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Epoch   /ˈɛpək/  /ˈipək/   Listen
Epoch

noun
(pl. epochs)
1.
A period marked by distinctive character or reckoned from a fixed point or event.  Synonym: era.
2.
(astronomy) an arbitrarily fixed date that is the point in time relative to which information (as coordinates of a celestial body) is recorded.  Synonym: date of reference.
3.
A unit of geological time that is a subdivision of a period and is itself divided into ages.



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"Epoch" Quotes from Famous Books



... At the epoch of the Renaissance the documents of ancient and modern history were scattered in innumerable private libraries and in innumerable depositories of archives, almost all of them inaccessible, not to mention those which lay hidden beneath the soil, their very existence as yet unsuspected. It was ...
— Introduction to the Study of History • Charles V. Langlois

... aggression of Spain, or France, or Austria. But if we carry our view to the moral world, do we find any principle equally obvious, and a solution as satisfactory? By no means. We may, indeed, say, with apparent precision, that during the earliest part of this epoch, Europe was divided between the champions and antagonists of religion, as, during its latter portion, it was between the enemies and supporters of political reformation. But a deeper analysis will show us that these names were but the badges of ideas, always complex, sometimes ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXVIII. February, 1843. Vol. LIII. • Various

... foreseen for a long time. What are the forces that have set the nations in movement? I do not seek to establish responsibility. Whosoever it may be, those who have let loose the conflict have behind them peoples of one mind. That, perhaps, is the most surprising feature in an epoch when economic, social, and moral interests are so interwoven from one end of the earth to the other that the conqueror himself must suffer cruelly from the ruin of ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various

... romantic idleness that he had thrown over the feeble conspiracies of Madame Mayer and her set in order to wear a uniform. He had profound convictions, though he was not troubled with any great number of them. Each new one which took hold of him marked an epoch in his young life, and generally proved tenacious in proportion as he had formerly regarded it as absurd; and it was a proof of the sound balance of his mind that the three or four real convictions which he had accumulated during his short life were in no ...
— Sant' Ilario • F. Marion Crawford

... was written an epoch making invention has been announced to the radio world. It is the super-regenerative system developed by E. H. Armstrong, the wizard of Columbia University. This system is bound to revolutionize the art of wireless ...
— The Radio Boys at the Sending Station - Making Good in the Wireless Room • Allen Chapman

... writing songs "in English word" and English rhyme; he merely accepted the suggestion and acted upon it. The suggestion came, under divine guidance, from Mr. J. D. Ward, the Chittagong magistrate. Here are the lines, setting forth that epoch-making moment, in an address to ...
— A Boswell of Baghdad - With Diversions • E. V. Lucas

... to hope the reader will Suppose from June the sixth (the fatal day, Without whose epoch my poetic skill For want of facts would all be thrown away), But keeping Julia and Don Juan still In sight, that several months have passed; we'll say 'T was in November, but I'm not so sure About the day—the era's ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron

... her own heart, much less that of her fellow. But when in face of that approach, eye met eye with an askance look of eager question, revelation came, crimsoning the cheeks of both, and marking an epoch ...
— The Mystery of the Hasty Arrow • Anna Katharine Green

... be knowledge, and little wisdom appear to be much, I will thank you to walk on with it, and apply at some other shop. The QUANTITY of shops where you can apply with thrice-golden advantage, from the Morning Newspapers to the National Senate, is tremendous at this epoch of the poor world's history;—go, I request you! And while his foot is on the stairs, descending from my garret, I think: O unfortunate fellow-creature in an unfortunate world, why is not there a Friedrich ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XXI. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle

... and who caused him forever to abandon the sonorous ingenuities of Lucan, for he was a keen observer, a delicate analyst, a marvelous painter. Tranquilly, without prejudice or hate, he described Rome's daily life, recounting the customs of his epoch in the sprightly little ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans

... time the tide of events in the aeronautical world rolls on in full flood, almost every half-year marking a fresh epoch, until a new departure in the infant art of ballooning was already on the point of being reached. It had been erroneously supposed that the ascent of the Montgolfier balloon had been due, not to the rarefaction of the air within it—which was its true ...
— The Dominion of the Air • J. M. Bacon

... of man found in Alaska up to the time of writing I refer to this epoch [Echinus layer of Dall]. There are some crania found by us in the lowermost part of the Amaknak cave and a cranium obtained at Adakh, near the anchorage in the Bay of Islands. These were deposited in a remarkable manner, ...
— A Further Contribution to the Study of the Mortuary Customs of the North American Indians • H.C. Yarrow

... heavy produce, in order to exchange it for the luxuries of the south, gave rise to manufactures as well as fishing on the southern confines of the Baltic Sea; from whence arose the wealth of Flanders, Holland, and the Hans Towns. This forms an epoch entirely new in its nature and description, and its termination was only brought on by the great discovery of the passage to Asia, by the Cape of Good Hope, and to America, by sailing straight out into the ...
— An Inquiry into the Permanent Causes of the Decline and Fall of Powerful and Wealthy Nations. • William Playfair

... from "the present age" (aion outos, aion ho paron). The designation "age" applied in common to both, indicates that each has a beginning and an ending. The future age begins at the termination of the present age, the separation between them being the epoch of a resurrection of the dead—not, however, of all the dead, but "a resurrection of the just," that is, of those who have been prepared and sealed by faith, and suffering, and good works, in the present life, for immediate entrance into a new state of life. ...
— An Essay on the Scriptural Doctrine of Immortality • James Challis

