QUATERNARY • DICTIONARY ONE.COM • Definition of Quaternary

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/kwˈɑtərnˌɛri/ Listen

adjective

Quaternary adj.

Consisting of four; by fours, or in sets of four.

(Geol.) Later than, or subsequent to, the Tertiary; Post-tertiary; as, the Quaternary age, or Age of man.

noun

Quaternary n.

The number four.

(Geol.) The Quaternary age, era, or formation. See the Chart of Geology.

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Etymology of 'Quaternary'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Quaternary" Quotes from Famous Books

... combinations are such as consist of two simple elements combined together. Ternary, and quaternary, consist of three and ...

— Elements of Chemistry, - In a New Systematic Order, Containing all the Modern Discoveries • Antoine Lavoisier

... the cacodemons of science, reverting to prehistoric times. A monstrous plant on the rocks, queer blocks everywhere, glacial mud, figures whose simian shapes, heavy jaws, beetling eyebrows, retreating foreheads and flat skulls, recalled the ancestral heads of the first quaternary periods, when inarticulate man still devoured fruits and seeds, and was still contemporaneous with the mammoth, the rhinoceros and the big bear. These designs were beyond anything imaginable; they leaped, for the most part, beyond the limits of painting and introduced a fantasy that was ...

— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans

... greatly err, all the real knowledge which we possess of the fossil remains of man goes no farther back than the Quaternary epoch; and the most that can be asserted on Professor Virchow's side respecting these remains is, that none of them present us with more marked pithecoid characters than such as are to be found among ...

— Freedom in Science and Teaching. - from the German of Ernst Haeckel • Ernst Haeckel

... sinking the value of the groups in several classes (and all our experience shows that their valuation is as yet arbitrary), could easily extend the parallelism over a wide range; and thus the septenary, quinary, quaternary and ternary classifications ...

— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin

... companion. And from their amazing skill at casting up accounts upon their fingers, they are regarded with as much veneration us were the disciples of Pythagoras of yore, when initiated into the sacred quaternary of numbers. ...

— Washington Irving • Charles Dudley Warner

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