Dr. Stephanie L. Canington

“Those who have studied nature only in books can see only their books in nature; they look upon the natural world only to find therein the names and the characters of their systems…How great a difference is there between a dead vegetable, dry, faded, discoloured, whose stems and leaves and flowers are crumbling to powder, and a living vegetable, full of sap, which buds, flowers, gives perfume, fructifies, and sows itself again…The best prepared animal only offers a stuffed skin and a skeleton.  The life is wanting, by which he was classed in the animal kingdom.  The stuffed wolf may preserve his teeth, but the peculiar instinct which determined his ferocious character is gone, and he then scarcely differs from the friendly dog” (Rennie, 1829; p. 29).