19th-century Geologist Quotes

The elements that unite to make the Grand Canyon the most sublime spectacle in nature are multifarious and exceedingly diverse.

John Wesley Powell

The laws of physics and chemistry must be the same in a crucible as in the larger laboratory of Nature.

The volumes, the surfaces, the lines-in one word, the structures that build a tectonic construction-do not represent the whole picture: there is also the movement that animated and still animates these bodies because the history continues and we live under no particular privileged conditions at any given time in this great process.

To describe, without rising to the causes, or descending to the consequences, is no more science, than merely and simply to relate a fact of which one has been a witness.

Arnold Henry Guyot

The technicalities of science, so bewildering to the layman, are merely aids to exactness, avoidances of circumlocution - in short, they are practical devices whereby labor is saved.

Frank Wigglesworth Clarke

Generally speaking, geologists seem to have been much more intent on making little worlds of their own, than in examining the crust of that which they inhabit. It would be much more desirable that facts should be placed in the foreground and theories in the distance, than that theories should be brought forward at the expense of facts.

Henry De la Beche

It seems that in our hunt for general principles we feel the need of tagging each observed fact with some word that may connect it with the language in which the great fundamental laws of the universe are proclaimed at the seats of learning.

George Otis Smith