Roderick Murchison Professions : Baronet Murchison Born : February 22, 1792 Died : October 22, 1871 Browse All Authors Top 7 quotes by Roderick Murchison 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. Roderick Murchison events men science Physical geography and geology are inseparable scientific twins. Roderick Murchison geography twins science 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. Roderick Murchison race animal science We should greatly err, if we endeavoured to force all ancient nature into a close comparison with existing operations. Roderick Murchison errors nature science 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. Roderick Murchison nature science mean 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. Roderick Murchison eye animal science 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. Roderick Murchison character men science