That Ere Long, Now That Curiosity Has

In The Shallow Parts Of Many Swiss Lakes, Where There Is A Depth Of No More Than From 5 To 15 Feet Of Water, Ancient Wooden Piles Are Observed At The Bottom Sometimes Worn Down To The Surface Of The Mud, Sometimes Projecting Slightly Above It.

When The Aggregate Amount Of Solid Matter Transported By Rivers In A Given Number Of Centuries From A Large Continent, Shall Be Reduced To Arithmetical Computation, The Result Will Appear Most Astonishing To Those...not In The Habit Of Reflecting How Many Of The Mightiest Of Operations In Nature Are Effected Insensibly, Without Noise Or Disorder.

[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 Those Principles, And As Evidence Strengthening The System Necessarily Arising Out Of The Admission Of Such Principles, Which... Are Neither More Nor Less Than That No Causes Whatever Have From The Earliest Time To Which We Can Look Back, To The Present, Ever Acted, But Those Now Acting; And That They Never Acted With Different Degrees Of Energy From That Which They Now Exert.

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.'

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 Earth's History, So Far At Least As Relates To Its Earliest Inhabitants.