a. and sb. Also 6 focille, 7–8 fossile, (7 -ill, 8 fosile, fossel). [a. F. fossile, ad. L. fossil-is dug up, f. fodĕre to dig.]
A. adj.
1. Obtained by digging; found buried in the earth.
[1563. W. Fulke, Meteors (1640), 1. To declare the causes of all those bodies that are generated in the earth called Fossilia.]
1654. Vilvain, Epit. Ess., III. lxx. Seven unmixt fossil Metals are forecited.
1669. J. Worlidge, Syst. Agric. (1681), 25. Lime, Chalk, Marle, or any cold fossile Soils, are an extraordinary Improvement to dry, sandy, hot Lands of a contrary nature or temperature.
1673. Ray, Journ. Low C., 101. The poor People put a Cheat upon Strangers, bringing them to sell (as they pretend) fossile Dice, which they say, they dig out of the Earth naturally so figured and marked.
1732. Arbuthnot, Rules of Diet, 269. All fossil Salts, as Sea-Salt, Rock-Salt, &c. have this Quality.
1816. J. Smith, The Panorama of Science and Art, II. 354. Fossil coal, and all kinds of bitumen, contain a large quantity of carbon.
1854. Ronalds & Richardson, Chem. Technol. (ed. 2), I. 54. The oldest of all kinds of fossil fuel, the anthracite, belonging to the transition formation, must be regarded as the last product of the mouldering process.
† b. Fossil fishes: fishes anciently supposed to live in water underground. Obs.
1661. Lovell, Hist. Anim. & Min., Introd. The fossile have a hard and unpleasant flesh, and sometimes have been so bad, that all have dyed, that have eate thereof.
[a. 1661. Fuller, Worthies Lancashire, II. (1662), 107. These Pisces Fossiles or Subterranean Fishes must needs be unwholesome.]
2. Now applied in narrower sense to the remains of animals and plants, belonging to past (usually prehistoric) ages, and found embedded in the strata of the earth. (Commonly apprehended as an attrib. use of the sb.)
Fossil ivory, ivory furnished by the tusks of mammoths preserved in Siberian ice; fossil screws (see quot. 1882).
1665. Phil. Trans., I. 111. Of Fossile wood and Coals.
c. 1680. Enquiries, 2/1. Is there any … Amianthus, Fossile teeth, or any kind of Ore unknown to you?
1695. Woodward, Nat. Hist. Earth, VI. (1702), 251. The fossil Shells are many of them of the same Kinds with those that now appear, if not on the neighbouring, upon remoter Shores.
1753. Chambers, Cycl., Suppl. s.v. Ivory, Fossile Ivory.
1754. Phil. Trans., XLVIII. 801. It is not only considerably lighter than any fossile petrifaction, but much more so than many animal.
1758. Fothergill, ibid., L. 688. The fossill Bones of an Alligator found on the Sea-shore, near Whitby.
1802. Playfair, Illustr. Hutton. Th., 196. This is true likewise of the fossil-pitch of Coal-Brookdale.
1850. Lyell, 2nd Visit U. S., II. xxx. 177. Bartram, in his travels in 1777, discovered there the existence of a fossil forest at the base of the tall cliff.
1875. Maskell, Ivories, 2. There is still another kind of real ivory—the fossil ivory—which is now extensively used in many countries, although it may be difficult to decide whether it was known to the ancients or to mediæval carvers.
1880. Haughton, Phys. Geog., vi. 264. Æpyornidæ. Recently extinct in Madagascar, of gigantic size; its fossil eggs are estimated at twenty-four pounds weight each, or eight times the bulk of those of the Ostrich, and are supposed to be the Roc’s Egg of the Arabian fables.
1882. Cassell, Fossil-screws, a popular name for the casts in the rock left by spiral shells, or for those of encrinites when their impressions are horizontally furrowed.
fig. 1841–4. Emerson, Ess., Poet, Wks. (Bohn), I. 162. Language is fossil poetry.
1849. Robertson, Serm., Ser. I. xii. (1866), 206. Words are fossil thoughts.
1877. E. R. Conder, The Basis of Faith, i. 34. In southern Africa, among tribes that had lost, to all appearance, every vestige of religious belief, Dr. Moffatt discovered, in the etymology of a word which had ceased to convey any distinct meaning, the fossil impression of a dead faith (once living) in ‘One above.’
b. Used in names of certain mineral substances fancifully considered to resemble organic products, as fossil copal, cork, farina: see the sbs.; fossil flax, paper, wood, wool, varieties of asbestos; fossil flour, meal, ? = fossil farina.
1859. Page, Handbk. Geol. Terms, Fossil-Paper, Fossil-Wool.
1882. Cassell, Fossil-flour. Ibid., Fossil-wood.
1882. Ogilvie, Fossil-flax.
1883. Cassell’s Fam. Mag., Dec., 62/2. ‘Fossil meal’ is the name given to a composition … used for coating steam pipes and boilers.
3. Applied contemptuously to persons, ideas, etc.: Belonging to the past, out of date; ‘petrified,’ incapable of growth or progress.
1859. T. Parker, in J. Weiss, Life (1863), II. 103. It [Rome] is a fossil city—the Pope is a fossil ruler, pre-mediæval.
1894. Ld. Rosebery, in Westm. Gaz., 22 March, 5/2. Those fossil politicians—for there is a fossil Radicalism as well as a fossil Toryism.
B. sb. † 1. In early use: Any rock, mineral, or mineral substance dug out of the earth. Obs.
1619. H. Hutton, Follie’s Anat. (Percy Soc.), 23.
| So that he seemes as if black Vulcans art | |
| Of diverse fossiles had compil’d each part. |
1665–6. Phil. Trans., I. 111. Of some Fossils as Sand, Gravel, Earths.
1744. Berkeley, Siris, § 23. It’s [sic] being dug out of the earth shews it [amber] to be a fossil, though of a very different kind from other fossils.
1799. Scotl. Descr. (ed. 2), 15. In the bowels of the earth, this territory contains an infinite diversity of MINERALS and other FOSSILS.
1807. Headrick, View Min. etc. Arran, 58. On the northern declivity saw many masses of pitchstone; though I could not find any solid rock of that fossil.
1814. trans. Klaproth’s Trav., 382. Though the chief mass of this porphyry seems in a mineralogical point of view to be a distinct fossil from basalt, it is nevertheless very nearly allied to the latter, and composes one formation with the basaltic porphyry proper, into the principal mass of which it not unfrequently changes.
† b. A fossil fish: see A. 1 b. Obs.
1569. E. Fenton, Secr. Nat., 50 b. The auncient Philosophers affirme, that there haue bene founde fishes vnder the earth, who (for that cause) they called Focilles.
c. humorously. Something dug out of the earth.
1855. Lady Holland, Mem. Syd. Smith, I. 429. ‘Ah, you always detect a little of the Irish fossil, the potato, peeping out in an Irishman.’
2. Now only in restricted sense: Anything found in the strata of the earth, which is recognizable as the remains of a plant or animal of a former geological period, or as showing vestiges of the animal or vegetable life of such a period.
[1707. Curios. in Husb. & Gard., 296. When a Plant petrifies, it degenerates by degrading it self to the Rank of Fossiles.]
1736. P. Collinson, in Darlington, Mem. of Bartram (1849), 73. Most things were made for the use and pleasure of mankind; others, to raise our admiration and astonishment; as, in particular, what are called fossils,—being stones, found all the world over, that have either the impressions, or else the regular form of shells, leaves, fishes, fungi, teeth, sea-eggs, and many other productions.
1774. Goldsm., Nat. Hist. (1776), I. 26. These shells and extraneous fossils are not productions of the earth, but are all actual remains of those animals which they are known to resemble.
1831. Brewster, Newton (1855), II. xvi. 100. He regarded fossils as the real remains of plants and animals which had been buried in the strata.
3. fig. Something ‘petrified,’ that has lost its vitality or capacity for growth or progress. Also, contemptuously applied to a person of antiquated notions or habits.
1844. Emerson, Lect. Yng. Amer., Wks. (Bohn), II. 300. Government has been a fossil; it should be a plant.
1857. C. Brontë, Professor, iv. When a man endures patiently what ought to be unendurable he is a fossil.
4. attrib. and Comb., attributive or similative, as fossil-like adj.; objective, as fossil-bearing adj.; fossil-botanist, one skilled in fossil-botany, the study of fossil plants; fossil-ore (see quot.).
1886. A. Winchell, Walks & Talks Geol. Field, 195. We find in these lowest, *fossil-bearing strata, remains of several types of animals appearing to our knowledge for the first time.
1830. H. Miller, Footpr. Creat., x. (1874), 183. The *fossil botanist who devoted himself chiefly to the study of microscopic structure would have to decide, from the facts of the case, not that trees were absent during the Carboniferous period, but that, in consequence of their having been present in amazing numbers, their remains had entered more palpably and extensively into the composition of coal than those of any other vegetable.
1882. Cassell, *Fossil-botany.
1874. Sayce, Compar. Philol., i. 61. Long-forgotten strata of society which our *fossil-like records reveal to us.
1881. Raymond, Mining Gloss., *Fossil ore. Fossiliferous red hematite.
Hence † Fossilry, ? a collection of fossils.
1755. Gentl. Mag., XXV. Dec., 567. Verses occasion’d by seeing the Fossilry at Tenderves in Cornwall.
