A true Englishman doesn't joke when he is talking about so serious a thing as a wager. - Jules Verne

Science, my lad, has been built upon many errors; but they are errors which it was good to fall into, for they led to the truth.

"Are we rising again?" "No. On the contrary." "Are we descending?" "Worse than that, captain! we are falling!"

The human mind delights in grand conceptions of supernatural beings. And the sea is precisely their best vehicle, the only medium through which these giants (against which terrestrial animals, such as elephants or rhinoceroses, are as nothing) can be produced or developed