother tongue
when he does? Yet how like the sub-divisions of textile life are to those of the animal and vegetable kingdoms! A
few great families—cotton, linen, hempen, woollen, silk, mohair, alpaca—into what an infinite variety of genera
and species do not these great families subdivide themselves? And does it take less labour, with less
intelligence, to master all these and to acquire familiarity with their various habits, habitats and prices than it
does to master the details of any other great branch of science? I do not know. But when I think of Shoolbred’s
on the one hand and, say, the ornithological collections of the British Museum upon the other, I feel as though it
would take me less trouble to master the second than the first.
— Samuel Butler
Samuel Butler, Henry Festing Jones (ed.), The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1917), 218.
Since disease originates in the elementary cell, the organization and microscopic functions of which reproduce
the general organization exactly and in all its relationships, nothing is more suited to simplifying the work of
classification and of systematic division than to take the elementary cell as the basis of division.
— François-Vincent Raspail
As quoted in article, Marc Klein,'François-Vincent Raspail', in Charles Coulston Gillispie (ed.), Dictionary of Scientific Biography (1975).
Vol.11, 300-301.
Since the seventeenth century, physical intuition has served as a vital source for mathematical porblems and
methods. Recent trends and fashions have, however, weakened the connection between mathematics and physics;
mathematicians, turning away from their roots of mathematics in intuition, have concentrated on refinement and
emphasized the postulated side of mathematics, and at other times have overlooked the unity of their science
with physics and other fields. In many cases, physicists have ceased to appreciate the attitudes of
mathematicians. This rift is unquestionably a serious threat to science as a whole; the broad stream of scientific
development may split into smaller and smaller rivulets and dry out. It seems therefore important to direct our
efforts towards reuniting divergent trends by classifying the common features and interconnections of many
distinct and diverse scientific facts.
— Richard Courant
As co-author with David Hilbert, in Methods of Mathematical Physics (1937, 1989), Preface, v.
Suppose we loosely define a religion as any discipline whose foundations rest on an element of faith, irrespective
of any element of reason which may be present. Quantum mechanics for example would be a religion under this
definition. But mathematics would hold the unique position of being the only branch of theology possessing a
rigorous demonstration of the fact that it should be so classified.
— Frank C. DeSua
Concluding remark in 'Consistency and Completeness—A Résumé', The American Mathematical Monthly (May 1956), 63, No.5, 305.
Taxonomy (the science of classification) is often undervalued as a glorified form of filing—with each species in
its folder, like a stamp in its prescribed place in an album; but taxonomy is a fundamental and dynamic science,
dedicated to exploring the causes of relationships and similarities among organisms. Classifications are theories
about the basis of natural order, not dull catalogues compiled only to avoid chaos.
Wonderful Life (1989), 98.
Taxonomy is often regarded as the dullest of subjects, fit only for mindless ordering and sometimes denigrated
within science as mere “stamp collecting” (a designation that this former philatelist deeply resents). If systems
of classification were neutral hat racks for hanging the facts of the world, this disdain might be justified. But
classifications both reflect and direct our thinking. The way we order represents the way we think. Historical
changes in classification are the fossilized indicators of conceptual revolutions.
In Hen’s Teeth and Horse’s Toes: Further Reflections in Natural History (1983, 2010), 72
The actual evolution of mathematical theories proceeds by a process of induction strictly analogous to the
method of induction employed in building up the physical sciences; observation, comparison, classification, trial,
and generalisation are essential in both cases. Not only are special results, obtained independently of one
another, frequently seen to be really included in some generalisation, but branches of the subject which have
been developed quite independently of one another are sometimes found to have connections which enable them
to be synthesised in one single body of doctrine. The essential nature of mathematical thought manifests itself
in the discernment of fundamental identity in the mathematical aspects of what are superficially very different
domains. A striking example of this species of immanent identity of mathematical form was exhibited by the
discovery of that distinguished mathematician … Major MacMahon, that all possible Latin squares are capable of
enumeration by the consideration of certain differential operators. Here we have a case in which an
enumeration, which appears to be not amenable to direct treatment, can actually be carried out in a simple
manner when the underlying identity of the operation is recognised with that involved in certain operations due
to differential operators, the calculus of which belongs superficially to a wholly different region of thought
from that relating to Latin squares.
— Ernest W. Hobson
In Presidential Address British Association for the Advancement of Science, Sheffield, Section A, Nature (1 Sep 1910), 84, 290.
The air of caricature never fails to show itself in the products of reason applied relentlessly and without
correction. The observation of clinical facts would seem to be a pursuit of the physician as harmless as it is
indispensable. [But] it seemed irresistibly rational to certain minds that diseases should be as fully classifiable
as are beetles and butterflies. This doctrine … bore perhaps its richest fruit in the hands of Boissier de
Sauvauges. In his Nosologia Methodica published in 1768 … this Linnaeus of the bedside grouped diseases into
ten classes, 295 genera, and 2400 species.
— Wilfred Trotter
In 'General Ideas in Medicine', The Lloyd Roberts lecture at House of the Royal Society of Medicine (30 Sep 1935), British Medical
Journal (5 Oct 1935), 2, 609. In The Collected Papers of Wilfred Trotter, FRS (1941), 151.
(source)
The chief work of the botanists of yesterday was the study and classification of dried, shriveled plant mummies
whose souls had fled.
— Luther Burbank
From Paper (18 Jun 1901), read before the California Academy of Sciences, published in 'The Making of New Flowers', American
Gardening (13 Jul 1901), 22, No. 342, 489.
The classification of facts and the formation of absolute judgments upon the basis of this classification—
judgments independent of the idiosyncrasies of the individual mind—essentially sum up the aim and method of
modern science. The scientific man has above all things to strive at self-elimination in his judgments, to provide
an argument which is as true for each individual mind as for his own.
— Karl Pearson
From The Grammar of Science (1892), 7-8.
The classification of facts and the formation of absolute judgments upon the basis of this classification—
judgments independent of the idiosyncrasies of the individual mind—is peculiarly the scope and method of
modern science.
— Karl Pearson
The concepts and methods on which the classification of hominid taxa is based do not differ in principle from
those used for other zoological taxa. Indeed, the classification of living human populations or of samples of
fossil hominids is a branch of animal taxonomy.
— Ernst Mayr
Opening sentence of 'The Taxonomic Evaluation of Fossil Hominids' (1963). Collected in Sherwood L. Washburn, Classification and
Human Evolution (1964), 332.
The ends of scientific classification are best answered, when the objects are formed into groups respecting
which a greater number of general propositions can be made, and those propositions more important, than could
be made respecting any other groups into which the same things could be distributed. ... A classification thus
formed is properly scientific or philosophical, and is commonly called a Natural, in contradistinction to a
Technical or Artificial, classification or arrangement.
— John Stuart Mill
A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive (1843), Vol. 2, Book 4, Chapter 7, 302-3.
The first step in wisdom is to know the things themselves; this notion consists in having a true idea of the
objects; objects are distinguished and known by classifying them methodically and giving them appropriate
names. Therefore, classification and name-giving will be the foundation of our science.
Systema Naturae (1735), trans. M. S. J. Engel-Ledeboer and H. Engel (1964), 19.
The first thing the intellect does with an object is to class it along with something else. But any object that is
infinitely important to us and awakens our devotion feels to us also as if it must be sui generis and unique.
Probably a crab would be filled with a sense of personal outrage if it could hear us class it without ado or apology
as a crustacean, and thus dispose of it. 'I am no such thing,' it would say; 'I am MYSELF, MYSELF alone.
— William James
The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (1902), 9.
The greatest of all spectral classifiers, Antonia Maury had two strikes on her: the biggest one was, she was a
woman. A woman had no chance at anything in astronomy except at Harvard in the 1880’s and 1890’s. And even
there, things were rough. It now turns out that her director, E.C. Pickering, did not like the way she classified;
she then refused to change to suit him; and after her great publication in Harvard Annals 28 (1897), she left
Harvard—and in a sense, astronomy. ... I would say the most remarkable phenomenological investigation in modern
astronomy is Miss Maury’s work in Harvard Annals 28. She didn’t have anything astrophysical to go on.
Investigations between 1890 and 1900 were the origin of astrophysics. But these were solar, mostly. And there
Miss Maury was on the periphery. I’ve seen pictures of groups, where she’d be standing away a little bit to one
side of the other people, a little bit in the background. It was a very sad thing. When Hertzsprung wrote
Pickering to congratulate him on Miss Maury’s work that had led to Hertzsprung’s discovery of super giants,
Pickering is supposed to have replied that Miss Maury’s work was wrong — could not possibly be correct.
— William Wilson Morgan
'Oral History Transcript: Dr. William Wilson Morgan' (8 Aug 1978) in the Niels Bohr Library & Archives.
The instinct for collecting, which began as in other animals as an adaptive property, could always in man spread
beyond reason; it could become a hoarding mania. But in its normal form it provides a means of livelihood at the
hunting and collecting stage of human evolution. It is then attached to a variety of rational aptitudes, above all in
observing, classifying, and naming plants, animals and minerals, skills diversely displayed by primitive peoples.
These skills with an instinctive beginning were the foundation of most of the civilised arts and sciences.
Attached to other skills in advanced societies they promote the formation of museums and libraries; detached,
they lead to acquisition and classification by eccentric individuals, often without any purpose or value at all.
— Cyril Dean Darlington
As quoted in Richard Fifield, 'Cytologist Supreme', New Scientist (16 Apr 1981), 90, No. 1249, 179; citing C.D. Darlington, The Little
Universe of Man (1978).
The modern system of elevating every minor group, however trifling the characters by which it is distinguished,
to the rank of genus, evinces, we think, a want of appreciation of the true value of classification. The genus is
the group which, in consequence of our system of nomenclature, is kept most prominently before the mind, and
which has therefore most importance attached to it ... The rashness of some botanists is productive of still
more detrimental effects to the science in the case of species; for though a beginner may pause before
venturing to institute a genus, it rarely enters into his head to hesitate before proposing a new species.
— Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker
(With Thomas Thomson) Flora Indica: A Systematic Account of the Plants of British India (1855),10-11.
The morning stars sang together.

