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Tertiary   Listen
adjective
Tertiary  adj.  
1.
Being of the third formation, order, or rank; third; as, a tertiary use of a word.
2.
(Chem.) Possessing some quality in the third degree; having been subjected to the substitution of three atoms or radicals; as, a tertiary alcohol, amine, or salt. Cf. Primary, and Secondary.
3.
(Geol.) Later than, or subsequent to, the Secondary.
4.
(Zool.) Growing on the innermost joint of a bird's wing; tertial; said of quills.
Tertiary age. (Geol.) See under Age, 8.
Tertiary color, a color produced by the mixture of two secondaries. "The so-called tertiary colors are citrine, russet, and olive."
Tertiary period. (Geol.)
(a)
The first period of the age of mammals, or of the Cenozoic era.
(b)
The rock formation of that period; called also Tertiary formation. See the Chart of Geology.
Tertiary syphilis (Med.), the third and last stage of syphilis, in which it invades the bones and internal organs.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Tertiary" Quotes from Famous Books



... of all sorts. Likewise, by way of preliminary, I desire to remind the reader, that while in the earlier geological strata there are found the fossils of monsters now almost completely extinct; the subsequent relics discovered in what are called the Tertiary formations seem the connecting, or at any rate intercepted links, between the antichronical creatures, and those whose remote posterity are said to have entered the Ark; all the Fossil Whales hitherto discovered belong to the Tertiary period, which is the last preceding the superficial formations. ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville

... it chanced, was spending his vacation near by on the shores of the lake, and his time was mostly passed—for how better can a man spend a month of pleasure?—in looking for outcroppings of Devonian rock of the post-tertiary period. For which purpose he carried a vacation hammer in his pocket, and made from time to time a note or two as he went along, or filled his pockets with the ...
— Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich • Stephen Leacock

... 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. ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas

... 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. The more extensive area formerly inhabited by the monkey tribe, would have favored their development ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 344, August 5, 1882 • Various

... agreed as to the length of time necessary for the changes that have taken place. At any rate, many hundreds of thousands of years, some millions of years, have passed by since in the eocene, at the beginning of the tertiary period, we find the traces of an abundant, varied, and highly developed mammalian life on the land masses out of which have grown the continents as we see them to-day. The ages swept by, until, with the ...
— African and European Addresses • Theodore Roosevelt

... participation in it, was indispensable even to the right development of the intellect, [Footnote: Hare, Mission of the Comforter, p. 552.] a conviction which would scarcely have uttered itself with greater clearness than it does in this secondary use of 'idiot.' Our tertiary, in which the 'idiot' is one deficient in intellect, not merely with intellectual powers unexercised, is only this secondary pushed a little farther. Once more, how wonderfully characteristic of the Greek mind it is that the language should have one and the same word ([Greek: ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench

... (Mesozoic) includes the more completely developed lizards and crocodiles, and the appearance of mammals and birds. The animal life of the third period (Cenozoic) resembles somewhat the modern species. This period includes the Tertiary and the Quaternary and the recent sub-periods. Man, the highest being in the order of creation, appears in the Quaternary period. Of the immense ages of time represented by the geological periods the life of man represents but a small portion, just ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar

... 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 ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various

... but she must (may I tell 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 ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 29, 1916 • Various

... geological map of the world will show the reader that the Valley of the Amazons, so far as any attempt is made to explain its structure, is represented as containing isolated tracts of Devonian, Triassic, Jurassic, cretaceous, tertiary, and alluvial deposits. As is shown by the above sketch, this is wholly inaccurate; and whatever may be thought of my interpretation of the actual phenomena, I trust that, in presenting for the first time the formations ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various

... charitable institutions in Manila in emulation of that of the holy Misericordia, although not so wealthy: in the cathedral church, in the seraphic tertiary order of the convent of Manila, in that of the convent of Dilao, in [the convent of] St. Dominic, in their convent of Binondoc, in their beaterio, in the convent of the calced Augustinian fathers, in that of the discalced Augustinians, and in that of the Society. ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 (Vol 28 of 55) • Various

... 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 adding another ...
— Cyclopedia of Telephony & Telegraphy Vol. 1 - A General Reference Work on Telephony, etc. etc. • Kempster Miller

