James Dwight Dana Quotes

The corals do not look much worn, but still appear to have been dead. There are some delicate shells of molluscs from depths beyond 500 fathoms, where they were certainly living.

I've had the joy of spending thousands of hours under the sea. I wish I could take people along to see what I see, and to know what I know.

For where Kingman is located, the coral cover is unique in the world. I refer to it as a universe of hard corals. You are not going to find soft corals like in the western Pacific - places like Indonesia, Palau, or Fiji.

The Bahamas has mangrove nurseries, coral reefs, shallow sea grass beds, and deep oceanic trenches - all perfect ecosystems for sharks. Photographing multiple shark species in exquisite water was the assignment I had dreamed about from the start.

I think that most people would associate big schools of fish with healthy coral reefs. At Kingman, the predators keep the herd thin, so there aren't a lot of big fish schools.

It is clear that if we are going to understand ocean ecosystems, we need to understand the part that bioluminescence plays in those ecosystems.

I am delighted to see that the issue of coral reefs is receiving the attention it deserves.

Everybody's got some fascination with undersea life, don't you think?

What are men to rocks and mountains?

Gems, in fact, are a species of mineral flowers; they are the blossoms of the dark, hard mine; and what they want in perfume, they make up in durability.

There's a passage about 'rivers of molten rock that wound their way... until they cooled and lay like twisted dragon-shapes vomited from the tormented earth.' That's a perfect description: how did Tolkien know, a quarter century before anyone ever saw a picture of Io? Talk about Nature imitating Art.

Pressure, no doubt, has always been a most important factor in the metamorphism of rocks; but there is, I think, at present some danger in over-estimating this, and representing a partial statement of truth as the whole truth. Geology, like many human beings, suffered from convulsions in its infancy; now, in its later years, I apprehend an attack of pressure on the brain.

In the great debates of early-nineteenth century geology, catastrophists followed the stereotypical method of objective science-empirical literalism. They believed what they saw, interpolated nothing, and read the record of the rocks directly.

The idea of protoplasm, which was really a name for our ignorance, [is] only a little less misleading than the expression "Vital force".

God is an ever-receding pocket of scientific ignorance that's getting smaller and smaller and smaller as time moves on.

Darwinian evolution is unscientific, unobservable, unbelievable, but understandable in a world that hates God.

We have concluded that it is not [science], and moreover that ID cannot uncouple itself from its creationist, and thus religious, antecedents.

In the American Southwest, I began a lifelong love affair with a pile of rock.

Gold delights to walk through the very midst of the guard, and to break its way through hard rocks, more powerful in its blow than lightning.

I am convinced, by repeated observation, that marbles, lime-stones, chalks, marls, clays, sand, and almost all terrestrial substances, wherever situated, are full of shells and other spoils of the ocean.

Butterflies doing strange things in very beautiful ways were in my mind when I sat down, but by the time my pen was uncapped my thoughts had shifted to rocks.

In trying to get votes for the Superconducting Super Collider, I was very much involved in lobbying members of Congress, testifying to them, bothering them, and I never heard any of them talk about postmodernism or social constructivism. You have to be very learned to be that wrong.

One fish. Two fish. Red fish. Blue fish. Black fish. Blue fish. Old fish. New fish. This one has a little star. This one has a little car. Say! What a lot of fish there are.

Does it mean, if you don't understand something, and the community of physicists don't understand it, that means God did it? Is that how you want to play this game? Because if it is, here's a list of things in the past that the physicists at the time didn't understand [and now we do understand] [...]. If that's how you want to invoke your evidence for God, then God is an ever-receding pocket of scientific ignorance that's getting smaller and smaller and smaller as time moves on - so just be ready for that to happen, if that's how you want to come at the problem

The greatest and saddest defect is not credulity, but an habitual forgetfulness that our science is ignorance.