And a person of delicate ear and nice judgment discussed the singing at length, and showed how and wherein one
star differed from another, and which was great and which was not.
And still the morning stars sang together.
— T.W.H. Crosland
'Classification' in Little Stings (1907, 1908), 83.
The morphological characteristics of plant and animal species form the chief subject of the descriptive natural
sciences and are the criteria for their classification. But not until recently has it been recognized that in living
organisms, as in the realm of crystals, chemical differences parallel the variation in structure.
— Karl Landsteiner
The Specificity of Serological Reactions (1936), 3.
The names of the plants ought to be stable [certa], consequently they should be given to stable genera.
Philosophia Botanica (1751), aphorism 151. Trans. Frans A. Stafleu, Linnaeus and the Linnaeans: The Spreading of their Ideas in
Systematic Botany, 1735-1789 (1971), 57.
The sciences of Natural History and Botany require so much time to be devoted to them that, however pleasing,
they may be justly considered as improper objects for the man of business to pursue scientifically, so as to
enter into the exact arrangement and classification of the different bodies of the animal, vegetable, and mineral
kingdoms. But reading and personal observation will supply him with ample matter for reflection and admiration.
— Thomas Henry
'On the Advantages of Literature and Philosophy in general and especially on the Consistency of Literary and Philosophical with
Commercial Pursuits' (Read 3 Oct 1781). As quoted in Robert Angus Smith, A Centenary of Science in Manchester (1883), 79.
The three most effective incentives to human action may be … classified as creed, greed and dread. … In
examining the scientist it is perhaps worth while to examine how far he is moved by these three incentives. I
think that, rather peculiarly and rather exceptionally, he is very little moved by dread. … He is in fact essentially
a person who has been taught he must be fearless in his dealing with facts.
— Sir Robert Alexander Watson-Watt
'Scientist and Citizen', Speech to the Empire Club of Canada (29 Jan 1948), The Empire Club of Canada Speeches (29 Jan 1948),
209-221.
There have been many authorities who have asserted that the basis of science lies in counting or measuring, i.e.
in the use of mathematics. Neither counting nor measuring can however be the most fundamental processes in
our study of the material universe—before you can do either to any purpose you must first select what you
propose to count or measure, which presupposes a classification.
— Roy Albert Crowson
Classification and Biology (1970), 2.
There is a moral or metaphysical part of nature as well as a physical. A man who denies this is deep in the mire
of folly. ’Tis the crown and glory of organic science that it does through final cause, link material and moral; and
yet does not allow us to mingle them in our first conception of laws, and our classification of such laws, whether
we consider one side of nature or the other. You have ignored this link; and, if I do not mistake your meaning,
you have done your best in one or two pregnant cases to break it. Were it possible (which, thank God, it is not) to
break it, humanity, in my mind, would suffer a damage that might brutalize it, and sink the human race into a
lower grade of degradation than any into which it has fallen since its written records tell us of its history.
— Adam Sedgwick
Letter to Charles Darwin (Nov 1859). In Charles Darwin and Francis Darwin (ed.), Charles Darwin: His Life Told in an Autobiographical
Chapter, and in a Selected Series of His Published Letters (1892), 217.
There is an integration of the present impressions with such past ones as they resemble, and a differentiation
of them from such past ones as they do not resemble; and this comparison of present with past impressions,
dependent on memory, implies classification, and is the germ of what we call Perception and Reasoning.
— John Fiske
In Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy: Based on the Doctrine of Evolution (1874), Vol. 2, 155-156.
There is nothing distinctively scientific about the hypothetico-deductive process. It is not even distinctively
intellectual. It is merely a scientific context for a much more general stratagem that underlies almost all
regulative processes or processes of continuous control, namely feedback, the control of performance by the
consequences of the act performed. In the hypothetico-deductive scheme the inferences we draw from a
hypothesis are, in a sense, its logical output. If they are true, the hypothesis need not be altered, but correction
is obligatory if they are false. The continuous feedback from inference to hypothesis is implicit in Whewell’s
account of scientific method; he would not have dissented from the view that scientific behaviour can be
classified as appropriately under cybernetics as under logic.
— Sir Peter B. Medawar
Induction and Intuition in Scientific Thought (1969), 54-5.
There may be as many classifications of any series of natural, or of other, bodies, as they have properties or
relations to one another, or to other things; or, again, as there are modes in which they may be regarded by the
mind: so that, with respect to such classifications as we are here concerned with, it might be more proper to
speak of a classification than of the classification of the animal kingdom.
— Thomas Henry Huxley
In Lecture (Spring 1863) to the Royal College of Surgeons of England, 'On the Classification of Animals', Lectures on the Elements of
Comparative Anatomy (1864), 1.
Though, probably, no competent geologist would contend that the European classification of strata is applicable
to all other parts of the globe, yet most, if not all geologists, write as though it were so.
