The last fling of winter is over ... The earth, the soil itself, has a dreaming quality about it. It is warm now to the touch; it has come alive; it hides secrets that in a moment, in a little while, it will tell.
Donald C. PeattieAll the great naturalists have been habitual walkers, for no laboratory, no book, car, train or plane takes the place of honest footwork for this calling, be it amateur's or professional's.
Donald C. PeattieThe Grand Canyon is carven deep by the master hand; it is the gulf of silence, widened in the desert; it is all time inscribing the naked rock; it is the book of earth.
Donald C. PeattieA thing is either alive or it isnโt; there is nothing that is almost alive. There is but the remotest possibility of the origin of life by spontaneous generation, and every likelihood that Arrhenius is right when he dares to claim that life is a cosmic phenomenon, something that drifts between the spheres, like light, and like light transiently descends upon those fit to receive it.
Donald C. PeattieAs the brain of man is the speck of dust in the universe that thinks, so the leavesโthe fern and the needled pine and the latticed frond and the seaweed ribbonโperceive the light in a fundamental and constructive sense. โฆ Their leaves see the light, as my eyes can never do. โฆ They impound its stellar energy, and with that force they make life out of the elements.
Donald C. Peattie