... number of Chinese who can use and appreciate Western knowledge without being the slaves of Western follies. What is being done in this direction is very interesting, and one of the most hopeful things happening in our not very cheerful epoch. ...
— The Problem of China • Bertrand Russell

... Geyer family came through the theatre. To this Richard added a small school-acquaintance with the classics; and now came Adolph to show him a huge, truly vital literature—poetry and prose dealing with the life of our own epoch. Adolph wrote reminding him of how finely Weber Had cultivated himself, of his breadth, of his outlook on history and mankind. It is evident that Adolph, seeing the irresistible bent of the Wagners towards the theatre, and fearing that Richard might in time learn to be content with ...
— Richard Wagner - Composer of Operas • John F. Runciman

... and burning afternoons I found myself, to my inexpressible astonishment, playing a game called croquet. I had imagined that it belonged to the epoch of Leach and Anthony Trollope, and I had neglected to provide myself with those very long and luxuriant side whiskers which are really essential to such a scene. I played it with a man whom we will call Parkinson, and with whom ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton

... I am more than delighted to shake hands with you," said the governor. "It looks as if you and the other crew over yonder were upon an epoch-making tour, for you are not ten minutes behind your schedule, as we have it in the London papers and also in our own Colombian newspaper. My only regret is that you do not represent England instead of America." He laughed good-naturedly as ...
— Around the World in Ten Days • Chelsea Curtis Fraser

... persuasions. No doubt the Governor considered himself entitled to wear a crown, and meant to win it, if not in Africa, then in England, or wherever fate might look propitiously upon him. He was of the stuff of which crusaders and dynasty founders had been made, at a somewhat earlier epoch. Who could have conquered the holy sepulchre, or wrested a crown from its lawful wearer, whether in Italy, Muscovy, the Orient, or in the British Ultima Thule, more bravely than this imperial bastard, this valiant and romantic adventurer? Unfortunately, he ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... own. The staterooms were sufficiently roomy, and each had two berths, one above the other. These berths, to be sure, were so exceedingly narrow as to be insufficient for more than one person; still, I could not comprehend why there were three staterooms for these four persons. I was, just at this epoch, in one of those moody frames of mind which make a man abnormally inquisitive about trifles: and I confess, with shame, that I busied myself in a variety of ill-bred and preposterous conjectures about this matter of the supernumerary stateroom. It was no business ...
— At Whispering Pine Lodge • Lawrence J. Leslie

... places wherever external conditions were sufficiently similar. And the unity of the plan in the vertebrata would be due, not to absolute unity of ancestry, but to unity of external conditions at a particular epoch in the descent of life. Hence it follows that the separation of animals into orders and genera and even into species took place, if not for the most part yet very largely, at a very early period in the history of organic evolution. Of course ...
— The Relations Between Religion and Science - Eight Lectures Preached Before the University of Oxford in the Year 1884 • Frederick, Lord Bishop of Exeter

... with comparative ease, the result of daily practice and experience. It is worth noting, for the benefit of the young, that furniture is an excellent subject for conversation for that very reason, nothing being simpler than to go in three minutes from a table to an epoch, from an epoch to an historical person and from that person to his or her love story. A young man would do well to associate the life of some famous lover or celebrated and unhappy beauty with each ...
— Don Orsino • F. Marion Crawford

... general features of the country even at the present day, it will readily be comprehended how much more wild and desolate was the character they exhibited as far back as the middle of the last century, about which period our story commences. At that epoch, it will be borne in mind, what we have described as being the United States were then the British colonies of America dependent on the mother-country; while the Canadas, on the contrary, were, or had very recently ...
— Wacousta: A Tale of the Pontiac Conspiracy (Complete) • John Richardson

... Christianity itself has felt, to a certain extent, the influence which social and political conditions exercise on religious opinions. At the epoch at which the Christian religion appeared upon earth, Providence, by whom the world was doubtless prepared for its coming, had gathered a large portion of the human race, like an immense flock, under the sceptre of the Caesars. The men of whom this multitude was composed were distinguished by numerous ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 2 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville

... abuses of the capitalistic system have brought both European and American society. In this day of those shifting standards which mark the gradual transference of power from one group to another in the community, and the merging of a spent epoch in a new order, neither the chief opportunity nor the most serious peril of religious leadership is met by fresh and energetic programs of religion in action. In such days, our chief gift to the world cannot be the support of any particular reforms or the ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch

... the Mississippi river to the Pacific ocean (1858), of which Dr Elliott Coues says (as quoted in the Popular Science Monthly, xxxiii. 553) that it "exerted an influence perhaps stronger and more widely felt than that of any of its predecessors, Audubon's and Wilson's not excepted, and marked an epoch in the history of American ornithology"; Mammals of North America: Descriptions based on Collections in the Smithsonian Institution (Philadelphia, 1859); and the monumental work (with Thomas Mayo Brewer and Robert Ridgway) History ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various

... very much that these people who spoke of her—your uncle and the others—knew what I didn't know!" cried Daphne, passionately. She stared at Roger, strangely conscious that something epoch-making and decisive had happened. Roger had had a secret from her all these years—that was what had happened; and now she had discovered it. That he could have a secret from her, however, was the real discovery. She felt a fierce resentment, and yet a ...
— Marriage a la mode • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... Hume-Frazers. Somehow I felt, when I first saw you and Davie together, that you would be bound up with a crisis in my life. I dread crises. They have ever been unfortunate for me. I cannot explain myself further. I know I am approaching an eventful epoch. Well, I am prepared. Go on with your work, in God's name. I cannot become more unhappy than ...
— The Stowmarket Mystery - Or, A Legacy of Hate • Louis Tracy

... dresses of the officers would have become a Bonaparte or a Washington." Ladies on horseback were an added feature of the procession. The ceremonies attending the cornerstone laying attracted the people from all the outlying districts, and marked an epoch in ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn

... (protestant) church (to which his father Rudolf Virag (later Rudolph Bloom) had been converted from the Israelitic faith and communion in 1865 by the Society for promoting Christianity among the jews) subsequently abjured by him in favour of Roman catholicism at the epoch of and with a view to his matrimony in 1888. To Daniel Magrane and Francis Wade in 1882 during a juvenile friendship (terminated by the premature emigration of the former) he had advocated during ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce

... country life that Tchekoff shows us, but Russian life and character in general, in which the old order is giving place to the new, and we see the practical, modern spirit invading the vague, aimless existence so dear to the owners of the cherry orchard. A new epoch was beginning, and at its dawn the singer of ...
— Swan Song • Anton Checkov

... derived from the primitive mass, and which appear to have been formed into strata in seas of vast depth. The absence from these rocks of all traces of vegetable and animal life, joined to a consideration of the excessive temperature which seems to have prevailed in their epoch, has led to the inference that no plants or animals of any kind then existed. A few geologists have indeed endeavoured to shew that the absence of organic remains is no proof of the globe having been then unfruitful or uninhabited, as the heat to which these rocks ...
— Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation • Robert Chambers

... night he saw her was an epoch in the history of this gentleman's mind. He had learning and refinement, and he had not great practical experience, and such men are most open to impression from the stage. He saw a being, all grace and bright nature, move like a goddess among the stiff ...
— Peg Woffington • Charles Reade

... within one minute of eleven, when the observers finding the barometer cease the upward motion, and finding that the machine oscillated round a position of equilibrium by noticing the bearing of the sun, they found the epoch favorable for another series of observations. The barometer there indicated that the balloon had attained the enormous height of 19,700 feet. The moisture which had invested the thermometer had frozen upon it, and obstructed, for ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, September, 1850 • Various

... connected with it in any way, this is a companion volume to the author's "epoch-making" story The Leopard's Spots. It is a novel with a great deal to it, and which very properly is going to interest many thousands of readers. * * * It is, first of all, a forceful, dramatic, absorbing love story, ...
— Mistress Nell - A Merry Tale of a Merry Time • George C. Hazelton, Jr.

... was at first, there was not a living plant or animal; after thousands of years, or millions of years, there came into the broad seas of the lower Silurian epoch, some of the lowest kinds of animals and seaweeds, a few trilobites and mollusks, but no plants save fucoids. Next came, after a long time, a few cartilaginous fishes and corals. A long time passed—thousands of years rolled by: then came real fishes and land ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke

... these countries that we find what we most require—evidence of a very striking character that these great islands must have once formed a part of the continent, and could only have been separated at a very recent geological epoch. The elephant and tapir of Sumatra and Borneo, the rhinoceros of Sumatra and the allied species of Java, the wild cattle of Borneo and the kind long supposed to be peculiar to Java, are now all known to inhabit some part or other of Southern Asia. None of these large animals could possibly ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume I. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace

... more between the year 1800 and the year 1900 than it had done in the previous five hundred years. That century, the nineteenth century, was the dawn of a new epoch in the history of mankind—the epoch of the great cities, the end of the old ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells

... occasion, will form one of the most shameful epochs of the human mind: it never praised even good men except for what was bad in them. He looked upon the gods whom that century had worshipped as the direct authors of the bloodshed and ruin in which their epoch had closed. The memory of mild and humane philosophers was covered with the kind of black execration that prophets of old had hurled at Baal or Moloch; Locke and Hume, Voltaire and Rousseau, were habitually ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 4: Joseph de Maistre • John Morley

... The new epoch[1] "is more and more replacing muscle-power fed on wheat at eighty cents a bushel, by machine-power fed on coal at five cents a bushel," thus liberating man from hard and deadening toil. As his mental activity increases his needs in the way of the comforts ...
— The Cost of Shelter • Ellen H. Richards

... Corn-mill grew out of the Rochdale Equitable Pioneers Society, which formed an epoch in the history of industrial co-operative institutions. The Equitable Pioneers Society was established in the year 1844, at a time when trade was in a very bad condition, and working people generally were heartless and hopeless as to their future state. ...
— Thrift • Samuel Smiles

... patriotism. It re-echoed the sentiments, the notions, the aspirations of the people. The cobbler of Natick rose above the rhetors, above the deliverers of prosy, classical, polished, elaborated orations, above young and above gray-haired Athenians, high as our fiery and stormy epoch towers over the epochs of quiet, self-satisfied, smooth, cold, elaborate and ...
— Diary from November 12, 1862, to October 18, 1863 • Adam Gurowski

... future celebrities, such as Couture, Gerome, etc., had been employed by the opulent and intelligent creator of this palace. On the banquet table was displayed a marvel of silverware worthy of the epoch of Benvenuto; candelabra, ewers, ice basins, fruit bowls, flower vases, all would have done honor to a musee by the rich purity of form and the precious finish and delicacy that characterized ...
— A Cardinal Sin • Eugene Sue

... admitted the first time with much ceremony in order that the day may be one of pleasant memories. He also receives a new name, the name of his babyhood being dropped. Indeed, a change of name accompanies each new epoch of his life, as the time he takes a new degree, the day of his marriage, etc. Thus the boy enters upon his new work. The first years of study are devoted to reading, writing, and the elements of arithmetic, which studies complete the education of the ...
— History of Education • Levi Seeley

