19th-century Paleontologist Quotes

Marie Stopes
Henry Fairfield Osborn
Othniel Charles Marsh
Charles Doolittle Walcott
Nathaniel Shaler
Richard Swann Lull
Alexander Winchell

The most complete human being is he or she who consciously or unconsciously obeys the profound physical laws of our being in such a way that the spirit receives as much help and as little hindrance from the body as possible.

Marie Stopes
Marie Stopes
It is certainly within the domain of science to determine when the earth was first fitted to receive life, and in what form the earliest life began. To trace that life in its manifold changes through past ages to the present is a more difficult task, but one from which modern science does not shrink.

Othniel Charles Marsh
Othniel Charles Marsh
The hunter of wild game is always bringing live animals nearer to death and extinction, whereas the fossil hunter is always seeking to bring extinct animals to life.

Henry Fairfield Osborn
Henry Fairfield Osborn
Comets are facts of observation; there is no mistake as to the real existence of such bodies, whatever they may be. They always excite our admiration. They are full of wonder. They come from the unsearchable depths of space, and after shining in our heavens a few weeks, disappear in the unsearchable depths.

Alexander Winchell
Alexander Winchell
It has been well observed that the imagination of man does not really enable him to create anything new, but only to recombine or rearrange what he has seen.

It does not come within the domain of geology to investigate the origin of the universe and of solar and planetary systems. Yet such investigations are so closely associated with the origin and earliest history of the earth that the results attained by astronomical researches have at all times exerted an influence upon the views of geologists.

The greater part of the facts [with] which geologists have to deal possess for the general public a recondite character. They concern things which are not within the limits of familiar experience. In treating of them, the science uses a language of its own, an argot as special as that of the anatomist or the metaphysician.

Nathaniel Shaler
Nathaniel Shaler
The great problem of the whence and whither of man has been before the minds of thinkers from time immemorial. This has, of course, also extended to questions concerning animal and plant origins and that of the world and of the universe itself. These questions, after centuries of thought, are still far from their ultimate solution.

Richard Swann Lull
Richard Swann Lull
Nature has a habit of placing some of her most attractive treasures in places where it is difficult to locate and obtain them.

Charles Doolittle Walcott
Charles Doolittle Walcott