We wanted proper outback: a place where men were men and sheep were nervous.
We have better maps of Mars than we do of our own seabeds. At
We have been gulled by the ease of air travel and other forms of communication into thinking that the world is not all that big, but at ground level, where researchers must work, it is actually enormo...
We clambered for hours up vast, perpendicular slopes, over clattering scree and lumpy tussocks, round towering citadels of rock, and emerged at length into a cold, bleak, lofty nether world so remote...
Wallace’s theory was, by Wallace’s own admission, the result of a flash of insight; Darwin’s was the product of years of careful, plodding, methodical thought. It was all crushingly unfair.
Twice I flushed grouse, always a terrifying experience: an instantaneous explosion from the undergrowth at your feet, like balled socks fired from a gun, followed by drifting feathers and a lingering...
Tokyo: When a passenger of the foot heave in sight, tootle the horn. Trumpet at him melodiously at first, but if he still obstacles your passage, then tootle him with vigor.
To be sure, Wegener made mistakes. He asserted that Greenland is drifting west at about 1.6 kilometres a year, a clear nonsense. (Its more like a centimetre.)
To an American the whole purpose of living, the one constant confirmation of continued existence, is to cram as much as sensual pleasure as possible into one's mouth more or less continuously. Gratifi...
They were most peculiar. And they eat pizza pie. For breakfast? No, for lunch and dinner. But it’s not a pie at all, it’s a kind of bread with tomato sauce and cheese on it. Sounds dreadful.
There is still quite a lot of life out there, but it is mostly very small. According to a wildlife census by an ecologist at the University of Illinois named V. E. Shelford, a typical ten-square-mile...
There is a phenomenon called Trail Magic, known and spoken of with reverence by everyone who hikes the trail, which holds that often when things look darkest some little piece of serendipity comes alo...
There is a certain irony in the fact that Britain gave the world nearly all its most important geological names—Devonian, Cambrian, Silurian, Ordovician—but that the one epoch that everybody knows abo...
There are many other tree museums in the world – including the fine United States National Arboretum in Washington, DC
Then much later—about four or five years ago—I was on a long flight across the Pacific, staring idly out the window at moonlit ocean, when it occurred to me with a certain uncomfortable forcefulness t...
The woods were full of peril — rattlesnakes and water moccasins and nests of copperheads; bobcats, bears, coyotes, wolves, and wild boar; loony hillbillies destabilized by gross quantities of impure c...
The wind’s on the wold And the night is a-cold, And Thames runs chill Twixt mead and hill, But kind and dear Is the old house here, And my heart is warm Midst winter’s harm …
The white people never looked at the Aborigines, and the Aborigines never looked at the white people. The two races seemed to inhabit separate but parallel universes. I felt as if I was the only perso...
The tiniest deviation from any of these evolutionary imperatives and you might now be licking algae from cave walls or lolling walrus-like on some stony shore or disgorging air through a blowhole in t...
The telephone, he wrote, may be briefly described as an electrical contrivance for reproducing in different places the tones and articulations of a speaker’s voice so that Conversations can be carried...