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George Farrer Rodwell
(1843 - 1 Jun 1905)
educator and writer who was a science master in Marlborough College. He wrote articles for the Dictionary of National Biography, and several books, including A Dictionary of Science (1873), The Birth of Chemistry (1874) and Etna: A History Of The Mountain And Of Its Eruptions (1878).
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Science Quotes by George Farrer Rodwell (2 quotes)
If we peep into Dom Claude’s cell, we are introduced to a typical alchemist’s laboratory—a gloomy, dimly-lighted place, full of strange vessels, and furnaces, and melting-pots, spheres, and portions of skeletons hanging from the ceiling; the floor littered with stone bottles, pans, charcoal, aludels, and alembics, great parchment books covered with hieroglyphics; the bellows with its motto Spira, Spera; the hour-glass, the astrolabe, and over all cobwebs, and dust, and ashes. The walls covered with various aphorisms of the brotherhood; legends and memorials in many tongues; passages from the Smaragdine Table of Hermes Trismegistus; and looming out from all in great capitals, ’ANAΓKH.
— George Farrer Rodwell
In The Birth of Chemistry (1874), 100.
Step by step we cross great eras in the development of thought: there is no sudden gigantic stride; a theory proceeds by slow evolution until it dominates or is destroyed.
— George Farrer Rodwell
In 'Theory of Phlogiston', The London, Edinburgh, and Dublin Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science (Jan 1868), 35, 28-29.
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) -- 