... number to the Chhandas period, from 1000 to 1200 B.C., we can do so only under the supposition that during the early periods of history the growth of the human mind was more luxuriant than in later times, and that the layers of thought were formed less slowly in the primary than in the tertiary ages of ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke

... colored in the maps as Triassic. Such a region would take in quite a respectable part of the continent of Europe." "We now know beyond any reasonable doubt, that all the country from the Platte to the British Possessions, and from the Mississippi to the Black Hills, is occupied by Cretaceous and Tertiary rocks. And as regards the region from the Platte southward to the Red River, very far the largest part is known to be not Triassic, while it is possible the Trias may occur in some parts of it." "It is unfortunate in its bearing on the progress of geological science to have false views about ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson

... earth's surface was at first very similar in all parts, and only from the middle of the Tertiary epoch onwards, began to show a distinct ...
— Geological Contemporaneity and Persistent Types of Life • Thomas H. Huxley

... of the middle geological ages and the opening of the Tertiary periods, the Monocotyledons become abundant, the first plants with flower and inclosed seed, though with no true floral envelope: but not until the two last epochs of the Tertiary age do we find in any number the Dicotyledonous plants, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 11, Issue 67, May, 1863 • Various

... however, I checkmated his triumph, by forwarding to the people in high places the resignation of that position as a clerk of the tertiary formation, which I had, been nominated to, examined in respect of, and competed for, under the auspices of Her Majesty's Polite Letter Writer Commissioners; and which I had been duly appointed to—all in proper official ...
— She and I, Volume 2 - A Love Story. A Life History. • John Conroy Hutcheson

... disposed of some fifteen copies. . .My work advances fairly; I shall soon have described all the species I know, numbering now about nine hundred. I need some weeks in Paris for the comparison of several tertiary species with living ones in order to satisfy myself of their specific identity, and then my task will be accomplished. Next comes the putting in order of all my notes. My long vacations will give me time to do this with the ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz

... back in a canyon or gulch that never felt a human footfall before I stumbled into it. It's a limited thing—limited to this ravine that is not more than fifty feet wide and a half a mile long. It was probably the old stream bed back before the Tertiary ages, but when the troubled mountain took another surge, it was left high and dry, twenty feet above water. I was working it this summer but the little bear cubs took most of my time. It takes a full day to lug enough water up to the canyon levels to wash out a pan of gravel. It takes the ...
— David Lannarck, Midget - An Adventure Story • George S. Harney

... deposit was formed; 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 the Eocene ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various

... 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 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... the Great Bend of the Murray, and pursued an easterly course, we rode along the base of some low hills of tertiary fossil formation, the summits of which form the table land of the interior. We were on an upper flat, and consequently considerably above the level of the water as it then was. In riding along, Tenbury pointed out a line of rubbish ...
— Expedition into Central Australia • Charles Sturt

... reach back so far. And if fetishism and magic be regarded as stages of religion, one may say that personal religion in the inward sense and the genuinely spiritual ecclesiasticisms which it founds are phenomena of secondary or even tertiary order. But, quite apart from the fact that many anthropologists—for instance, Jevons and Frazer —expressly oppose "religion" and "magic" to each other, it is certain that the whole system of thought which leads to magic, fetishism, and the lower superstitions may just ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James

... third day tertiary fever intervened, with incessant thirst and fits of delirium, and Francesco's condition caused the gravest anxiety. Bianca was inconsolable. Unable to wait upon him, and suffering exactly as was he, she penned, ...
— The Tragedies of the Medici • Edgcumbe Staley

... that the rocks are Tertiary and not Devonian, and that my slatey vein is cobalt. Much of the stone peels readily into large flat slabs which we find ...
— The Incomparable 29th and the "River Clyde" • George Davidson

... is still stronger evidence of the long duration of certain types. I have already stated that, as we work our way through the great series of the Tertiary formations, we find many species of animals identical with those which live at the present day, diminishing in numbers, it is true, but still existing, in a certain proportion, in the oldest of the Tertiary rocks. Furthermore, when we examine the rocks of the Cretaceous epoch, we find the ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley

... this defile we proceeded an 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 the plateau, for the first time of my life, the celebrated mirage, which our ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson

... 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 had ...
— Studies in Forensic Psychiatry • Bernard Glueck

... the preceding number) sketched some of the reasons suggestive of such a theory of derivation of species,—reasons which give it plausibility, and even no small probability, as applied to our actual world and to changes occurring since the latest tertiary period. We are well pleased at this moment to find that the conclusions we were arriving at in this respect are sustained by the very high authority and impartial judgment of Pictet, the Swiss palaeontologist. ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various

... lower hills are composed of crystalline rocks, syenite and granite, with, here and there, a strata of sandstone or limestone. These are, undoubtedly, relics of the lower Cretaceous age, and we, or rather, my brother, states that he has found them covered with marine Tertiary deposits. ...
— Tom Swift and his Big Tunnel - or, The Hidden City of the Andes • Victor Appleton

... outposts are drawn in and signs appear of 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 ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various

... organisms, so that the fauna and flora of the ante-human time are lost in those of the human period by transitions gliding from the one to the other. For instance, in the Miocene formation of the tertiary epoch {65} we find thirty per cent. of species still living to-day; in the Pliocene, even sixty to eighty per cent., and toward its end even about ninety-six per cent. of species which are ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid

... 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 Christ, to fail to utilize an unprecedented opportunity, ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN

... they never have asthma, for the humid nature of which a heavy man is required. They cure hot fevers with cold potations of water, but slight ones with sweet smells, with cheese-bread or sleep, with music or dancing. Tertiary fevers are cured by bleeding, by rhubarb or by a similar drawing remedy, or by water soaked in the roots of plants, with purgative and sharp-tasting qualities. But it is rarely that they take purgative medicines. Fevers ...
— The City of the Sun • Tommaso Campanells

... it was a juvenile compared with some of the rocks and mountains which the Hudson of to-day mirrors. The Highlands date from the earliest geological race—the primary; the river—the old river—from the latest, the tertiary; and what that difference means in terrestrial years hath not entered into the mind of man to conceive. Yet how the venerable mountains open their ranks for the stripling to pass through. Of course, the river did not force its way through this barrier, but ...
— The Hudson - Three Centuries of History, Romance and Invention • Wallace Bruce

... of these highly suggestive pages of the geologic story, other still more instructive chapters were being brought to light in America. It was found that in the Rocky Mountain region, in strata found in ancient lake beds, records of the tertiary period, or age of mammals, had been made and preserved with fulness not approached in any other region hitherto geologically explored. These records were made known mainly by Professors Joseph Leidy, O. C. Marsh, and E. D. Cope, ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams

... manifest now that if the Belgian and French frontiers had been properly prepared—as they should have been prepared when the Germans built their strategic railways—with trenches and gun emplacements and secondary and tertiary lines, the Germans would never have got fifty miles into either France or Belgium. They would have been held at Liege and in the Ardennes. Five hundred thousand men would have held them indefinitely. But the Allies had never worked ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells

... not to come within the period of exact scientific observation. To enable the reader to appreciate the gradual manner in which a passage may have taken place from an extinct fauna to that now living, I shall say a few words on the fossils of successive Tertiary periods. When we trace the series of formations from the more ancient to the more modern, it is in these Tertiary deposits that we first meet with assemblages of organic remains having a near analogy to the fauna of certain parts of the globe in our own time. In the ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various

... I have heard tell, there abode near San Pancrazio an honest man and a rich, called Puccio di Rinieri, who, devoting himself in his latter days altogether to religious practices, became a tertiary[160] of the order of St. Francis, whence he was styled Fra Puccio, and ensuing this his devout life, much frequented the church, for that he had no family other than a wife and one maid and consequently, it behoved him not apply himself to any craft. Being an ignorant, ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio

... honour you. I have been, like you, quite surprised at the want of originality in opposed arguments and in favour too. Gwyn Jeffreys attacks me justly in his letter about strictly littoral shells not being often embedded at least in Tertiary deposits. I was in a muddle, for I was thinking of Secondary, yet Chthamalus applied ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin

... sentence already), "first of all, Christ died for our sins." [1 Cor. xv. 3.] Alas for the Church, for the congregation, for the pulpit, where that is forgotten, obscured, or put into a secondary, or perhaps a tertiary place! One thing is certain; that pulpit cannot be bearing its right witness meanwhile to the "exceeding sinfulness" of sin—not merely the deformity of sin, but the awful evil and condemnable guilt of sin. [SN: Rom. vii. 13.] But ...
— To My Younger Brethren - Chapters on Pastoral Life and Work • Handley C. G. Moule

... example, by decomposing water through the intervention of a dynamo—suppose them to lay up in this way a store of potential energy capable of heating the boilers of a second order of engines, representing the graminivorous animal. It is obvious without proceeding to a tertiary or carnivorous order, that the condition of energy in the animal world may be supposed fulfilled in these successive series of engines, and no violation of the principles governing the actions going on in our machines assumed. Organisms evolving on similar principles would experience ...
— The Birth-Time of the World and Other Scientific Essays • J. (John) Joly

... 118th parallels of longitude, and the 24th and 27th degrees of south latitude, may be considered as an inclined plane, the eastern edge of which has an elevation of about 1700 feet above the level of the sea. Commencing from the coast, the first 100 miles is almost exclusively of tertiary sandstone formation, which the process of denudation has, in many instances, converted into either stony or sandy tracts, rarely fertile, except when subject to the influence of frequent inundation. This region seldom gives rise to rivers or watercourses; the flat-topped ranges, which are ...
— Journals of Australian Explorations • A C and F T Gregory

... 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

... category, two new fields provide information on education in terms of opportunity and resources. "School Life Expectancy" is an estimate of the total number of years of schooling (primary to tertiary) that a child can expect to receive, assuming that the probability of his or her being enrolled in school at any particular future age is equal to the current enrollment ratio at that age. "Education expenditures" provides an estimate of the public expenditure on education as a percent ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... calls out. "Come over here a minute. I've got some brand-new limerickii for you. Tertiary Tonsillitis got 'em from a traveling man he met day before yesterday when he was up in the city laying in his stock of ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb

... could only stop here, content with explaining the diversification and succession of species between the tertiary period and the present time, through natural agencies or secondary causes still in operation, we fancy they would not be generally or violently objected to by the savans of the present day. But it is hard, if not impossible, to find a stopping-place. Some of ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various

... 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, he spent no small part of his time ...
— The Decameron, Volume I • Giovanni Boccaccio

... usually formed by the breaking down of a cutaneous or subcutaneous gumma in the tertiary stage of syphilis. When the gummatous tissue is first exposed by the destruction of the skin or mucous membrane covering it, it appears as a tough greyish slough, compared to "wash leather," which slowly separates and leaves a more or less circular, deep, punched-out ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles

... between the 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

... perspective of history, his ardent young mind mistook for a principal object, erected into a permanent question in the politics of the times. But the expenditure of enormous energies upon things of secondary and of even tertiary importance, to the neglect of others of prime and lasting interest, is supremely human. He was errant where all men go astray. But the schoolmaster of the nation was abroad, and was training this young man for the work he was born to do. These six months were, therefore, not wasted, ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke

... eastern, give those plains a peculiar appearance. The soil is composed of sand and red or yellow clay, and this is covered by a layer of earth, in which the vegetation takes root. The geologist would find rich treasures in the tertiary strata here, for it is full of antediluvian remains—enormous bones, which the Indians attribute to some gigantic race that ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne

... walls decorated with grotesque ornaments cut on the faces of the stone. Foster states that "these structures are composed of a soft coralline limestone of comparatively recent geological formation, probably of the Tertiary period." [Footnote: Prehistoric Races of ...
— Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines • Lewis H. Morgan

... 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 ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... of December, 1881, a patent relating to the distribution of electricity was taken out in Germany and other countries by Mr. B. Haitzema Enuma, whose system is based upon a series of successive inductions. The primary current developed by a dynamo-electric machine gives rise to secondary, tertiary, etc., currents. The principal line runs through the streets parallel with their axes, and, when the arrangement of the places is adapted thereto, it is closed upon the generator itself. In those frequent cases where it is necessary ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 455, September 20, 1884 • Various

