"Devonian" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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 gardens in ...
— Cleveland Past and Present - Its Representative Men, etc. • Maurice Joblin
... now becoming Devonian in character, of the softly pleasant aspect of the south, lines of hill occasionally rising into picturesque hummocky outline; wide troughed valleys richly timbered, with mellow old farmhouses here and there ...
— Wanderings in Wessex - An Exploration of the Southern Realm from Itchen to Otter • Edric Holmes
... consumed in the building of this great Canyon. In that time ten thousand feet of non-conformable strata have been deposited, elevated, tilted, and washed away; the depression of the Canyon Surface serving for the depositing of Devonian, Lower Carboniferous, Upper Carboniferous, Permian, Triassic, Jurassic, Cretaceous; the formation of the vast eocene lake and its total disappearance; the opening of the earth's crust and the venting from its angry stomach the foul lavas—-the ...
— The Pony Rider Boys in the Grand Canyon - The Mystery of Bright Angel Gulch • Frank Gee Patchin
... 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, ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Volume III • Various
... having been selected, the ordinary oil-drilling outfit is employed to sink a hole of about six inches in diameter until the gas is reached. In the neighborhood of Pittsburgh, this is usually found at a depth of 1,300 to 1,500 feet, in what is known as the Third Oil Sand, a sandstone of the Devonian period. Where the gas comes from originally is an open question. When the driller strikes gas, he is not left in any doubt of the event, for if the well be one of any strength, the gas manifests itself by sending the drill and its attachments into the air, often to a height of a hundred ...
— Burroughs' Encyclopaedia of Astounding Facts and Useful Information, 1889 • Barkham Burroughs
... a small, lagoon-dwelling survivor of the Devonian forms that initiated the change from Crossopterygii to Amphibia (Jarvik, 1955). It shows, however, that this transition did not affect all structures at the same time, for some, as the braincase with its notochordal canal, the mandibular bones and axial limb ...
— A New Order of Fishlike Amphibia From the Pennsylvanian of Kansas • Theodore H. Eaton
... mentality in relation to contemporary politics. Mr. Froude was the tenant of a well-known house in Devonshire, and had come to be on very friendly terms with Mr. Emmot, his landlord's agent, a typical and true Devonian. One day Mr. Emmot came to him in a condition of some perplexity. He had been asked an important question, and was anxious to know if the answer he had given to it was satisfactory. It appeared that a cottager ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... 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 ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... shores of Lake Michigan, and that narrow strip of land, which, commencing near them, runs along the northern bank of the Illinois towards its southwestern bend, until it meets Rock River at its mouth, belong to the Devonian system. The residue of the northern part of the State consists of Silurian strata, which, containing the rich lead mines of Galena in the northwest corner of the State, rise at intervals into conical hills, giving the landscape a character different from that ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 43, May, 1861 • Various
... animal life 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 ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... said, addressing the old Devonian gardener who was trimming the borders a few yards away. "Conybeare, I am going down to Mrs. Brassbound later in the evening. I want you to cut me a nice bunch of ...
— Men of Affairs • Roland Pertwee
... expression, "a proper bender," is inclined to ask if this is not Zummerzetsheer for, and only applicable to, a running hare? The Baron remembers the expression well, though 'tis years since he heard it, and owns to being uncertain as to whether it is not Devonian or Cornish. That he heard it applied to a hare apparent he is prepared to make oath and say; but he is not in the least prepared to assert that it is not generally applied as an expression of admiration for adroitness in avoiding pursuit. ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 103, October 15, 1892 • Various
... earth. The remains of reefs formed by coral polypes of different kinds from those which exist now, enter largely into the composition of the limestones of the Jurassic period; and still more widely different coral polypes have contributed their quota to the vast thickness of the carboniferous and Devonian strata. Then as regards the latter group of rocks in America, the high authority ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... year. He was then known as Mr. William Beauvoir. I was acquainted with his history, of which the details escape me at this writing. He was a countryman of mine; a member of an important county family—Devonian, I believe—and had left England on account of large gambling debts, of which he confided to me the exact figure. I believe they totted ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 1 • Various
... Athenian diamond with forms of beauty divine. To the quay from the gabled alleys, the huddled ravines of the town, Twilights of jutting lattice and beam, the Guild-merchants come down, Cheapening the gifts of the south, the sea-borne alien bales, For the snow-bright fleeces of Leom'ster, the wealth of Devonian vales; While above them, the cavernous gates, on which knight-robbers have gazed Hopeless, in peace look down, their harrows of iron upraised; And Dustyfoot enters at will with his gay Autolycus load, And the maidens are flocking as doves when they ...
