Robert Chambers Quotes

Zoophyta, polyparia, crinoidea, conchifera, and crustacea are the orders of the animal kingdom thus found in the earliest of earth's sepulchres.

It has been among the visions of some dreaming philosophers that human life is capable of almost indefinite extension. The great Condorcet was one of these. He thought that by the removal of the two causes of evil—poverty and superfluity—by destroying prejudices and superstitions, and by various other operations, which he considered the purification of mankind, but which other people would call their pollution, the approach of death would by degrees be farther and farther indefinitely protracted. It is desirable that the practical views entertained by sanitary reformers should be kept widely distinct from any such theories, the character of which has been well drawn by Malthus when he says—"...Though I may not be able in the present instance to mark the limit at which further improvement will stop I can very easily mention a point at which it will not arrive."

May not the sacred text, on a liberal interpretation, or with the benefit of new light reflected from nature, or derived from learning, be shewn to be as much in harmony with the novelties of this volume as it has been with geology and natural philosophy? What is there in the laws of organic creation more startling to the candid theologian than in the Copernican system or the natural formation of strata?

Now it is possible that wants and the exercise of faculties have entered in some manner into the production of the phenomena which we have been considering; but certainly not in the way suggested by Lamarck, whose whole notion is obviously so inadequate to account for the rise of the organic kingdoms, that we only can place it with pity among the follies of the wise.

The evidence of the existence of other astral systems besides our own is much more decided than might be expected when we consider that the nearest of them must needs be placed at a mighty interval beyond our own.

Just suppose for a moment that every fact reported to us by others were viewed in the light of the skeptical system, as to the fallaciousness of the senses and the tendency to self-deception. Should we not from that moment be at a stand-still in all the principal movements of our lives?

The elder Herschel, directing his wonderful tube towards the sides of our system, where stars are planted most rarely... was enabled with awe struck mind to see suspended in the vast empyrean astral systems, or, as he called them, firmaments, resembling our own. Like light cloudlets to a certain power of the telescope, they resolved themselves, under a greater power, into stars, though these generally seemed no larger than the finest particles of diamond dust. The general forms of these systems are various; but one at least has been detected as bearing a striking resemblance to the supposed form of our own. The distances are also various... The farthest observed by the astronomer were estimated by him as thirty-five thousand times more remote than Sirius, supposing its distance to be about twenty thousand millions of miles. It would thus appear, that not only does gravitation keep our earth in its place in the solar system, and the solar system in its place in our astral system, but it also may be presumed to have the mightier duty of preserving a local arrangement between that astral system and an immensity of others, through which the imagination is left to wander on and on without limit or stay, save that which is given by its inability to grasp the unbounded.

It must be borne in mind that the gestation of a single organism is the work of but a few days, weeks, or months, but the gestation (so to speak) of a whole creation is a matter probably involving enormous spaces of time.

Geometry is that of mathematical science which is devoted to consideration of form and size, and may be said to be the best and surest guide to study of all sciences in which ideas of dimension or space are involved. Almost all the knowledge required by navigators, architects, surveyors, engineers, and opticians, in their respective occupations, is deduced from geometry and branches of mathematics. All works of art constructed according to the rules which geometry involves; and we find the same laws observed in the works of nature. The study of mathematics, generally, is also of great importance in cultivating habits of exact reasoning; and in this respect it forms a useful auxiliary to logic.

The monkeys themselves, without instruction from any quarter, learn to use sticks in fighting, and some build houses—an act which cannot in their case be considered as one of instinct, but of intelligence.

When we come to consider specific characters, we see that a difference exists—that, in short, the species and even genera are no longer represented upon earth. More than this, it will be found that the earliest species comparatively soon gave place to others, and that they are not represented even in the next higher group of rocks.

I may here refer to a curious mathematical calculation by Dr. Thomas Young, to the effect, that if three words coincide in two different languages, it is ten to one they must be derived in both cases from some parent language, or introduced in some other manner.

The appearance... of limestone beds in the early part of the stratified series, may be presumed to be connected with the fact of the commencement of organic life upon our planet, and, indeed, a consequent and a symptom of it. ...My hypothesis may indeed be unsound; but, whether or not, it is clear, taking organic remains as upon the whole a faithful chronicle, that the deposition of these limestone beds was coeval with the existence of the earliest, or all but the earliest, living creatures upon earth.

Analogy would lead us to conclude that the combinations of the primordial matter, forming our so-called elements, are as universal or as liable to take place everywhere as are the laws of gravitation and centrifugal force. We must therefore presume that the gases, the metals, the earths, and other simple substances, (besides whatever more of which we have no acquaintance,) exist or are liable to come into existence under proper conditions, as well in the astral system, which is thirty five thousand times more distant than Sirius, as within the bounds of our own solar system or our own globe.

The facts, indeed, connected with this gloomy department of statistics show that the most valuable period of human life—that in which a man is producing more than he is consuming—is that which provides the greatest number of victims.