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John Jeremiah Bigsby
(14 Aug 1792 - 10 Feb 1881)
English physician and geologist who published Thesaurus Siluricus in 1868), his “master-roll” of the flora and fauna of the Silurian period. He spent most of his career in North America. After six years travelling through Canada, he published The Shoe and Canoe (1850) describing the scenery and society he saw.
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Science Quotes by John Jeremiah Bigsby (5 quotes)
[About Sir Roderick Impey Murchison:] The enjoyments of elegant life you early chose to abandon, preferring to wander for many successive years over the rudest portions of Europe and Asia—regions new to Science—in the hope, happily realized, of winning new truths.
By a rare union of favourable circumstances, and of personal qualifications equally rare, you have thus been enabled to become the recognized Interpreter and Historian (not without illustrious aid) of the Silurian Period.
By a rare union of favourable circumstances, and of personal qualifications equally rare, you have thus been enabled to become the recognized Interpreter and Historian (not without illustrious aid) of the Silurian Period.
— John Jeremiah Bigsby
Dedication page in Thesaurus Siluricus: The Flora and Fauna of the Silurian Period (1868), iv.
As long as an individual mollusk remains unregistered it is deprived of its full usefulness; but even then it may reveal an important fact—as the trilobite speaks of the Palaeozoic period, and a nummulite of the Tertiary.
— John Jeremiah Bigsby
In 'A Brief Account of the Thesaurus Siluricus with a Few Facts and Inferences', Proceedings op the Royal Society (1867), No. 90, 373.
I deal not with the perishing things of the hour—with statistics, … so fugitive,—that truth to-day is falsehood almost on the morrow.
— John Jeremiah Bigsby
In The Shoe and Canoe: Or Pictures of Travel in the Canadas (1850), viii.
I spent a long hot night here for the benefit of hosts of mosquitoes, and began to feel geology a rude trade, saying, with St. Bernard, “Je me vois un petit oiseau, sans plumes, presque toujours hors de son nid, exposé aux orages.”
— John Jeremiah Bigsby
In The Shoe and Canoe: Or Pictures of Travel in the Canadas (1850), 237. Describing camping overnight on a trip along the St. Lawrence river. The French sentence is given by Google Translate as “I see myself as a little bird, without feathers, almost always out of its nest, exposed to thunderstorms.”
The Silurian Period—the grandest of all the Periods,—and, as yet, apparently the seed-time of all succeeding life.
— John Jeremiah Bigsby
Dedication page in Thesaurus Siluricus: The Flora and Fauna of the Silurian Period (1868), iv.
See also:
- 14 Aug - short biography, births, deaths and events on date of Bigsby's birth.
- The Shoe and Canoe, by John Jeremiah Bigsby. - book suggestion.
- Booklist for John Jeremiah Bigsby.
In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
(1987) -- 
