William Morris Davis Quotes

6 Sourced Quotes

Once established, an original river advances through its long life, manifesting certain peculiarities of youth, maturity and old age, by which its successive stages of growth may be recognized without much difficulty.

William Morris Davis
It is the relationship between the physical environment and the environed organism, between physiography and ontography (to coin a term), that constitutes the essential principles of geography today.

William Morris Davis
The very foundation of our science is only an inference; for the whole of it rests on the unprovable assumption that, all through the inferred lapse of time which the inferred performance of inferred geological processes involves, they have been going on in a manner consistent with the laws of nature as we know them now.

William Morris Davis
The more clearly the immensely speculative nature of geological science is recognized, the easier it becomes to remodel our concepts of any inferred terrestrial conditions and processes in order to make outrages upon them not outrageous.

William Morris Davis
The sensible facts are discoverable by our senses, the insensible facts by our thoughts. The invention of hypotheses is therefore nothing more than a mental effort to bring insensible facts into causal relation with sensible facts, and such an effort of correlation is praiseworthy even if it is daring.

William Morris Davis
Science is therefore not final any more than it is infallible.

William Morris Davis