When the aggregate amount of solid matter transported by rivers in a given number of centuries from a large continent, shall be reduced to arithmetic….

Hitherto, no rival hypothesis has been proposed as a substitute for the doctrine of transmutation; for 'independent creation,' as it is often termed,….

In the course of this short tour, I became convinced that we must turn to the New World if we wish to see in perfection the oldest monuments of the e….

It must have appeared almost as improbable to the earlier geologists, that the laws of earthquakes should one day throw light on the origin of mounta….

It was a profound saying of Wilhelm Humboldt, that 'Man is man only by means of speech, but in order to invent speech he must be already man.'.

Millions of our race are now supported by lands situated where deep seas once prevailed in earlier ages. In many districts not yet occupied by man, l….

The earth's becoming at a particular period the residence of human beings, was an era in the moral, not in the physical world, that our study and con….

In attempting to explain geological phenomena, the bias has always been on the wrong side; there has always been a disposition to reason á priori on ….

Notwithstanding, therefore, that we have not witnessed of a large continent, yet, as we may predict the future occurrence of such catastrophes, we ar….

The present is the key to the past.

Never was there a dogma more calculated to foster indolence, and to blunt the keen edge of curiosity, than the assumption of the discordance between ….

[My Book] will endeavour to establish the principle[s] of reasoning in ... [geology]; and all my geology will come in as illustration of my views of ….

Such discoveries have led me, and other geologists, to reconsider the evidence previously derived from caves brought forward in proof of the high ant….

It has long been a fact familiar to geologists, that, both on the east and west coasts of the central part of Scotland, there are lines of raised bea….

It is probable that a greater number of monuments of the skill and industry of man will, in the course of the ages, be collected together in the bed ….

Amidst the vicissitudes of the earth's surface, species cannot be immortal, but must perish, one after another, like the individuals which compose th….

Probably there was a beginning-it is a metaphysical question, worthy a theologian-species have begun and ended-but the analogy is faint and distant..

When on my return to England I showed the cast of the cranium to Professor Huxley, he remarked at once that it was the most ape-like skull he had eve….

'Time's noblest offspring is the last.' This line of Bishop Berkeley's expresses the real cause of the belief in progress in the animal creation..

So far from having a materialistic tendency, the supposed introduction into the earth at successive geological periods of life,-sensation,-instinct,-….

The ordinary naturalist is not sufficiently aware that when dogmatizing on what species are, he is grappling with the whole question of the organic w….