How we cite our quotes: Possession: A Romance. London: Vintage Books, 1991.
Quote #4
He, Cropper, on the other hand, had early begun to trace the journeyings of Randolph Ash—not consecutively, but as the chances presented themselves, so that his first expedition had been to the North Yorkshire Moors and coast where Ash had enjoyed a solitary walking-tour, combined with amateur marine biologising, in 1859. (6.40)
Even though we aren't really meant to like Mortimer Cropper very much, it has to be said that he has long known certain things that Roland Mitchell and Maud Bailey discover much later in their academic lives—like the value of visiting the natural landscapes that fired their favourite authors' imaginations.
Quote #5
I have read other of your poems of Insect Life, and marveled at the way they combined the brilliance and fragility of those winged things—or creeping—with something too of the biting and snapping and devouring that may be seen under a microscope. It would be a brave poet indeed who would undertake a true description of the Queen Bee—or Wasp—or Ant—as we now know them to be—having for centuries supposed these centres of communal worship and activity to be Male Rulers […]. (10.2)
Throughout Randolph Henry Ash's correspondence with Christabel LaMotte, there is strong evidence of his diverse interests in the natural world. A. S. Byatt also uses these letters as opportunities to highlight many different kinds of scientific discoveries that changed human perceptions of the world—like the discovery that many insect colonies have a "queen" and not a "king" at their centers.
Quote #6
I run on, and have not communicated to you the subject of my insect-poem, which is to be the short and miraculous—and on the whole tragic—life of Swammerdam, who discovered in Holland the optic glass which revealed to us the endless reaches and ceaseless turmoil of the infinitely small just as the great Galileo turned his optic tube on the majestic motions of the planets and beyond them the silent spheres of the infinitely great. (10.4)
As we see here, Randolph Henry Ash isn't just interested in scientific discoveries about the natural world itself: he's also fascinated by the human personalities that give rise to those discoveries—and by the kinds of human responses that greet those discoveries when they're made public.