"Silurian" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... above the sea, while in Snowdon it dislikes growing lower than 2000 feet, and is not plentiful even there?—it will reply—Because in the Craven I can get as much carbonic acid as I want from the decomposing limestone; while on the Snowdon Silurian I get very little; and I have to make it up by clinging to the mountain tops, for the sake of the greater rainfall. But if you ask Polypodium calcareum—How is it you choose only to grow on limestone, while Polypodium Dryopteris, of which, I suspect, you are only ...
— Scientific Essays and Lectures • Charles Kingsley
... The ore-bed in which the remains were found, and part of which seems to have formed after the period of human occupation of the cave, lies in the second (or saccharoidal) sandstone of the Lower Silurian." ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... it is not strange when we reflect that it is but a score of years since St. Paul was really occupied and settled. All of this various strata of rock and sand belongs, geologically speaking, to what is known as the lower silurian system, extending from near the western shores of Lake Michigan, and sweeping over all the lower half of Minnesota, westward and upward along the valley of the great Red and Assinniboin Rivers to the north, ...
— Minnesota; Its Character and Climate • Ledyard Bill
... subcarboniferous group throughout a great part of its range in Kentucky and Indiana, is due in a great measure to this cause, together with the solvent and eroding effects of water charged with carbonic acid. The 'rock-houses' frequently encountered both in this formation and in the limestones of Silurian date, are produced by similar causes; the more easily disintegrated beds gradually crumbling away, while the more durable remain in overhanging ledges. By the oxidation of other elements, sulphates of oxide of iron and alkalies result, which, by double ...
— Cave Regions of the Ozarks and Black Hills • Luella Agnes Owen
... special reason for denying that serpents may have talked, millions and millions of years ago. In fact, they still have rudimentary organs of speech—as do most animals. Perhaps they all talked at one time. Snakes developed in the Silurian Era, some twenty million years ago. In the vast intervening stretch of time they may have lost their power to talk. But, as for the second chapter of Genesis, Moses may or may not have written it. Indeed, he may not have written the first. We do not know. The book of ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... beds of peat; but the remains of plant-tissue are contained in all the older formations, though there only as anthracite or graphite—the last two groups of residual products. Of these we have examples in the beds of graphite in the Laurentian rocks of Canada, and of anthracite of the lower Silurian strata of Upper Church and ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 362, December 9, 1882 • Various
... shrouded in haze, like those of the Hebrides or the West of Ireland. Onward through a narrow channel in the mountain-wall, not a rifle-shot across, which goes by the name of the Ape's Mouth, banked by high cliffs of dark Silurian rock—not bare, though, as in Britain, but furred with timber, festooned with lianes, down to the very spray of the gnawing surf. One little stack of rocks, not thirty feet high, and as many broad, stood almost in the midst of the channel, and in the very ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... geological term, bequeathed to us by a great authority, and which cannot be changed for the better: I mean that of Geological Horizon, applied by Humboldt to the whole extent of any one geological division,—as, for instance, the Silurian horizon, including the whole extent of the Silurian epoch. It indicates one level in time, as the horizon which limits our view indicates the farthest extension of the plain on which ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... era of fire was followed by an era of water. At first there was ocean everywhere. Then, during the Silurian period, the tops of mountains gradually appeared above the waves, islands emerged, disappeared beneath temporary floods, rose again, were fused to form continents, and finally the earth's geography settled ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... years 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 for those observations ...
— The Naturalist in Nicaragua • Thomas Belt
... the maddest geologist under such circumstances would have studied the nature of the rocks that we were passing. I am sure I did trouble my head about them. Pliocene, miocene, eocene, cretaceous, jurassic, triassic, permian, carboniferous, devonian, silurian, or primitive was all one to me. But the Professor, no doubt, was pursuing his observations or taking notes, for in one of our halts ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne
... found little more than a year ago is the sole evidence of insects older than the Devonian; and scorpions (highly-organized crustaceans) have been found in the Upper Silurian ...
— Creation and Its Records • B.H. Baden-Powell
... between the atoms of the carbonate of line, and consequently to the segregation of the earthy extraneous matter. I was much interested by this fact, because I have often seen quartz rocks (for instance, in the Falkland Islands, and in the lower Silurian strata of the Stiper-stones in Shropshire), mottled in a precisely analogous manner, with little spots of a white, earthy substance (earthy feldspar?); and these rocks, there was good reason to suppose, had undergone ...
