Perkins Marsh Quotes

Wherever modern Science has exploded a superstitious fable or even a picturesque error, she has replaced it with a grander and even more poetical truth.

To the natural philosopher, the descriptive poet, the painter, and the sculptor, as well as to the common observer, the power most important to cultivate, and, at the same time, hardest to acquire is that of seeing what is before him. Sight is a faculty; seeing, an art.

[...] one must have known the Levant to be able to conceive how readily persons intelligent and otherwise respectable will prefer a lie to the truth, when the slightest advantage is to be gained by the use of a falsehood.

This exercise of the eye I desire to promote, and, next to moral and religious doctrine, I know no more important practical lesson in this earthly life of ours … than those relating to the employment of the sense of vision in the study of nature.

We must know words not as abstract grammatical and logical quantities, but as animated and social beings. Roots, inflections, word-book definitions, are products of the decomposition of speech, not speech itself. They are dead remains, stripped of their native attachments and functions, and hence it is that a living Danish scholar, himself a man of rare philological attainment and of keen linguistic perceptions, calls scholastic grammar 'the grave of language.

In 1864, George Perkins Marsh, a diplomat and philologist, published Man and Nature, a landmark work in which he cataloged how human activity had transformed parts of the natural environment, often with disastrous results. “Man has too long forgotten that the earth was given to him for usufruct alone, not for consumption, still less for profligate waste,” Marsh wrote.4 Among other things, he claimed that forest clearing and soil degradation had contributed to the decline of ancient Mediterranean civilizations.