TODAY IN SCIENCE HISTORY ®  •  TODAYINSCI ®
Celebrating 24 Years on the Web
Find science on or your birthday

Today in Science History - Quickie Quiz
Who said: “I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, ... finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell ... whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”
more quiz questions >>
Home > Dictionary of Science Quotations > Scientist Names Index B > Francis Maitland Balfour Quotes

Thumbnail of Francis Maitland Balfour
Francis Maitland Balfour
(10 Nov 1851 - 19 Jul 1882)

Scottish embryologist and zoologist.


Science Quotes by Francis Maitland Balfour (3 quotes)

… the embryological record, as it is usually presented to us, is both imperfect and misleading. It may be compared to an ancient manuscript, with many of the sheets lost, others displaced, and with spurious passages interpolated by a later hand. … Like the scholar with his manuscript, the embryologist has by a process of careful and critical examination to determine where the gaps are present, to detect the later insertions, and to place in order what has been misplaced.
— Francis Maitland Balfour
A Treatise on Comparative Embryology (1885), Vol. 1, 3-4.
Science quotes on:  |  Ancient (198)  |  Both (496)  |  Careful (28)  |  Comparison (108)  |  Critical (73)  |  Detect (45)  |  Detection (19)  |  Determine (152)  |  Displace (9)  |  Embryologist (3)  |  Embryology (18)  |  Examination (102)  |  Gap (36)  |  Imperfect (46)  |  Insertion (2)  |  Lost (34)  |  Manuscript (10)  |  Misleading (21)  |  Order (638)  |  Other (2233)  |  Passage (52)  |  Present (630)  |  Process (439)  |  Record (161)  |  Scholar (52)  |  Sheet (8)  |  Spurious (3)  |  Usually (176)

The embryological record is almost always abbreviated in accordance with the tendency of nature (to be explained on the principle of survival of the fittest) to attain her needs by the easiest means.
— Francis Maitland Balfour
A Treatise on Comparative Embryology (1880), Vol. I, 3-4.
Science quotes on:  |  Attain (126)  |  Embryology (18)  |  Explain (334)  |  Mean (810)  |  Means (587)  |  Nature (2017)  |  Principle (530)  |  Record (161)  |  Survival (105)  |  Survival Of The Fittest (43)  |  Tendency (110)

Why it is that animals, instead of developing in a simple and straightforward way, undergo in the course of their growth a series of complicated changes, during which they often acquire organs which have no function, and which, after remaining visible for a short time, disappear without leaving a trace ... To the Darwinian, the explanation of such facts is obvious. The stage when the tadpole breathes by gills is a repetition of the stage when the ancestors of the frog had not advanced in the scale of development beyond a fish.
— Francis Maitland Balfour
In The Works of Francis Maitland Balfour (1885), Vol. 1, 702.
Science quotes on:  |  Acquisition (46)  |  Advance (298)  |  Ancestor (63)  |  Animal (651)  |  Beyond (316)  |  Breathe (49)  |  Change (639)  |  Complicated (117)  |  Complication (30)  |  Course (413)  |  Charles Darwin (322)  |  Development (441)  |  Disappear (84)  |  Disappearance (28)  |  Explanation (246)  |  Fact (1257)  |  Facts (553)  |  Fish (130)  |  Frog (44)  |  Function (235)  |  Gill (3)  |  Growth (200)  |  Leaving (10)  |  Obvious (128)  |  Organ (118)  |  Remain (355)  |  Remaining (45)  |  Repetition (29)  |  Scale (122)  |  Series (153)  |  Short (200)  |  Simple (426)  |  Simplicity (175)  |  Stage (152)  |  Straightforward (10)  |  Tadpole (3)  |  Time (1911)  |  Trace (109)  |  Undergo (18)  |  Visibility (6)  |  Visible (87)  |  Way (1214)  |  Why (491)


See also:
  • 10 Nov - short biography, births, deaths and events on date of Balfour's birth.

