"Devonian" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... certain strata—their parallelism—or their entire suppression. If we would thus comprehend in its greatest simplicity the general type of the sedentary formations, we find in proceeding successively from below upwards: (1) The Transition group, including the Silurian and Devonian (Old Red Sandstone) systems; (2) the Lower Trias, comprising mountain limestone, the coal measures, the lower new red sandstone, and the magnesian limestone; (3) the Upper Trias, composing the bunter, or variegated sandstone, the ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... wrought to-day. How the Eternal's unconcern of time,— Omnipotence that hath not dreamed of haste,— Is graven in granite-moulding aeons' gloom; Is told in stony record of the roar Of long Silurian storms, and tempests huge Scourging the circuit of Devonian seas; Is whispered in the noiseless mists, the gray Soft drip of clouds about rank fern-forests, Through dateless terms that stored the layered coal; Is uttered hoarse in strange Triassic forms Of monstrous life; or stamped in ice-blue ...
— In Divers Tones • Charles G. D. Roberts
... distinguish it from its namesake, Isca Silurum, Usk of the Silurians, now Caerleon-upon-Usk. In the west country, to this day, ask always becomes ax, or rather remains so, for that provincial form was the King's English at the court of Alfred; and so Isca became on Devonian lips Exan ceaster, after the West Saxon conquest. Thence it passed rapidly through the stages of Exe ceaster and Exe cester till it finally settled down into Exeter. At the same time, the river itself became the Exe; and the Exan-mutha of the Chronicle dropped into Exmouth. ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... low radioactivity in which the derived lead would be small in amount. By rejecting such results as appeared to be of this character, he arrives at 370 millions of years as the age of the Devonian. ...
— The Birth-Time of the World and Other Scientific Essays • J. (John) Joly
... nomenclature plagued them. Why Devonian, Cambrian, Jurassic—as if the portions of the earth designated by these names were not in other places as well as in Devonshire, near Cambridge, and in the Jura? It was impossible to know where you are there. That ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert
... spot. The 'coffins,' or abandoned native diggings, must date from at least two centuries ago. The natives scraped off the gold-bearing stone till the water drove them out. The formation is upper Silurian or lower Devonian, a transition to gneiss, but not highly metamorphic. No fossils have yet been found: if any exist they would be microscopic. Where talcose it is bluish, and shows streaks of 'black sand,' titaniferous iron. The grey sand washes to white. There ...
— To The Gold Coast for Gold, Vol. II - A Personal Narrative • Richard Francis Burton and Verney Lovett Cameron
... reception room; storeroom; treasure-house; and at times a wash-house,—it is an epitome of the household's activities and a reflexion of the family's world-wide seafaring. Devonshire is the sea county—at every port the Devonian dialect. It is probably the pictures and reminders of the broad world which, by contrast, make Mrs Tony's ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... the term forrell, when describing the cover of a book, is a solecism, I fancy, peculiarly Devonian. Whether a book be bound in cloth, vellum, or morocco, it is all alike forrell in Devonshire parlance. I imagine, however, that the word, in its present corrupt sense, must have originated from forrell, a term still used by ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 191, June 25, 1853 • Various
... "Recherches sur les Poissons Fossiles" was completed, and fast upon its footsteps, in 1844, followed the author's "Monograph on the Fossil Fishes of the Old Red Sandstone, or the Devonian System of Great Britain and Russia," a large quarto volume of text, accompanied by forty-one plates. Nothing in his paleontological studies ever interested Agassiz more than this curious fauna of the Old Red, ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... of ideas and the forming of new relations - a simple matter were it not for our mental inertia. Lester Ward speculates that life remained aquatic for the vast periods that paleontology would indicate; Cambrian, Silurian, Devonian, Carboniferous - a duration greater than all subsequent time - for the reason that the creature had not progressed beyond the stage when it could move otherwise than in a straight line when actuated by desire for food or mate. Life was not able ...
— The Fourth Dimensional Reaches of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition • Cora Lenore Williams
... days, and in this time I made several pleasant little excursions, chiefly with the object of examining the geological structure of the immediate neighbourhood. The main points of interest consist, first in some highly fossiliferous strata belonging to the Devonian or Carboniferous period; secondly, in proofs of a late small rise of the land; and lastly, in a solitary and superficial patch of yellowish limestone or travertin, which contains numerous impressions of leaves of trees, together with land-shells, not now existing. It is not improbable that this ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin
... of the ammonites, taken as a group, is simple and clear; they arose as a branch of the nautiloids in the lower Devonian, the shells known as goniatites having zigzag, angulated sutures. Late in the succeeding Carboniferous period appear shells with a truly ammonoid complexity of sutures, and in the Permian their number and variety cause them to form a ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... For on the page from which we have just quoted (Siluria, p. 387), he says, that "whilst the soft Lower Silurian clays and sands of St. Petersburg have their equivalents in the hard schists and quartz rocks with gold veins in the heart of the Ural mountains, the equally soft red and green Devonian marls of the Valdai Hills are represented on the western flank of that chain by hard, contorted, and fractured limestones." But these, and other such admissions, seem to go for little. While himself asserting that the Potsdam-sandstone of North America, the Lingula-flags of England, and the ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer |
