"Devonian" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Vertebrata to appear in the fossil history of the world are fishes; fish spines and placoid scales (compare dog-fish) appear in the Ordovician rocks. In the coal measures come the amphibia; and in the Permo-triassic strata, reptile-like mammals. In the Devonian rocks, which come between the Silurian and the coal measures, we find very plentiful remains of certain fish called the dipnoi, of which group three genera still survive; they display, in numberless features of their anatomy, transitional ...
— Text Book of Biology, Part 1: Vertebrata • H. G. Wells
... date. 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, ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... local Devon men, so much of the dialogue in the book is in a strong Devonian accent, still to be heard in the outlying districts of ...
— The Cruise of the Nonsuch Buccaneer • Harry Collingwood
... determined, are mapped as Lower Carboniferous, and Lower Silurian, with the Coal Measures covering portions of Barton and Jasper and appearing in a few small, scattered spots in Dade, Polk, Green and Christian counties, and some scanty lines of Devonian fringing the edges of the Silurian ...
— Cave Regions of the Ozarks and Black Hills • Luella Agnes Owen
... but Skelton, the stalwart Devonian, who was doctor of our outfit, said rather grimly, "If you get a similar smash in this country, Stewart, my boy, I'm afraid you won't live to tell of it, for we don't seem to be getting into a healthier atmosphere, though we are a good few thousand ...
— Adventures in Many Lands • Various
... hands together so as to effect his purpose, and his strength could not accomplish it. Ignorant of his antagonist's mode of attack, he had allowed him an advantage over him; and when he endeavoured to gain it by tripping his heels, the other suddenly changed his feet, favoured Robin with a "Devonian kick," and suddenly dashing his bended knee against his person, Robin lost his footing, and fell upon his back, with the stranger ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume III • Various
... also Windmill Hill Cavern, is a well-known ossiferous cave situated near Brixham, on the brow of a hill composed of Devonian limestone. It was discovered by chance in 1858, having been until then hermetically sealed by a mass of limestone breccia. Dr Hugh Falconer with the assistance of a committee of geologists excavated it. The succession of beds in descending order is as follows:—(1) Shingle consisting of pebbles ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... sweet-cloth'd valleys or aspiring hills,.... And if the earth can show the like again, Yet will she fail in her sea-ruling men. Time never can produce men to o'ertake The fames of Grenville, Davies, Gilbert, Drake, Or worthy Hawkins, or of thousands more That by their power made the Devonian shore Mock the proud Tagus, for whose richest spoil The boasting Spaniard left the Indian soil Bankrupt of store, knowing it would quit cost By winning this, though all the rest were lost. (II. ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... in the previous year), but he read "Further Observations on Pyrosoma" at the Linnean Society, and was busy with paleontological work, the results of which appeared in three papers the following year, the most important of which was the Memoir called a "Preliminary Essay on the Arrangement of the Devonian Fishes," in the report of the Geological Survey, "which," says Sir M. Foster, "though entitled a Preliminary Essay, threw an entirely new light on the affinities of these creatures, and, with the continuation published later, in 1866, still ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... on the ridge road five miles out of Cleveland, he entered with zeal into the business of scientific farming. Here he demonstrated that a stiff clay soil derived from the underlying Devonian Shales may be made highly productive in fruit. His success stimulated others along the ridge road, until the old pastures and meadows on that side of the city have been changed into the most profitable orchards and ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin
... system lie beds which have yielded in succession Ordovician and Silurian fossils, forming altogether a compact division which has been distinguished locally as the Muth system. Then follows the so-called Kanawar system, which introduces Devonian conditions, followed by fossils characteristic of the well-known mountain limestone ...
— The Panjab, North-West Frontier Province, and Kashmir • Sir James McCrone Douie
... abundant fauna of mixed mesozoic and palaeozoic types, in rocks of an epoch once supposed to be eminently poor in life; witness, lastly, the incessant disputes as to whether a given stratum shall be reckoned devonian or carboniferous, silurian ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... commenced with the Lingula- flags, e.g., would seem to be exactly of this unsatisfactory uncorroborated sort. The Cambrian witnesses simply swear they "haven't seen anybody their way"; upon which the counsel for the other side immediately puts in ten or twelve thousand feet of Devonian sandstones to make oath they never saw a fish or a mollusk, though all the world knows there were ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... the lowest kinds of animals and seaweeds, a few trilobites and mollusks, but no plants save fucoids. Next came, after a long time, a few cartilaginous fishes and corals. A long time passed—thousands of years rolled by: then came real fishes and land plants in what is called the Devonian period, or the old red sandstone. After a great while came the period to which belongs all the coal formation; and in that carboniferous epoch first appears a whole vegetable world of trees and ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... of your Devonian readers give additional particulars of his office or his duties? They would be ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 223, February 4, 1854 • Various
... of 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 the trade to designate an inferior kind of vellum {631} or parchment, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 191, June 25, 1853 • Various
... solitary peaks, are all that the frosts and rains of very many millions of years and the glaciers of more recent geologic times have left of what once must have been a towering mountain region crested in snow. The wrinkling of the earth's surface which produced this range occurred during the Devonian period when fishes were the predominant inhabitants of the earth, many millions of years before birds or even reptiles appeared. Its rise was accompanied by volcanic disturbances, whose evidences are abundant on islands ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard
... from a parapet Of earth and rock. Then bending curiously, As reaching, in a moment with his hand He scraped the turf and stones, pried up a key Of harder granite, and at his command, When he had made an opening, I slid And sank, down, down through the Devonian land Until with him I reached a cavern hid From every eye but ours, and where no light But from our faces was, a pyramid Of hills that walled this crypt of soundless night. Then in a mood, it seemed more fanciful, He bent again and raked, and to my sight ...
— Toward the Gulf • Edgar Lee Masters
... plan; the sense of the magnitude of his stake in this attempt had given him an unwonted outburst of inspiration. As she wandered with her father among those boggy uplands, or stood on the rocky tors that so strangely crest the low flat hill-tops of the great Devonian moor. She felt a marvelous exhilaration stir her blood —the old Cornish freedom making itself felt through all the restrictions of our modern civilization. She was to the manner born, and she loved the Celtic ...
— Michael's Crag • Grant Allen |
