Philosophy, astronomy, and politics were marked at zero, I remember. Botany variable, geology profound as regards the mud stains f...rom any region within fifty miles of town, chemistry eccentric, anatomy unsystematic, sensational literature and crime records unique, violin player, boxer, swordsman, lawyer, and self-poisoner by cocaine and tobacco.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We learn geology the morning after the earthquake, on ghastly diagrams of cloven mountains, upheaved plains, and the dry bed of th...e sea.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
"What we know, is a point to what we do not know." Open any recent journal of science, and weigh the problems suggested concerning... Light, Heat, Electricity, Magnetism, Physiology, Geology, and judge whether the interest of natural science is likely to be soon exhausted.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If usually the "present age" is no very long time, still, at our pleasure, or in the service of some such unity of meaning as the ...history of civilization, or the study of geology, may suggest, we may conceive the present as extending over many centuries, or over a hundred thousand years.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Observation is so wide awake, and facts are being so rapidly added to the sum of human experience, that it appears as if the theor...izer would always be in arrears, and were doomed forever to arrive at imperfect conclusions; but the power to perceive a law is equally rare in all ages of the world, and depends but little on the number of facts observed. The senses of the savage will furnish him with facts enough to set him up as a philosopher. The ancients can still speak to us with authority, even on the themes of geology and chemistry, though these subjects are thought to have had their birth in modern times.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
As in geology, so in social institutions, we may discover the causes of all past changes in the present invariable order of societ...y.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »