19th-century Geologist Quotes

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

We should greatly err, if we endeavoured to force all ancient nature into a close comparison with existing operations.

Roderick Murchison

In vein do we aspire to assign limits to the works of creation in space, whether we examine the starry heavens, or that world of minute animalcules which is revealed to us by the microscope. We are prepared, therefore, to find that in time also the confines of the universe lie beyond the reach of mortal ken.

With a certain class of minds, fancy comes in to supply the place of facts that fail.

Archibald Geikie

The older fossils, therefore, like the mummies of Egypt, can be described well nigh as minutely as the existences of the present creation: the newer, like the comparatively modern remains of our churchyards, exist, except in a few rare cases, as mere fragments...

Rocks are like human beings; they will bend before force, if you give them time enough and are not too rough with them.

Reginald Aldworth Daly

Roses bloom, and then they wither;
Cheeks are bright, then fade and die;
Shapes of light are wafted hither,
Then, like visions, hurry by.

James Gates Percival

Mortal birth is a boon to which only those spirits who kept their first estate are eligible.

James E. Talmage

I became a geologist forever by seeing with my own eyes: THE EARTH IS ALIVE.

In these hurried days, geologists will take no harm from a quiet contemplation of the history of even this small part of their science.

Herbert Harold Read

We had found an accursed country. On the fringe of an unspanned continent along whose gelid coast our comrades had made their home—we knew not where—we dwelt where the chill breath of a vast, Polar wilderness, quickening to the rushing might of eternal blizzards, surged to the northern seas.

I can still feel within me the strength and readiness for hardship and suffering, yet I would like to live long enough to see the day when I might freely work for Poland, and not wander aimlessly through God knows what land.[...] And if death finds me working on alien soil, this too will not be without profit for Poland, particularly if among some distant tribe, the farthest possible from our country, they will remember a Pole, will wish Poland well, and will be supportive toward her.

The world over which early man wandered was to him the theatre of a never-ending conflict, in which were arrayed against him impassable seas, unscalable mountains, gloomy forests peopled by deadly beasts of prey, raging streams and foaming torrents, each and all the haunts of spirits luring him to doom.

Charles Lapworth

I cannot see of what use these slides can be to a field man. I don't believe in looking at a mountain through a microscope.

Andrew Ramsay (geologist)

If we imagine an observer to approach our planet from outer space, and, pushing aside the belts of red-brown clouds which obscure our atmosphere, to gaze for a whole day on the surface of the earth as it rotates beneath him, the feature, beyond all others most likely to arrest his attention would be the wedge-like outlines of the continents as they narrow away to the South.

The scrutinizing eye of science penetrates with far-reaching sight the system of things about us, and in the dim limits of vision reads everywhere the word mystery.

James Dwight Dana

The geologist, ascending from the oldest and lowest portions of the earth's crust, and dealing for millions of years with physical forces and the instinctive powers of animals alone, at length as he approaches the surface finds himself in contact with an entirely new agency, the free-will and conscious action of man.

John William Dawson

There is ample evidence of suspicion, due to ignorance, directing the thoughts of American people when they consider the actions of peoples in other lands.

Wallace Walter Atwood

The western margin of this continent [North America] is built of a succession of mountain chains folded in broad corrugations, like waves of stone upon whose seaward base beat the mild, small breakers of the Pacific.

Experience has shown that whenever a new and more advanced viewpoint has been gained to take the place of an earlier one, and its superiority has come to be acknowledged, the tendency has always been to sketch in from that one standpoint even the more distant objects, rather than to move forward to new and independent positions.

William Herbert Hobbs

In the domain of the world's knowledge there is no infallibility.

Grove Karl Gilbert

It was mistakenly reported that the Times correspondent Morrison had been killed during the Boxer Rebellion in Beijing, to which Morrison responded:

Have just read obituary in the Times. Kindly adjust pay to suit.

George Ernest Morrison