... the family of the Musaceae, appear to be natives of the southern portion of the Asiatic continent (R. Brown, "Bot. of Congo," p. 51). Transplanted at an unknown epoch into the Indian Archipelago and Africa, they have spread also into the, New World, and in general into all intertropical countries, sometimes before the arrival ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds

... however, what is known antecedent to that period with the precise data available regarding the following it, and by checking the inferred results with what little evidence exists respecting the obscure epoch of Rumanian history, it has been possible to reconstruct, almost to a certainty, the evolution of the Rumanians during the ...
— The Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey • Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth

... that journey, notwithstanding much that might well have blotted it from my memory. Every mile sped over seemed to mark one more barrier passed on my way to some strange fate; every moment which brought me nearer this incomprehensible girl with her magical eyes was an epoch of impossibility against my ever voluntarily turning back. And now that it is all over, I am glad that I went on steadfastly ...
— The Crack of Doom • Robert Cromie

... brave and proud people they are. It is through the effects of these chiefly that they have been kept from becoming indolent and effeminate. They are now strong, fearless, haughty, and independent. But the near future is to initiate a new epoch in their history, an era in which their career may be the reverse of what it has been. Man is becoming a factor of new importance in their environment. The moving lines of the white population are closing in upon the ...
— The Seminole Indians of Florida • Clay MacCauley

... scoffs at the popular idea that man is the great central figure round which all things gyrate like marionettes; in fact, the anthropocentric era of Draper, which, strange to say, lives by the side of the telescope and the microscope. As man is of recent origin, and may end at an early epoch of the macrocosm, so before his birth all things revolved round nothing, and may continue to ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton

... the flame," is one thing Priestley did explain in America. He discovered carbon monoxide—not in England, but in "exile."[2] It may not be an epoch-making observation. There are not many such and those who make them are not legion in number. It was an interesting fact, with a very definite value, which has persisted through many succeeding decades and is so matter-of-fact that ...
— Priestley in America - 1794-1804 • Edgar F. Smith

... himself in relation with the new governments,[5209] he, acting for himself, "that he may put an end to the widowhood of the Churches," appoints bishops, assigns them a provisional regime in anticipation of the epoch when, in concert with better founded governments, he will decree their definitive regime. In this way, all the great existing churches of the Catholic universe are the work of the Pope, his latest work, his own creation attested by a positive act of contiguous date, and ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine

... about the "other effects of directly transforming agents" being rarely transmitted, he should first show us the directly transforming agents. Lamarck, as I have said, knows them not. "It is little short of an absurdity," he continues, "for people to come forward at this epoch, when evolution is at length accepted solely because of Mr. Darwin's doctrine, and coolly to propose to replace that doctrine by the old notion ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler

... was no reason why he should be glad to see a lady calling on business, and no doubt he often found her troublesome, but he had never shown it before. She felt like crying at first; then she passed through an epoch of resentment, and then through a period of compassion for him. She ended by telling him with dignified severity that she wanted some money: they usually made some jokes about her destitution when she came upon that ...
— A Modern Instance • William Dean Howells

... are that we are now coming to an epoch of a quieter style. There have been in our generation three strong masters in the aft of prose writing. There was, first of all, Carlyle, there was Macaulay, and there is Mr. Raskin. These are all giants, ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley

... a fresh epoch in the history of Old England; but as no writer of those days has thought fit to enlighten us as to naval affairs, our knowledge of them is ...
— How Britannia Came to Rule the Waves - Updated to 1900 • W.H.G. Kingston

... no spiritual apprehension to lay hold upon it. He that hath ears, let him hear. Nor would we attempt to confuse the functions of sayer and doer. But let there be a sympathy and understanding between them, that, when achieved, will mark an epoch in the world's history. Nowhere, at least in modern times, have thought and action approached so nearly and intimately as in America; nowhere is speculative intellect so colored with the hues of practical interest without limiting its own ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 12, October, 1858 • Various

... that could not fail to be impressive; and to us it was doubly so, for that very period formed an epoch ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman

... flights. Thus it came to pass that I did I not take the time of Hadrian for the background of a tale till after I had dealt with the still later period of the early monastic move in "Homo Sum." Since finishing that romance my old wish to depict, in the form of a story, the most important epoch of the history of that venerable nation to which I have devoted nearly a quarter century of my life, has found its fulfilment. I have endeavored to give a picture of the splendor of the Pharaonic times in "Uarda," of the subjection of Egypt to the new Empire of the Persians ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... stand-off attitude on the part of the rest of the form was the cementing of a close friendship between Winona and Garnet. It seemed natural for the holders of the two County Scholarships to become chums, also they found each other's society congenial. It marked a new epoch for Winona. She had had few friends of her own age. She had been the eldest pupil at Miss Harmon's small school, and her sisters were so much younger than herself that their interests were on a different plane to her own. Garnet, with her merry brown eyes, eager and enthusiastic ...
— The Luckiest Girl in the School • Angela Brazil

... the succeeding ones, every geological period having its special set of representatives. But still they are always true to their class, and have a certain general correspondence with animals of like kind that follow them in later periods. In this sense the Millepores are in our epoch the representatives of those early Corals called by naturalists Tabulata and Rugosa,—distinguished from the Polyp Corals by the horizontal floors, waving in some, straight in others, which divide the body transversely at successive heights through its whole ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various

... as mere material progress is concerned, it may be doubtful whether anything so epoch-making as the steam-engine or the telegraph is held in store for us by the future. But in the field of purely scientific discovery we are finding a crowd of things of which our philosophy did not dream even ten ...
— Side-lights on Astronomy and Kindred Fields of Popular Science • Simon Newcomb

