“Many distinguishing features of the surface may often be ascribed to the operation at a remote era of slow and tranquil causes-to the gradual deposition of sediment in a lake or in the ocean, or to the prolific increase of testacea and corals therein.”

—  Charles Lyell , book Principles of Geology

Chpt.1, p. 2
Principles of Geology (1832), Vol. 1

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Many distinguishing features of the surface may often be ascribed to the operation at a remote era of slow and tranquil…" by Charles Lyell?
Charles Lyell photo
Charles Lyell 103
British lawyer and geologist 1797–1875

Related quotes

“The Aswan Dam, built at enormous expense to improve the lot of the Egyptian peasant, has caused the Nile to deposit its fertilizing sediment in Lake Nasser, where it is unavailable. Egyptian fields must now be artificially fertilized. Gigantic fertilizer plants have been built to meet the new need. The plants require enormous amounts of electricity. The dam must operate at capacity merely to supply the increased need for electricity which was created by the building of the dam”

John Gall (1925–2014) American physician

Source: General systemantics, an essay on how systems work, and especially how they fail..., 1975, p. 18. Cited in: Harvey J. Bertcher (1988) Staff development in human service organizations. p. 45

Thomas Love Peacock photo

“Marriage may often be a stormy lake, but celibacy is almost always a muddy horsepond.”

Thomas Love Peacock book Melincourt

Melincourt, chapter VII (1817).

Aldous Huxley photo

“Music is an ocean, but the repertory is hardly even a lake; it is a pond.”

Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) English writer

Interview, Time magazine, December 1957

Ebenezer Howard photo

“Whatever may have been the causes which have operated in the past, and are operating now, to draw the people into the cities, those causes may all be summed up as "attractions "”

Ebenezer Howard (1850–1928) British writer, founder of the garden city movement

Introduction.
Garden Cities of To-morrow (1898)
Context: Whatever may have been the causes which have operated in the past, and are operating now, to draw the people into the cities, those causes may all be summed up as "attractions "; and it is obvious, therefore, that no remedy can possibly be effective which will not present to the people, or at least to considerable portions of them, greater "attractions " than our cities now possess, so that the force of the old "attractions" shall be overcome by the force of new "attractions" which are to be created. Each city may be regarded as a magnet, each person as a needle; and, so viewed, it is at once seen that nothing short of the discovery of a method for constructing magnets of yet greater power than our cities possess can be effective for redistributing the population in a spontaneous and healthy manner.

Albert Pike photo

“All the great and beneficent operations of Nature are produced by slow and often imperceptible degrees. The work of destruction and devastation only is violent and rapid.”

Albert Pike book Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry

Source: Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry (1871), Ch. XIX : Grand Pontiff, p. 317

“China's post-totalitarian era has two distinguishing characteristics. First, the rulers still want desperately to hold on to their dictatorial system in the midst of a crisis of legitimacy. Second, society no longer approves of such a system of dictatorship. A spontaneously growing civil society is gradually coming into being, and, although it does not yet have the strength to change the existing system, the increasing pluralism of its economy and its values, like water dripping on stone, is gradually eroding our rigid political monism.”

Liu Xiaobo (1955–2017) Chinese literary critic, writer, professor, and human rights activist

The Spiritual Landscape of the Urban Young in Post-Totalitarian China" (2004)
No Enemies, No Hate: Selected Essays and Poems

Andrew Marvell photo

“Where the remote Bermudas ride,
In th' ocean's bosom unespied.”

Andrew Marvell Bermudas

Bermudas (1657)

Oliver Goldsmith photo

“Remote, unfriended, melancholy, slow,
Or by the lazy Scheldt, or wandering Po.”

Oliver Goldsmith (1728–1774) Irish physician and writer

Source: The Traveller (1764), Line 1.

Carl Sagan photo

“Evolution often uses this strategy. Indeed, the standard evolutionary practice of increasing the amount of genetic information as organisms increase in complexity is accomplished by doubling part of the genetic material and then allowing the slow specialization of function of the redundant set.”

Carl Sagan (1934–1996) American astrophysicist, cosmologist, author and science educator

Source: The Dragons of Eden (1977), Chapter 7, “Lovers and Madmen” (p. 183)

Related topics