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Table 8.1 (cont.)
Era
Period
Epoch
Date Author
Silurian
1835 Roderick Murchison
Ordovician
1879 Charles Lapworth
Cambrian
1835 Adam Sedgwick;
named by
Murchison
Precambrian
1862 Joseph Beete Jukes
been penned by unknown authors which help one to remember the
sequence, but given the recent modifications to the geological column
they do not work. The author remembers being taught the Epochs of
the Tertiary and Quaternary by bringing to mind the fantastically
named imaginary Tertiary pachyderm EOMPPR: Eocene, Oligocene,
Miocene, Pliocene, Pleistocene and Recent. The creature has now
been reduced to cerebral extinction.
Althoughmost divisions were named and defined in the 1830s, a
number pre-date this burst of nomenclatural activity in the geological
literature (see Table 8.1 ) . The earliest, the Tertiary, is a throwback to
the work of Giovanni Arduino, who applied the term in his four-fold
division of rocks in Italy, and while he did not rigidly define the limits
of the Tertiary, it became used for rocks deposited after the Chalk and
before the deposition of the loose frosting of the alluvial drift. The
Jurassic, which is perhaps the geological Period most familiar to the
general public through those Hollywood dinosaur romps, was first used
in 1795 by the celebrated German scientist Alexander vonHumboldt in
his description of successions exposed in the Jura Mountains of
Switzerland. Humboldt was a scientist with an all-encompassing inter-
est in many branches of learning, and although he is known for his
monumental description of the physical characteristics of the world,
published as Kosmos or Cosmos, in seven or more volumes, and in
several translations between 1845 and 1867, and remembered today in
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