“During the course of many years of investigation into the plant life of the world, creating new forms, modifying old ones, adapting others to new conditions, and blending still others, I have constantly been impressed with the similarity between the organization and development of plant and human life.”

— Luther Burbank

p, 125
The Training of the Human Plant (1907)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "During the course of many years of investigation into the plant life of the world, creating new forms, modifying old on…" by Luther Burbank?

Luther Burbank 30

American botanist, horticulturist and pioneer in agricultur… 1849–1926

Related quotes

“The fundamental division of forms of life on Earth is not that between plants and animals, as is commonly assumed, but between prokaryotes—organisms composed of cells with no nucleus, that is, bacteria—and eukaryotes—all other life forms.”

Lynn Margulis (1938–2011) American evolutionary biologist

Microcosmos: Four Billion Years of Evolution from Our Microbial Ancestors (1986)

“The ever-changing display of plant forms, which I have followed for so many years, awakens increasingly within me the notion: The plant forms which surround us were not all created at some given point in time and then locked into the given form, they have been given… a felicitous mobility and plasticity that allows them to grow and adapt themselves to many different conditions in many different places. …How they can be brought together under one concept has slowly become clear to me and that this conception can be enlivened at a higher level [of consciousness]: thus I began to recognize, in the sense perceptible form, a supersensible archetype. Whoever has felt what a rich, saturated thought… has to say, will admit what a passionate movement comes to life in the spirit when we are enthused, and we anticipate the totality of what will evolve step by step…”

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) German writer, artist, and politician

Goethe's Story of My Botanical Studies (1831) attributed by Frank Teichmann (tr. Jon McAlice) "The Emergence of the Idea of Evolution in the Time of Goethe" http://www.waldorfresearchinstitute.org/pdf/BAIdeaEvolTeich.pdf
Attributed

“[T]he human reason discovers new relations between things not by deduction, but by that unpredictable blend of speculation and insight… induction, which—like other forms of imagination—cannot be formalized.”

Jacob Bronowski (1908–1974) Polish-born British mathematician

"The Reach of Imagination" (1967)

“Goethe's thinking was mobile. It followed the whole growth process of the plant and followed how one plant form is a modification of the other. Goethe's thinking was not rigid with inflexible contours; it was a thinking in which the concepts continually metamorphose. Thereby his concepts became, if I may put it this way, intimately adapted to the process that plant nature itself goes through.”

Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925) Austrian esotericist

Lecture from August 30, 1921, trans. Craig Holdrege

“It [variation and natural selection] would explain, says Mr. Darwin, the unity of type which runs through the whole organic world, and why there is sometimes a fundamental agreement in structure in the same class of beings which is quite independent of their habits of life, for such structure, derived by inheritance from a remote progenitor, has been modified, in the course of ages, in different ways, according to the conditions of existence. It would also explain why all living and extinct beings are united, by complex radiating and circuitous lines of affinity with one another, into one grand system; also, there having been a continued extinction of old races and species in progress, and a formation of new ones by variation, why in some genera which are largely represented, or to which a great many species belong, many of these are closely but unequally related; also, why there are distinct geographical provinces of species of animals and plants, for, after long isolation by physical barriers, each fauna and flora, by varying continually, must become distinct from its ancestral type, and from the new forms assumed by other descendants which have diverged from the same stock.”

Charles Lyell (1797–1875) British lawyer and geologist

Source: The Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man (1863), Ch.21, p. 413

“I didn't add any new elements [to the modern synthetic theory] to speak of. I just modified things so that people could understand how things were in the plant world.”

G. Ledyard Stebbins (1906–2000) American botanist and geneticist

G.Ledyard Stebbins, January 6, 1906-January 19, 2000. Spring 2000, UC Davis Alumni newsletter http://www.dbs.ucdavis.edu/alumni/newsletter/spring00/stebbins.html