— Volcanic Islands • Charles Darwin
... old age of bed-ridden torture, in the form of rheumatic gout. Not that he was at all happy—indeed, he had no reason to be so; for, first, the hounds would not find; next, he had left half-finished at home a review article on the Silurian System, which he had solemnly promised an abject and beseeching editor to send to post that night; next, he was on the windward side of the cover, and dare not light a cigar; and lastly, his mucous membrane in general ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... ore may be discovered. This will be valuable to make bullets in case of a war with Oshkosh. In peace it is always best to prepare for war, and I trust you will lend your countenance to the able men who are investigating the Lower Silurian age. ...
— Peck's Compendium of Fun • George W. Peck
... forms of life are the lineal descendants of those which lived long before the Silurian epoch, we may feel certain that the ordinary succession by generation has never once been broken, and that no cataclysm has desolated the whole world. Hence we may look with some confidence to a secure future of equally ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... 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
... said, "that the basalt monadnock on which we stand is a carboniferous upthrust of metamorphosed schists, shales and conglomerate, probably Mesozoic or at least early Silurian." ...
— The Cruise of the Kawa • Walter E. Traprock
... seems as if the "nexts" would grow on so that at last it would only be our old "set" that would be in any danger of getting left out. "Society is like a coral island after all," says Leslie Goldthwaite. "It isn't a rock of the Old Silurian." ...
— We Girls: A Home Story • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... along the line of division between Canada and the States was the 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 ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IX., March, 1862., No. LIII. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics, • Various
... that ordeal by the Silurian liner Caradoc. Arrayed in borrowed clothes they were notified of a second rescue and came out on deck in time to behold in the dusk of evening the "pirate." He was relating to an admiring throng how he had stuck by the burning ship till it exploded. He had actually been blown ...
— The Perils of Pauline • Charles Goddard
... single transitional form. These fishes have organs as complex and perfect as the fishes of to-day. Suddenly, in the "carbonic age" amphibia and reptiles appear, and then come, in the "Triassic" the huge reptiles known as dinosaurs. Insects and scorpions have been found in the "Silurian." [tr. note: sic on punctuation] They stand among the highest of even living articulates, and they are the "oldest" known airbreathing animals. "We seek in vain for the progenitors of these highly organized ...
— Evolution - An Investigation and a Critique • Theodore Graebner
... far the greater part of the surface of the belt is covered by the igneous rocks. The belt as a whole may be regarded as an anticline, the igneous rocks constituting the core, the Lower Cambrian the flanks, and the Silurian and Newark the adjoining zones. The outcrops of the Lower Cambrian rocks are in synclines, as a rule, and are complicated by many faults. The igneous rocks have also been much folded and crumpled, but on account ...
— History and Comprehensive Description of Loudoun County, Virginia • James W. Head
... 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 ...
— The Foundations of the Origin of Species - Two Essays written in 1842 and 1844 • Charles Darwin
... be said of other organic divisions. It has gone to record that the shell-fish of the Silurian system are the lowest division of the molluscous animals. While the statement is received as true, it must be remembered that there is some diversity of structure in this lower division, and that the earliest molluscs are not the lowest, but the highest in the division. The most ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 7, July, 1880 • Various
... me that. I know better. I have lived among fiddles all my life,—embryotic, Silurian fiddles, splintered from cornstalks, that blessed me in the golden afternoons of green summers waving in the sunshine of long ago,—sympathetic fiddles that did me yeomen's service once, when I fell off a bag of corn up garret and broke my head, and the frightened fiddles, not knowing what ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... occur as several unconformable groups, chiefly developed in the south where alone their stratigraphy has been determined. They are unfossiliferous, and in the absence of undoubted Cambrian, Ordovician and Silurian strata in Africa they may be regarded as of older date than any of these formations. The general occurrence of jasper-bearing rocks is of interest, as these are always present in the ancient pressure-altered sedimentary formations of America and Europe. Some unfossiliferous conglomerates, sandstones ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... himself in past times been 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, ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... the British area, and to have extended thence through boreal and arctic latitudes into North America. Of the height and mass of this primeval land some idea may be formed by considering the enormous bulk of the material derived from its disintegration. In the Silurian formations of the British Islands alone there is a mass of rock, worn from the land, which would form a mountain-chain extending from Marseilles to the North Cape (1800 miles), with a mean breadth of over thirty-three miles, and an average ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly |
