English Geologist Quotes

William Buckland

Adam Sedgwick

Henry De la Beche

Arthur Holmes

William Conybeare (geologist)

Charles Lapworth

Your admission of the late appearance of the great intellectual crown of the whole animal race [man] strikes me as perfectly fatal to the analogy of your system of a continually recurring series of identical terms.

William Conybeare (geologist)

I cannot promise to teach you all geology, I can only fire your imaginations.

The earth, from her deep foundations, unites with the celestial orbs that roll through boundless space.

William Buckland

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

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

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

Ignorance, having few facts, loses sight of all in her endeavors to generalize; knowledge, with many facts, finds it difficult so to arrange them as to obtain the conclusions they properly warrant.

David T. Ansted

It is perhaps a little indelicate to ask of our Mother Earth her age, but Science acknowledges no shame and from time to time has boldly attempted to wrest from her a secret which is proverbially well guarded.

Experts sometimes suffer from an hypertrophy of learning and an atrophy of common sense to which men of wider outlook and more general culture can apply a wholesome correction.

Thomas George Bonney

Even those who have more sympathy with man's endeavor than with the affairs of Nature may take an interest in the Science of Tectonics. Knowledge, after all, is of human creation; and, as a rule, the knowledge of the structure of a mountain chain comes as the reward of glorious struggle, both physical and mental.

Edward Battersby Bailey