Henry Fairfield Osborn Quotes (1857-1935)

“Every breath you draw, every accelerated beat of your heart in the emotional periods of your oratory depend upon highly elaborated physical and chemical reactions and mechanisms which nature has been building up through a million centuries. If one of these mechanisms, which you owe entirely to your animal ancestry, were to be stopped for a single instant, you would fall lifeless on the stage. Not only this, but some of your highest ideals of human fellowship and comradeship were not created in a moment, but represent the work of ages.”

“Care for the race, even if the individual must suffer — this must be the keynote of our future. This was the guiding principle which underlay all the discussions of the Second International Congress of Eugenics in 1921. Not quantity but quality must be the aim in the development of each nation, to make men fit to maintain their places in the struggle for existence. We must be concerned above all with racial values; every race must seek out and develop and improve its own racial characteristics. Racial consciousness is not pride of race, but proper respect for the Purity of race is today found in but one nation — the Scandinavian.”

“The fossil hunter must first of all be a scientific enthusiast. He must be willing to endure all kinds of hardships, to suffer cold in the early spring and the late autumn and early winter months, to suffer intense heat and the glare of the sun in summer months, and he must be prepared to drink alkali water, and in some regions to fight off the attack of the mosquito and other pests. He must be something of an engineer in order to be able to handle large masses of stone and transport them over roadless wastes of desert to the nearest shipping point; he must have a delicate and skilful touch to preserve the least fragments of bone when fractured; he must be content with very plain living, because the profession is seldom, if ever, remunerative, and he is almost invariably underpaid; he must find his chief reward and stimulus in the sense of discovery and in the despatching of specimens to museums which he has never seen for the benefit of a public which has little knowledge or appreciation of the self-sacrifices which the fossil hunter has made.”

“The Earth Speaks, clearly, distinctly, and, in many of the realms of Nature, loudly, to William Jennings Bryan, but he fails to hear a single sound. The earth speaks from the remotest periods in its wonderful life history in the Archaeozoic Age, when it reveals only a few tissues of its primitive plants. Fifty million years ago it begins to speak as “the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creatures that hath life.” In successive eons of time the various kinds of animals leave their remains in the rocks which compose the deeper layers of the earth, and when the rocks are laid bare by wind, frost, and storm we find wondrous lines of ascent invariably following the principles of creative evolution, whereby the simpler and more lowly forms always precede the higher and more specialized forms.
The earth speaks not of a succession of distinct creations but of a continuous ascent, in which, as the millions of years roll by, increasing perfection of structure and beauty of form are found; out of the water-breathing fish arises the air-breathing amphibian; out of the land-living amphibian arises the land-living, air-breathing reptile, these two kinds of creeping things resembling each other closely. The earth speaks loudly and clearly of the ascent of the bird from one kind of reptile and of the mammal from another kind of reptile.
This is not perhaps the way Bryan would have made the animals, but this is the way God made them!”