Roderick Murchison Quotes

• The earliest signs of living things, announcing as they do a high complexity of organization, entirely exclude the hypothesis of a transmutation from lower to higher grades of being. The first fiat of Creation which went forth, doubtlessly ensured the perfect adaptation of animals to the surrounding media; and thus, whilst the geologist recognizes a beginning, he can see in the innumerable facts of the eye of the earliest crustacean, the same evidences of Omniscience as in the completion of the vertebrate form.

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  Roderick Murchison

  Eye   Science   Animal  

  Roderick Impey Murchison (1854). “Siluria the History of the Oldest Known Rocks Containing Organic Remains, with a Brief Sketch of the Distribution of Gold Over the Earth by Roderick Impey Murchison”, p.469

  4788

• During cycles long anterior to the creation of the human race, and while the surface of the globe was passing from one condition to another, whole races of animals-each group adapted to the physical conditions in which they lived-were successively created and exterminated.

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  Roderick Murchison

  Science   Animal   Race  

  Roderick Impey Murchison (1854). “Siluria the History of the Oldest Known Rocks Containing Organic Remains, with a Brief Sketch of the Distribution of Gold Over the Earth by Roderick Impey Murchison”, p.5

  3000

• The order of ... successive generations is indeed much more clearly proved than many a legend which has assumed the character of history in the hands of man; for the geological record is the work of God.

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  Roderick Murchison

  Character   Science   Men  

  2164

• Placed as the fossils are in their several tiers of burial-places the one over the other; we have in them true witnesses of successive existences, whilst the historian of man is constantly at fault as to dates and even the sequence of events, to say nothing of the contradicting statements which he is forced to reconcile.

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  Roderick Murchison

  Science   Men   Events  

  4492

• Combining in our survey then, the whole range of deposits from the most recent to the most ancient group, how striking a succession do they present:- so various yet so uniform-so vast yet so connected. In thus tracing back to the most remote periods in the physical history of our continents, one system of operations, as the means by which many complex formations have been successively produced, the mind becomes impressed with the singleness of nature's laws; and in this respect, at least, geology is hardly inferior in simplicity to astronomy.

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  Roderick Murchison

  Nature   Mean   Science  

  Roderick Impey Murchison (1839). “The silurian system, founded on geological researches in the counties of Salop, Hereford etc”, p.574

  4345

• Physical geography and geology are inseparable scientific twins.

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  Roderick Murchison

  Science   Twins   Geography  

  "The Journal of the Royal Geographical Society: JRGS", Volume 27, p. cxxxvii, 1857.

  3335

• We should greatly err, if we endeavoured to force all ancient nature into a close comparison with existing operations.

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  Roderick Murchison

  Nature   Science   Errors  

  Roderick Impey Murchison (1854). “Siluria: the history of the oldest known rocks containing organic remains”, p.481

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