At present good work in science pays less well very often than mediocrity in other subjects. This, as was pointed out by Sir Lyon Playfair in his Presidential Address to the British Association in 1885 helps to arrest progress in science teaching.

Each of us by his own work and thought, if he so choose, may enlarge the circle of his own knowledge at least, and thus make the universe more and more beautiful, to himself at all events, if not to others.

I must, in the first place, ask my readers to grant me the scientific use of their imagination; and in order that it may not be called upon to cope with questions as to whether space is infinite or not, or whether space and time ever had a beginning, we will not consider the possibility of the beginning of things or attempt to define the totality of space, but we will in imagination clear a certain part of space and then set certain possibilities at work.

In physical science in most cases a new discovery means that by some new idea, new instrument, or some new and better use of an old one, Nature has been wooed in some new way.

It is impossible with our present knowledge to suppose that at any prior stage of the history of the heavens gravitation did not exist. It is impossible, from what we know now, to suppose that even the finest form of matter which entered our clearing in space was not endowed with motion. Given this matter, its motion and gravitation,… will give us a formation of centres;… rotation…; we shall… get condensing masses of this curdled substance.

Owing to their [minor planets or asteroids] small size; … The force of gravity on their surfaces must be very small. A man placed on one of them would spring with ease 60 feet high, and sustain no greater shock in his descent than he does on the Earth from leaping a yard. On such planets giants may exist; and those enormous animals which here require the buoyant power of water to counteract their weight, may there inhabit the land.

Slowly, but very surely, by means of quiet sap,… we are effecting an entrance into the treasure-houses wherein are kept the secrets of the sun.

The nineteenth century will ever be known as the one in which the influences of science were first fully realised in civilised communities; the scientific progress was so gigantic that it seems rash to predict that any of its successors can be more important in the life of any nation.

The secrets of the sun include the cipher in which the light messages … the Chemistry of Space.

The Telescope, in fact, was comparatively little used until astronomy annexed that important branch of physics to its aid which gave us a Clock—a means of dividing time in the most accurate manner.

The work of the true man of Science is a perpetual striving after a better and closer knowledge of the planet on which his lot is cast, and of the universe in the vastness of which that planet is lost. The only way of doing this effectually, is to proceed as gradually, and therefore as surely as possible, along the dim untrodden ground lying beyond the known. Such is scientific work.

Time out of mind—or, rather, ever since Nicolas Le Fèvre … pointed out that chemistry was the art of separations as well as of transmutations—it has been recognized that, with every increase of temperature, or dissociating power, bodies were separated from each other.

We believe that each molecular vibration disturbs the ether; that spectra are thus begotten, each wavelength of light resulting from a molecular tremor of corresponding wavelength. The molecule is, in fact, the sender, the ether the wire, and the eye the receiving instrument, in this new telegraphy.

[Lockyer]... sometimes forgets he is only the editor and not the author of Nature.
[Lockyer was the first editor of Nature.]

Your printers have made but one blunder,
Correct it instanter, and then for the thunder!
We’ll see in a jiffy if this Mr S[pencer]
Has the ghost of a claim to be thought a good fencer.
To my vision his merits have still seemed to dwindle,
Since I have found him allied with the great Dr T[yndall]
While I have, for my part, grown cockier and cockier,
Since I found an ally in yourself, Mr L[ockyer]
And am always, in consequence, thoroughly willin’,
To perform in the pages of Nature's M[acmillan].