... with glowing eyes, as Hawke proudly referred to the wonderful sweep of the sword of Clive, which conquered an unrifled treasure vault of ages, annexed a giant Empire, and set with Golconda's diamonds the scepter of distant England. The year 1756 was hailed by the renegade as the epoch when England's rule of the sea became her one vitalizing policy—her first and last national necessity—for the Empire of the waves followed ...
— A Fascinating Traitor • Richard Henry Savage

... out of the accumulated knowledge of the past. Pagel, in Puschmann's "Handbook," does not hesitate to say that "a farther merit of Constantine must be recognized, inasmuch as that not long after his career the second epoch of the school of Salerno begins, marked not only by a wealth of writers and writings on medicine, but, above all, because from this time on the study of Greek medicine received renewed encouragement through the Latin versions of the Arabian literature. We may ...
— Old-Time Makers of Medicine • James J. Walsh

... publicly to make a similar observation, "not only among foreigners, but many from whom some knowledge of our constitutional laws might be expected, that the statute of Charles II. enlarged in a great degree our liberties, and forms a sort of epoch in their history; but though a very beneficial enactment, it introduced no new principle, nor conferred any right upon the subject.... It was not to bestow an immunity from arbitrary imprisonment, which is abundantly provided in Magna Charta (if, ...
— Ten Thousand a-Year. Volume 1. • Samuel Warren

... most necessary for his success that he should remain there at this critical epoch; for, in the arrangement of every branch of the new government, he had systematically sought for his own security in balancing against each other the lovers of opposite sets of principles -men, who, by cordially coalescing together, might still have undone him; or by carrying their animosities ...
— The History of Napoleon Buonaparte • John Gibson Lockhart

... no means approved of this resolution. He pointed out to his friend that in life we must adapt ourselves to the different conditions and modes of existence suitable to the different ages, that after the epoch of pleasures comes that of ambition, and that it was good and prudent, as youth waned, to contract alliance with some rich and noble family, affording access to the great offices of the Republic, such as Prior of the Arts and Liberty, Captain ...
— The Well of Saint Clare • Anatole France

... With the nation, it blooms and ripens. Its season of blossoming and of maturity is the period of its greatest strength, and, at the same time, of the most perfect development of all its more important organs.(127) In respect to it, the economic endeavors of any epoch may be said to be represented by two great parties, the one progressive, the other, conservative. The former would hasten the period of the nation's richest and most varied development, the latter postpone its departure as long as possible; and hence it comes, that a people's ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • William Roscher

... A new epoch began at Eisenstadt with the rule of Prince Nicolaus. He was a man of unbounded energy himself, and he expected everybody in his service to be energetic too. There is nothing to suggest that Haydn neglected any of his routine duties, which certainly gave ...
— Haydn • J. Cuthbert Hadden

... are so fond of cabbage that it enters into the composition of a majority of their culinary products. The cabbage was first raised in England about 1640, by Sir Anthony Ashley. That this epoch, important to the English horticultural and culinary world, may never be forgotten, a cabbage is ...
— Science in the Kitchen. • Mrs. E. E. Kellogg

... ride!—most truly it was an epoch in my existence; and I still look back to it with feelings of longing and regret. People may talk of first love—it is a very agreeable event, I daresay—but give me the flush, and triumph, and glorious sweat of a first ride, like mine on the mighty cob! My whole frame was shaken, ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow

... the defenceless city of Pest on the opposite bank of the Danube, and thus the capital, too, was restored to the country. Yet after this last glorious feat of war, good fortune deserted the national banners. The grand heroic epoch was hastening to its tragic end. Two hundred thousand Russians crossed the borders of Hungary, and were there reenforced by sixty thousand to seventy thousand Austrians, whom the Viennese Government had succeeded in collecting ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne

... portions of the retina. This knowledge, and some of another kind, came afterwards in the course of an eventful five years, during which I have dropped the prejudices of my former humble situation in life, and forgotten the bellows-mender in far different occupations. But at the epoch of which I speak, the analogy which a casual observation of a star offered to the conclusions I had already drawn, struck me with the force of positive conformation, and I then finally made up my mind to the course which ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... quick grasps from a firm hand, gave them all round, not seeming to know she hadn't met Anne and Lydia, and at once took off her bonnet. It had strings and altogether belonged to an epoch at least twenty years away. The bonnet she "laid aside" on a table with a certain absent care, as ladies were accustomed to treat bonnets before they got into the way of jabbing them with pins. Then she sat down, earnestly solicitous and attentive as at a consultation. Anne thought she was the ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown

... of most of the disasters that befell England and her colonies at this dismal epoch, was the ruin of the Louisbourg expedition. The greater part of La Motte's fleet reached its destination a full month before that of Holbourne. Had the reverse taken place, the fortress must have fallen. As it was, the ill-starred attempt, drawing off the British forces ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman

... glows in an eloquent paragraph, or is embodied in a loving portrait like that of the professor and historian Harlem. The novel, taken in connection with the subsequent developments of the writer's mind, is a study of singular interest. It is a chaos before the creative epoch; the light has not been divided from the darkness; the firmament has not yet divided the waters from the waters. The forces at work in a human intelligence to bring harmony out of its discordant movements are as ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... party was a Japanese in European clothes. Notwithstanding her western garb, she resembled a print of Utamaro. Beside her walked a tall, grave girl, with dark hair and gray eyes, attired in the quaint garb of some early nineteenth-century epoch—1840 or thereabouts. As old-fashioned as she looked, a delicate girlish beauty was hers, and when she indifferently gazed at Davos, straightway he heard humming in his head the "glance motive" from Tristan ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker

... parasites have been unravelled; and here again knowledge means mastery. To a degree which has almost surpassed expectations there has been a revelation of the intricacy of the stones and mortar of the house of life, and the microscopic study of germ-cells has wonderfully supplemented the epoch-making experimental study of heredity which began with Mendel. It goes without saying that no one can call himself educated who does not understand the central and simple ideas of Mendelism and other ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson

... its way through the ranks of the besiegers, as the general tried gallantly, but unsuccessfully, to do on more than one occasion, besides making numerous sorties. It is apparent to most unprejudiced minds now, at this distance of time from the momentous epoch of the struggle between the two nations, that the Marshal, in his situation, accomplished all that could have been expected in detaining for such a length of time a huge German army nearly on the frontier, thus giving the invaded ...
— Fritz and Eric - The Brother Crusoes • John Conroy Hutcheson

... not to be reserved for him. Suddenly, on the 19th of July, 1879, less than seven years after the beginning of the work, and six months before the meeting of the adits, in the course of one of his visits to the tunnel Favre was carried off by the rupture of a blood vessel. A year before that epoch, I had left the enterprise, Favre having confided to me the general supervision over the manufacture of dynamite that he had undertaken at Varallo Pombia for the needs of his tunnel, but my friend M. Stockalper, engineer in chief of the Goschenen section, who accompanied Favre on his fatal ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 365, December 30, 1882 • Various

... of the three great lakes and the immense empire they had won for France, while the Indian tribes hurried from all quarters to bend the knee to the Great Chief of the Pale Faces. It was a great and glorious epoch; and what traveller would not feel deeply stirred when he comes upon such bitter memories of the ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville

... to alter in the Emancipation of Massachusetts, viewed as history, though I might soften its asperities somewhat, here and there; but when I come to consider it as philosophy, I am startled to observe the gap which separates the present epoch ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams

... individual States. After which, speaking of foreign trade with America, he says, that "those countries in Europe, which are truly commercial ones, knowing that North America had been reduced to contract debts at the epoch even of her greatest prosperity, wisely thought, that in her present distress, she would be able to pay but very little, for what might be carried ...
— A Letter Addressed to the Abbe Raynal, on the Affairs of North America, in Which the Mistakes in the Abbe's Account of the Revolution of America Are Corrected and Cleared Up • Thomas Paine

... present his demand for satisfaction to the man who had insulted him. A duel was the only thing that could appease his furious anger and heal his wounded pride. And a great scandal, which he would be the hero of, was not without a certain charm for him. What a glorious chance to win notoriety at an epoch when newspapers have become public laundries, in which every one washes his soiled linen and dries it in the glare of publicity! He saw his already remarkable reputation enhanced by the interest that always ...
— Baron Trigault's Vengeance - Volume 2 (of 2) • Emile Gaboriau

... separated Kachmyr from the rest of the empire and ceded it, under color of hereditary right, and for the sum of 160,000,000 francs, to Goulab-Sing, one of the familiars of the late sovereign, conferring on him besides the title of Maharadja. At the epoch of my journey, the actual Maharadja was Pertab-Sing, the grandchild of Goulab, whose residence is Jamoo, on the southern slope of ...
— The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ - The Original Text of Nicolas Notovitch's 1887 Discovery • Nicolas Notovitch

... the United States forms an epoch of no inconsiderable importance in the progress of interest in missions among the churches of various denominations in this country. She visited several of the leading cities of the Union; met a large number of associations ...
— Lives of the Three Mrs. Judsons • Arabella W. Stuart

... found in the Brahmanas, but I do not think it worth while to elaborate the broken shreds of thought of this epoch. I could have dealt with the Upani@sad period more fully, but many works on the subject have already been published in Europe and those who wish to go into details will certainly go to them. I have therefore limited myself to the dominant current flowing through the earlier Upani@sads. Notices of ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta

... if a hundred tongues were mine they could not speak the glad welcome in our hearts. It is an epoch in the history of the world that your coming marks. For the first time within the written history of mankind have the women of the nations left their homes and assembled in council to declare the position of women before the world, bringing to ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper

... well or ill, on sea or shore, in peril or safety, Strong had never been seen unhappy or depressed. He had the faculty of interesting himself without an effort in the doings of his neighbors, and Wharton always had on hand some scheme which was to make an epoch in the history of art. Just now it was a question of a new academy of music which was to be the completest product of architecture, and to combine all the senses in delight. The Grand Opera at Paris was to be tame beside it. Here he was to be tied down by no such restraints as the church ...
— Esther • Henry Adams

... effusions of the heart, those mutual confidences; those ingenuities, those unexpected avowals, and those transports which excite in us the certainty of creating an absolute happiness, and meriting all the esteem of the person we love. That day is, in a word, the epoch when a man of refinement discovers inexhaustible treasures which have always been hidden from him; the freedom a woman acquires who brings into play all the sentiments which constraint has held in reserve; her heart takes a lofty flight, but one well under control. Time, far from ...
— Life, Letters, and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de L'Enclos, - the Celebrated Beauty of the Seventeenth Century • Robinson [and] Overton, ed. and translation.

