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Cambrian   Listen
adjective
Cambrian  adj.  
1.
(Geog.) Of or pertaining to Cambria or Wales.
2.
(Geol.) Of or pertaining to the lowest subdivision of the rocks of the Silurian or Molluscan age; sometimes described as inferior to the Silurian. It is named from its development in Cambria or Wales. See the Diagram under Geology.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Cambrian" Quotes from Famous Books



... those determining the birth and death of the individual. When I view all beings not as special creations, but as the lineal descendants of some few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Cambrian system was deposited, they seem to me to become ennobled. Judging from the past, we may safely infer that not one living species will transmit its unaltered likeness to ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various

... in mind is the long road of evolution,—the road you and I have traveled in the guise of humbler organisms, from the first unicellular life in the old Cambrian seas to the complex and highly specialized creature that rules supreme in the animal kingdom to-day. Surely a long journey, stretching through immeasurable epochs of geologic time, and attended by vicissitudes of which we can ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs

... land of smoke, advise thee well. Here Nature's bounteous hand around shall fling, Scenes that thy Muse hath never dar'd to sing. When sickness weigh'd thee down, and strength declin'd; When dread eternity absorb'd thy mind, Flow'd the predicting verse, by gloom o'erspread, That 'Cambrian mountains' thou should'st never tread, That 'time-worn cliff, and classic stream to see,' Was wealth's prerogative, despair for thee. Come to the proof; with us the breeze inhale, Renounce despair, ...
— The Banks of Wye • Robert Bloomfield

... current. Buller describes a case of lightning-stroke in which the external ocular muscles, the crystalline lens, and the optic nerve were involved. Godfrey reports the case of Daniel Brown, a seaman on H.M.S. Cambrian. While at sea on February 21, 1799, he was struck both dumb and blind by a lightning-stroke. There was evidently paralysis of the optic nerve and of the oculomotor muscles; and the muscles of the glottis were also in some manner ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould

... suspension in water and deposited in geologic basins according to their specific gravity and degree of fineness (see CLAY). These deposits have been formed in all geologic epochs from the "Recent" to the "Cambrian," and they vary in hardness from the soft and plastic "alluvial" clays to the hard and rock-like shales and slates of the older formations. The alluvial and drift clays (which were alone used for brickmaking until modern times) are found near ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various

... Of Cambrian mountains still I dream, And mouldering vestiges of war; By time-worn cliff or classic stream Would rove,—but prudence holds a bar. Conic then, O Health, I'll strive to bound My wishes to this airy stand; 'Tis not for me to trace around The ...
— Wild Flowers - Or, Pastoral and Local Poetry • Robert Bloomfield

... slight, quick arrest of her look, in an astonishment not unlike the hiccup in speech, while her act of courtesy proceeded. At once he was conscious of the price he paid for respectability, and saw the Teuton skin on the slim Cambrian, baggy at shoulders, baggy at seat, pinched at the knees, short at the heels, showing outrageously every spot where he ought to have been bigger or smaller. How accept or how reject the invitation to drive in such ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... Smithfield, commissioned him to translate into English Elis Wyn's The Sleeping Bard, a book printed originally in 1703. The bookseller foresaw for the volume a large sale, not only in England but in Wales; but "on the eve of committing it to the press, however, the Cambrian-Briton felt his small heart give way within him. 'Were I to print it,' said he, 'I should be ruined; the terrible descriptions of vice and torment would frighten the genteel part of the English public out of its wits, and I should to a certainty be prosecuted by Sir James Scarlett ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins

... two organisations—the Welsh Education Committee and the Cambrian Society—were formed; and they developed, respectively, the national schools and the British schools. After the Education Act of 1870, the schools became voluntary or Board; education gradually became compulsory and free; and in 1902 an attempt ...
— A Short History of Wales • Owen M. Edwards

... Hastings told the Rev. Mr Swan, chaplain of the Cambrian, that he had found the germ of fact from which many of the most incredible tales in ancient history had grown during his stay in India. One instance only we would relate. A Grecian author mentions a people who had only one leg. An embassy from the interior was conducted into the presence of ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 1 (of 2) • John Roby

... for his learning and research. He has explored portions of that continent as far down as the azoic rocks, and made many important discoveries as to the past life of the globe. His researches have been especially rich in the Cambrian or Lower Silurian epochs, and have led to many modifications in the classification of the various forms of life pervading those earlier periods, and we may say that the facts he has brought to light tend strongly to show the correctness of our theory ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright

... expression, "as the floor of a temple," would, at any rate, have arrested my eye, as a circumstance of impressive beauty, even though the want of such a feature might not, in any case, have affected me as a fault. As something that had a positive value, this characteristic of the Cambrian valleys had fixed my attention, but not as any telling point of contrast against the Cambrian valleys. No faults, however, at that early age disturbed my pleasure, except that, after one whole day's travelling, (for so long it cost us between Llangollen ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey

... I belonged to H.M.S. Cambrian, (the Honourable Captain Legge,) on our return voyage from St. Helena, we passed so near this island, that we sent a 24-pound shot among the hills, and saw it scatter the dust around the spot where it fell, but we did not send a boat on shore, for we knew it was then uninhabited, and ...
— A Voyage Round the World, Vol. I (of ?) • James Holman

... killed and five wounded; among the latter was Lieutenant Chads, whose arm was nearly severed by a Malay kris. While here the Superb arrived from Hong Kong on her way to England; the Driver, with Sir Henry Pottinger on board; and the Cambrian, Commodore Chads. Also the Iris from England, and the Dido from Hong Kong, which latter vessel ...
— Borneo and the Indian Archipelago - with drawings of costume and scenery • Frank S. Marryat

... romance. Rowena comes with her golden wine-cup. Merlin instructs Vortigern how to discover the two sleeping dragons who hindered the foundation of his tower. Aurelius, the Christian King, burns Vortigern in his Cambrian city of refuge. Eldol fights a duel with Hengist, cuts off his head, and destroys the Saxons without mercy. Merlin the magician, and Uther Pendragon, with fifteen thousand men, bring over "the Giant's Dance" from Ireland, and set it up in Salisbury Plain. Uther ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various

... household smoke, your eye excursive roams; Wide stretching from the hall, in whose kind haunt The hospitable genius lingers still, To where the broken landscape, by degrees, Ascending, roughens into rigid hills; O'er which the Cambrian mountains, like far clouds, That skirt the blue horizon, ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson

... to sit by Beauty's side Beneath the hawthorn shade; But Beauty is more beautiful In green and buff array'd. More radiant are her laughing eyes, Her cheeks of ruddier glow, As, hoping for the envied prize, She twangs the Cambrian bow. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 184, May 7, 1853 • Various

... Archaen system; but sometimes, according to Loczy, there is no unconformity. Covers a large area in the northern part of China proper; absent in the eastern Kuen-lun; occurs again in the ranges of S.E. China. In Liao-tung Cambrian fossils have been found near the summit of the series; they belong to the oldest fauna known upon the earth, the fauna of the Olenellus zone. It is, however, not improbable that in many places beds of considerably later date have ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various

... summoned, and the Romans came slowly into the camp. The herald came in front, and he was followed by an officer of high rank, as could be seen from his apparel and the golden trappings of the horse that bore him; and another officer followed behind; and the herald, who knew something of the Cambrian language, said that this was the Lord Legate himself, and that he was come to ...
— Paul the Minstrel and Other Stories - Reprinted from The Hill of Trouble and The Isles of Sunset • Arthur Christopher Benson

... actions are the common consequence of bad thoughts; and though the better sort of people treat this ceremony as a barbarism, it is very much to be doubted whether more faux pas have been committed by the Cambrian boors in this free access to the bed chambers of their mistresses, than by more fashionable Strephons and their nymphs in groves and shady bowers. The power of habit is perhaps stronger than the power of passion, or even ...
— Bundling; Its Origin, Progress and Decline in America • Henry Reed Stiles

... the moraines, the rock exposed in situ was mainly a uniform type of gneiss, crumpled and folded, showing all the signs of great antiquity—pre-Cambrian, in the geological phrase. Relieving the grey sheen of the gneiss were dark bands of schist which tracked about in an irregular manner. Sporadic quartz veins here and there showed a light tint. They were specially interesting, ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson

... it the facility, at length wears out, and it must be pumped up again by the heavy machinery of duty or gratitude, when it should run free. I have read your 'Fall of Cambria' with as much pleasure as I did your 'Messiah.' Your Cambrian Poem I shall be tempted to repeat oftenest, as human poems take me in a mood more frequently congenial than divine. The character of Llewellyn pleases me more than anything else perhaps; and then some of the ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle

... into the Derwent. Had it been a girl, the name should have been Greta. By the by, Greta, or rather Grieta, is exactly the Cocytus of the Greeks; the word, literally rendered in modern English, is, "The loud Lamenter;" to griet, in the Cambrian dialect, signifying to roar aloud for grief or pain, and it does "roar" ...
— Biographia Epistolaris, Volume 1. • Coleridge, ed. Turnbull

... and during this, or perhaps a longer roll of years, the land and waters have everywhere teemed with living creatures, all exposed to the struggle for life, and undergoing change." (p. 354). "Mr. Croll," he tells us, "estimates that about sixty millions of years have elapsed since the Cambrian period, but this, judging from the small amount of organic change since the commencement of the glacial period, seems a very short time for the many and the great mutations of life, which have certainly ...
— What is Darwinism? • Charles Hodge

... Tideswellites, can this be true, Which Fame's loud trumpet brings; That ye, to view the Cambrian Prince, Forsook the King of Kings? That when his rattling chariot wheels, Proclaim'd his Highness near, Ye trod upon each others' heels, To leave the house of prayer. Be wise next time, adopt this plan, Lest ye ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 227, March 4, 1854 • Various

... in Merionethshire, North Wales), a small seaport on the north of the estuary. Pop. of urban district (1901), 2214. The ride to Dolgelley (Dolgellau) is fine. The parish church, Llanaber, 1-1/2 m. from Barmouth, is on a cliff overlooking the sea. Barmouth is a favourite bathing place, on the Cambrian railway. It is a centre for coaching in summer, especially to and through the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various

... that it was the great national festival of Wales, sacred to good St. David; a day on which no man of Welch blood, though he should be at Seringapatam, would think it lawful to forget this ancient recognizance of Cambrian fraternity.—True it is however, that, like all other old usages, this also (except in the principality itself) is rapidly falling into disuse. Else surely it could never have happened that precisely on this day a certain noble lord of Welch descent should have thought fit ...
— Walladmor: - And Now Freely Translated from the German into English. - In Two Volumes. Vol. I. • Thomas De Quincey

... appearance of perfect trilobites and other organisms in the oldest known life-bearing strata would be fatal to evolution. But I for one, and many others, utterly reject any such belief. Already three or four piles of unconformable strata are known beneath the Cambrian; and these are generally in a crystalline condition, and may once have been charged with ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin

... waters of numberless lakes and streams on the heights came tumbling down to join the river, or again a great gap in the solid mountain of rock let through a rush of blue-green, foaming water. The hills have the characteristic Cambrian outline and it is the opinion of Mr. Low that this formation extends continuously eastward from the Kaniapiscau to the George. The mountains on the right bank were more rugged and irregular than those on the left, and Bridgman Mountains in places ...
— A Woman's Way Through Unknown Labrador • Mina Benson Hubbard (Mrs. Leonidas Hubbard, Junior)

... had lost their liberty, or changed their masters, by the accidents of war. When time and religion had mitigated the fierce spirit of the Anglo-Saxons, the laws encouraged the frequent practice of manumission; and their subjects, of Welsh or Cambrian extraction, assumed the respectable station of inferior freemen, possessed of lands, and entitled to the rights of civil society. [154] Such gentle treatment might secure the allegiance of a fierce people, who had been recently subdued on the confines of Wales and Cornwall. The sage Ina, ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon

... then, we listen, when, after having sounded every note in the wide gamut of Nature, after reading the story of life as it stands written in the long series of records reaching from Cambrian fossils to ovarian germs, after tracing the divine principle of order from the starlike flower at his feet to the flower-like circle of planets which spreads its fiery corolla, in obedience to the same simple law that disposes the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various

... Cambrian, Talbot, and Glasgow, along with the French frigate Armide, was alongside of the Turkish frigates at the left of the crescent on entering into the bay; whilst the Dartmouth, Musquito, the Rose, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 13, No. 356, Saturday, February 14, 1829 • Various

... and hunted by their conquerors among the Cambrian hills, but clinging to their independent faith, or even when paralyzed into spiritual apathy under tribute to a foreign church, the heavenly song still murmured in a few true hearts amidst the vain and vicious lays of carnal mirth. It survived even when people and priest ...
— The Story of the Hymns and Tunes • Theron Brown and Hezekiah Butterworth

