"it's turtles all they way down"

[Stephen Goranson]

good Yale Book of Quotations quotes Stephen Hawking's 1988 version of a story an
 an audience member objection to an astronomer's cosmological description. A
lady sareplied that the world rests on a giant tortoise. When challenged on
what the tortoise stood on, she explained "it's turtles all the way down." YBQ
adds that this may have been told earlier by Bertrand Russell, which sounds
reasonable (I think I've encountered that attribution, perhaps in his
Autobiography?). In any case I guessed it would predate Yertle the Turtle (one
of the first books I could read, all by myself). Google book gives, e.g.:

1902 As, in the old Hindu account of how the world was supported....the elephant
on a tortoise....[when challenged] he sought to save himself in this quandry by
roundly asserting that it was "tortoise all the way down"
The New World and the New Thought, J. T. Bixby

1908 p. 563, Princeton Theological Review: "rocks all the way down"

Stephen Goranson
http://www.duke.edu/~goranson

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