A Garden of Marvels Quotes

“Spallanzani was a genial, round-faced, baldheaded man who looked a bit like actor Wally Shawn. Born in northern Italy in 1729 to a lawyer and his well-connected wife, at the age of twenty he embarked on the study of law at the University of Bologna, where his cousin Laura Bassi was the first female professor of physics and mathematics in Europe.”
― Ruth Kassinger, The Garden of Marvels: How We Discovered that Flowers Have Sex, Leaves Eat Air, and Other Secrets of the Way Plants Work

“image. It made masturbation mass murder. Pollen, which blew about in spring in quantities great enough to fur a pond in a coat of yellow, was an even larger, if less heart-wrenching, waste of life. While Nature was obviously prodigal of youth—in early eighteenth-century London, almost half the children died before their second birthday—this level of carnage was hard to accept.”
― Ruth Kassinger, The Garden of Marvels: How We Discovered that Flowers Have Sex, Leaves Eat Air, and Other Secrets of the Way Plants Work

“Over time, however, doubts about spermism arose. According to Leeuwenhoek, a million human spermatozoa could fit in a grain of sand. That meant that if each sperm held a tiny person, God was horrendously wasteful of creatures made in his own”
― Ruth Kassinger, The Garden of Marvels: How We Discovered that Flowers Have Sex, Leaves Eat Air, and Other Secrets of the Way Plants Work