18th-century Geologist Quotes

William Buckland

Adam Sedgwick

William Smith (geologist)

Abraham Gottlob Werner

William Conybeare (geologist)

Karl Georg von Raumer

Giovanni Arduino

Your admission of the late appearance of the great intellectual crown of the whole animal race [man] strikes me as perfectly fatal to the analogy of your system of a continually recurring series of identical terms.

William Conybeare (geologist)

I cannot promise to teach you all geology, I can only fire your imaginations.

The earth, from her deep foundations, unites with the celestial orbs that roll through boundless space.

William Buckland

I would rather have a mineral ill-classified and well-described, than well-classified and ill-described.

Abraham Gottlob Werner

With the sole guidance of our practical knowledge of those physical agents which we see actually used in the continuous workings of nature, and of our knowledge of the respective effects induced by the same workings, we can with reasonable basis surmise what the forces were which acted even in the remotest times.

Giovanni Arduino

In the pure mathematics is the point for setting the lever which will move the world; it is the center from which light radiates to innumerable points on the circumference - to innumerable sciences and arts.

Karl Georg von Raumer

Organized Fossils are to the naturalist as coins to the antiquary; they are the antiquities of the earth; and very distinctly show its gradual regular formation, with the various changes of inhabitants in the watery element.

William Smith (geologist)

Crystallographic science does not consist in the scrupulous description of all the accidents of crystalline form, but in specifying, by the description of these forms, the more or less close relationship they have with each other.

Jean-Baptiste L. Romé de l'Isle