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Tertiary   /tˈərʃəri/  /tˈərʃiˌɛri/   Listen
Tertiary

noun
(pl. tertiaries)
1.
From 63 million to 2 million years ago.  Synonym: Tertiary period.



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"Tertiary" Quotes from Famous Books



... anthropology, he would, I doubt not, be aware that the equine quadrupeds of the Quaternary period do not differ from existing Equidae in any more important respect than these last differ from one another; and he would know that it is, nevertheless, a well-established fact that, in the course of the Tertiary period, the equine quadrupeds have undergone a series of changes exactly such as the doctrine of evolution requires. Hence sound analogical reasoning justifies the expectation that, when we obtain the remains of Pliocene, Miocene, ...
— Freedom in Science and Teaching. - from the German of Ernst Haeckel • Ernst Haeckel

... great masses, which covered spots having an area of twenty to thirty square metres. At some places this bush rose to a height of about a metre above the ground. The prevailing rock appeared to be granite. The bottoms of the valleys were formed of post-Tertiary formations, which most frequently consisted of sand and rolled stones, as, for instance, was the case in the great valley in which ilenka's brother's ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold

... late origin, and yet should they remain at their present level, subjected only to the action of the sea and to the growing powers of the coral, during as many centuries as must have elapsed since any of the earlier tertiary epochs, it cannot, I think, be doubted that their lagoons and the islets on their reef, would present a totally different appearance from what they now do. This consideration leads to the suspicion that some renovating agency (namely subsidence) comes into ...
— Coral Reefs • Charles Darwin

... however, realised fortunes out of the enterprise. Almost any kind of soil that will successfully rear wheat and maize is adapted to the growth of mint. Rich alluvions, however, seem to be most natural, as would be inferred from the fact that the wild herb is almost uniformly found growing upon the tertiary formations on the margins of streams. The rich bottom lands along our rivers and the boundless prairies of the West are eminently adapted for its successful culture. It is believed by those best acquainted with the subject, that its cultivation ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds

... monkey tribe then enjoyed a far greater range over the earth, and perhaps filled a more important place in nature than it does now. Its restriction to the comparatively narrow limits of the tropics is no doubt mainly due to the great alteration of climate which occurred at the close of the Tertiary period, but it may have been aided by the continuous development of varied forms of mammalian life better fitted for the contrasted seasons and deciduous vegetation of the north temperate regions. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 344, August 5, 1882 • Various

... reached at which a beat is dropped from, or an extra one introduced into, the series. In the course of a set of reactions which presents no interpolation of extra-serial beats periodic retardation and acceleration of the tapping take place. This tertiary rhythm, superimposed on the differentiation of simple phases, has, as regards the forms involved in the present experiments, a period of ten single ...
— Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 1 • Various

... Cuvier, offer numerical relations which Deshayes and Lyell have made the object of researches by which they have been conducted to important results, especially as regards the numerous and well-preserved fossils of the Tertiary formation. Agassiz, who has examined 1,700 species of fossil fishes, and who estimates at 8,000 the number of living species which have been described, or which are preserved in our collections, affirms that, with ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various

... good place," announced Clarissa, pausing where a shelf of gravelly rock afforded tolerable foothold. "Professor Hitchcock told father that in here were strata of the tertiary formation, and there's where we get ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various

... vinifera more often appear in varieties arising as primary hybrids between that and the native species, and the weaknesses of the foreign grape, which prevent their cultivation in America, crop out. Hybrids in which the vinifera blood is more attenuated, as secondary or tertiary crosses, ...
— Manual of American Grape-Growing • U. P. Hedrick

... fewer number of zig-zags, and the secondary by a finer line having a greater number of zig-zags. In this way the fact that the primary is of large wire and of comparatively few turns is indicated. This diagrammatic symbol may be modified to suit almost any conditions, and where a tertiary as well as a secondary winding is provided it may be shown by merely ...
— Cyclopedia of Telephony & Telegraphy Vol. 1 - A General Reference Work on Telephony, etc. etc. • Kempster Miller

... handed me the following note: "There are abnormal structures in animals of all ages anterior to the creation of mankind. Malformed specimens of Crinoids are known from the Triassic and Jurassic deposits. Malformed and diseased bones of tertiary mammalia have been collected in the caverns of Gailenreuth with traces ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... Edition of the Life and Legends of St. Francis of Assisi is Respectfully Dedicated to all Members of the Third Order in the City of Cleveland and Vicinity, above all, to the Nobel Patrons and Zealous Workers of Our Tertiary Branches. ...
— The Life and Legends of Saint Francis of Assisi • Father Candide Chalippe

