Quote

But it was soon ascertained that this quaternary matter of the animal body was chemically the same in the plant, was elaborated there, and only appropriated by the animal.

— Asa Gray

Sentiment: NEGATIVE

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✓Similar Perspectives

Many years ago it was taught that plants and animals were composed of different materials: plants, of a chemical substance of three elements,- carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen; animals of one of four elements, nitrogen being added to the other three.

— Asa Gray

Next it was found that it was physiologically and structurally the same in the plant, that it was the living part of the plant, that which manifested the life and did the work in vegetable as well as in animal organisms.

— Asa Gray

Animals are something invented by plants to move seeds around. An extremely yang solution to a peculiar problem which they faced.

— Terence McKenna

It was very important thousands of years ago to categorize things. I can eat that plant, I can't eat that plant. Or this tribe, not that tribe. We don't have to do that anymore - we have processed food now!

— Keegan-Michael Key

Moreover, all our knowledge of organic remains teaches us, that species have a definite existence, and a centralization in geological time as well as in geographical space, and that no species is repeated in time.

— Edward Forbes

Whatever life may really be, it is to us an abstraction: for the word is a generalised term to signify that which is common to all animals and plants, and which is not directly operative in the inorganic world.

— Oliver Joseph Lodge

The structural or biogenetic relations of plant products as deduced from the recognizable architectural components of the molecules have been consistent guides in my investigations.

— Robert Robinson

✗Opposing Perspectives

It was implicitly supposed that every living thing was distinctively plant or animal; that there were real and profound differences between the two, if only they could be seized.

— Asa Gray

The well-known fact that the form of a specific substance, e.g. water, and hence its properties can alter without a change in composition was disposed of by the formal view that a physical, not a chemical, process was involved.

— Wilhelm Ostwald

It was always understood that plants and animals, though completely contrasted in their higher representatives, approached each other very closely in their lower and simpler forms. But they were believed not to blend.

— Asa Gray