It is probable that a greater number of monuments of the skill and industry of man will, in the course of the ages, be collected together in the bed of the ocean than will exist at any other time on the surface of the continents.

So far from having a materialistic tendency, the supposed introduction into the earth at successive geological periods of life,-sensation,-instinct,-the intelligence of the higher mammalia bordering on reason,-and lastly the improvable reason of Man himself, presents us with a picture of the ever-increasing dominion of mind over matter.

Never was there a dogma more calculated to foster indolence, and to blunt the keen edge of curiosity, than the assumption of the discordance between the former and the existing causes of change.

Geology differs as widely from cosmogony, as speculations concerning the creation of man differ from history.

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.

No tools have yet been met with in any of the gravels occurring at the higher levels of the valley of the Seine; but no importance can be attached to this negative fact, as so little search has yet been made for them.

Man, whose organization is regarded as the highest, departs from the vertebrate archetype; and it is because the study of anatomy is usually commenced from, and often confined to, his structure, that a knowledge of the archetype has been so long hidden from anatomists.