... various hills of granite, exhibiting shells in great abundance. In the more level parts, the surface was so coated over with sand, that nothing else could be seen. I have no doubt, however, that the whole of the substrata would have been found an uninterrupted continuation of the tertiary deposit. ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre

... preserved on the rocks: you never find any great and enormous difference between the immediately successive Faunae and Florae, unless you have reason to believe there has also been a great lapse of time or a great change of conditions. The animals, for instance, of the newest tertiary rocks, in any part of the world, are always, and without exception, found to be closely allied with those which now live in that part of the world. For example, in Europe, Asia, and Africa, the large mammals are at present rhinoceroses, hippopotamuses, elephants, lions, ...
— A Critical Examination Of The Position Of Mr. Darwin's Work, "On The Origin Of Species," In Relation To The Complete Theory Of The Causes Of The Phenomena Of Organic Nature • Thomas H. Huxley

... core of the central cone is left. The rest has been long since destroyed by rains and winds. A white cliff at the south end of the island should be examined by geologists. It belongs probably to that formation of tertiary calcareous marl so often seen in the West Indies, especially at Barbadoes: but if so, it must, to judge from the scar which it makes seaward, have been upheaved long ago, and like the whole island—and indeed all the islands—betokens ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley

... In the Tertiary era—some twenty millions of years ago—the earth, basking in the warmth of a tropical climate, had produced a luxuriant vegetation and a swarming progeny of gigantic small-brained animals for which the exuberant vegetation provided ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park

... called the Primary period, when, as they believed, no life stirred on the surface of the earth; the Secondary or middle period, when animals and plants were introduced, and the land began to assume continental proportions; and the Tertiary period, or comparatively modern geological times, when the physical features of the earth as well as its inhabitants were approaching more nearly to the present condition of things. But as their investigations proceeded, they found that every one of these great ages of the world's ...
— Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) - Wonders of Earth, Sea and Sky • Various

... singularly strong limbs and feet, on which rests its value to man, were formed in the great laboratory of geologic time. The story is so closely related to the interests of man that it will be well briefly to set it before the reader. In the first stages of the Tertiary period, in the age when we begin to trace the evolution of the suck-giving animals above the lowly grade in which the kangaroos and opossums belong, we find the ancestors of our mammalian series all characterized by rather weakly organized ...
— Domesticated Animals - Their Relation to Man and to his Advancement in Civilization • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler

... defined as solid, liquid, or gaseous absolutely, but only within certain degrees of temperature, and therefore as dependent upon causation. Similarly, the geological classification of rocks, according to relative antiquity (primary, secondary, tertiary, with their subdivisions), and mode of formation (igneous and aqueous), rests upon causation; and so does the chemical classification of compound bodies according to the elements that enter into them in definite ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read

... infinitesimal degrees the use of fire, the mode of manufacturing stone hatchets and flint arrowheads, the earliest beginnings of the art of pottery. With drill or flint he became the Prometheus to his own small heap of sticks and dry leaves among the tertiary forests. By his nightly camp-fire he beat out gradually his excited gesture-language and his oral speech. He tamed the dog, the horse, the cow, the camel. He taught himself to hew small clearings in ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen

... of East Dorset. You must try to form a conception of how the land was shaped in miocene times, before that tremendous upheaval which reared the chalk cliffs at Freshwater upright, lifting the tertiary beds upon their northern slopes. You must ask—Was there not land to the south of the Isle of Wight in those ages, and for ages after; and what was its extent and shape? You must ask—When was the gap between the Isle of Wight and the Isle of Purbeck sawn through, leaving ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley

... put Campion and Ormsby and the doctor, and the old Tertiary, Clohessy, under the canopy. It's time that these men should be made to understand that they are Catholics in reality as well ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan

... a few bones; and after many years' patience and skill he ascertains and demonstrates the existence and place of a number of tapir-like animals which he classed as Lophiodon Paleotherium and Anoplotherium, formerly abounding on the banks of the ponds which have left their mud and marl in the tertiary strata of the Paris basin. His anticipations seemed like prophecies, based, as they were, on a tooth or a bone; but subsequent discoveries enabled him to verify them all, so that they became parts of scientific and general knowledge. The ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various

... a class of which brown, marrone, and gray may be considered types. They are so called, because they comprehend all the combinations of the primary, secondary, and tertiary colours, with the neutral black. Of the various combinations of black, those in which yellow, orange, or citrine predominates, have obtained the name of brown, &c. A second class in which the compounds ...
— Field's Chromatography - or Treatise on Colours and Pigments as Used by Artists • George Field

