John Playfair Quotes

15 Sourced Quotes

To trace the series of these revolutions, to explain their causes, and thus to connect together all the indications of change that are found in the mineral kingdom, is the proper object of a Theory of the Earth.

John Playfair
Thus we conclude, that the strata both primary and secondary, both those of ancient and those of more recent origin, have had their materials furnished from the ruins of former continents, from the dissolution of rocks, or the destruction of animal or vegetable bodies, similar, at least in some respects, to those that now occupy the surface of the earth.

John Playfair
Amid all the revolutions of the globe, the economy of Nature has been uniform,... and her laws are the only things that have resisted the general movement. The rivers and the rocks, the seas and the continents, have been changed in all their parts; but the laws which direct those changes, and the rules to which they are subject, have remained invariably the same.

John Playfair
If nature in her subterraneous abodes is provided with a force that could burst asunder the massy pavement of the globe, and place the fragments upright upon their edges, could she not, by the same effort, raise them from the greatest depths of the sea, to the highest elevation of the land?

John Playfair
The geologist sadly mistakes both the object of his science and the limits of his understanding who thinks it his business to explain the means employed by INFINITE WISDOM for establishing the laws which now govern the world.

John Playfair
Every new improvement in science affords the means of delineating more accurately the face of nature as it now exists, and of transmitting, to future ages, an account, which may be compared with the face of nature as it shall then exist.

John Playfair
A theory is never more unfairly dealt with, than when those parts are separated which were meant to support one another, and each left to stand or fall by itself.

John Playfair
But to reason and to arrange are very different occupations of the mind; and a man may deserve praise as a mineralogist, who is but ill qualified for the researches of geology.

John Playfair
A river, of which the course is both serpentine and deeply excavated in the rock, is among the phenomena by which the slow waste of the land, and also the cause of that waste, are most directly pointed out.

John Playfair
For the moving of large masses of rock, the most powerful engines without doubt which nature employs are the glaciers, those lakes or rivers of ice which are formed in the highest valleys of the Alps, and other mountains of the first order.

John Playfair
The mind seemed to grow giddy by looking so far into the abyss of time.

John Playfair
The inhabitants of the globe, then, like all the other parts of it, are subject to change. It is not only the individual that perishes, but whole species, and even perhaps genera, are extinguished.

John Playfair
The Author of nature has not given laws to the universe, which, like the institutions of men, carry in themselves the elements of their own destruction.

John Playfair
The outlines, at least, of geology have now been traced with tolerable truth, and are not susceptible of great variation... The mass of knowledge is in that state of termination from which the true theory may be expected to emerge.

John Playfair
A change 'in the animal kingdom seems to be a part of the order of nature, and is visible in instances to which human power cannot have extended.'

John Playfair