"Amphibian" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... exceedingly well are not those who have taken courses in the theory of swimming at natatoriums, from professors of the amphibian art—they were just boys who jumped into the ol' swimmin' hole, and came home with shirts on wrong-side out and a tell-tale ...
— Love, Life & Work • Elbert Hubbard
... an amphibian, found only in cold waters. A few pelts are obtained along the Greenland coast, but the chief sealing-grounds of the world have been at the Pribilof Islands, in Bering Sea. The pelts of the young males only ...
— Commercial Geography - A Book for High Schools, Commercial Courses, and Business Colleges • Jacques W. Redway
... tragedy, in which, for millions upon millions of years the sole actors are low and all but brainless forms of life, devouring and devoured, in the old seas. We see, during other millions upon millions of years, a savage carnival of huge bestial forms upon the land, amphibian monsters and dragons of the land and air, devouring and being devoured, a riot of blood and carnage. We see the shifting of land and sea, the folding and crumpling of the earth's crust, the rise of mountains, the engulfing of forests, ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... amazing rapidity of the same. Indeed, Miss Carmichael talked so fast that Emily got but a blurred impression of her surroundings, carrying away a dazed consciousness that the contents of certain jars to the right and left of the lady were amphibian in their nature, and that certain other objects in skin leering down from dusty shelves were there because of saurian claims. And because man is a vertebrate, having an internal, jointed, bony skeleton, man stood in a glass case behind ...
— Emmy Lou - Her Book and Heart • George Madden Martin
... an elephant ford. Never pausing the ape-man urged the beast into the river, and with trunk held high Tantor forged steadily toward the opposite bank. Once an unwary crocodile attacked him but the sinuous trunk dove beneath the surface and grasping the amphibian about the middle dragged it to light and hurled it a hundred feet down stream. And so, in safety, they made the opposite shore, Korak perched high and dry above ...
— The Son of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... was the time of the establishment of flowering plants upon the earth and of terrestrial backboned animals. One would like to have been the discoverer of the Devonian foot-print of Thinopus, the first known Amphibian foot-print—an eloquent vestige of the third great invasion of the dry land. It was probably from a stock of Devonian lung-fishes that the first Amphibians sprang, but it was not till the next period that they came to their own. While they were still feeling their ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... my Redfins were fish, but mentally they had advanced a little beyond the usual tadpole train of reactions, reaching forward toward the varied activities of the future amphibian. One noticeable thing was their segregation, whether in the mica pools, or in two other smaller ones near by, in which I found them. Each held a pure culture of Redfins, and I found that this was no accident, ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... Aeronautics and nautics are an effort toward angelhood. Men can walk water who are willing to take a boat for an overshoe. So we may air when we get the right shoe. Browning gives us a delicious sense of being amphibian as we swim. And the butterfly, that winged rather than rooted flower, looking down upon us as we float, begets in us a great longing to be polyphibian. We have innate tendencies toward a life of finer surroundings, and ...
— Among the Forces • Henry White Warren
... the young amphibian ranges the waters, the terror of his insect contemporaries, not only are the nutritious particles supplied by its prey, by the addition of which to its frame, growth takes place, laid down, each in its proper spot, and in such due proportion to the ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... everything she meets: now she looks as though she would grind to bits the salambaw, insecure fishing apparatus which in their movements resemble skeletons of giants saluting an antediluvian tortoise; now she speeds straight toward the clumps of bamboo or against the amphibian structures, karihan, or wayside lunch-stands, which, amid gumamelas and other flowers, look like indecisive bathers who with their feet already in the water cannot bring themselves to make the final plunge; at times, following a sort of channel marked out in ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal
... Lake planned an excursion on the bottom of the sea for October 12, 1898. His strange amphibian craft, the Argonaut, about which we had been hearing so many marvels, lay off the pier at Atlantic Highlands. Before we were near enough to make out her hulk, we saw a great black letter A, framed ...
— Aircraft and Submarines - The Story of the Invention, Development, and Present-Day - Uses of War's Newest Weapons • Willis J. Abbot
... tolerably well acquainted with a considerable number of forms. All of them seem to have belonged to the division of Amphibians in which the long tail of the young is permanently retained; and there is evidence that some of them kept the gills also throughout life. The skull is of the characteristic Amphibian type (fig. 132, a), with two occipital condyles, and having its surface singularly pitted and sculptured; and the vertebrae are hollowed out at both ends. The lower surface of the body was defended by an armour of singular integumentary shields or scales (fig. 132, c); and an extremely characteristic ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... instance at least, to have hit upon the root-idea of the biogenetic law, but he was far from appreciating its significance. He recognised that an amphibian in its development passed through a stage when it was in all essentials similar to a fish, and he saw in this visible transformation a picture of the evolutionary transformation. "An amphibian," he writes,[106] "is at first a fish under ...
— Form and Function - A Contribution to the History of Animal Morphology • E. S. (Edward Stuart) Russell
... this respect the normal digits and limbs in the lower vertebrate classes. They also resemble the digits of some of the lower animals in the number exceeding five; for no mammal, bird, existing reptile, or amphibian (unless the tubercle on the hind feet of the toad and other tailless Batrachians be viewed as a digit) has more than five; whilst fishes sometimes have in their pectoral fins as many as twenty metacarpal and ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... after a moment, recollects the historical proprieties, and mutters to herself, apologetically, 'No, not tobacco; that's not yet invented.' A would-be silurian or triassic toad ought, in like manner, to remember that in the ages to whose honours he aspires his own amphibian kind was not yet developed. He ought rather to come out in the character of a ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... first, time to look at the boats lying on Bagley's wharf, their ominous porpoise-like appearance gave me a peculiar sensation. I had expected rough-water, but this was the first understanding I had that the journey was to be more or less amphibian. On a day when the waves on Lake Michigan were running high we took them out for trial. The crews were filled out by Bagley's men, our party not all being present, and with some reporters and a cargo of champagne and cigars our course was laid for the open sea. The action of the boats ...
— The Romance of the Colorado River • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... marsupial animal [usually provided with a pouch for the reception and nourishment of the young, as in the case of the kangaroo] and this through a long line of diversified forms, from some reptile-like or some amphibian-like creature, and this again from some fish-like animal. In the dim obscurity of the past we can see that the early progenitor of all the Vertebrata must have been an aquatic animal, provided with branchiae [gills], with the two sexes united in the same individual, ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - The Naturalist as Interpreter and Seer • Various
... token; and as it is not mentioned, to my knowledge, by the poets and writers of other lands, I am ready to believe it is characteristic of our season alone. You may be sure April has really come when this little amphibian creeps out of the mud and inflates its throat. We talk of the bird inflating its throat, but you should see this tiny minstrel inflate its throat, which becomes like a large bubble, and suggests a drummer- boy with his drum ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... wide frontier of salt marshes, that witness the border warfare of land and sea, alternate invasion and retreat. In low-shored estuaries like those of northern Brittany and northwestern Alaska, this amphibian girdle of the land expands to a width of four miles, while on precipitous coasts of tideless sea basins it contracts to a few inches. Hence this boundary zone changes with every impulse of the mobile sea and ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple |
