Life itself is a school, and Nature always a fresh study.

It is an excellent circumstance that hospitality grows best where it is most needed. In the thick of men it dwindles and disappears, life fruit in the thick of a wood; but where people are planted sparely it blossoms and matures, like apples on a standard or an espalier. It flourishes where the inn and lodging-house cannot exist.

The primary rocks, ... I regard as the deposits of a period in which the earth's crust had sufficiently cooled down to permit the existence of a sea, with the necessary denuding agencies,-waves and currents,-and, in consequence, of deposition also; but in which the internal heat acted so near the surface, that whatever was deposited came, matter of course, to be metamorphosed into semi-plutonic forms, that retained only the stratification.

Problems are only opportunities with thorns on them.

That special substance according to whose mass and degree of development all the creatures of this world take rank in the scale of creation, is not bone, but brain.

The footprint of the savage traced in the sand is sufficient to attest the presence of man to the atheist who will not recognize God, whose hand is impressed upon the entire universe.

The six thousand years of human history form but a portion of the geologic day that is passing over us: they do not extend into the yesterday of the globe, far less touch the myriads of ages spread out beyond.