1926 W. S. Cooper & A. O. Weese in Ecology 7 390 In order..to provide terms which shall be applicable to both plants and animals, we suggest that the adjectives ‘xerophytic’, ‘hydrophytic’ and ‘mesophytic’ be entirely abandoned as useless and misleading. In their place we offer the terms ‘xeric’, ‘hydric’ and ‘mesic’, to be defined as follows: Xeric (hydric, mesic): characterized by or pertaining to conditions of scanty (abundant, medium) moisture supply.

1967 M. E. Hale Biol. Lichens vii. 91 The curves of frequency show the relative abundance of lichens in oak-dominated woods and their rarity..in mesic climax forests.

1974 Environmental Conservation 1 60/1 A small tracked vehicle..was employed to establish a series of repetitive passes in a level mesic ‘meadow’.

1996 Nature 4 July 21/3 Pollen from these Beringian bottom peats matches pollen from modern mesic tundras of Arctic Alaska.

1939 Physica 6 877 ‘Mesic’ charges.

1956 S. Tolansky Introd. Atomic Physics (ed. 4) xix. 328 Since mesons only exist virtually within unexcited nuclei and are only made free to exist alone by collision processes, there are no mesic atoms in normal unexcited materials.

1972 Physics Bull. Mar. 148/2 The meson then cascades down first by Auger transitions and, as it reaches lower orbits, increasingly by radiative transitions, emitting mesic x rays.

1995 Jrnl. Physics B 28 l255 In the process of the mesic atoms' formation, a muon is usually initially captured into a highly excited orbit, from which transitions..drive it towards the lower levels.