I am sufficiently convinced already that the members of a profession know their own calling better than anyone else can know it.

I accept extinction as best explaining disjoined species. I see that the same cause must have reduced many species of great range to small, and that it may have reduced large genera to so small, and of families.

It remains to consider what attitude thoughtful men and Christian believers should take respecting them, and how they stand related to beliefs of another order.

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.

I take it for granted that you do not wish to hear an echo from the pulpit nor from the theological class-room.

Why is it not just as likely that there were as many small general nearly at first as now, and as great a disproportion in the number of their species?

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.

We may take it to be the accepted idea that the Mosaic books were not handed down to us for our instruction in scientific knowledge, and that it is our duty to ground our scientific beliefs upon observation and inference, unmixed with considerations of a different order.

The best opinion now is, that there are multitudinous forms which are not sufficiently differentiated to be distinctively either plant or animal, while, as respects ordinary plants and animals, the difficulty of laying down a definition has become far greater than ever before.

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.

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.

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.

Is it philosophical, is it quite allowable, to assume without evidence from fossil plants that the family or any of the genera was once larger and wide spread? and occupied a continuous area?

Your candor is worth everything to your cause. It is refreshing to find a person with a new theory who frankly confesses that he finds difficulties, insurmountable, at least for the present.

There is a class, moreover, by whom all these scientific theories, and more are held as ascertained facts, and as the basis of philosophical inferences which strike at the root of theistic beliefs.

I know some people who never have any difficulties to speak of. The moment I understood your premisses, I felt sure you had a real foundation to hold on.

We have spoken of beings so low in the scale that the individuals throughout their whole existence are not sufficiently specialized to be distinctively plant or animal: yet these are definite life in simpler shape.

Indeed upon much that may have to say, I expect rather the charitable judgment than the full assent of those whose approbation I could most wish to win.

I am sufficiently convinced already that the members of a profession know their own calling better than anyone else can know it.

I proceed with the proper subject of this discourse; namely, the further changes in scientific belief, which have occurred within my own recollection, even since the time when I first aspired to authorship, now forty- five years ago.

The former conviction that these two kingdoms were wholly different in structure, in function, and in kind of life, was not seriously disturbed by the difficulties which the naturalist encountered when he undertook to define them.

In short, the animal and vegetable lines, diverging widely above, join below in a loop.

This substance, which is manifold in its forms and protean in its transformations, has, in its state of living matter, one physiological name which has become familiar, that of protoplasm.

I take it for granted that you do not wish to hear an echo from the pulpit nor from the theological class room.

A man must be strong in that profession, he must have vigor of body and mind, yet I am all out of breath if I walk up a hill; I have not the heart to crush even a fly.

The Epistle is a correction of profession without life, and most valuable in this respect.

They must have a feeling of do or die. It is such an overcrowded profession.

I'll be damned if I am not getting tired of this. It seems to be the profession of a President simply to hear other people talk.

Acting is the perfect idiot's profession.

Reality is, I'm an actor and an entertainer, and I really wouldn't know what to do with another profession.

I think one of the greatest joys I have now in my career and in my profession is to be playing at an age where I can appreciate it more than I used to... It's a whole different lens you look through the older you get.

My parents and grandparents have always been engaged in teaching or the medical profession or the priesthood, so I've sort of grown up with a sense of complicity in the lives of other people, so there's no virtue in that; it's the way one is raised.

We have indeed at the moment little cause for pride: as a profession we have made a mess of things.

Twenty years ago I wanted to move to a nice place so our Charley would grow up a nice boy and learn a profession. But instead we live in a jungle, so he can only be a wild animal. D'you think I picked the East Side like Columbus picked America?

Politics I supposed to be the second-oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first.

Acting is the most brotherly and sisterly profession in the world.

When I joined the band, being that I was going to take this up as a profession, I realized that there were no two finer guitar players in the world that I'd rather play with.

In Hungary acting is a profession. In America it is a decision.

Journalism is a kind of profession, or craft, or racket, for people who never wanted to grow up and go out into the real world.

Never the less, at the age of fifteen, having never seen a writer, a poet, a publisher or a magazine editor, and having only the vaguest ideas of procedure, I began working on the profession I had chosen.

One of the big draws of the show is here's a guy who is ordinary in a lot of ways but, due to his profession, he's placed in extraordinary situations that he has to make right with action and with thought. That's what is appealing about Jack - he takes charge.

Politics, as a practice, whatever its profession, has always been the systematic organization of hatreds.

The development of the comedy club industry destroyed the uniqueness and intimacy of the profession but it also created jobs for comics and bred some great performers.

I am deeply interested in the progress and elevation of journalism, having spent my life in that profession, regarding it as a noble profession and one of unequaled importance for its influence upon the minds and morals of the people.

Admittedly, scientific authority is not distributed evenly throughout the body of scientists; some distinguished members of the profession predominate over others of a more junior standing.

The University of North Carolina provided me with every tool necessary to rise to the top of my profession.

I never thought I would live long enough to see the legal profession change to the extent it has.

It has been said that politics is the second oldest profession. I have learned that it bears a striking resemblance to the first.

I come from a profession which has suffered greatly because of the lack of civility. Lawyers treat each other poorly and it has come home to haunt them. The public will not tolerate a lack of civility.