Science Quote by John Joly

A scientist opening with “all admit” is doing more than praising a view; he’s drafting a coalition. Joly’s line is a small rhetorical trick: start with the one thing no reader wants to argue about. The sea, as spectacle, is bipartisan. By framing beauty as a shared admission rather than a personal impression, he establishes a baseline of consensus that can carry the reader into less intuitive terrain - measurement, theory, maybe even controversy.

The phrasing matters. “One of the most beautiful and magnificent sights in Nature” leans on the 19th-century habit of treating Nature as capital-N: not just scenery, but a moral and intellectual authority. Joly isn’t sentimentalizing the ocean so much as legitimizing wonder as a scientific starting point. In an era when science was professionalizing and specializing, that gesture reassures the lay reader: the lab coat hasn’t killed the capacity for awe.

The subtext is also strategic humility. “All admit” concedes the obvious first, signaling that what follows will not be an argument against common sense, but an extension of it. It’s the soft entry point to a harder claim: the sea’s magnificence isn’t exhausted by what it looks like. Underneath the “sight” lies time, chemistry, erosion, heat - the kind of invisible machinery Joly, known for geophysical thinking, would want you to notice. The ocean becomes a gateway drug: you come for the view, you stay for the planet-scale calculus.