Charles Lyell Short Quotes

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Geology differs as widely from cosmogony, as speculations concerning the creation of man differ from history.

Charles Lyell
In a rude state of society all great calamities are regarded by the people as judgments of God on the wickedness of man.

Charles Lyell
'In the economy of the world,' said the Scotch geologist, [James Hutton], 'I can find no traces of a beginning, no prospect of an end.'

Charles Lyell
It was a profound saying of Wilhelm Humboldt, that 'Man is man only by means of speech, but in order to invent speech he must be already man.'

Charles Lyell
'Time's noblest offspring is the last.' This line of Bp. Berkeley's expresses the real cause of the belief in progress in the animal creation.

Charles Lyell
When we study history we obtain a more profound insight into human nature by instituting a comparison between the present and former states of society.

Charles Lyell
Probably there was a beginning—it is a metaphysical question, worthy a theologian—species have begun and ended—but the analogy is faint and distant.

Charles Lyell
When on my return to England I showed the cast of the cranium to Professor Huxley, he remarked at once that it was the most ape-like skull he had ever beheld.

Charles Lyell
I conceive that Lamarck was the first to bring it forward systematically & to 'go the whole orang'..Yet evolutionists 'cannot be pooh-poohed & ought not to be so.'

Charles Lyell
Such discoveries have led me, and other geologists, to reconsider the evidence previously derived from caves brought forward in proof of the high antiquity of Man.

Charles Lyell
I long ago suggested the hypothesis, that in the basin of the Thames there are indications of a meeting in the Pleistocene period of a northern and southern fauna.

Charles Lyell
There is no foundation in geological facts, for the popular theory of the successive development of the animal and vegetable world, from the simplest to the most perfect forms.

Charles Lyell
That ere long, now that curiosity has been so much excited on this subject, some human remains will be detected in the older alluvium of European valleys, I confidently expect.

Charles Lyell
Never was there a dogma more calculated to foster indolence, and to blunt the keen edge of curiosity, than...[the] assumption of the discordance between the former and the existing causes of change.

Charles Lyell