The lowest and most level land areas show us, especially when we dig there to very great depths, nothing but horizontal layers of material more or le….

The observer listens to nature: the experimenter questions and forces her to reveal herself..

Secondly, the nature of the revolutions which have altered the surface of the earth must have had a more decisive effect on the terrestrial quadruped….

It is in this mutual dependence of the functions and the aid which they reciprocally lend one another that are founded the laws which determine the r….

My object will be, first, to show by what connections the history of the fossil bones of land animals is linked to the theory of the earth and why th….

It is to them [fossils] alone that we owe the commencement of even a Theory of the Earth ... By them we are enabled to ascertain, with the utmost cer….

To spread healthy ideas among even the lowest classes of people, to remove men from the influence of prejudice and passion, to make reason the arbite….

In spite of what moralists say, the, animals are scarcely less wicked or less unhappy than we are ourselves. The arrogance of the strong, the servili….

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….

Hence the same instant which killed the animals froze the country where they lived. This event was sudden, instantaneous, without any gradual develop….

Genius and science have burst the limits of space, and few observations, explained by just reasoning, have unveiled the mechanism of the universe. Wo….

[Audubon's works are] the most splendid monuments which art has erected in honor of ornithology..

At the sight of a single bone, of a single piece of bone, I recognize and reconstruct the portion of the whole from which it would have been taken. T….

Since nothing can exist that does not fulfil the conditions which render its existence possible, the different parts each being must be co-ordinated ….

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. Th….

Nurse, it was I who discovered that leeches have red blood.[]On his deathbed when the nurse came to apply leeches.

If they [enlightened men] take any interest in examining, in the infancy of our species, the almost obliterated traces of so many nations that have b….

Thus it cannot be denied that the masses which today form our highest mountains were originally in a liquid state; for a long time they were covered ….

A famous anecdote concerning Cuvier involves the tale of his visitation from the devil—only it was not the devil but one of his students dressed up w….

It is my object, in the following work, to travel over ground which has as yet been little explored and to make my reader acquainted with a species o….

The appearance of the bones of quadrupeds, especially those of complete bodies in the strata, tells us either that the layer itself which carries the….