Nature, Volume 4

Front Cover
Sir Norman Lockyer
Macmillan Journals Limited, 1871 - Electronic journals
 

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Page 270 - There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.
Page 270 - It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth...
Page 295 - But expectation is permissible where belief is not ; and if it were given me to look beyond the abyss of geologically recorded time to the still more remote period when the earth was passing through physical and chemical conditions, which it can no more see again than a man can recall his infancy, I should expect to be a witness of the evolution of living protoplasm from not living matter.
Page 295 - With organic chemistry, molecular physics, and physiology yet in their infancy, and every day making prodigious strides, I think it would be the height of presumption for any man to say that the conditions under which matter assumes the properties we call " vital " may not, some day, be artificially brought together.
Page 266 - I am purposing them, to be considered of and examined, an account of a philosophical discovery which induced me to the making of the said telescope ; and I doubt not but will prove much more grateful than the communication of that instrument ; being in my judgment the oddest, if not the most considerable detection which hath hitherto been made in the operations of nature.
Page 270 - ... have been from time immemorial, many worlds of life besides our own, we must regard it as probable in the highest degree that there are countless seedbearing meteoric stones moving about through space. If, at the present instant, no life existed upon this earth, one such stone falling upon it might, by what we blindly call natural causes, lead to its becoming covered with vegetation.
Page 270 - I have always felt that this hypothesis does not contain the true theory of evolution, if evolution there has been, in biology.
Page 265 - ... property of matter shown in dynamical relation to the whole. The prospect we now have of an early completion of this chart is based on the assumption of atoms. But there can be no permanent satisfaction to the mind in explaining heat, light, elasticity, diffusion, electricity and magnetism, in gases, liquids and solids, and describing precisely the relations of these different states of matter to one another by statistics of great numbers of atoms when the properties of the atom itself are simply...
Page 210 - Report on the Progress and Condition of the Royal Gardens at Kew during the Year 1875, p.
Page 238 - Newton and Raphael — are potential in the fires of the sun. We long to learn something of our origin. If the Evolution hypothesis be correct, even this unsatisfied yearning must have come to us across the ages which separate the primeval mist from the consciousness of to-day.

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