— Herbert Spencer
'Illogical Geology', The Universal Review (1859), 2, 54.
We may therefore say in the future, strictly within the limits of observation, that in certain respects the fossil
species of a class traverse in their historical succession metamorphoses similar to those which the embryos
undergo in themselves. … The development of a class in the history of the earth offers, in many respects, the
greatest analogy with the development of an individual at different periods of his life. The demonstration of
this truth is one of the most beautiful results of modern paleontology.
— Carl Vogt
From Embryologie des Salmones, collected in L. Agassiz, Poissons d'Eau Douce de l’Europe Centrale (1842), 260. Translated by
Webmaster using Google Translate, from the original French, “On pourra donc dire à l'avenir, en restant rigoureusement dans les
limites de l'observation, qu'à certains égards, les espèces fossiles d'une classe parcourent dans leur succession historique des
métamorphoses semblables à celles que subissent les embryons en se développant … Le développement d’une classe dans l’histoire
de la terre offre, à divers égards, la plus grande analogie avec le dévelopment d’un individu aux différentes époques de sa vie. La
démonstration de cette vérité est un des plus beaux résultat de la paléontologie moderne.”
Western science is a product of the Apollonian mind: its hope is that by naming and classification, by the cold
light of intellect, archaic night can be pushed back and defeated.
— Camille Paglia
In Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), 5.
Whatever plan of classification, founded on the natural relations of the elements, be adopted, in the practical
study of chemistry, it will always be found most advantageous to commence with the consideration of the great
constituents of the ocean and the atmosphere.
— George Fownes
In Elementary Chemistry, Theoretical and Practical (1854), 104.
When every fact, every present or past phenomenon of that universe, every phase of present or past life
therein, has been examined, classified, and co-ordinated with the rest, then the mission of science will be
completed. What is this but saying that the task of science can never end till man ceases to be, till history is no
longer made, and development itself ceases?
— Karl Pearson
When we have amassed a great store of such general facts, they become the objects of another and higher
species of classification, and are themselves included in laws which, as they dispose of groups, not individuals
have a far superior degree of generality, till at length, by continuing the process, we arrive at axioms of the
highest degree of generality of which science is capable. This process is what we mean by induction.
— Sir John Herschel
In A Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy (1830), 102.
(source)
Where there is dirt there is a system. Dirt is the by-product of a systematic ordering and classification of
matter, in so far as ordering involves rejecting inappropriate elements.
— Dame Mary Douglas
In Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (1966), 35.
While natural science up to the end of the last century was predominantly a collecting science, a science of
finished things, in our century it is essentially a classifying science, a science of processes, of the origin and
development of these things and of the interconnection which binds these processes into one great whole.
— Friedrich Engels
Speaking of the 18th (last) and 19th (our) centuries, in Ludwig Feuerbach and the Outcome of Classical German Philosophy (1886,
1941).
Why should an hypothesis, suggested by a scientist, be accepted as true until its truth is established? Science
should be the last to make such a demand because science to be truly science is classified knowledge; it is the
explanation of facts. Tested by this definition, Darwinism is not science at all; it is guesses strung together.
— William Jennings Bryan
In chapter, 'The Origin of Man', In His Image (1922), 94.
Why, it is asked, since the scientist, by means of classification and experiment, can predict the “action of the
physical world, shall not the historian do as much for the moral world”! The analogy is false at many points; but
the confusion arises chiefly from the assumption that the scientist can predict the action of the physical world.
Certain conditions precisely given, the scientist can predict the result; he cannot say when or where in the
future those conditions will obtain.
— Carl L. Becker
In 'A New Philosophy of History', The Dial (2 Sep 1915), 148. This is Becker’s review of a book by L. Cecil Jane, The Interpretation of
History. Becker refutes Jane’s idea that the value of history lies in whether it consists in furnishing “some clue as to what the future will
bring.”
Without preparing fluorine, without being able to separate it from the substances with which it is united,
chemistry has been able to study and to analyze a great number of its compounds. The body was not isolated, and
yet its place was marked in our classifications. This well demonstrates the usefulness of a scientific theory, a
theory which is regarded as true during a certain time, which correlates facts and leads the mind to new
hypotheses, the first causes of experimentation; which, little by little, destroy the theory itself, in order to
replace it by another more in harmony with the progress of science.
[Describing the known history of fluorine compounds before his isolation of the element.]
— Henri Moissan
'Fluorine', lecture at the Royal Institution (28 May 1897), translated from the French, in Proceedings of the Royal Institution (1897). In
Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution to July 1897 (1898), 262.
Without the discovery of uniformities there can be no concepts, no classifications, no formulations, no

principles, no laws; and without these no science can exist.
Co-editor with American psychologist Henry Murray (1893-1988)
— Clyde K.M. Kluckhohn
'Personality Formation: the Determinants'. In Clyde Kluckhohn and Henry A. Murray (eds.), Personality in Nature, Society, and Culture
(1949), 37-8.
You can find that sort of regularity in Stock Exchange quotations.

[Expressing his lack of confidence in reported regularities in the periodic classification of elements.]
— Robert Bunsen
As quoted in Stanley I. Levy, 'Brauner Memorial Lecture', Journal of the Chemical Society (1935), Pt. 2, 1878. It has also been quoted
as “One might just as well seek regularities in the figures of stock exchange bulletins” in L. Vlasov and D. Trifonov, trans. from Russian
by David Sobolev, 107 Stories About Chemistry (1970).
Measurement Systems Sir James Jeans 1-Year plan at $0.99/mo Albert Einstein Quotes
Analysis on God from - 608
Science Quotes -
Ad GoSkills todayinsci.com Ad PUREVPN todayinsci.com
Unleash the power of Science Quotes - Wonder Quotes - 236 Sir Isaac Newton
RPA Categories Index for… quotes on Wonder Quotes - 333 Science
Science Quotes - Quotes - Dictionary of…
Ad Signavio todayinsci.com todayinsci.com todayinsci.com
Today in Science History® © 1999-2019 by Todayinsci ®

Classification Quotes

Загружено:

Сведения о документе

Оригинальное название

Авторское право

Доступные форматы

Поделиться этим документом

Поделиться или встроить документ

Параметры публикации

Этот документ был вам полезен?

Это неприемлемый материал?

Авторское право:

Доступные форматы

Classification Quotes

Загружено:

Авторское право:

Доступные форматы

3/16/2019 Classification Quotes - 97 quotes on Classification Science Quotes - Dictionary of Science Quotations and Scientist Quotes

Classification Quotes (97 quotes)

Branches or types are characterized by the plan of their structure,

And all their botany is Latin names.

God created, Linnaeus ordered.

I pull a flower from the woods,

Mathematics is the classification and study of all possible patterns.

Click here or image for larger picture

Science is the systematic classification of experience.

The morning stars sang together.

Without the discovery of uniformities there can be no concepts, no classifications, no formulations, no

You can find that sort of regularity in Stock Exchange quotations.

Today in Science History® © 1999-2019 by Todayinsci ®

Вам также может понравиться