Georges Cuvier Quotes

24 quotes in 581 categories

• The observer listens to nature: the experimenter questions and forces her to reveal herself.
• It is to them [fossils] alone that we owe the commencement of even a Theory of the Earth ... By them we are enabled to…
• 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…
• Nurse, it was I who discovered that leeches have red blood.[]On his deathbed when the nurse came to apply leeches
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• 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…
• It is evident that one cannot say anything demonstrable about the problem before having resolved these preliminary questions, and yet we hardly possess the necessary…
• Secondly, the nature of the revolutions which have altered the surface of the earth must have had a more decisive effect on the terrestrial quadrupeds…
• It has been long considered possible to explain the more ancient revolutions on... the Earth surface by means of these still existing causes; in the…
• 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…
• But the revolutions and changes which are responsible for the present state of the earth are not limited to the upsetting of the ancient strata…
• 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…
• 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…
• The appearance of the bones of quadrupeds, especially those of complete bodies in the strata, tells us either that the layer itself which carries them…
• Moreover, it thus follows that not a great deal of time was needed for the large animals of the three major parts of the world…
• Hence the same instant which killed the animals froze the country where they lived. This event was sudden, instantaneous, without any gradual development.
• 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…
• Genius and science have burst the limits of space, and few observations, explained by just reasoning, have unveiled the mechanism of the universe. Would it…

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