Georges Cuvier Quotes

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 sediments of the past are many miles in collective thickness: yet the feeble silt of the rivers built them all from base to summit.

Geologists have a saying - rocks remember.

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.

In my junior year, I studied geology on Saturday mornings at the Museum of Natural History. Mineralogy has always been a major interest.

A stone is ingrained with geological and historical memories.

Unfortunately, we haven't found many very old rocks on Earth because our planet's surface is constantly renewed by plate tectonics, coupled with erosion.

The earth's crust has not yet stopped heaving and plunging under our feet. Mountain ranges are still being thrust up on the horizon. Granites are still growing under the continental masses. Nor has the organic world ceased to produce new buds at the tips of its countless branches.

Why are the bones of great fishes, and oysters and corals and various other shells and sea-snails, found on the high tops of mountains that border the sea, in the same way in which they are found in the depths of the sea?

Mountains aren't eternal: even the most imposing massifs are smoothed away by weathering in a few hundred million years or less. Plate tectonics makes new ones, and without it, our future would be flat.

During the Tertiary period the whole valley of Mexico was one great lake.

If you could drive straight down, into a tunnel bored through the crust of the planet, you'd hit this molten mess in about an hour. It's called the asthenosphere - a sluggish sea, several hundred miles thick, on which floats the Earth's cool epidermis - the so-called tectonic plates.

Why has not anyone seen that fossils alone gave birth to a theory about the formation of the earth, that without them, no one would have ever dreamed that there were successive epochs in the formation of the globe.

The appearance of the bones of quadrupeds, especially those of complete bodies in the strata, tells us either that the layer itself which carries them was in earlier times dry land or that dry land was at least formed in the immediate area.

I do believe that enduring geological features are important, though I don't think I can be clear about exactly why.

England is not a country of granite and marble, but of chalk, marl, and clay.

The mineral world is a much more supple and mobile world than could be imagined by the science of the ancients. Vaguely analogous to the metamorphoses of living creatures, there occurs in the most solid rocks, as we now know, perpetual transformation of a mineral species.

Do not doubt that mountains walk simply because they may not appear to walk like humans.

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 may confidently come to the conclusion, that the forces which slowly and by little starts uplift continents, and that those which at successive periods pour forth volcanic matter from open orifices, are identical.

I happen to hold a bachelor of science degree in geology... And my greatest contribution to the field of science is that I never entered it.

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.

We learn geology the morning after the earthquake, on ghastly diagrams of cloven mountains, upheaved plains, and the dry bed of the sea.

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.

Mountains have been formed by one [or other] of the causes of the formation of stone, most probably from agglutinative clay which slowly dried and petrified during ages of which we have no record. It seems likely that this habitable world was in former days uninhabitable and, indeed, submerged beneath the ocean. Then, becoming exposed little by little, it petrified in the course of ages.