... a flutter; the manager was beside himself with joy; bell-boys danced jig steps in the corridors; chambermaids went about with a distracted air—and all because the grand duke, Alexander Melovich, was to arrive on the morrow. It was an epoch-making event. It was better than a circus, for it was free. Copies of the Almanach de Gotha appeared, as if by magic. Everybody was interested. Everybody ...
— Cupid's Understudy • Edward Salisbury Field

... persons affected by them, were now regarded, in some degree, as public injuries, and as infringements of a charter calculated for general security. And thus the establishment of the great charter, without seeming anywise to innovate in the distribution of political power, became a kind of epoch in the constitution. ...
— The History of England, Volume I • David Hume

... dramatic attempt—perhaps even prior in conception to the Venus and Adonis, and planned before he left Stratford—was Love's Labour's Lost. Shortly afterwards I suppose Pericles and certain scenes in Jeronymo to have been produced; and in the same epoch, I place the Winter's Tale and Cymbeline, differing from the Pericles by the entire 'rifacimento' of it, when Shakspeare's celebrity as poet, and his interest, no less than his influence as manager, enabled him to bring forward the laid-by labours of ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge

... sacred to honor, patriotism, and glory. In after ages the historic genius of our America shall produce the writers which the subject demands—men far removed from the contests of this day, who will know how to estimate this great epoch, and how to acquire an immortality for their own names by painting, with a master's hand, the immortal events of the ...
— American Eloquence, Volume I. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1896) • Various

... after that epoch-making contest between the Monitor and the Merrimac before the world witnessed another battle to the death between ironclads. Theoretically, wood had long since been displaced by iron, iron by steel, and steel by specially-forged armor-plate, ...
— American Men of Action • Burton E. Stevenson

... spent Christmas with their mother; now both parents were away in India, and everything was strange and altered. As Peggy sat gazing into the heart of the big gloomy fire, it seemed to her that the year that was passing away would end a complete epoch in her brother's experiences and her own, and that from this hour a new chapter would begin. She herself had come back from the door of death, and had life given, as it were, afresh into her hands. Arthur's longed-for career had been checked at its commencement, and all his plans laid ...
— About Peggy Saville • Mrs. G. de Horne Vaizey

... the new epoch had not, indeed, been entirely unanticipated in the past. It had been "witnessed by the law and the prophets." The law could bear witness to it only negatively by demonstrating its necessity. But the prophets anticipated it more positively. ...
— The Life of St. Paul • James Stalker

... are also mine, have endeavoured to diminish the universal sympathy felt in Europe for your cause, by causing it to be believed that I am making war for personal ambition, or to increase French territory. If there are men who fail to comprehend their epoch, I am not one of them. In the enlightened state of public opinion now prevailing, true greatness lies in the moral influence which we exercise rather than in sterile conquests.' The proclamation ended with the words: 'To-morrow you will be the citizens ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco

... last hours consigned to the care of the British conquerors the colonists he had loved and for whom he had fought, he proclaimed a momentous epoch in the world's history—the loss of an Empire to a great nation of Europe and the gain of an Empire to another. Within a generation the Saxon Conquistador was to suffer the same humiliation, and to yield up that colonial ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan

... of the last epoch, comparing Russia to a swift troika galloping to an unknown goal, exclaims, 'Oh, troika, birdlike troika, who invented thee!' and adds, in proud ecstasy, that all the peoples of the world stand aside respectfully to make way for the recklessly galloping ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky

... second wrangler in 1850, who was a year his senior, has given me a very interesting account of impressions made at this time. The two had been together at King's College. Fitzjames's appearance at Trinity was, writes Mr. Watson, 'an epoch in my college life. A close intimacy sprung up between us, and made residence at Cambridge a totally different thing from what it had been in my first year. Your brother's wide culture, his singular force of character, his powerful but, at that time, rather unwieldy intellect, his Johnsonian brusqueness ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen

... contradictions. These dramas touch our sympathies at all points, and are representative of human life today, because they reflected the human life of their time. This is supremely true of Shakespeare, and almost equally true of Jonson and many of the other stars of that marvelous epoch. In England as well as in France, as we have said, it was the period of the classic revival; but in England the energetic reality of the time was strong enough to break the classic fetters, and ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... through their mutual relations with the atmospheric air, plants and animals are interbalanced, and neither permitted to obtain a superiority. The condensation of carbon from the air and its inclusion in the strata constitute the chief epoch in the organic life of the earth giving a possibility for the appearance of the hot-blooded and more intellectual animal tribes. That event was due to the influence of the rays of ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various

... "Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie . . . has simplified the class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.'' ...
— Proposed Roads To Freedom • Bertrand Russell

... I would once have called an epoch in my life," said Anne, as she took Roy's violets out of their box and gazed at them thoughtfully. She meant to carry them, of course, but her eyes wandered to another box on her table. It was filled with lilies-of-the-valley, as fresh and fragrant as those which bloomed in the Green Gables ...
— Anne Of The Island • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... skirts. Not too immediately modern indeed, as the events fall within the period of the South African war, a fact that will, of course, much increase their appeal for those whose Oxford memories belong to the same epoch. But it is naturally a book difficult for the male reviewer to appraise with exactitude. All I can say, being unconversant with the domestic politics of a ladies' college, is that I should imagine Miss WINIFRED TAYLOR to have given a remarkably true picture of existence ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 14, 1919 • Various

... was bending over her, his face was very close. Some vivid instinct told her that he must not kiss her. She tried to struggle but she could not. The next instant she was living that epoch which innocence may only know ere it perishes—a man's lips making free with eyes and mouth and cheeks. She lay now, half in his arms, looking at him with wide, startled eyes, ...
— Prince or Chauffeur? - A Story of Newport • Lawrence Perry

... an evidence and expression of an uncommon or special grace given to a certain number of souls, so that they may be sanctified by the practice of particular virtues to meet the special needs of their epoch, and in this way to renew the spiritual life of the members of the Church and to extend her fold. A new community is this, or it has no reason for its existence. The means to accomplish its special work are both new and old. It should ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott

... common occurrence for a series of striking signs and wonderful emotions to precede an epoch-making discovery. Even the experiment I have just referred to has its own attractive history; but it goes back to a surprisingly ancient era. Friedrich August Wolf has exactly indicated the spot where Greek antiquity dropped the question. The zenith of the historico-literary studies ...
— Homer and Classical Philology • Friedrich Nietzsche

... interruptions had been enough to prove to the perspicacious that here, seated on the platform at the big binge of the season, was one who, if pushed forward to make a speech, might let himself go in a rather epoch-making manner. ...
— Right Ho, Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse

... close with Rome, an imitation of the monastic life by way of shelter from the rude checks which their aspirations sustained in the world without, seems to have answered for a time, and possibly retarded for about three years that rush of conversion which made 1845 such an epoch in the history even of the Church. This may be inferred from the next letter, written shortly after Mr. Newman and his disciples were regularly settled at Littlemore. I am not aware what the report was which he ...
— Memoirs of James Robert Hope-Scott, Volume 2 • Robert Ornsby

... "is a history of the North American Indians from the time of the flood until some epoch prior to Columbus. It would be as difficult to prove that it was not true as to prove that Smith is not honest in his delusion. We can only fall back upon what Butler ...
— The Mormon Prophet • Lily Dougall

... overflowing meeting of the most monikinized of the monikin race, holden at the house of Peleg Pat (we still used the human appellations, at that epoch), in the year of the world 3,007, and of the monikin era 317, Plausible Shout was called to the chair, and ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper

... epoch in my life when I read 'White's Letters to Pennant' about natural history in Selborne. Selborne is an English village, not half so pretty as most; and, until Gilbert White came, nobody saw anything there worth printing. His book showed ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade

... young, at thirty-five To herd with boys, or hoard with good threescore, I wonder people should he left alive. But since they are, that epoch is ...
— Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale) (2nd ed.) (2 vols.) • Mrs. Hester Lynch Piozzi

... disturbed by the fashions of to-day, as if Doctor Jephson had never developed all those Parades and Crescents out of his magic well. I used to wonder whether the inhabitants had ever yet heard of railways, or, at their slow rate of progress, had even reached the epoch of stage-coaches. As you approach the village, while it is yet unseen, you observe a tall, overshadowing canopy of elm-tree tops, beneath which you almost hesitate to follow the public road, on account of the remoteness that seems to exist between the precincts of this old-world ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 60, October 1862 • Various

... the account of the situation and general character of the island but also in numerous small details.... The island became almost entirely depopulated in the middle ages, in consequence of the raids of pirates and the Turkish wars, and did not begin to recover until the Venetian epoch. But similar conditions of life make the modern islanders resemble the ancient. To this day the Ithacans are distinguished by their bold seamanship, their love of home, and their hospitality." ...
— Odysseus, the Hero of Ithaca - Adapted from the Third Book of the Primary Schools of Athens, Greece • Homer

... the respect and friendship of a woman; the only life which distinguishes a man from the present crowd,—in short, the only life for which a young man should even think of resigning his bachelor blessings. Thus established, the Comte de Manerville may advise his epoch, place himself above the world, and be nothing less than a minister or an ambassador. Ridicule can never touch him; he has gained the social advantages of marriage while keeping all the privileges of ...
— The Marriage Contract • Honore de Balzac

... to catch at that life in passing, but its poet had not yet arisen. The few sporadic attempts, thus he told himself, had only touched the keynote. He strove for the diapason, the great song that should embrace in itself a whole epoch, a complete era, the voice of an entire people, wherein all people should be included—they and their legends, their folk lore, their fightings, their loves and their lusts, their blunt, grim humour, their stoicism under stress, their adventures, their treasures ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris

... interpolations are not added from a vulgar idea of correcting or improving the composer's music, but are strictly in accordance with certain conventions thoroughly understood by both composer and singer. To omit them, or follow too closely the printed text, would be to ignore the epoch, school and character of the music; a careful study of which forms one of the cornerstones of Interpretation. A skilled artist will always strive to analyze and interpret the intentions of the author. If one to whom is confided the ...
— Style in Singing • W. E. Haslam

... plan of the sinking fund. The commercial treaties of '87 were struck in the same mint, and are notable as the first effort made by the English government to emancipate the country from the restrictive policy which had been introduced by the "glorious revolution;" memorable epoch, that presented England at the same time with a corn law and a public debt.. But on no subject was the magnetic influence of the descendant of Sir William Petty more decided, than in the resolution of his pupil to curb the power ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli

... summer school of architecture was held in Salem and Portsmouth for the study of colonial work. The courtesy of owners of houses built at this epoch allowed the students to measure and sketch the best work of this interesting locality, and in the future it is proposed to make an exhaustive study ...
— The Brochure Series of Architectural Illustration, Volume 01, No. 06, June 1895 - Renaissance Panels from Perugia • Various

... of Joey from the school was immediately communicated to McShane by the master, who could not imagine how such an incident could have occurred in such a decent establishment as his preparatory seminary; it was an epoch in his existence, and ever afterwards his chronology was founded upon it, and everything that occurred was so many months or weeks before or after the absconding of young Master McShane. The letter had, of course, been produced, and as soon as the schoolmaster ...
— The Poacher - Joseph Rushbrook • Frederick Marryat



Words linked to "Epoch" :   historic period, date, common era, modern era, recent, Christian era, time period, period of time, uranology, astronomy, age, caliphate, Paleocene, day, Oligocene, Eocene, Miocene, Pliocene, geological period, geological time, period, geologic time, Holocene, Pleistocene



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