Carl Sagan Thumbnail 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) -- Carl Sagan
Quotations by:Albert EinsteinIsaac NewtonLord KelvinCharles DarwinSrinivasa RamanujanCarl SaganFlorence NightingaleThomas EdisonAristotleMarie CurieBenjamin FranklinWinston ChurchillGalileo GalileiSigmund FreudRobert BunsenLouis PasteurTheodore RooseveltAbraham LincolnRonald ReaganLeonardo DaVinciMichio KakuKarl PopperJohann GoetheRobert OppenheimerCharles Kettering  ... (more people)

Quotations about:Atomic  BombBiologyChemistryDeforestationEngineeringAnatomyAstronomyBacteriaBiochemistryBotanyConservationDinosaurEnvironmentFractalGeneticsGeologyHistory of ScienceInventionJupiterKnowledgeLoveMathematicsMeasurementMedicineNatural ResourceOrganic ChemistryPhysicsPhysicianQuantum TheoryResearchScience and ArtTeacherTechnologyUniverseVolcanoVirusWind PowerWomen ScientistsX-RaysYouthZoology  ... (more topics)
Sitewide search within all Today In Science History pages:
Visit our Science and Scientist Quotations index for more Science Quotes from archaeologists, biologists, chemists, geologists, inventors and inventions, mathematicians, physicists, pioneers in medicine, science events and technology.

Names index: | A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z |

Categories index: | 1 | 2 | A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z |
Thank you for sharing.
- 100 -
Sophie Germain
Gertrude Elion
Ernest Rutherford
James Chadwick
Marcel Proust
William Harvey
Johann Goethe
John Keynes
Carl Gauss
Paul Feyerabend
- 90 -
Antoine Lavoisier
Lise Meitner
Charles Babbage
Ibn Khaldun
Euclid
Ralph Emerson
Robert Bunsen
Frederick Banting
Andre Ampere
Winston Churchill
- 80 -
John Locke
Bronislaw Malinowski
Bible
Thomas Huxley
Alessandro Volta
Erwin Schrodinger
Wilhelm Roentgen
Louis Pasteur
Bertrand Russell
Jean Lamarck
- 70 -
Samuel Morse
John Wheeler
Nicolaus Copernicus
Robert Fulton
Pierre Laplace
Humphry Davy
Thomas Edison
Lord Kelvin
Theodore Roosevelt
Carolus Linnaeus
- 60 -
Francis Galton
Linus Pauling
Immanuel Kant
Martin Fischer
Robert Boyle
Karl Popper
Paul Dirac
Avicenna
James Watson
William Shakespeare
- 50 -
Stephen Hawking
Niels Bohr
Nikola Tesla
Rachel Carson
Max Planck
Henry Adams
Richard Dawkins
Werner Heisenberg
Alfred Wegener
John Dalton
- 40 -
Pierre Fermat
Edward Wilson
Johannes Kepler
Gustave Eiffel
Giordano Bruno
JJ Thomson
Thomas Kuhn
Leonardo DaVinci
Archimedes
David Hume
- 30 -
Andreas Vesalius
Rudolf Virchow
Richard Feynman
James Hutton
Alexander Fleming
Emile Durkheim
Benjamin Franklin
Robert Oppenheimer
Robert Hooke
Charles Kettering
- 20 -
Carl Sagan
James Maxwell
Marie Curie
Rene Descartes
Francis Crick
Hippocrates
Michael Faraday
Srinivasa Ramanujan
Francis Bacon
Galileo Galilei
- 10 -
Aristotle
John Watson
Rosalind Franklin
Michio Kaku
Isaac Asimov
Charles Darwin
Sigmund Freud
Albert Einstein
Florence Nightingale
Isaac Newton


by Ian Ellis
who invites your feedback
Thank you for sharing.
Today in Science History
Sign up for Newsletter
with quiz, quotes and more.