Some Salient Points in the Science of the Earth

Animal life had its beginning in the waters, and to this day the waters are the chief habitat of animals, especially of the lower forms. If we divide the animal kingdom into gre...

Scientific superstitions, understanding by this name the reception of hypotheses of prominent men, and using these as fetishes to be worshipped and to be employed in miraculous...

I had the pleasure of being present at the meeting of the British Association at Birmingham, in 1865: a meeting attended by an unusually large number of eminent geologists, unde...

The group of the White Mountains is the culminating point of the northern division of the great Appalachian range, extending from Tennessee to Gaspé in a south-west and north-ea...

Do we know the first animal? Can we name it, explain its structure, and state its relations to its successors? Can we do this by inference from the succeeding types of being; an...

The microscope has long been a recognised and valued aid of the geological observer, and is perhaps now in danger of being somewhat overrated by enthusiastic specialists. To the...

If, for convenience of reference, we divide the whole history of the earth, from the time when a solid crust first formed on its surface and began to be ridged up into islands o...

Time was when naturalists were content to take nature as they found it, without any over-curious inquiries as to the origin of its several parts, or the changes of which they mi...

Geological reading, especially when of a strictly uniformitarian character and in warm weather, sometimes becomes monotonous; and I confess to a feeling of drowsiness creeping o...

Few words are used among us more loosely than "nature." Sometimes it stands for the material universe as a whole. Sometimes it is personified as a sort of goddess, working her o...

All are now agreed that to explain the extraordinary and often apparently anomalous distribution of animals and plants over the surface of the earth, and the occurrence of like...

My early boyhood was spent on the Coal formation rocks and in the vicinity of collieries; and among my first natural history collections, in a childish museum of many kinds of o...

The science of the earth has its culmination and terminus in man; and at this, the most advanced of our salient points, as we look back on the long process of the development of...

The subject of this chapter is one which has been in dispute ever since I began to read anything on geology, nearly sixty years ago. It ought to have been settled, but up to to-...

Complaints of the imperfection of the geological record are rife among those biologists who expect to find continuous series of fossils representing the gradual transmutation of...

I believe my attention was first directed to the markings made by animals on the surfaces of rocks, when travelling with the late Sir Charles Lyell in Nova Scotia, in 1842. He n...

The natural prejudice of persons not acquainted with geology is that in the world all things continue as they were from the beginning. But a little observation and experience di...

An explorer trudging along some line of coast, or traversing some mountain region, may now and then reach a projecting headland, or bold mountain spur, which may enable him to c...