Louis Agassiz Quotes

49 Sourced Quotes

The office of science is not to record possibilities; but to ascertain what nature does...As far as Darwinism deals with mere arguments of possibilities or even probabilities, without a basis of fact, it departs from the true scientific method and injures science, as most of the devotees of the new ism have already done.

Louis Agassiz
The resources of the Deity cannot be so meagre, that, in order to create a human being endowed with reason, he must change a monkey into a man.

Louis Agassiz
The long summer was over. For ages a tropical climate had prevailed over a great part of the earth, and animals whose home is now beneath the Equator roamed over the world from the far South to the very borders of the Arctics.... But their reign was over. A sudden intense winter, that was also to last for ages, fell upon our globe.

Louis Agassiz
In-depth studies have an influence on general ideas, whereas theories, in turn, in order to maintain themselves, push their spectators to search for new evidence. The mind's activity that is maintained by the debates about these works, is probably the source of the greatest joys given to man to experience on Earth.

Louis Agassiz
Every great scientific truth goes through three stages. First, people say it conflicts with the Bible. Next they say it has been discovered before. Lastly they say they always believed it.

Louis Agassiz
The world is the geologist's great puzzle-box; he stands before it like the child to whom the separate pieces of his puzzle remain a mystery till he detects their relation and sees where they fit, and then his fragments grow at once into a connected picture beneath his hand.

Louis Agassiz
America, so far as her physical history is concerned, has been falsely denominated the New World. Hers was the first dry land lifted out of the waters, hers the first shore washed by the ocean that enveloped all the earth beside; and while Europe was represented only by islands rising here and there above the sea, America already stretched an unbroken line of land from Nova Scotia to the Far West.

Louis Agassiz
It is a fact, which seems to be entirely overlooked by those who assume an extensive influence of physical causes upon the very existence of organized beings, that the most diversified types of animals and plants are everywhere found under identical circumstances.

Louis Agassiz
I have devoted my whole life to the study of Nature, and yet a single sentence may express all that I have done. I have shown that there is a correspondence between the succession of Fishes in geological times and the different stages of their growth in the egg,-this is all. It chanced to be a result that was found to apply to other groups and has led to other conclusions of a like nature.

Louis Agassiz
Philosophers and theologians have yet to learn that a physical fact is as sacred as a moral principle. Our own nature demands from us this double allegiance.

Louis Agassiz
The world has arisen in some way or another. How it originated is the great question, and Darwin's theory, like all other attempts to explain the origin of life, is thus far merely conjectural. I believe he has not even made the best conjecture possible in the present state of our knowledge.

Louis Agassiz
Are these divisions artificial or natural? Are they the devices of the human mind to classify and arrange our knowledge in such a manner as to bring it more readily within our grasp and facilitate further investigations, or have they been instituted by the Divine Intelligence as the categories of his mode of thinking?

Louis Agassiz
It is not true that a slight variation among the successive offspring of the same stock goes on increasing until the difference amounts to a specific distinction. On the contrary, it is a matter of fact that extreme variations finally degenerate or become sterile; like monstrosities they die out, or return to their type.

Louis Agassiz
The philosopher's stone is no more to be found in the organic than the inorganic world; and we shall seek as vainly to transform the lower animal types into the higher ones by any of our theories, as did the alchemists of old to change the baser metals into gold.

Louis Agassiz
The only true scientific system must be one in which the thought, the intellectual structure, rises out of, and is based upon, facts.

Louis Agassiz
The crust of our earth is a great cemetery, where the rocks are tombstones on which the buried dead have written their own epitaphs. They tell us not only who they were and when and where they lived, but much also of the circumstances under which they lived.

Louis Agassiz
It requires as much practical knowledge, in dealing with facts of anatomy, to trace the relations of one family with another, as it does in mathematics to deal with intricate problems.

Louis Agassiz
Lay aside all conceit. Learn to read the book of nature for yourself. Those who have succeeded best have followed for years some slim thread which has once in a while broadened out and disclosed some treasure worth a life-long search.

Louis Agassiz
The facts will eventually test all our theories, and they form, after all, the only impartial jury to which we can appeal.

Louis Agassiz