Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon Quotes

The noble science of Geology loses glory from the extreme imperfection of the record. The crust of the earth with its embedded remains must not be looked at as a well-filled museum, but as a poor collection made at hazard and at rare intervals.

We hence acquire this sublime and interesting idea; that all the calcareous mountains in the world, and all the strata of clay, coal, marl, sand, and iron, which are incumbent on them, are MONUMENTS OF THE PAST FELICITY OF ORGANIZED NATURE!

Geology is the science which investigates the successive changes that have taken place in the organic and inorganic kingdoms of nature; it enquires into the causes of these changes, and the influence which they have exerted in modifying the surface and external structure of our planet.

But the revolutions and changes which are responsible for the present state of the earth are not limited to the upsetting of the ancient strata and to the ebbing of the sea after the formations of new layers.

The traces of upheavals become more impressive when one moves a little higher, when one gets even closer to the foot of the great mountain ranges. There are still plenty of shell layers. We notice them, even thicker and more solid ones.

The older the layers, the more each of them is uniform over a great extent; the newer the layers, the more they are limited and subject to variation within small distances.

Geology is rapidly taking its place as an introduction to the higher history of man. If the author has sought to exalt a favorite science, it has been with the desire that man-in whom geological history had its consummation, the prophecies of the successive ages their fulfilment-might better comprehend his own nobility and the true purpose of his existence.

We'll get to the details of what's around here, but it looks like a collection of just about every variety of shape - angularity, granularity, about every variety of rock.... The colors - well.... There doesn't appear to be too much of a general color at all; however, it looks as though some of the rocks and boulders are going to have some interesting colors to them. Over.

We choose to believe that the granite is alive. If life is movement, then rock - with its atoms flying around like stars in cosmos - is alive.

Geology gives us a key to the patience of God.

No conclusion is more fully established, than the important fact of the total absence of any vestiges of the human species throughout the entire series of geological formations.

In every outthrust headland, in every curving beach, in every grain of sand there is the story of the earth.

The only way we can determine the true age of the earth is for God to tell us what it is. And since He has told us, very plainly, in the Holy Scriptures that it is several thousand years in age, and no more, that ought to settle all basic questions of terrestrial chronology.

We cannot take one step in geology without drawing upon the fathomless stores of by-gone time.

What are men to rocks and mountains?

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.

The successive series of stratified formations are piled on one another, almost like courses of masonry.

Gold delights to walk through the very midst of the guard, and to break its way through hard rocks, more powerful in its blow than lightning.

Butterflies doing strange things in very beautiful ways were in my mind when I sat down, but by the time my pen was uncapped my thoughts had shifted to rocks.

The primary rocks, ... I regard as the deposits of a period in which the earth's crust had sufficiently cooled down to permit the existence of a sea, with the necessary denuding agencies,-waves and currents,-and, in consequence, of deposition also; but in which the internal heat acted so near the surface, that whatever was deposited came, matter of course, to be metamorphosed into semi-plutonic forms, that retained only the stratification.

In the great debates of early-nineteenth century geology, catastrophists followed the stereotypical method of objective science-empirical literalism. They believed what they saw, interpolated nothing, and read the record of the rocks directly.

[Geology] opens up such wide intellectual vistas and supplies a more perfectly unified and more comprehensive conception of nature than any other science.

Palaeontological research exhibits, beyond question, the phenomenon of provinces in time, as well as provinces in space. Moreover, all our knowledge of organic remains teaches us, that species have a definite existence, and a centralization in geological time as well as in geographical space, and that no species is repeated in time.

In the American Southwest, I began a lifelong love affair with a pile of rock.

For now I stand as one upon a rock environed with a wilderness of sea, who marks the waxing tide grow wave by wave, expecting ever when some envious surge will in his brinish bowels swallow him.