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The act of constituting or investing with a new character; appointment; formation. An Irish peer of recent creation. Landor.

Having the qualities of chalk;abounding with chalk; chalky; as, cretaceous rocks and formations. See Chalk. Cretaceous acid, an old name for carbonic acid. -- Cretaceous formation (Geol.), the series of strata of various kinds, including beds of chalk, green sand, etc., formed in the Cretaceous period; -- called also…

Relating to or resembling croup; especially, attended with the formation of a deposit or membrance like that found in membranous croup; as, croupous laryngitis. Croupous pneumonia, pneumonia attended with deposition of fibrinous matter in the air vesicles of the lungs; ordinary acute pneumonia.

One who describes crystals, or the manner of their formation; one versed in crystallography.

ation, teaching the system of forms among crystals, their structure, and their methods of formation.

to inquire, investigate, or seek after knowledge; a desire to gratify the mind with new information or objects of interest; inquisitiveness. Milton.

A disease in which the body is colored blue in its surface, arising usually from a malformation of the heart, which causes an imperfect arterialization of the blood; blue jaundice.

sciences); circle of human knowledge. Hence, a work containing, in alphabetical order, information in all departments of knowledge, or on a particular department or branch; as, a cyclopedia of the physical sciences, or of mechanics. See Encyclopedia.

A subdivision at the base of the cretaceous formation in Western North America; -- so named from the region where the strata were first studied.

the body as a whole. Degradation of energy, or Dissipation of energy (Physics), the transformation of energy into some form in which it is less available for doing work.

Formation and separation of laminæ or layers; one of the methods by which the various blastodermic layers of the ovum are differentiated.

The formation of a delta or of deltas. [R.]

Formation of teeth; toothed form. [R.] How did it [a bill] get its barb, its dentation Paley.

The change of vapor into water, as in the formation of rain.

onversion of molten glassy matter into a stony mass by slow cooling, the result being the formation of crystallites, microbites, etc., in the glassy base, which are then called devitrification products.

an; -- called also the Age of fishes. The various strata of this age compose the Devonian formation or system, and include the old red sandstone of Great Britain. They contain, besides plants and numerous invertebrates, the bony portions of many large and remarkable fishes of extinct groups. See the Diagram under Geolo…

l division, the loops of the nuclear network separate into two groups, preparatory to the formation of two daughter nuclei. See Karyokinesis.

The gradual formation or production of organs or parts by a process of evolution or development, as when the seed develops the root and the stem, the initial stem develops the leaf, branches, and flower buds; or in animal life, when the germ evolves the digestive and other organs and members, or when the animals as the…

, in all directions; to spread; to circulate; to disseminate; to scatter; as to diffuse information. Thence diffuse His good to worlds and ages infinite. Milton. We find this knowledge diffused among all civilized nations. Whewell.

To finger; as, to digitize a pen. [R.] Sir T. Browne. computers to convert (information, a signal, an image) into a form expressible in binary notation