path-maker

Updated: May 7, 2025

What a beautiful path the cows make through the snow to the stack or to the spring under the hill! always more or less wayward, but broad and firm, and carved and indented by a multitude of rounded hoofs. In fact, the cow is the true pathfinder and path-maker. She has the leisurely, deliberate movement that insures an easy and a safe way.

John Burroughs - In the Catskills : Selections from the Writings of John Burroughs

But the records of his own observations are so intermingled with knowledge drawn from books that it is difficult to distinguish the one from the other. Nor does this greatly matter, for whether as closet-student or field-naturalist, Pliny's trait of mind is essentially that of the compiler. He was no philosophical thinker, no generalizer, no path-maker in science.

Edward Huntington Williams - A History of Science — Volume 1