— The Visions of England - Lyrics on leading men and events in English History • Francis T. Palgrave
... and cherry-time, Vague music and green trees, Hot sun and gentle breeze, England in June attire, And life born young again, For your gay goatish brute Drunk with warm melody Singing on beds of thyme With red and rolling eye, All the Devonian plain, Lips dark with juicy stain, Ears hung with bobbing fruit? Why should I keep him time? Why in this cold and rime, Where even to dream is pain? No, Robert, there's no reason: Cherries are out ...
— Fairies and Fusiliers • Robert Graves
... breaking up of old associations 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 ...
— The Fourth Dimensional Reaches of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition • Cora Lenore Williams
... state that this work occupied the greater portion of sixteen years, and hence the results obtained may be regarded as, in a general way, illustrative of the life of the cave dwellers. "This cave is about a mile east of Torquay harbor, and is of a sinuous character, running deeply into a hill of Devonian limestone, about half a mile distant from the sea. In places it expands into large chambers, to which various ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen
... England; and yet with all its tillage is perhaps not worth more than English grass would be, thanks to that small-farm system much be-praised by some who know not wheat from turnips. Then along a road, which might be a Devon one, cut in the hill-side, through authentic "Devonian" slate, where the deep chocolate soil is lodged on the top of the upright strata, and a thick coat of moss and wood sedge clusters about the oak-scrub roots, round which the delicate and rare oak-fern mingles its fronds with great blue campanulas; while the "white admirals" ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... of Silurian age, we find in rocks usually regarded as Devonian[13] the most ancient fossils that can be certainly referred to the insects, while from beds of the succeeding Carboniferous period, a number of insect remains have been disinterred. These Palaeozoic insects were frequently of large size, and they show distinct affinities with our ...
— The Life-Story of Insects • Geo. H. Carpenter
... apparent allies. It has in our own country, as has been just shown, its ferns, its lepidodendra, its striated plants allied to the calamites, and its decided araucanite; in America, in the Cadent series, it had its "plants allied to ferns and lepidodendra;" and in the Devonian basin of Sabero in Spain, its characteristic organisms are, a lepidodendron (L. Chemungensis), and a very peculiar fern (Sphenopteris laxus).[52] But while in its main features it resembled the succeeding flora of the Carboniferous period, it seems in ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... the gaps, by which a chronological table, like that given at page 135, is rendered defective, will be removed. We were enabled by aid of the labours of Prof. Sedgwick and Sir Roderick Murchison to intercalate, in 1838, the marine strata of the Devonian period, with their fossil shells, corals, and fish, between the Silurian and Carboniferous rocks. Previously the marine fauna of these last- mentioned formations wanted the connecting links which now render the ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... ancient and the Cenozoic, or recent forms of life. The periods are lesser divisions of the eras. In the Proterozoic, there are two periods, viz.: the Archaean and the Algonkian. The Paleozoic has six periods, viz.: the Cambrian, Ordovician, Silurian, Devonian, Carboniferous and Permian. The Mesozoic era has three periods, the Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous, while the Cenozoic era names five periods,—the Eocene, Oligocene, ...
— The Grand Canyon of Arizona: How to See It, • George Wharton James
... indirectly improving their own race by furnishing finer and more healthful materials to be built into man's body. Marble, cedar, rosewood, gold, and gems make a finer edifice than thatch and ordinary timber and stones. So South-Down mutton and Devonian beef fattened on the blue-grass pastures of the West, and the magnificent prize vegetables and rich appetizing fruits, equal to anything grown in the famed gardens of Alcinoues or the Hesperides, which are displayed at ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... of the summer mornings, when Dick and Paul, and the cousins, male and female, rose at four and strayed with their Devonian angel through lanes and fields as far as Beacon Hargate, gathering wild flowers and calling at the farm for milk. There are no more such flowers, there is no more such air, no more such merry sunshine; there is no such nectar any more ...
— Despair's Last Journey • David Christie Murray
... as a Devonshire man, naturally wished to have the portrait painted by Northcote, who was a brother Devonian. Cunningham said of tins picture that the conception was good, and reality given by the introduction of the painter, palette in hand, putting the finishing touch to the head of the poet. "The likenesses were considered good."—Cunningham's Lives, ...