... during the times of the insurrections were of great fruit. He labored zealously in that district even visiting the schools in addition to the regular duties of a missionary. He received a number of devout women into the tertiary branch of the order. He was untiring in his efforts for both the spiritual and corporal ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume 41 of 55, 1691-1700 • Various

... scarcely endure 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 ...
— Beechcroft at Rockstone • Charlotte M. Yonge

... of Iamblichus are, by the way, magicians, charlatans, miracle-mongers, men as antipositivist as possible. Iamblichus himself sought to reconcile polytheism with Neoplatonism by putting in the centre of all a supreme deity, an essential deity from whom he made a crowd of secondary, tertiary, and quaternary deities to emanate, ranging from those purely immaterial to those inherent in matter. The subtle wanderings of Neoplatonism were continued obscurely in the school of Athens until it was closed for ever in 529 by the Emperor Justinian as being ...
— Initiation into Philosophy • Emile Faguet

... Glaciers') were soon issued, and Agassiz received many gifts from lovers of science, among whom was numbered the King of Prussia. His zooelogical and geological investigations were continued, and important works on 'Fossil Mollusks,' 'Tertiary Shells,' and 'Living and Fossil Echinoderms' ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner

... his repeated demand that not only individual parts of the animals but the whole organism as well should be derived from the earlier forms. If, for instance, it be possible to arrange horses and their tertiary kindred in an unbroken line of descent according to the formation of their feet, whilst the other characteristics (teeth, skull-structure, etc.,) do not admit of arrangement in a corresponding series, the ...
— At the Deathbed of Darwinism - A Series of Papers • Eberhard Dennert

... advanced to account for fewness of preserved organisms compared to what have lived on the world. The very same argument explains why in older formations the organisms appear to come on and disappear suddenly,—but in [later] tertiary not quite suddenly{116}, in later tertiary gradually,—becoming rare and disappearing,—some have disappeared within man's time. It is obvious that our theory requires gradual and nearly uniform introduction, possibly more sudden extermination,—subsidence of continent ...
— The Foundations of the Origin of Species - Two Essays written in 1842 and 1844 • Charles Darwin

... said that if a geologist should actually make the circuit of the plateau country, he could so conduct his route that for three-fourths of the time he would be treading upon volcanic materials and could pitch his camp upon them every night. The oldest eruptions do not go back of Tertiary time, while some are so recent as probably to come within the historic period—within three or ...
— The Cliff Ruins of Canyon de Chelly, Arizona • Cosmos Mindeleff

... which is a weathered form of dolerite. It was long widely accepted that the pre-Tertiary rocks of this group differed from their Tertiary and Recent representatives in certain essential respects, but this is now admitted to be untenable, and the differences are known to be merely the result of the longer exposure to decomposition, pressure ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various

... caterpillars, not oblique but longitudinal 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

... Lower Danube. In Bulgaria, on the southern side of the river, where the banks often rise to a height of 300 or 400 feet, there are distinct traces of the miocene formation; but there, as on the northern banks, before the hills are reached, there is a wide plain of loess, tertiary alluvial deposit. On the northern or Roumanian bank, beginning close to the Iron Gates in the west, and extending to the eastern embouchures of the Danube, in fact over the whole zone of the plain already referred to, this alluvial deposit is found, and at the foot of the Carpathians it sometimes ...
— Roumania Past and Present • James Samuelson

... Saleve, and in another of lateral compression, the Mont Brezon: but the investigation of the Mont Saleve had presented unexpected difficulty. Its facade had been always considered to be formed by vertical beds, raised into that position during the tertiary periods; the speaker's investigations had, on the contrary, led him to conclude that the appearance of vertical beds was owing to a peculiarly sharp and distinct cleavage, at right angles with the beds, but nearly ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin

... is this ancient tradition, it is in consistency with the conclusions of modern geology, that at the commencement of the tertiary period northern Asia and a considerable part of India were in all probability covered by the sea but that south of India land extended eastward and westward connecting Malacca with Arabia. PROFESSOR ANSTED has propounded this view. His opinion is, ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent

... distinct whorls, and of at least two others less perfectly developed. These primary flowers did not give rise to median formations, but they produced secondary buds in the axils of the segments of the perianth. These latter buds were themselves the subject of tertiary prolification of both kinds, median and axillary. The tertiary median growths, like the primary flower, did not develop median buds, but ...
— Vegetable Teratology - An Account of the Principal Deviations from the Usual Construction of Plants • Maxwell T. Masters

... principal, although not the only centre of that submarine volcanic action, during the continuance of which Madeira first emerged from the sea, an event, which the evidence afforded by the limestone fossils of St. Vincente (on the north side of the island) associates with the tertiary epoch. See Paper by Dr. J. Macaulay in Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal ...
— Narrative Of The Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Commanded By The Late Captain Owen Stanley, R.N., F.R.S. Etc. During The Years 1846-1850. Including Discoveries And Surveys In New Guinea, The Louisiade • John MacGillivray

... Rughm of the Bedawin, not to be confounded with Rukhm ("alabaster or saccharine marble"). We afterwards traced this main feature of the 'Akabah Gulf as far south as the Wady Hamz. It is composed of the sulphates of lime—alabaster, gypsum, and the plaster with which the Tertiary basin of Paris supplies the world; and of the carbonates of lime—marble, chalk, kalkspar, shells, and eggs. The broken crests of the Jibl el-Hamr, the red hills backing Makn,[EN33] and the jagged black peaks of their eastern parallel, the Kalb el-Nakhlah, look ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton

... with hard dark sandstone and masses of secondary limestone, form as it were the skeleton of the country. Here and there, at Carmel and Gerizim, patches of the tertiary nummulite of Egypt make their appearance, and in the plains of Megiddo and the coast, as well as in the "Ghor" or valley of the Jordan, there is rich alluvial soil. But elsewhere all is barren or nearly so, cultivation being possible ...
— Patriarchal Palestine • Archibald Henry Sayce

... the Palaeontographical Society,' a full account of all the fossil species known, I will not repeat here the conclusions there arrived at. I will only state, that species of Pollicipes are found in all the formations, extending from the Lower Oolite to the Upper Tertiary beds. ...
— A Monograph on the Sub-class Cirripedia (Volume 1 of 2) - The Lepadidae; or, Pedunculated Cirripedes • Charles Darwin

... as have 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 ...
— Santo Domingo - A Country With A Future • Otto Schoenrich

... proved, not only by geographic and paleontologic records, but by legitimate induction. From the highly crystalline, and, for the most part, non-fossiliferous era, far back in the Laurentian period, down, in the order of time, to the modern or post-tertiary period, there is one continuous history of life-manifestations, written upon the stratified rocks, in the order of the Bible Genesis. Was this mere guess and fancy on the part of the writer, even to the seemingly improbable ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright

... the earth has never since witnessed, which resulted in the upheaval of the Himalayas by a process of crushing and folding of the sedimentary rocks till marine fossils were forced to an altitude of 20,000 ft. above the sea. It was not till the Tertiary age, and even late in that age, that much of the land area of Afghanistan was raised above the sea-level. Then the ocean gradually retired into the ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... (as at Rovigno), and wore white shirts with full sleeves, sometimes embroidered, hose of woven wool, a jacket hung loosely over the shoulders, and a little black cap on the head. The women had full skirts of beautiful tertiary colours, rows of coral round their necks, and large silver-gilt brooches, and rosette ornaments on their breasts with chains attached. On their heads, tied round the base of the skull, they had white handkerchiefs, sometimes with ornamented ...
— The Shores of the Adriatic - The Austrian Side, The Kuestenlande, Istria, and Dalmatia • F. Hamilton Jackson

... "tertiary treatment" are becoming common terms nowadays. They refer to any of a considerable array of additional or intensified processes aimed at attaining levels of purification that would have cost an impossible price a few years ago. Most of them are still experimental and often ...
— The Nation's River - The Department of the Interior Official Report on the Potomac • United States Department of the Interior

... its lowest ridges the Himalaya drops to a height of about 5000 feet. But the traveller to any of the summer resorts in the mountains passes through a zone of lower hills interspersed sometimes with valleys or "duns." These consist of Tertiary sandstones, clays, and boulder conglomerates, the debris in fact which the Himalaya has dropped in the course of ages. To this group of hills and valleys the general name of Siwaliks is given. East of the Jhelam it includes the Nahan hills to the north of Ambala, ...
— The Panjab, North-West Frontier Province, and Kashmir • Sir James McCrone Douie

... therefore be 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 proportions. Hence, only ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read

... he said, "I'll 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 ...
— My New Curate • P.A. Sheehan

... part of the main-land of our continent was of equal antiquity, and dated back alike to the alluvial period; but I suppose our little three acres must have been injected through the intervening strata by some physical convulsion, from the drift, or the tertiary formation, perhaps ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various

... miles North-West from Melbourne, there has been discovered, I was informed, a quarry of marble of a very fine quality; and in the same neighbourhood is an extinct crater. The formation at and in the immediate vicinity of Melbourne, is of tertiary deposits associated with arenaceous ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 1. • J Lort Stokes

... Baptistery of San Pietro, 11th cent., resting on short columns with square capitals. Alfieri, the poet, was born here, in a palace built by his uncle, who was a count and an architect. He died in 1803. The tertiary strata of the neighbourhood are very rich in fossils. Loop-line from Asti to Milan ...
— The South of France—East Half • Charles Bertram Black

... from skulls and human remains which he takes to be those of tertiary man, show man to be as obstinately unlike the "dryopithecus" as ever, in fact, the reputedly oldest skulls [65] are a decided improvement on the Carnstadt and Neanderthal type. Even then man seems to have been the same flint-chipping, tool-making, speaking animal as now. So convinced is ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell

... richest secondary color, we must take two primaries, each of which partakes of the quality of the other. To make a pure orange, for instance, we must use a yellow red and a red yellow. If we used a bluish red and a bluish (greenish) yellow, the blue in both would give us a sort of tertiary in the form of a negative secondary instead of the pure rich orange we wanted. This latter fact is quite as useful in keeping colors gray without too much mixing when we want them so, but nevertheless we must know how to get ...
— The Painter in Oil - A complete treatise on the principles and technique - necessary to the painting of pictures in oil colors • Daniel Burleigh Parkhurst

... paralyzed, 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 the ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould

... 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 ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various

... 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 of Galilee.[128] ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson

... Hauterivien to the Senonian, appears throughout the whole extent of Northern Bulgaria, from the summits of the Balkans to the Danube. Gosau beds are found on the southern declivity of the chain. Flysch, representing both the Cretaceous and Eocene systems, is widely distributed. The Eocene, or older Tertiary, further appears with nummulitic formations on both sides of the eastern Balkans; the Oligocene only near the Black Sea coast at Burgas. Of the Neogene, or younger Tertiary, the Mediterranean, or earlier, stage appears near Pleven (Plevna) in the Leithakalk and Tegel forms, and between Varna ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various

... largely naturalised on islands. On a small island, the race for life will have been less severe, and there will have been less modification and less extermination. Hence, we can understand how it is that the flora of Madeira, according to Oswald Heer, resembles to a certain extent the extinct tertiary flora of Europe. All fresh water basins, taken together, make a small area compared with that of the sea or of the land. Consequently, the competition between fresh water productions will have been less severe than elsewhere; new forms will have been more slowly produced, and ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin

... the pre-existing ones. St. Helena is a similar case of a very ancient island having obtained an entirely peculiar, though limited, flora. On the other hand, no example is known of an island which can be proved geologically to be of very recent origin (late in the Tertiary, for instance), and yet possesses generic or family groups, or even ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace

... of the great divisions of modern mammals, such as the clawed mammals, hoofed mammals, and the race of monkeys or Primates. In the Upper Cretaceous there was an exuberant "radiation" of mammals, adaptive to the conquest of all sorts of haunts, and this was vigorously continued in Tertiary times. ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson

... 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 could not ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.

... constancy from seed cannot, of course, be applied. Apart from these difficulties, paleontologists agree in recognizing the very great age of large numbers of species. It would require a too close survey of geologic facts to go into details on this point. Suffice it to say that in more recent Tertiary deposits many species have been identified with living forms. In the Miocene period especially, the similarity of the types of phanerogamic plants with their present offspring, becomes so striking that in a large number of cases specific distinctions rest ...
— Species and Varieties, Their Origin by Mutation • Hugo DeVries

... Colour Mixing: Pure and Impure Greens, Orange and Violets; Large Variety of Shades from few Colours; Consideration of the Practical Primaries: Red, Yellow and Blue.—VII., Secondary Colours; Nomenclature of Violet and Purple Group; Tints and Shades of Violet; Changes in Artificial Light.—VIII., Tertiary Shades; Broken Hues; Absorption Spectra of Tertiary Shades.—Appendix: Four Plates with Dyed ...
— The Dyeing of Cotton Fabrics - A Practical Handbook for the Dyer and Student • Franklin Beech

... astonishment, and to this hour scarcely a minute has passed in idleness.... Geology carries the day; it is like the pleasure of gambling. Speculating, on first arrival, what the rocks may be, I often mentally cry out, three to one tertiary against primitive; but the latter has hitherto won all the bets.... My life, when at sea, is so quiet, that to a person who can employ himself, nothing can be pleasanter; the beauty of the sky and brilliancy of the ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb

... been throughout regular and uniform, and if none of the lower strata had been tilted up, so that even those who run might read, no shaft from the surface could have been sunk deep enough to bring the geologist from the tertiary strata down to the Silurian rocks. The same in language. Unless some languages had been arrested in their growth during their earlier stages, and had remained on the surface in this primitive state ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller

... products of human industry.[11] The results of the celebrated researches of Dr. Schmerling in the caves near Liege were published in 1833. He states his conclusions frankly: "The shape of the flints," he says, "is so regular, that it is impossible to confound them with those found in the Chalk or in Tertiary strata. Reflection compels us to admit that these flints were worked by the hand of man, and that they may have been used as arrows or as knives."[12] Schmerling does not refer, though Lyell does, and that in terms ...
— Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples • The Marquis de Nadaillac

... the later marine vertebrate faunas are more heterogeneous than the oldest known one. Nor, again, can any such reply be made to the fact that there are far more numerous orders and genera of mammalian remains in the tertiary formations than in the secondary formations. Did we wish merely to make out the best case, we might dwell upon the opinion of Dr. Carpenter, who says that "the general facts of Palaeontology appear to sanction the ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer

... that these gigantic quadrupeds, more different from those of the present day than the oldest of the Tertiary quadrupeds of Europe, lived whilst the sea was peopled with most of its present inhabitants. These animals migrated on land, since submerged, near Behring's Strait, from Siberia into North America, and thence on land, since submerged, in the West Indies ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various

... life been prolonged, his patient accumulation of evidence might have ultimately led him to suggest answers that would have been generally accepted by scientific men. But the cause of the remarkable change of climate during those late Tertiary and post-Tertiary times known as the glacial period is still without a completely satisfactory explanation. In Belt's day geologists were inclined to get over the difficulty of accounting for the phenomena ...
— The Naturalist in Nicaragua • Thomas Belt

... Long before the news came, indeed, she carried out a plan she had conceived, so Padre Abella told us, even while Rezanov was yet here. There were no convents in California in those days—you may know what a stranded handful we were—but she joined the Tertiary or Third Order of Franciscans, and wore always the grey habit, the girdle, and the cross. She went among the Indians christianizing them, remaining a long while at Soledad, a bleak and cheerless place, where she was also a great solace to the wives of the soldiers and settlers, whose ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various

... were exhausted we got off the first few outer layers—the post tertiary formation, a geologist would term it—and the smell of many breakfasts cooking, coming down over the hill, set our stomachs in a mutiny against any ...
— Andersonville, complete • John McElroy

... geological record. A somewhat curious distribution awaits the man of science in this latter respect. Most readers are aware that the geologists are accustomed to classify rocks, according to their relative age, into three great groups, known respectively as the primary, secondary, and tertiary periods. In the secondary period we do not appear to meet with the fuels of the future, but as far back as the Devonian or old Red Sandstone period, and in the still older Silurian rocks, stores of gas and petroleum ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 717, September 28, 1889 • Various



Words linked to "Tertiary" :   period, Oligocene, tertiary syphilis, Paleocene, Eocene epoch, Eocene, Tertiary period, Age of Mammals, Cenozoic era, Pliocene, Paleocene epoch, Cenozoic, Miocene, 3rd, Pliocene epoch, Miocene epoch, Oligocene epoch, geological period



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