Ambuscade Quotes (2 quotes)
We have been scourged by invisible thongs, attacked from impenetrable ambuscades, and it is only to-day that the light of science is being let in upon the murderous dominion of our foes.
From Lecture (19 Oct 1876) to the Glasgow Science Lectures Association, 'Fermentation, and its Bearings on the Phenomena of Disease,' printed in The Fortnightly Review (1 Nov 1876), 26 N.S., No. 119, 572.
When I behold a fashionable table set out in all its magnificence, I fancy that I see gouts and dropsies, fevers and lethargies, with other innumerable distempers lying in ambuscade among the dishes. Nature delights in the most plain and simple diet. Every animal but man keeps to one dish. Herbs are the food of this species, fish of that, and flesh of a third. Man falls upon everything that comes in his way; not the smallest fruit or excrescence of the earth, scarce a berry or a mushroom can escape him.
Spectator, No. 195. In Samuel Austin Allibone, Prose Quotations from Socrates to Macaulay (1880), 363.
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) -- 
