Life of Sir Roderick I. Murchison, Bart.; K.C.B., F.R.S.: Sometime Director-general of the Geological Survey of the United Kingdom. Based of His Journals and Letters; with Notices of His Scientific Contemporaries and a Sketch of the Rise and Growth of Palæozoic Geology in Britain, Volum 1

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J. Murray, 1875
 

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Side 76 - And this is in the night. — Most glorious night ! Thou wert not sent for slumber ! let me be A sharer in thy fierce and far delight, — A portion of the tempest and of thee ! How the lit lake shines a phosphoric sea, And the big rain comes dancing to the earth ! And now again 'tis black, — and now the glee Of the loud hills shakes with its mountain-mirth, As if they did rejoice o'er a young earthquake's birth.
Side 120 - for the purpose of making geologists acquainted with each other, of stimulating their zeal, of inducing them to adopt one nomenclature, of facilitating the communication of new facts, and of ascertaining what is known in their science, and what yet remains to be discovered.
Side 202 - geology, in the magnitude and sublimity of the objects of which it treats, undoubtedly ranks, in the scale of the sciences, next to astronomy...
Side 234 - The following quotation is from a letter of Sir Roderick Murchison's, at the time of the meeting of the British Association at Bristol : ' At that meeting the fun of one of the evenings was a lecture of Buckland's. In that part of his discourse which treated of ichnolites, or fossil footprints, the Doctor exhibited himself as a cock or a hen on the edge of a muddy pond, making impressions by lifting one leg after another. Many of the grave people thought our science was altered to buffoonery by an...
Side 189 - I took this opportunity of turning lecturer and having visited those parts this summer I brought out my little druggist with all the eclat he merited. This is another practical exemplification of the good arising from such a reunion. The Archbishop had all the party on one of the days and it would have gratified the liberality of Cambridge to have seen old Quaker Dalton on his Grace's right hand.
Side 100 - ... is held by another section termed by Professor Huxley the catastrophic Werner, on the other hand, treating the rocks as mere masses of minerals, taught that the earth " had been originally covered by the ocean, in which the materials of the minerals were dissolved, but of this ocean he imagined that the various rocks were precipitated in the same order in which he found those of Saxony to lie ; hence on the retirement of the ocean, certain universal formations spread over the surface of the globe,...
Side 107 - superficial reasoning men who judge of the great operations of the mineral kingdom from having kindled a fire and looked into the bottom of a little crucible.
Side 94 - In the summer following the hunting season of 1822-3, when revisiting my old friend Morritt of Rokeby, I fell in with Sir Humphry Davy, and experienced much gratification in his lively illustrations of great physical truths. As we shot partridges together in the morning, I perceived that a man might pursue philosophy without abandoning field-sports ; and Davy, seeing that I had already made observations on the Alps and Apennines, independently of my antiquarian rambles, encouraged me to come to London...
Side 125 - On repairing, from the Star Inn to Buckland's domicile, I never can forget the scene that awaited me. Having, by direction of the janitor, climbed up a narrow staircase, I entered a long, corridor-like room, which was filled with rocks, shells, and bones in dire confusion, and in a sort of sanctum at the end was my friend in his black gown, looking like a necromancer, sitting on one rickety chair covered with some fossils, and clearing out a fossil bone from the matrix.
Side 361 - There are no people here, and no events, so I have no news to tell you, except that in this mild climate my orange-trees are now out of doors, and in full bearing. Immediately before my window there are twelve large oranges on one tree. The trees themselves are not the...