Science Quote by Edward Burnett Tylor

Tylor opens by borrowing your eyes before he borrows your assent. The first clause, "Every one knows", is a sly bit of scientific stagecraft: he pretends the observation is common property, then uses that shared mental snapshot to smuggle in a larger claim about landscape and deep time. You don’t need to have stood in the Alps; you just need to have absorbed the 19th-century travel-imaginary of sublime mountains and tidy, legible nature. He’s recruiting that cultural familiarity as evidence.

The sentence is basically a guided visualization, a proto-lab demonstration for readers without instruments. Snow in an Alpine valley becomes a model: a wide basin, a gently sloping surface, an outlet. Then comes the pivot - "not of snow but of earth" - which is where his real intent lives. He’s training the reader to think in analogies, to accept that slow, physical processes can shape massive forms, and to treat sediment as something that behaves like a fluid when given enough time. It’s persuasive because it’s domesticating scale: terrifying geologic duration is translated into an everyday winter phenomenon, just swapped in material.

The subtext is also disciplinary. As a scientist writing in an era when geology, archaeology, and anthropology were building public authority, Tylor performs clarity and inevitability. He doesn’t argue; he invites you to imagine, and imagination does the work of consent. Contextually, it fits a Victorian confidence in natural laws and gradualism: the world, and by extension human history, can be read as layered deposits, sloping toward an "outlet" that reason can locate.