Definitions
from The Century Dictionary.
- Formerly, as in Cuvier's system of classification, an order of reptiles, containing the frogs, toads, newts, salamanders, etc., and coextensive with the modern class Amphibia; the amphibians, or those vertebrates which breathe at first by gills, and then, generally, lose the gills and breathe by lungs.
- Now, an order of Amphibia, synonymous with Anura (which see), containing the frogs and toads only, or those amphibians which lose the tail as well as the gills.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun plural (Zoöl.) The order of amphibians which includes the frogs and toads; the Anura. Sometimes the word is used in a wider sense as equivalent to Amphibia.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun frogs, toads, tree toads
Etymologies
Sorry, no etymologies found.
Support
Help support Wordnik (and make this page ad-free) by adopting the word batrachia.
Examples
-
Take, for instance, batrachia: they are as heavy, clumsy, and slow in their movements as they are unintelligent, and at the same time extremely tenacious of life.
-
Take, for example, batrachia: they are slow, cumbrous and sluggish in their movements; they are unintelligent, and, at the same time, extremely tenacious of life; the reason of which is that, with a very small brain, their spine and nerves are very thick.
-
Page 334 esthetically, intellectually, and as a mold of form one of the very lowest of the low order of batrachia, will eat his fill of leaden shot, when thrown to him one by one, until by excess of artificial weight he is utterly unable to move.
Recollections and reflections : an auto of half a century and more,
-
The brain and nervous system display the same progressive ascent from the brainless acrania, up through the fishes, batrachia, reptiles, and birds to the top in mammals.
-
He feels after his pocket instinctively while yet in what corresponds in the _genus homo_ with the polywog state in batrachia.
-
Accipenser and Ceratodus, and also the salamanders and batrachia, belong to the old, conservative groups of our stem.
-
They all contain indigenous mammalia or batrachia, and generally a much greater variety of birds, reptiles, insects, and plants, than do the oceanic islands.
-
In his _Origin of Species_, Darwin further showed that no true oceanic island had any native mammals or batrachia when first discovered, this fact constituting the test of the class to which an island belongs; whence he argued that none of them had ever been connected with continents, but all had originated in mid-ocean.
-
The latter difficulty applies especially to the lizard tribe, which are found in almost all the tropical oceanic islands; but the particular mode in which they are able to traverse a wide expanse of ocean, which is a perfect barrier to batrachia and almost so to snakes, has not yet been discovered.
-
Oceanic animals, colours of, 193 and continental areas, 346 islands have no mammals or batrachia, 342
Comments
Log in or sign up to get involved in the conversation. It's quick and easy.