Not until after they had passed beyond the best work of the First Men in science and philosophy did the Second Men discover the remains of the great stone library in Siberia. A party of engineers happened upon it while they were preparing to sink a shaft for subterranean energy. The tablets were broken, disordered, weathered. Little by little, however, they were reconstructed and interpreted, with the aid of the pictorial dictionary. The finds were of extreme interest to the Second Men, but not in the manner which the Siberian party had intended, not as a store of scientific and philosophic truth, but as a vivid historical document. The view of the universe which the tablets recorded was both too naïve and too artificial; but the insight which they afforded into the mind of the earlier species was invaluable. So little of the old world had survived the volcanic epoch that the Second Men had failed hitherto to get a clear picture of their predecessors.

From this standpoint history can be divided into two main epochs.

That was the happiest epoch of my life.

This picturesque legend tells us that in the early days of the Christian epoch the city of Ys, or Ker-is, was ruled by a prince called Gradlon, surnamed Meur, which in Celtic means ‘the Great.’

What characterizes our epoch is the fear of being considered stupid when praising, and the certainty of being considered clever when faulting.

The age of chivalry is the favourite epoch of the romantics.

The fall of the Berlin Wall was really an epochal event.

There have always been fashionable faces and expressions which marked an epoch.

His description of that epoch is fascinating.

Pope Francis has told the world's oil executives that a transition to less-polluting energy sources "is a challenge of epochal proportions."