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: “Genius is two percent inspiration, ninety-eight percent perspiration.”
more quiz questions >>
Home > Category Index for Science Quotations > Category Index S > Category: Slime

Slime Quotes (6 quotes)

Evolution: At the Mind's Cinema
I turn the handle and the story starts:
Reel after reel is all astronomy,
Till life, enkindled in a niche of sky,
Leaps on the stage to play a million parts.
Life leaves the slime and through all ocean darts;
She conquers earth, and raises wings to fly;
Then spirit blooms, and learns how not to die,-
Nesting beyond the grave in others' hearts.
I turn the handle: other men like me
Have made the film: and now I sit and look
In quiet, privileged like Divinity
To read the roaring world as in a book.
If this thy past, where shall they future climb,
O Spirit, built of Elements and Time?
'Evolution: At the Mind's Cinema' (1922), in The Captive Shrew and Other Poems of a Biologist (1932), 55.
Science quotes on:  |  Astronomy (251)  |  Beyond (316)  |  Book (413)  |  Conquer (39)  |  Death (406)  |  Divinity (23)  |  Earth (1076)  |  Element (322)  |  Evolution (635)  |  Film (12)  |  Fly (153)  |  Future (467)  |  Grave (52)  |  Handle (29)  |  Heart (243)  |  Leap (57)  |  Learn (672)  |  Life (1870)  |  Look (584)  |  Mind (1377)  |  Niche (9)  |  Ocean (216)  |  Other (2233)  |  Past (355)  |  Poem (104)  |  Quiet (37)  |  Read (308)  |  Sky (174)  |  Spirit (278)  |  Stage (152)  |  Start (237)  |  Story (122)  |  Through (846)  |  Time (1911)  |  Turn (454)  |  Wing (79)  |  World (1850)

Man is but a perambulating tool-box and workshop or office, fashioned for itself by a piece of very clever slime, as the result of long experience. ... Hence we speak of man's body as his “trunk.”
Samuel Butler, Henry Festing Jones (ed.), The Note-Books of Samuel Butler (1917), 18.
Science quotes on:  |  Body (557)  |  Box (22)  |  Clever (41)  |  Cleverness (15)  |  Definition (238)  |  Experience (494)  |  Fashion (34)  |  Long (778)  |  Man (2252)  |  Office (71)  |  Result (700)  |  Speak (240)  |  Tool (129)  |  Trunk (23)  |  Workshop (14)

Populations of bacteria live in the spumes of volcanic thermal vents on the ocean floor, multiplying in water above the boiling point. And far beneath Earth’s surface, to a depth of 2 miles (3.2 km) or more, dwell the SLIMES (subsurface lithoautotrophic microbial ecosystems), unique assemblages of bacteria and fungi that occupy pores in the interlocking mineral grains of igneous rock and derive their energy from inorganic chemicals. The SLIMES are independent of the world above, so even if all of it were burned to a cinder, they would carry on and, given enough time, probably evolve new life-forms able to re-enter the world of air and sunlight.
In 'Vanishing Before Our Eyes', Time (26 Apr 2000).
Science quotes on:  |  Air (366)  |  Assemblage (17)  |  Bacteria (50)  |  Beneath (68)  |  Burn (99)  |  Carry (130)  |  Chemical (303)  |  Cinder (6)  |  Depth (97)  |  Derive (70)  |  Earth (1076)  |  Ecosystem (33)  |  Energy (373)  |  Enough (341)  |  Enter (145)  |  Evolution (635)  |  Form (976)  |  Fungus (8)  |  Grain (50)  |  Igneous (3)  |  Life (1870)  |  Life-Form (6)  |  Live (650)  |  Microbe (30)  |  Mineral (66)  |  More (2558)  |  New (1273)  |  Ocean (216)  |  Ocean Floor (6)  |  Point (584)  |  Population (115)  |  Pore (7)  |  Rock (176)  |  Sunlight (29)  |  Surface (223)  |  Thermal (15)  |  Time (1911)  |  Unique (72)  |  Volcano (46)  |  Water (503)  |  World (1850)

The breakfast slimes, angel food cake, doughnuts and coffee, white bread and gravy cannot build an enduring nation.
Science quotes on:  |  Angel (47)  |  Bread (42)  |  Breakfast (10)  |  Build (211)  |  Cake (6)  |  Coffee (21)  |  Food (213)  |  Gravy (2)  |  Nation (208)  |  White (132)

The mutton in the study gathered over it a thick blanket of Penicillium. On the 13th [December 1875] it had assumed a light brown colour as if by a faint admixture of clay; but the infusion became transparent. The ‘clay’ here was the slime of dead or dormant Bacteria, the cause of their quiescence being the blanket of Penicillium. I found no active life in this tube, while all the others swarmed with Bacteria. In every case where the mould was thick and coherent the Bacteria died, or became dormant, and fell to the bottom of the sediment … The Bacteria which manufacture a green pigment appear to be uniformly victorious in their fight with the Penicillium.
From paper read to the Royal Institution (1 Jan 1876). In 'Professor Tyndall on the Optical Deportment of the Atmosphere in Relation to Putrefaction and Infection' , Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London (1876), 166, 62.
Science quotes on:  |  Active (80)  |  Bacteria (50)  |  Being (1276)  |  Blanket (10)  |  Bottom (36)  |  Brown (23)  |  Cause (561)  |  Clay (11)  |  Coherence (13)  |  Death (406)  |  Dormant (4)  |  Fight (49)  |  Gather (76)  |  Green (65)  |  Infusion (4)  |  Life (1870)  |  Light (635)  |  Manufacture (30)  |  Manufacturing (29)  |  Mold (37)  |  Mutton (4)  |  Other (2233)  |  Penicillium (3)  |  Pigment (9)  |  Quiescence (2)  |  Sediment (9)  |  Study (701)  |  Swarm (15)  |  Transparent (16)  |  Victory (40)

There is a reference in Aristotle to a gnat produced by larvae engendered in the slime of vinegar. This must have been Drosophila.
A History of Genetics (1965), 43. Used as an Epigraph in M. M. Green, James F. Crow and William F. Dove (eds.), 'It Really Is Not a Fruit Fly', Genetics (Sep 2002), 162, 1. The article points out that Drosphila melanogaster now called the “fruit fly” was historically known in general genetics texts as the “pomace fly” (e.g. Castle, 1911) or the “vinegar fly” (e.g. Morgan, Bridges and Sturtevant, 1925). The article footnotes the origin as a sentence in Aristotle’s History of Animals, book 5, section 19: “The conops comes from a grub engendered in the slime of vinegar.” Whereas that insect would seen to be the “vinegar fly,” from descriptions elsewhere in Aristotle's writing, he also used the word “conops” for an insect like a mosquito.
Science quotes on:  |  Aristotle (179)  |  Drosophila (10)  |  Engender (3)  |  Fruit Fly (6)  |  Genetics (105)  |  Gnat (7)  |  Larva (8)  |  Must (1525)  |  Nomenclature (159)  |  Produced (187)  |  Reference (33)  |  Vinegar (7)


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.