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Eduard Suess
(20 Aug 1831 - 26 Apr 1914)
Austrian geologist who helped establish the fields of paleogeography and tectonics. He proposed, and coined the name for, the ancient supercontinent Gondwanaland which eons ago, due to tectonic activity, broke apart to give the continents we know today.
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Science Quotes by Eduard Suess (3 quotes)
[W]e are prone to forget that the planet may be measured by man, but not according to man.
— Eduard Suess
The Face of the Earth (1904), Vol. 1, 17.
If we imagine an observer to approach our planet from outer space, and, pushing aside the belts of red-brown clouds which obscure our atmosphere, to gaze for a whole day on the surface of the earth as it rotates beneath him, the feature, beyond all others most likely to arrest his attention would be the wedge-like outlines of the continents as they narrow away to the South.
— Eduard Suess
The Face of the Earth (1904), Vol. 1, 1.
The breaking up of the terrestrial globe, this it is we witness. It doubtless began a long time ago, and the brevity of human life enables us to contemplate it without dismay. It is not only in the great mountain ranges that the traces of this process are found. Great segments of the earth's crust have sunk hundreds, in some cases, even thousands, of feet deep, and not the slightest inequality of the surface remains to indicate the fracture; the different nature of the rocks and the discoveries made in mining alone reveal its presence. Time has levelled all.
— Eduard Suess
The Face of the Earth (1904), Vol. 1, 604.
Quotes by others about Eduard Suess (1)
The creation of a science, like that of a world, demands more than a single day; but when our successors write the history of our science, I am convinced that they will say that the work of Suess marks the end of the first day, when there was light.
As translated to English, in Karl Alfred von Zittel, History of Geology and Palæontology to the End of the Nineteenth Century (1901), 321, from Bertrand’s Preface to the French translation by Emile de Margerie of Éduard Seuss, Das Antlitz der Erde (The Face of the Earth). The quote is the concluding sentence of La Face de la Terre (1897), Preface, xvi: “Il faut savoir attendre; la création d’une science, comme celle d’un monde, demande plus d’un jour; mais quand nos successeurs écriront l’histoire de la nôtre, ils diront, j’en suis persuadé, que l’œuvre de M. Suess marque dans cette histoire la fin du premier jour, celui où la lumière fut.”
See also:
- 20 Aug - short biography, births, deaths and events on date of Suess's birth.
- Eduard Suess, Obituary by Pierre Termier - translated in Annual Report of the Smithsonian Institution (1915)
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) -- 
