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Reginald Aldworth Daly
(19 May 1871 - 19 Sep 1957)
Canadian-American geologist who independently developed the theory of magmatic stoping, a process by which magma rises up through overlying rock.
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Science Quotes by Reginald Aldworth Daly (9 quotes)
At bottom each “exact” science is, and must be speculative, and its chief tool of research, too rarely used with both courage and judgement, is the regulated imagination.
— Reginald Aldworth Daly
In Igneous Rocks and their Origin (1914), Introduction, xxi.
Earthquakes traveling through the interior of the globe are like so many messengers sent out to explore a new land. The messages are constantly coming and seismologists are fast learning to read them.
— Reginald Aldworth Daly
In Our Mobile Earth (1926), 5.
Ninety-nine and nine-tenths of the earth’s volume must forever remain invisible and untouchable. Because more than 97 per cent of it is too hot to crystallize, its body is extremely weak. The crust, being so thin, must bend, if, over wide areas, it becomes loaded with glacial ice, ocean water or deposits of sand and mud. It must bend in the opposite sense if widely extended loads of such material be removed. This accounts for … the origin of chains of high mountains … and the rise of lava to the earth’s surface.
— Reginald Aldworth Daly
Presidential speech to the Geological Society of America at Cambridge, Mass. (1932). As quoted in New York Times (20 Sep 1957), 23. Also summarized in Popular Mechanics (Apr 1933), 513.
Our earth is very old, an old warrior that has lived through many battles. Nevertheless, the face of it is still changing, and science sees no certain limit of time for its stately evolution. Our solid earth, apparently so stable, inert, and finished, is changing, mobile, and still evolving. Its major quakings are largely the echoes of that divine far-off event, the building of our noble mountains. The lava floods and intriguing volcanoes tell us of the plasticity, mobility, of the deep interior of the globe. The slow coming and going of ancient shallow seas on the continental plateaus tell us of the rhythmic distortion of the deep interior-deep-seated flow and changes of volume. Mountain chains prove the earth’s solid crust itself to be mobile in high degree. And the secret of it all—the secret of the earthquake, the secret of the “temple of fire,” the secret of the ocean basin, the secret of the highland—is in the heart of the earth, forever invisible to human eyes.
— Reginald Aldworth Daly
In Our Mobile Earth (1926), 320.
Reality is never skin-deep. The true nature of the earth and its full wealth of hidden treasures cannot be argued from the visible rocks, the rocks upon which we live and out of which we make our living. The face of the earth, with its upstanding continents and depressed ocean-deeps, its vast ornament of plateau and mountain-chain, is molded by structure and process in hidden depths.
— Reginald Aldworth Daly
The conditions of the earth’s core are starlike. From their study can physicists of the future tell us something more of the true nature of the stars?
— Reginald Aldworth Daly
The discovery of the famous original [Rosetta Stone] enabled Napoleon’s experts to begin the reading of Egypt’s ancient literature. In like manner the seismologists, using the difficult but manageable Greek of modern physics, are beginning the task of making earthquakes tell the nature of the earth’s interior and translating into significant speech the hieroglyphics written by the seismograph.
— Reginald Aldworth Daly
The interpretation of messages from the earth’s interior demands all the resources of ordinary physics and of extraordinary mathematics. The geophysicist is of a noble company, all of whom are reading messages from the untouchable reality of things. The inwardness of things—atoms, crystals, mountains, planets, stars, nebulas, universes—is the quarry of these hunters of genius and Promethean boldness.
— Reginald Aldworth Daly
This planet is essentially a body of crystallized and uncrystallized igneous material. The final philosophy of earth history will therefore be founded on igneous-rock geology.
— Reginald Aldworth Daly
In Igneous Rocks and their Origin (1914), 1.
See also:
- 19 May - short biography, births, deaths and events on date of Daly's birth.
- Earth's Most Challenging Mysteries, by Reginald Daly. - book suggestion.