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Description
Richard Fortey—one of the world’s most gifted natural scientists and acclaimed author of Life, Trilobite and Earth —describes this splendid new book as a museum of the mind. But it is, as well, a perfect behind-the-scenes guide to a legendary place. Within its pages, London’s Natural... read more
Memorable Quotes
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“page 58: "A great library like that of the Natural History Museum is an enormous asset, because it holds all the old literature… In this regard, systematic science is quite different from physics or chemistry or physiology, subjects in which old literature rapidly becomes obsolete. Most scientists will not cite references dating back more than a decade, and so they will be unfamiliar with the scholarly pleasures of browsing through old, leather-bound tomes. It is also a fact that old literature in taxonomy is often as beautifully illustrated as any modern production, particularly the plants, for the drawings of many of the botanical artists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have never been surpassed. Old is not necessarily out of date.” page 309: "I suppose that my attachment to the look of the printed page is hopelessly old fashioned, as is feeling a curious connection with those who went before me when I take an old volume from the shelf. It might well happen that visitors to the lines of shelves with their runs of journals bound in matching livery will get fewer and fewer as the internet access improves. If this happens one might wonder whether the next generation might lose contact with history itself, riding always on a few months virtual journals a gathering amnesia erasing the past as intellectual obsolescence creeps inexorably towards what was published the day before yesterday."”
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“page 309: "I suppose that my attachment to the look of the printed page is hopelessly old fashioned, as is feeling a curious connection with those who went before me when I take an old volume from the shelf. It might well happen that visitors to the lines of shelves with their runs of journals bound in matching livery will get fewer and fewer as the internet access improves. If this happens one might wonder whether the next generation might lose contact with history itself, riding always on a few months virtual journals a gathering amnesia erasing the past as intellectual obsolescence creeps inexorably towards what was published the day before yesterday."”
First Sentence
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Authors & Contributors
- Richard Fortey (Author)
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