— The Journal of Sir Walter Scott - From the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford • Walter Scott
... outcrop of the early Devonian formation. It was Stalky who had invented his unlovely name. "He was pretty average drunk, or he wouldn't have done it. Rabbits-Eggs is a little shy of me, somehow. But I swore it was pax between us, and gave him a bob. He stopped ...
— Stalky & Co. • Rudyard Kipling
... by its crystals whether a bit of stone of igneous origin belongs to this or that period of the world's history, as the palaeontologist will tell you by its fossils whether a piece of rock of aqueous origin belongs to the Silurian or Devonian or ...
— Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) - Wonders of Earth, Sea and Sky • Various
... New York is to the geologist what the Holy Land is to the Christian, and the works of her Palaeontologist are the Old Testament Scriptures of the science. It is a Laurentian, Cambrian, Silurian and Devonian State, containing all the groups and all the formations of these long ages, beautifully developed in belts running nearly across the State in an east and west direction, lying undisturbed as ...
— The Hudson - Three Centuries of History, Romance and Invention • Wallace Bruce
... joined in, and all appeared, through the traveling nincompoop, to know all about my past and present, lapsing into a desultory harangue upon all men and things foreign. The street reminded me of Clovelly—rugged and ragged—and the people were wrinkled and wretched; and, indeed, being a Devonian myself by birth, I should be excused of wantonly intending to hurt the delicate feelings of the lusty sons of Devon were I to declare that I thought the life not of a very terrible dissimilarity from that port of antiquity in ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... of 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 plants, to the number of nine hundred and thirty-four species. Some insects ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... the rigging? Who is it? well may be asked. What name is it that blanches with terror the cheeks of the Patagonian navy? Who but the Pirate Prodigy—the relentless Boy Scourer of Patagonian seas? Voyagers slowly drifting by the Silurian beach, coasters along the Devonian shore, still shudder at the name of Bromley Chitterlings—the Boy Avenger, late ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... 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 which is a system for one is for another a stratum, for a third a mere layer. ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert
... foreseen the storm for some time, as he had observed one star ahead of the moon, towing her, and another astern, chasing her. 'I know'd 'twas coming, safe enough.'" [359] The moon was simply in apparent proximity to two stars; but the old Devonian descried mischief. ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... 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 striking element of the marine faunas. It is in ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... in his Geology of the United States, places the northern portion of the southern peninsula of Michigan in the Terrain Devonian. ...
— Old Mackinaw - The Fortress of the Lakes and its Surroundings • W. P. Strickland
... supper, and he has not been here since. This morning I asked Mother Hopgood who Zachary Pearse was. She's a true Devonian; if there's anything she hates, it is to be committed to a definite statement. She ambled round her answer, and at last told me that he was "son of old Cap'en Jan Pearse to Black Mill. 'Tes an old family to Dartymouth an' Plymouth," she went on in a communicative outburst. "They du ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... will call the Devonian—it was noticeable that neither of them told his name—had both been brought up and seen the world in a much smaller way. His father, a confectioner, died and was closely followed by his mother. ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... thousand miles farther south than localities where magnolias, tulip-trees, and deciduous cypresses, grew in the latter age. Some learned and cautious geologists even assert that there have been several Ice periods, one as far back as the Devonian."[1] ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... Carboniferous) are hard, and very little enrichment by weathering has taken place; they carry in their richer portions 70 to 80 per cent calcium phosphate, and large sections range only from about 30 to 50 per cent. In the southeastern deposits (Silurian and Devonian in Tennessee and Tertiary in the Carolinas and Florida), there has been considerable enrichment, the rock is softer, and the general grade ranges from 65 to 80 per cent. Both calcium carbonate and calcium phosphate are soluble in ordinary ground waters, but the carbonate is the more soluble ...
— The Economic Aspect of Geology • C. K. Leith
... river 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 Upheaved ...
— Toward the Gulf • Edgar Lee Masters
... 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, so strange in its combinations that even well-informed naturalists had attributed ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... in agreement, 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
... occurring so abundantly in what is known as the Utica slates. Wherever the slates make their appearance, whether in Australia, America, or any portion of Europe, this fossil, characteristic of the Silurian and Devonian systems, appeared, not so much in time and place as in extended localities and conditions—indicating the presence of a law of life such as we have enunciated. We once inquired of the elder Prof. Silliman how long it took for the formation of one of these periods or ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... mountains. In an agony of terror, in an access of despair, when all else fails, he strikes a bee-line for the hills he loves; rationally or irrationally, he seems to think he can hide there. Hugo Le Geyt, with his frank boyish nature, his great Devonian frame, is sure to have done so. I know his mood. He has ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen |
