Hugh Miller - The Testimony of the Rocks

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All geologic history is full of the beginning and the ends of species,—of their first and last days; but it exhibits no genealogies of development.

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
They are fraught with strange meaning, these footprints of Connecticut.

Hugh Miller
It has been well remarked that that writer would be equally in danger or error who would assign very abstruse motives for the conduct of great bodies of men, or very obvious causes for the great phenomena of nature.

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
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
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
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