... third colour can be eliminated by two lenses, if an interval be allowed between them; or by three lenses in contact, which may not all consist of the old glasses. In uniting three colours an "achromatism of a higher order'' is derived; there is yet a residual "tertiary spectrum,'' but it can always be ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... to deposit the precious bag in the omnibus, and as he walked home his talk was all of tertiary formations, and coal measures, and limestones, as he extracted a hammer from his pocket, and looked perilously disposed to use it on the vein of crystals in a great pink stone in a garden wall. His aunt was obliged to begin ...
— Beechcroft at Rockstone • Charlotte M. Yonge

... Carmel is, in the main, what is called "the Jura formation," or "the upper oolite"—a soft white limestone, with nodules and veins of flint. At the western extremity, where it overhangs the Mediterranean, are found chalk, and tertiary breccia formed of fragments of chalk and flint. On the north-east of the mountain, beyond the Nahr-el-Mukattah, plutonic rocks appear, breaking through the deposit strata, and forming the beginning of the basalt formation which runs through the plain of Esdraelon to Tabor and the Sea ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson

... been published it appears that the rock formations of Santo Domingo correspond to the secondary, the lower and middle tertiary and the quaternary epoch. The most ancient part of the island is the central mountain range, also a series of protuberances in the Samana peninsula, the nucleus of the Baboruco mountains and a single point in the northern coast range near Puerto Plata. The tertiary lands are those forming the entire ...
— Santo Domingo - A Country With A Future • Otto Schoenrich

... evacuation. Their climate, indeed, is determined in winter rather by altitude than by latitude. The low swamps and pineries that skirt tide-water in the Middle States furnish them a retreat. Thence they scatter themselves over the tertiary plain as it widens southward beneath the granite bench that divides all the great rivers south of the Hudson into an upper and a lower reach. Detachments of them extend their tour to the Gulf. Readers of "A Subaltern on the Campaign of New Orleans in 1814-15" will recall his mention of the assemblage ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various

... San Pancrazio there used to live, as I have heard tell, a worthy man and wealthy, Puccio di Rinieri by name, who in later life, under an overpowering sense of religion, became a tertiary of the order of St. Francis, and was thus known as Fra Puccio. In which spiritual life he was the better able to persevere that his household consisted but of a wife and a maid, and having no need to occupy himself with any craft, ...
— The Decameron, Volume I • Giovanni Boccaccio

... defences. Those ancients must have had cisterns; inconceivable that springs should ever have issued from this limestone crag. You can see the women of to-day fetching water from below, from a spot which I was too lazy to investigate, where perhaps the soft tertiary rock leans upon this impervious stuff and allows the liquid to escape into the open. An unclean place is Bellegra, and loud, like all these Sabine villages, with the confused crying of little children. That multiple wail of misery will ring in your ear for days afterwards. They are more ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas

... fitted for defence or offence. Thus, these races became rapidly extinct, and are now only remembered by the tracks as wide as a man's shoulderblades which are occasionally found in parts of the post-tertiary formation." ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens

... once a little animal, No bigger than a fox, And on five toes he scampered Over Tertiary rocks. They called him Eohippus, And they called him very small, And they thought him of no value— When they thought of him at all; For the lumpish old Dinoceras And Coryphodon so slow Were the heavy aristocracy In days of ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various

... to the Geographical Society just delivered he points out Africa, as being the oldest existing land. He says there is no evidence of its having been ever submerged during the tertiary epoch. Here, then, is evidently the place to find early man. I hope something good may be found in Borneo, and that then means may be found to explore the still more promising regions of tropical Africa, for we can expect nothing of ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant

... Southern Africa was peculiar; the geographical series described in books was not to be found here, for, as Sir Roderick Murchison had shown, the great submarine depressions and elevations that had so greatly affected the other continents during the secondary, tertiary, and more recent periods, had not affected Africa. It had preserved its terrestrial conditions during a long period, unaffected by any changes save those dependent on atmospheric influences. There ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie

... two of these exclusively west-coast shells,—Trochus umbilicatus and Pecten niveus. As neither of them has yet been detected in any Tertiary formation, they are in all probability shells of comparatively recent origin, that came into existence in some western centre of creation; whereas specimens of Trochus magus and Nassa reticulata, ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller

... from then down to the present time there has succeeded a series of sea-level subsidences, resulting in the formation of the terraces and the accummulation of the detritus now seen on the first inland cliff, the old submarine slope of the island. The occurrence of such a series of Tertiary deposits appears to be unknown elsewhere. The whole series was evidently deposited in shallow water on the summit of a submarine volcano standing in its present isolation, and round which the ocean floor has probably altered but a few hundred feet since ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various

... Church prepared to abandon the field to the diplomat, the soldier, the trader? How soon is China likely to be pacified by them, judging from their past acts? The gospel is the primary need of China to-day, not the tertiary. The period of unrest is not the time for the messenger of Christ to hold his peace, but to declare with new zeal and fidelity his ministry of reconciliation. To leave the field to the politician, the soldier and the trader would be to dishonour ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN

... latter is a solid breccia, cemented with lime, composed of similar fragments. In the clay banks are well-preserved petrifactions, so similar in color, habitat, and aspect to many of those in the German tertiary formations that they might be taken for them. The breccia also is fossil, probably also tertiary; at all events, the identity of the few species which were recognisable in it—Cerithium, Pecten, and Venus—with living species ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.

... her?) arrest the development of "the Fatal Caesura," that exasperating histrionic device whereby every salient phrase is broken up for no conceivable reason into two halves. In the secondary stages there is but slender hope of a cure; in the tertiary there is none. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 29, 1916 • Various

... and the woman suffered great dyspnea. There was at first a grave emphysematous condition due to the laceration of several broken ribs. There was also suffusion and ecchymosis about the neck and shoulder. Although complicated with tertiary syphilis, the woman made a fair recovery, and eight weeks later she walked into a doctor's office. Many similar and equally wonderful injuries to ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould

... hour, but it had no natural opening at the end. We came at last to a very abrupt ascent of some hundred feet high, and mounted an elevated plateau. Once on the plateau, all was plain as far as the eye could see. The defile was tertiary formation, mere dull crumbling limestone; nothing in the shape and consistence of granite. We are now on the highway for Ghat, and it is said we shall arrive in fifteen days from the plateau. Saw on ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson

... certain acts of France, French Polynesia has acquired autonomy in all areas except those relating to police and justice, monetary policy, tertiary education, immigration, and defense and foreign affairs; the duties of its president are fashioned after those ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States

... the much greater age of the Osiride gods, and still further of the primitive gods Seb and Nut, and the earliest worship of animals. {80} The great ennead of Heliopolis consisted of Shu, Tefnut, Seb, Nut, Osiris, Isis, Set, Nebhat, and Horus; there were also secondary and tertiary enneads of lesser gods. When the sun-god Atmu became prominent, Horus was omitted and the eight other gods were called children of Atmu, who headed the group, as in the Pyramid texts. The nine are not composed of three triads, but of four pairs and a leader. This is ...
— The Religion of Ancient Egypt • W. M. Flinders Petrie

... to be differentiated from peri-synovial gummata, from myeloma and sarcoma of the lower end of the femur, and from bleeder's knee. In the first of these the swelling is nodular and less uniform, and there may be tertiary ulcers or depressed scars in the neighbourhood of the patella. In tumours the swelling is more marked on one side of the joint, it is uneven or nodular, it does not correspond to the shape of the synovial membrane, and may extend beyond the limits of the joint, ...
— Manual of Surgery Volume Second: Extremities—Head—Neck. Sixth Edition. • Alexander Miles

... involved in some trouble while here, which was entirely his own fault. He was discharged on September 23, 1913, diagnosis "Not insane, psychopathic constitution," and returned to the U.S.S. Southery Prison Ship. Upon his return there it was noted that he was suffering from a double benign, tertiary, malarial infection, which it was maintained he ...
— Studies in Forensic Psychiatry • Bernard Glueck

... end to end with twelve-inch plates against which ordinary projectiles smashed as harmlessly as egg-shells. Twelve fourteen-inch thousand-pounder guns composed her primary battery; her secondary consisted of ten 9.2 guns, and her tertiary of twelve-pounder Maxim-Nordenfeldts in ...
— The World Peril of 1910 • George Griffith

... carries the day: it is like the pleasure of gambling. Speculating, on first arriving, what the rocks may be, I often mentally cry out 3 to 1 tertiary against primitive; but the latter have hitherto won all the bets. So much for the grand end of my voyage; in other respects things are equally flourishing. My life, when at sea, is so quiet, that to a person who can employ himself, ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin

... Three Divine Persons of the One Supreme Essence already shown to have been probable. And it seems likeliest and discreetest to my thinking, that, with this view, the secondary phase, loving Obedience, under the dictate of the primary phase, a loving Will, and energized by the tertiary or conjoining phase a loving Quickening Entity, should assume the visible type of Godhead, and thus concentrate unto Himself the worship of all worlds. I can conceive no scheme more simply profound, more admirably suited to its ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper

... of Mammals. Before this period was a very much longer one—at least thirty times as long—during which modern quadrupeds were slowly evolving from small and primitive ancestors into their present variety of form and size. This is the Tertiary Period or Age of Mammals. Through this long period we can trace step by step the successive stages through which the ancestors of horses, camels, elephants, rhinoceroses, etc., were gradually converted into their present form in adaptation to their various habits and environment. And with them ...
— Dinosaurs - With Special Reference to the American Museum Collections • William Diller Matthew

... stripes, which are more effective for concealment among grass and plants, have been evolved? And finally, how is it that the same Hawk-moth caterpillars, which to-day show oblique stripes, possessed longitudinal stripes in Tertiary times? We can read this fact from the history of their development, and I have before attempted to show the biological significance of this change of colour. ("Studien zur Descendenz-Theorie" II., "Die Enstehung der Zeichnung bei den ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others

... mastiff or some other breed, or that both these and other breeds came (as is suspected) from some wolf? If not, how is the argument for design in the structure of our particular dog affected by the supposition that his wolfish progenitor came from a post-tertiary wolf, perhaps less unlike an existing one than the dog in question is from some other of the numerous existing races of dogs, and that this post-tertiary came from an equally or more different tertiary ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... tended. In the midst of cheerful society, I had often a feeling of loneliness. For it was impossible not to be sensible that, while these three characters figured so largely on my private theatre, I—though probably reckoned as a friend by all—was at best but a secondary or tertiary personage with ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... the two countries. This view is supported by the geology of India, which shows us Ceylon and South India consisting mainly of granite and old-metamorphic rocks, while the greater part of the peninsula is of tertiary formation, with a few isolated patches of secondary rocks. It is evident, therefore, that during much of the tertiary period,[5] Ceylon and South India were bounded on the north by a considerable extent of sea, and probably formed part of an extensive ...
— The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria • W. Scott-Elliot

... way, ignoring the varying ages of the rocks they happen to meet; as is also true of nearly all the great faults or fissures which are of more than local extent. The ore veins of the various minerals are about as likely to be found in Tertiary or Mesozoic as in the Palaeozoic. A very similar lesson is to be learned from the fossils found lying exposed on the deep ocean bottom; for they are about as likely to be ...
— Q. E. D., or New Light on the Doctrine of Creation • George McCready Price

... Very good: I see you are with me, and that you think I have not begun too near the ground. Now, without teasing you by putting farther question, I venture to assume that you will admit duty as at least a secondary or tertiary motive. You think that the desire of doing something useful, or obtaining some real good, is indeed an existent collateral idea, though a secondary one, in most men's desire of advancement. You will grant that moderately ...
— Sesame and Lilies • John Ruskin

... implements and practiced guides. It is a striking fact that its upper rocks have been found to be marine calcareous beds. That proud eminence has not stood thus in the clouds for all time; it was once buried fathoms deep under the Tertiary ocean. ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix

... That cannot be. She cannot appear stupid to you. She is a secondary, and getting on for a tertiary ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw

... Violets; Large Variety of Shades from few Colours; Consideration of the Practical Primaries: Red, Yellow and Blue — Secondary Colours; Nomenclature of Violet and Purple Group; Tints and Shades of Violet; Changes in Artificial Light — Tertiary Shades; Broken Hues; Absorption Spectra of Tertiary Shades — Appendix: Four Plates with Dyed Specimens Illustrating Text ...
— The Dyeing of Woollen Fabrics • Franklin Beech

... attributed the red flush Oscar complained of on his chest and back, which he declared was due to eating mussels, to another and graver cause. They warned him at once to stop drinking and smoking and to live with the greatest abstemiousness, for they recognised in him the tertiary symptoms of that dreadful disease which the brainless prudery in England allows to decimate the ...
— Oscar Wilde, Volume 2 (of 2) - His Life and Confessions • Frank Harris



Words linked to "Tertiary" :   geological period, Miocene, Oligocene epoch, Cenozoic, ordinal, Cenozoic era, Paleocene, Miocene epoch, period, Eocene, third, Oligocene, Pliocene epoch, Eocene epoch, Pliocene, Tertiary period, Paleocene epoch, Age of Mammals



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