Charles Lyell

The Egyptian philosophers ventured on the perilous task of seeking out some analogy to the mode of operation employed by the Author of Nature in the first creation of organized beings, and they compared it to that which governs the birth …

since every extermination was assumed to be penal, it could only be reconciled with divine justice, by the supposition that man, at each successive creation, was regenerated in a state of purity and innocence.

In the account given to Solon by the Egyptian priests, of the submersion of the island of Atlantis under the waters of the ocean, after repeated shocks of an earthquake, we find that the event happened when Jupiter had seen the moral …

In a rude state of society all great calamities are regarded by the people as judgments of God on the wickedness of man.

We learn particularly from the Timaeus of Plato, that the Egyptians believed the world to be subject to occasional conflagrations and deluges, whereby the gods arrested the career of human wickedness, and purified the earth from guilt. …

Respecting the cosmogony of the Egyptian priests, we gather much information from writers of the Grecian sects, who borrowed almost all their tenets from Egypt, and amongst others that of the former successive destruction and renovation of …

'The Indians,' he says, 'celebrated, after the ideas of an antique superstition, by festivals and dancing, the destruction of the world and the approaching epoch of its regeneration.

Humboldt relates the interesting fact, that after the annihilation of a large part of the inhabitants of Cumana, by an earthquake in 1766

to augment them into general cataclysms and conflagrations.

Floods and volcanic eruptions, the agency of water and fire, are the chief instruments of devastation on our globe. ...it scarcely requires the passion for the marvelous

The first who endeavored to draw a clear line of demarcation between these distinct departments, was Hutton, who declared that geology was in no ways concerned with 'questions as to the origin of things.

It was long ere the distinct nature and legitimate objects of geology were fully recognized, and it was at first confounded with many other branches of inquiry

We find in certain localities subterranean deposits of coal consisting of vegetable matter formerly drifted into seas and lakes. ...These seas and The commercial prosperity and numerical strength of a nation may now be mainly dependent on …

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 …

When we study history we obtain a more profound insight into human nature by instituting a comparison between the present and former states of society.