19th-century Geologist Quotes

Charles Lyell

Eduard Suess

James Dwight Dana

Roderick Murchison

John Wesley Powell

Vladimir Obruchev

Archibald Geikie

A hypothesis to gain scientific credence must emerge successful from the test of observed facts and mathematical theory.

Experts sometimes suffer from an hypertrophy of learning and an atrophy of common sense to which men of wider outlook and more general culture can apply a wholesome correction.

Thomas George Bonney

Each single layer of earth Tells a story that's all its own; The sands of the ancient beaches Have changed into strata of stone.

Hugh Auchincloss Brown

Perhaps it is because we know so much about magmas that we have such a vivid appreciation of what there is yet to learn.

Norman L. Bowen

Once a continent, always a continent; once an ocean, always an ocean.

Foot-marks on stone! How plain and yet how strange! A bird track truly though of giant bulk, Yet of the monster every vestige else Has vanished. Bird, a problem thou hast solved Man never has: to leave his trace on earth To deep for time and fate to wear away.

Edward Hitchcock

A scientist lacking imagination can at best become a splendid walking library and source of information — he absorbs, but does not create.

Feodor Yulievich Levinson-Lessing

Everyone knows that the same animals and plants are not found everywhere... but that they are distributed so as to be gathered in distinct zoological and botanical provinces, of greater or less extent, according to their degree of limitation by physical conditions, whether features of the earth's outline, or climate.

Robert Alfred Cloyne Godwin-Austen

Science is not sacrificing any of its strength nor compromising its ideals. It is technology that is changing - that is becoming less empirical, more systematic, more quantitative, more scientific.

Charles S. Slichter

It is almost with a sense of shock that we realize that the essence of physics and chemistry alike lies in the arrangements within the atom.

Robert Charles Wallace

Even those who have more sympathy with man's endeavor than with the affairs of Nature may take an interest in the Science of Tectonics. Knowledge, after all, is of human creation; and, as a rule, the knowledge of the structure of a mountain chain comes as the reward of glorious struggle, both physical and mental.

Edward Battersby Bailey

The prime object of the geologist as a scientist is to find the truth. The prime object of the geologist as a practitioner is to find ore.

Waldemar Lindgren

It is perhaps a little indelicate to ask of our Mother Earth her age, but Science acknowledges no shame and from time to time has boldly attempted to wrest from her a secret which is proverbially well guarded.

No science can exist wholly for itself alone, exerting neither a passive nor an active influence. Each science must make some use of the results acquired by allied branches of knowledge for the furthering of its own advancement, and again each must contribute from its own results toward the advancement of other sciences.

Ferdinand Zirkel

Our first step towards the acquirement of scientific or exact knowledge, must be the unlearning of what we have before been led to regard as true.

John Wesley Judd

Ignorance, having few facts, loses sight of all in her endeavors to generalize; knowledge, with many facts, finds it difficult so to arrange them as to obtain the conclusions they properly warrant.

David T. Ansted

The difference between bad observation and good observation is that the former is erroneous; the latter is incomplete.

Charles R. Van Hise

Mountains rise and disappear; sea and land repeatedly change places. Majestic forces in orderly succession perform their work, and development, whose course we may follow and whose processes understand, is made clear before our eyes.

James Furman Kemp

The ice of Greenland is incessantly travelling both by land and sea, and is ever ready to meet the tourist and the explorer far down toward the middle of the Atlantic.

Geology has to do with many cycles, but the greatest of these is the erosional flow of rock mass from the continents to the sea and the isostatic return flow of equivalent mass from beneath the sea to the land.

Facts are the bricks of human experience, your implement in creation. Search for facts tirelessly, collect them in nature and in books, and read good textbooks from cover to cover.

Vladimir Obruchev

In comparison with ourselves our world is large, its mountains and valleys are gigantic excrescences on its surface, whilst the elevations and depressions, representing continental elevations and ocean basins, form irregularities the magnitude of which we can only appreciate by the aid of figures.

We have defined geology as the history of the evolution of the earth. Evolution, therefore, is the central idea of geology. It is this idea alone which makes geology a distinct science.

The expanding horizon of knowledge has simply lengthened the line of contact between man and the unknown elements in the cosmos.

Kirtley F. Mather

Narrow and loose habits of thought, prejudiced attitudes towards evidence, bias from previous opinions and feelings, shallowness and superficiality in observation, and carelessness in reasoning are appropriate subjects of moral reproof.

Thomas Chrowder Chamberlin