quinarianadj.n.

1765 J. Elphinston Princ. Eng. Lang. Digested II. 341 We see that english heroic verse is quinarian or pentameter iambic, that is, iambic of five feet.

1835 Penny Cycl. IV. 431/2 In 1831 William Swainson, Esq., rejecting the quinarian theory..which he had adopted in the year 1824, proposed..a new arrangement [of birds].

1845 R. Chambers Vestiges Nat. Hist. Creation (ed. 3) 246 The quinarian part of the theory.

1865 Athenæum No. 1953. 460/2 The circular quinarian system of nature.

1992 A. L. Panchen Classification, Evol., & Nature of Biol. ii. 29 It has been suggested..that Darwin's barnacle work was undertaken at least in part to refute MacLeay's quinarian system which he would have seen as anti-evolutionary.

2000 Osiris 15 90 Richardson entrusted his biological specimens to another philosophical naturalist, the quinarian taxonomist William Swainson.

1836 N. Wood Ornithologist's Text-bk. 23 Rennie gathers that the Quinarians suppose a stone to improve itself into an oak, and a horse into a man, &c., from the simple expression of one group leading through another, and passing into a third.

1851 S. P. Woodward Man. Mollusca i. 58 The quinarians make out five molluscous classes, by excluding the tunicata.

1907 Science 18 Oct. 501/2 For a time (1822–42) the school of quinarians, as they were called, claimed most of the naturalists of Britain.

1977 Isis 68 496/2 Huxley, under the influence of the quinarian MacLeay, insisted upon an array of formal analogies and affinities to bind the Radiata together.

1990 C. G. Sibley & J. E. Ahlquist Phylogeny & Classif. Birds xiv. 185 The search for a theoretical framework for classification led a few ornithologists of the early nineteenth century to embrace the mystical nonsense of the Quinarians.

1850 T. H. Huxley in Ann. & Mag. Nat. Hist. 6 67 There is a great law hidden in the ‘Circular system’ if one could but get at it, perhaps in Quinarianism too.

1935 Amer. Lit. 7 268 Audubon counted among his friends the Englishman, William Swainson, who advocated Quinarianism, or the doctrine of the esoteric significance of the recurrence of the number five in nature.

1982 E. Mayr Growth of Biol. Thought i. 12 Macleay's and Swainson's quinarianism, for instance, which was totally eclipsed by the Origin of Species, represented a sincere endeavor to reconcile the seeming chaotic diversity of nature with the then prevailing conviction that there had to be some ‘higher’ order in nature.