... limestone, with a wedge of dark rock; this very doubtful! Limestone is of great interest owing to chance of finding Cambrian fossils (Archeocyathus). ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott

... attending, the introduction of physiological life, there appeared signs of sentient life. The preservation of certain of the sense organs, taken together with the collateral evidences of sense action, as early as Cambrian times, furnish the groundwork for a historical study of the progress of sentient life, eventuating in the higher forms of mental life. Here the problems of geology run hand in hand with the problems of psychology. The limitations ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper

... of the circle itself forming the fourth; this being evidently the place where the Druids who presided had their station; or where the more sacred and important part of the rites and ceremonies (whatever they may have been) were performed. All this is as perfect at this day as when the Cambrian bards, according to the custom of their ancient order, described by my old acquaintances, the living members of the Chair of Glamorgan, met there for the ...
— Colloquies on Society • Robert Southey

... meeting of the Cambrian Archaeological Society, Lord Cawdor in the chair, I read a letter on this subject from the resident at Lucknow, Colonel Sleeman, to whom India is indebted for the suppression of Thuggee, and other ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 180, April 9, 1853 • Various

... of special engagements. I had eighteen years' experience in singing for the Welsh colony of men and women who formed a society known as the Cambrian Mutual Aid Society. It had been in existence four years before I was engaged as vocalist. The society was prosperous and about 300 strong at that time. Professor Price, Mr. Jehu, Samuel Williams, Gomer Evans, H.J. Owens (Obedog), E. Meredith (tenor) and J.R. Jones (bass) were the prominent ...
— Sixty Years of California Song • Margaret Blake-Alverson

... assume this form. We know that the tides must have been greater in Cambrian or Laurentian days than they are at present; so that they were available as a means of assisting other agents in the stupendous operations of strata manufacture which were then conducted. This certainly helps us to understand how these tremendous beds of strata, a dozen miles or more in solid ...
— Time and Tide - A Romance of the Moon • Robert S. (Robert Stawell) Ball

... The last 200 feet or so of deposits we call the Pleistocene or Quaternary; the rest are known as the Tertiary strata. They are only a small part of the total thickness of aqueous deposit of stratified rock—which amounts to 60,000 feet more before the earliest remains of life in the Cambrian beds are reached, whilst older than, and therefore below this, we have another 50,000 feet of water-made rock which yields no fossils—no remains of living things, though living things were certainly ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester

... every one, that all four, though perfect strangers to each other, were actually bound to the same point, namely, Headlong Hall, the seat of the ancient and honourable family of the Headlongs, of the vale of Llanberris, in Caernarvonshire. This name may appear at first sight not to be truly Cambrian, like those of the Rices, and Prices, and Morgans, and Owens, and Williamses, and Evanses, and Parrys, and Joneses; but, nevertheless, the Headlongs claim to be not less genuine derivatives from the antique branch of Cadwallader than any of the last named multiramified families. They claim, indeed, ...
— Headlong Hall • Thomas Love Peacock

... prepared to prove that they must have seen him had he been there. But the evidence that 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 ...
— Geological Contemporaneity and Persistent Types of Life • Thomas H. Huxley

... with the 'Pearl' through the Delta to doctor them if they become ill, and send them on to Ceylon with a blessing. All have behaved well, and I am really thankful to see it, and hope that God will graciously make some better use of us in promoting his glory. I met a Dr. King in Simon's Bay, of the 'Cambrian' frigate, one of our class-mates in the Andersonian. This frigate, by the way, saluted us handsomely when we sailed out. We have a man-of-war to help us (the 'Hermes'), but the lazy muff is far behind. He is, however, to carry ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie

... to the wilds of Kent; And, tired like me with follies and with crimes, In angry numbers warn'st succeeding times, Then shall thy friend, nor thou refuse his aid, 260 Still foe to vice, forsake his Cambrian shade; In Virtue's cause once more exert his rage, Thy satire point, and animate ...
— Poetical Works of Johnson, Parnell, Gray, and Smollett - With Memoirs, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Samuel Johnson, Thomas Parnell, Thomas Gray, and Tobias Smollett

... regarding the causes of the "origin of the fittest," the rise of variations, and the appearance of a population of plant and animal forms sufficiently extensive and differentiated to allow for the play of the competitive forces, and of the more passive selective agencies which began to operate in pre-cambrian times, or as soon as the earth became fitted for the existence of ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard

... of all the marine animals which, on the hypothesis of evolution, must have existed in myriads in those seas, wherein the many thousand feet of Cambrian and Laurentian rocks now devoid, or almost devoid, of any ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley

... Times, worshiped one Madog as an Hero. Concerning the Virginians, See Martyr Decade the VII. chap. 3. concerning the Guahutemallians, Decade VIII. chap. 5. Among them we have Matec Zungam and Mat Jngam, and why this should not be Madog the Cambrian, whom the Monuments in the Country prove to have been in those parts, no reason can be given. As to Antiquity, five Centuries are sufficient, beyond which American Traditions ...
— An Enquiry into the Truth of the Tradition, Concerning the - Discovery of America, by Prince Madog ab Owen Gwynedd, about the Year, 1170 • John Williams

... A worthy Cambrian at the recent Eisteddfod, or Welsh Musical Festival, after staying a short time at the concert, walked off, shaking his head, exclaiming, "I like singing and drinking by turns—here it is all sing and no drink—that will ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 333 - Vol. 12, Issue 333, September 27, 1828 • Various

... Henry Austin Bruce is a native of Wales. He was born at Duffryn, Aberdare, Glamorganshire, and is both by birth and training a thorough Cambrian. His father, who is still living, was for several years Stipendiary Magistrate at Merthyr, and once contested that borough unsuccessfully with Sir John Guest. He was originally a Mr. Knight—a patronymic which, in 1805, he changed to Bruce, and afterwards, in 1837, to Pryce. ...
— Western Worthies - A Gallery of Biographical and Critical Sketches of West - of Scotland Celebrities • J. Stephen Jeans

... previously. They said people married each other because they loved each other. I hope other ethnologists will follow this inquiry up, for we may here find a real golden age, which in other races of humanity lies away in the mists of the ages behind the kitchen middens and the Cambrian rocks. My own opinion in this matter is that the earlier courting methods of the Igalwa involved a certain amount of effort on the man's part, a thing abhorrent to an Igalwa. It necessitated his dressing himself up, and likely enough fighting that impudent scoundrel who was ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley

... attention to this remarkable compound, having stated that a passage in Pliny informed us that the Cimbri called the sea in their neighbourhood Mori-marusa, inferred that the name was Cimbric; and further argued, that as mor mawth in Welsh meant the same, the Cimbric tongue was Welsh, Cambrian, or British. As far as it went the inference was truly legitimate; but the reasoning which led to it was deficient. The likelihood of there being more languages than one wherein both mor meant sea, and ...
— The Ethnology of the British Islands • Robert Gordon Latham

... of 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 ...
— The Hudson - Three Centuries of History, Romance and Invention • Wallace Bruce

... the narrow entrance, a canoe came alongside with the news that the man-of-war had just left that morning after having burned three villages, killed some thirty pigs, and drowned a baby. This was the Cambrian, Captain Lewes commanding. He and I had first met in Korea during the Japanese-Russian War, and we had been crossing each ether's trail ever since without ever a meeting. The day the Snark sailed into Suva, in the Fijis, we made ...
— The Cruise of the Snark • Jack London

... mischief of breeding too continuously from one strain such as that of Crown Prince has to some extent been eradicated, and we have had many splendid Mastiffs since his time. Special mention should be made of that grand bitch Cambrian Princess, by Beau. She was purchased by Mrs. Willins, who, mating her with Maximilian (a dog of her own breeding by The Emperor), obtained Minting, who shared with Mr. Sidney Turner's Beaufort the reputation of being unapproached for all ...
— Dogs and All About Them • Robert Leighton

... any facts adapted to his purpose; and when history failed him, he has had recourse to probability. Yet we own that the nomenclature of his heroes has shocked what Mr. S. would call our prejudices. Goervyl and Ririd and Rodri and Llaian may have charms for Cambrian ears, but who can feel an interest in Tezozomoc, Tlalala, ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney

... topography derived from rocks of nearly every variety of composition, and of topography derived from all types of structure except the flat plateau type. In the recurrence of its main geographic features from pre-Cambrian time till the present day it furnishes a remarkable and unique example of the ...
— History and Comprehensive Description of Loudoun County, Virginia • James W. Head



Words linked to "Cambrian" :   European, welsh, Cymry, Cambrian period, Cambrian Mountains, Cambria, Wales, Paleozoic, geological period



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