1800s Quotes

“As far back as the 1800s, people were moving to Florida to make their dreams come true.”

“Tennis has been around for so long - women have been playing the majors since the 1800s. Other sports have not had professional leagues for women for as long.”

“If you go back in American history, oysters were the food of poor people. New York was filled with oyster saloons in the 1800s.”

“And evolution wasn't even properly invented until the late 1800s. Is that enough time to get a Labrador retriever from a dire wolf? I think not.”

“I don't know if it's a failure of imagination on my part, but I'm not going to be writing about Paris in the 1800s. I feel like it would come off as just ludicrously uninformed, even if I did a lot of research.”

“Pierre Janet, a French professor of psychology who became prominent in the early twentieth century, attempted to fully chronicle late- Victorian hysteria in his landmark work The Major Symptoms of Hysteria. His catalogue of symptoms was staggering, and included somnambulism (not sleepwalking as we think of it today, but a sort of amnesiac condition in which the patient functioned in a trance state, or "second state," and later remembered nothing); trances or fits of sleep that could last for days, and in which the patient sometimes appeared to be dead; contractures or other disturbances in the motor functions of the limbs; paralysis of various parts of the body; unexplained loss of the use of a sense such as sight or hearing; loss of speech; and disruptions in eating that could entail eventual refusal of food altogether. Janet's profile was sufficiently descriptive of Mollie Fancher that he mentioned her by name as someone who "seems to have had all possible hysterical accidents and attacks." In the face of such strange and often intractable "attacks," many doctors who treated cases of hysteria in the 1800s developed an ill-concealed exasperation.”

“Let's look at one more quick example of modern evolution atwork. In the early 1800s, light-colored lichens covered many ofthe trees in the English countryside. The peppered moth was alight-colored insect that blended in unnoticeably with the lichens.Predators had great difficulty distinguishing the peppered mothfrom its background environment, so the moths easily survivedand reproduced. Then the Industrial Revolution came to the English country-side. Coal-burning factories turned the lichens a sooty black. Thelight-colored peppered moth became clearly visible. Most of themwere eaten. But because of genetic variation and mutation, a fewpeppered moths displayed a slightly darker color. These darkermoths were better able to blend in with the sooty lichens, and solived to produce other darker-colored moths. In little over a hun-dred years, successive generations of peppered moths evolvedfrom almost completely white to completely black. Natural selec-tion, rather than "random accident," guided the moth's evolution-ary progress.”

“Women are told from their infancy, and taught by the example of their mothers, that a little knowlegde of human weakness, justly termed cunning, softness of temper; outward obedience, and a scrupulous attention to a puerile kind of proptiety, will obtain for them the protection of man; and should they be beautiful, every thing else is needless, for, at least, twenty years of their lives.”