British Geologist Quotes

Charles Lyell

Roderick Murchison

William Smith (geologist)

Archibald Geikie

John Milne

Hugh Miller

Joseph Jukes

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...

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

The straightness, symmetry, extent and ubiquity of these patterns is without parallel in geology and their discovery was completely unexpected.

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

Roderick Murchison

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)

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.

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.

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

No man... can be a thorough geologist without being acquainted, to some extent, with the general results of other sciences, and being able both to understand them when stated in plain untechnical language, and to appreciate their application to his own researches.

The seismograph, recording the unfelt motion of distant earthquakes, enables us to see up to a certain point into the Earth and determine its nature with as great a certainty, as if we could drive a tunnel through it and take samples of the matter passed through.

Richard Dixon Oldham

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