"Silurian" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the epicentral district is covered by a sheet of Old Red Sandstone (Fig. 64), but, just to the north-east of the position laid down for the originating fault (indicated by the straight broken line), is the well-known Woolhope anticlinal, by which Silurian beds are brought to the surface. The anticlinal axis runs approximately north-west and south-east, and is thus roughly parallel to the earthquake-fault. Moreover, the thinning-out and occasional disappearance of some of the Silurian beds on the south-west side of the anticlinal ...
— A Study of Recent Earthquakes • Charles Davison
... requires that the first form which existed of each of the great divisions would present points intermediate between existing ones, but immensely different. Most geologists believe Silurian{117} fossils are those which first existed in the whole world, not those which have chanced to be the oldest not destroyed,—or the first which existed in profoundly deep seas in progress of conversion from sea to land: if they are first they give up. Not so Hutton ...
— The Foundations of the Origin of Species - Two Essays written in 1842 and 1844 • Charles Darwin
... of his life, and to which he himself attached the greatest importance. In Wales he took up the question of the age of the rocks in the neighbourhood of Dolgelly, and after much study of their fossils proposed the now accepted classification of the Lingula flags of the Lower Silurian system into the Maenturog flags and slates, the Festiniog flags, and the Dolgelly slates. The collecting of lepidoptera was his chief amusement in Brazil, where he made his first acquaintance with the teeming life of the torrid zone and laid the foundation ...
— The Naturalist in Nicaragua • Thomas Belt
... first American land lifted above the ocean. That land belongs to the Azoic period, and contains no trace of life. Along the base of that range of hills lie the deposits of the next great geological period, the Silurian; and the State of New York, geologically speaking, belongs almost entirely to this Silurian period, with its lowest Taconic division, and the Devonian period, the third in succession of these great epochs. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IX., March, 1862., No. LIII. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics, • Various
... blanks between strata in any particular vertical series are amply filled in with records in the form of thick strata in some geographically distant series. For example, in some regions Silurian rocks are directly overlaid by the coal measures; but elsewhere this sudden break is filled in with the Devonian rocks that tell of a great "age of fishes." So commonly are breaks in the strata in one region filled up in another that we are forced to conclude that the record ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... of the contemporaneity of the European and of the North American Silurians based? In the last edition of Sir Charles Lyell's 'Elementary Geology' it is stated, on the authority of a former President of this Society, the late Daniel Sharpe, that between 30 and 40 per cent. of the species of Silurian Mollusca are common to both sides of the Atlantic. By way of due allowance for further discovery, let us double the lesser number and suppose that 60 per cent. of the species are common to the North American and the British ...
— Geological Contemporaneity and Persistent Types of Life • Thomas H. Huxley
... City Front, despite of piles and pier and wharf, the Pacific tides still asserted themselves in mud and ooze as far as Sansome Street; the wooden sidewalks of Clay and Montgomery streets were mere floating bridges or buoyant pontoons superposed on elastic bogs; Battery Street was the Silurian beach of that early period on which tin cans, packing-boxes, freight, household furniture, and even the runaway crews of deserted ships had been cast away. There were dangerous and unknown depths in Montgomery Street and on the ...
— A Ward of the Golden Gate • Bret Harte
... yet in a chaotic and formative condition; huge slides of Silurian slates and diorite are of frequent occurrence. A ridge of one of these softer stones had most probably been encased in the surrounding granite for many centuries; then, loosened by water or by time, had crumbled and ...
— Under the Andes • Rex Stout
... of the lower vertebrata (Elasmobranch and Ganoid fishes) occur, indeed, in early strata (upper Silurian); but still far from the earliest in which some of the invertebrata are found. The general statement in the text applies chiefly to the more highly organised ...
— The Scientific Evidences of Organic Evolution • George John Romanes
... life and death struggle. The moss is built up of cell, the rock of crystal forms. Below this Devonian limestone, its crystals sparkling in the sunshine, with its coral fossils, its fragments of crinoids, and its broken shells of brachiopods, down through the Devonian, the Silurian, the Ordovician, and the Cambrian rocks, down to the original crust formed when first the earth began to cool, if any there be remaining; all these miles of rocks are inorganic, built up of crystals. But here on the surface, the tender green mosses ...
— Some Winter Days in Iowa • Frederick John Lazell
... road went through a place called absurdly enough Paris, from the quantity of gypsum with which the neighbourhood abounds; and fine specimens of silurian fossils of the trilobite family and of madrepores, millepores, and corallics, are found here. Love's Hotel is the best in the village, and ...
— Canada and the Canadians, Vol. 2 • Richard Henry Bonnycastle
... revenue stamps were printed on a paper which had a few bits of silk fibre scattered through it. The paper called granite or silurian has a quantity of colored threads mixed with the pulp. In Switzerland blue and red threads were used, giving the paper a slightly grayish tone. In Servia only red threads were used but in sufficient quantity to make the paper ...
— What Philately Teaches • John N. Luff
... misled by trusting to lithological evidence; yet his reasoning all through Siluria, shows that he still thinks it natural to expect formations of the same age to be chemically similar, even in remote regions. For example, in treating of the Silurian rocks of South Scotland, he says:—"When traversing the tract between Dumfries and Moffat, in 1850, it occurred to me, that the dull reddish or purple sandstone and schist to the north of the former town, which so resembled the bottom rocks of Longmynd, Llanberis, and St. David's, would prove ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... strongly suggest the evolution of the human no less than the lower animal races out of some simple primordial animal,—that all are equally "lineal descendants of sense few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Silurian system was deposited." But, as the author speaks disrespectfully of spontaneous generation, and accepts a supernatural beginning of life on earth, in some form or forms of being which included potentially all that have since existed and are yet to be, he is thereby not warranted to extend his ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... this continent, north-west of Minnesota, and known as the Saskatchewan district, is estimated by English authorities to comprise 368,000 square miles. North-west from Otter Tail Lake, the geographical centre of Minnesota, extends a vast silurian formation, bounded on the west along the eastern base of the Rocky Mountains by coal measures. Such a predominance of limestone implies fertility of soil, as in the north-western States, and the speedy colonisation of Saskatchewan would be assured if the current objection to the severity ...
— Handbook to the new Gold-fields • R. M. Ballantyne
... intrusive felspathic porphyry and ashes. The same formation occurs just within the county border at Cerrig-y-Druidion, Langum, Bettys-y-coed and in the Fairy Glen. Northwards from the Ceiriog to the limestone fringe at Llandrillo the Wenlock shale of the Silurian covers the entire mass of the Hiraethog and Clwydian hills, but verging on its western slopes into the Denbighshire grit, which may be traced southward in a continuous line from the mouth of the Conway as far as Llanddewi Ystrad Enni in Radnorshire, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... will get the thought into your mind that our present penal system is Silurian and unscientific—the same to-day as it was 10,000 years ago—you will see my stand-point. Our penitentiaries develop criminals, they make criminals out of men who are not criminals to begin with—boys, for instance. They debase ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... drivers, bearded as cave men, walking by the oxen. The line moved steadily, without sound or hurry, as if directed by a single intelligence possessed of a single idea. It was not a congeries of separated particles, but a connected whole. As it wound down the face of the hill, it suggested a vast Silurian monster, each wagon top a vertebra, ...
— The Emigrant Trail • Geraldine Bonner |
