Ox Quotes (5 quotes)
As for Galen’s netlike plexus, I do not need to pass on a lot of misinformation about it here, as I am quite sure that I have examined the whole system of the cerebral vessels. There is no occasion for making things up, since we are certain that Galen was deluded by his dissection of ox brains and described the cerebral vessels, not of a human but of oxen.
From De Humani Corporis Fabrica Libri Septem (1543), Book III, 310, as translated by William Frank Richardson and John Burd Carman, in 'Structure of the Plexus in the Prior Ventricles of the Brain; Galen’s Netlike Plexus', On The Fabric of the Human Body: Book III: The Veins And Arteries; Book IV: The Nerves (1998), 140.
His Majesty has, with great skill, constructed a cart, containing a corn mill, which is worked by the motion of the carriage. He has also contrived a carriage of such a magnitude as to contain several apartments, with a hot bath; and it is drawn by a single elephant. This movable bath is extremely useful, and refreshing on a journey. … He has also invented several hydraulic machines, which are worked by oxen. The pulleys and wheels of some of them are so adjusted that a single ox will at once draw water out of two wells, and at the same time turn a millstone.
From Ain-i-Akbery (c.1590). As translated from the original Persian, by Francis Gladwin in 'Akbar’s Conduct and Administrative Rules', 'Of Machines', Ayeen Akbery: Or, The Institutes of the Emperor Akber (1783), Vol. 1, 284. Note: Akbar (Akber) was a great ruler and enlightened statesman.
One never finds fossil bones bearing no resemblance to human bones. Egyptian mummies, which are at least three thousand years old, show that men were the same then. The same applies to other mummified animals such as cats, dogs, crocodiles, falcons, vultures, oxen, ibises, etc. Species, therefore, do not change by degrees, but emerged after the new world was formed. Nor do we find intermediate species between those of the earlier world and those of today's. For example, there is no intermediate bear between our bear and the very different cave bear. To our knowledge, no spontaneous generation occurs in the present-day world. All organized beings owe their life to their fathers. Thus all records corroborate the globe's modernity. Negative proof: the barbaritY of the human species four thousand years ago. Positive proof: the great revolutions and the floods preserved in the traditions of all peoples.
'Note prese al Corso di Cuvier. Corso di Geologia all'Ateneo nel 1805', quoted in Pietro Corsi, The Age of Lamarck, trans. J. Mandelbaum (1988), 183.
The American farmer should in no sense be the prototype of Edwin Markham’s brainless fellow, whom he so graphically portrays—
“Bowed by the weight of centuries, he leans
Upon his hoe and gazes on the ground,
The emptiness of ages in his face, …
A thing that grieves not and that never hopes,
Stolid and stunned, a brother to the ox.”
“Bowed by the weight of centuries, he leans
Upon his hoe and gazes on the ground,
The emptiness of ages in his face, …
A thing that grieves not and that never hopes,
Stolid and stunned, a brother to the ox.”
In Farmer’s Leaflet 7: The Need of Scientific Agriculture in the South (1902). Reprinted in The Review of Reviews (1902), 25, 322. Edwin Markham composed his poem, Man With a Hoe, after viewing a painting of the same name by Jean-François Millet.
What happened to those Ice Age beasts? What caused the mammoth and mastodon and wooly rhinoceros to pay the ultimate Darwinian penalty, while bison and musk ox survived? Why didn't the fauna of Africa suffer the kinds of losses evident in other regions of the world? And if something like climatic change caused the extinction of North America's Pleistocene horse, how have feral horses managed to reestablish themselves on the western range?
(1986)
In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
(1987) -- 
