Bernhard von Cotta

In the course of the history of the earth innumerable events have occurred one after another, causing changes of states, all with certain lasting consequences. This is the basis of our developmental law, which, in a nutshell, claims that the diversity of phenomena is a necessary consequence of the accumulation of the results of all individual occurrences happening one after another… The current state of the earth, thus, constitutes the as yet most diverse final result, which of course represents not a real but only a momentary end-point.