Hugh Miller Quotes

45 Sourced Quotes

There is no progression. If fish rose into reptiles, it must have been by sudden transformation.... There is no getting rid of miracle in the case, — there is no alternative between creation and metamorphosis. The infidel substitutes progression for Deity; Geology robs him of his god.

Hugh Miller
There is scarce an architectural ornament of the Gothic or Grecian styles which may not be found existing as fossils in the rocks.

Hugh Miller
Up till the introduction of man upon our planet, the humbler creatures, his predecessors, formed but mere figures in its various landscapes, and failed to alter or affect by their works the face of nature.

Hugh Miller
There is surely something very wonderful in the fact, that in uniting the links of the chain of creation into an unbroken whole, we have in like manner to seek for them all along the scale of the geologist.

Hugh Miller
It is said that modern science is averse to the exercise and development of the imaginative faculty. But is it really so?

Hugh Miller
Creation cannot take place without miracle; but it would be a strange reversal of all our previous conclusions on the subject, should we have to hold that the dead, dark blank out of which creation arose was miraculous also.

Hugh Miller
In the geologic, as in other departments, What can we reason but from what we know?

Hugh Miller
The natural boundaries of the geographer are rarely described by right lines. Whenever these occur, however, the geologist may look for something remarkable.

Hugh Miller
It cannot be too extensively known, that nature is vast and knowledge limited; and that no individual, however humble in place or acquirement, need despair of adding to the general fund.

Hugh Miller
We may turn over these wonderful leaves one after one, like the leaves of a herbarium, and find the pictorial records of a former creation in every page.

Hugh Miller
Geology, of all the sciences, addresses itself most powerfully to the imagination; and hence one main cause of the interest which it excites.

Hugh Miller
And over the roar of waves or the rush of tides we may hear the growling of a subterranean thunder, that now dies away in low deep mutterings, and no, ere some fresh earthquake-shock tern — pests the sea, bellows wildly from the abyss.

Hugh Miller
There are two great infinities, — the infinite in space and the infinite in time.

Hugh Miller
Physiognomy is no idle or doubtful science in connection with geology. The physiognomy of a country indicates almost invariably its geological character.

Hugh Miller
The planet which we inhabit is but one vessel in the midst of a fleet sailing on through the vast ocean of space, under convoy of the sun.

Hugh Miller
He will find sermons in stones, and more of the suggestive and the sublime in a few broken scaurs of clay, a few fragmentary shell, and a few green reaches of the old coast line...

Hugh Miller
It is an excellent circumstance that hospitality grows best where it is most needed.

Hugh Miller
The perfection of the works of Deity is a perfection entire in its components, and yet these are not contemporaneous, but successive: it is a perfection which includes the dead as well as the living, and bears relation, in its completeness, not to time, but to eternity.

Hugh Miller
Paleontology, or the science of ancient organisms, deals, as its subject, with all the plants and animals of all the geologic periods. It bears nearly the same sort of relation to the physical history of the past that biography does to the civil and political history of the past.

Hugh Miller
But should we continue to linger amid a scene so featureless and wild, or venture adown some yawning opening into the abyss beneath, where all is fiery and yet dark,-a solitary hell, without suffering or sin,-we would do well to commit ourselves to the guidance of a living poet of the true faculty,-Thomas Aird and see with his eyes.

Hugh Miller
My lecture contains but little. Such is the scantiness of the materials on which I had to work, that it could not have contained much: if according to the dramatist, the "amount be beggarly," it is because the "boxes are empty."

Hugh Miller
Reptiles, reptiles, reptiles — flying, swimming, waddling, walking.

Hugh Miller
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...

Hugh Miller
The fact of the existence, throughout all the geological ages, of the great law of death, is a fact which must often press upon the geologist.

Hugh Miller
The six thousand years of human history form but a portion of the geologic day that is passing over us: they do not extend into the yesterday of the globe, far less touch the myriads of ages spread out beyond.

Hugh Miller
Nature is a vast tablet, inscribed with signs, each of which has its own significancy, and becomes poetry in the mind when read; and geology is simply the key by which myriads of these signs, hitherto indecipherable, can be unlocked and perused, and thus a new province added to the poetical domain.

Hugh Miller
The existing premises, wholly altered by geologic science, are no longer those of Hume. The foot-print in the sand—to refer to his happy illustration—does not now stand alone. Instead of one, we see many footprints, each in turn in advance of the print behind it, and on a higher level.

Hugh Miller
That special substance according to whose mass and degree of development all the creatures of this world take rank in the scale of creation, is not bone, but brain.

Hugh Miller
The development doctrines are doing much harm on both sides of the Atlantic, especially among intelligent mechanics, and a class of young men engaged in the subordinate departments of trade and the law. And the harm thus considerable in amount must be necessarily more than considerable in degree. For it invariably happens, that when persons in these walks become materialists, they become turbulent subjects and bad men.

Hugh Miller
Because science flourishes, must poesy decline? The compliant serves but to betray the weakness of the class who urge it.

Hugh Miller