"Cranium" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... hideous object to look upon. He was some twenty-five years of age, and about six feet in height, robust and well made, and of the most extraordinary aspect. His head was carefully shaven with the exception of two circular spots, about the size of a dollar, near the top of the cranium, where the hair, permitted to grow of an amazing length, was twisted up in two prominent knots, that gave him the appearance of being decorated with a pair of horns. His beard, plucked out by the root from every other part of his face, was suffered to droop in hairy ...
— Typee - A Romance of the South Sea • Herman Melville
... outlines of the adult female cranium are intermediate between those of the child and the adult man; they are softer, more graceful and delicate, and the apophyses and ridges for the attachment of muscles are less pronounced,... the forehead ...
— Sex and Society • William I. Thomas
... of red hair stood on the dressing-table, and Mrs. Sharpe's cranium was adorned with a respectable growth of ...
— The Unseen Bridgegroom - or, Wedded For a Week • May Agnes Fleming
... pursuer should vanish, according to rule, in a flash of fire and brimstone. Just then he saw the goblin rising in his stirrups, and in the very act of hurling his head at him. Ichabod endeavored to dodge the horrible missile, but too late. It encountered 10 his cranium with a tremendous crash. He was tumbled headlong into the dust, and Gunpowder, the black steed, and the goblin rider passed by ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... happened often that the poor animal's legs do their duty so badly that he falls and causes his rider to be trodden into a mummy; or, losing his presence of mind, the rider may allow the horse to dash under a tree and crack his cranium against a branch. As one charge from an elephant has made embryo Nimrods bid a final adieu to the chase, incipient Gordon Cummings might try their nerves by standing on railways till the engines were within a few yards of them. ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... was driving the mules attached to the fieldpiece, turned his head, and saw what was going on. In a trice he snatched up another rammer, and, without any warning, came crack over the fellow's cranium to whom we had been speaking, as hard as he could draw, making ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... downtown. He responded to my real mental and emotional state, responded against his will many times; and I did not know it. I supposed him perverse and impossible of pleasing. I knew I had tried my best (according to my lights, which it had not occurred to me to doubt), but it never entered my cranium that he had tried, too. I looked upon the outward appearance—my immaculate appearance, met by fault-finding or indifference ...
— Happiness and Marriage • Elizabeth (Jones) Towne
... nerves, which convey impulses outward to the muscles and cause them to contract. There are also twelve pairs of nerves connected with the eye, ear, nose, tongue, and face, which, instead of projecting from the spinal cord, proceed at once from the brain through openings in the cranium. These are, therefore, known as cerebral nerves. In their general character, however, they do not differ from ...
— Ontario Normal School Manuals: Science of Education • Ontario Ministry of Education
... was rather a greater man than even reform mayors generally fancy themselves. He was at that state of development in the lives of aspiring persons which compels the average spectator to debate whether the swelling of the cranium should be met by a larger hat-band or by a sweeping haircut. En passant, Addicks' Panama had had its fifth enlargement to accommodate the ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... calm is awful. His voice begins to grow strange and portentous. He feels it in him like something swallowed too big for the esophagus. It keeps up a sort of involuntary interior humming in him, like a live beetle. His cranium is a dome full of reverberations. The hollows of his very bones are as whispering galleries. He is afraid to speak loud, lest he be stunned; like the man in the ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. I (of 2) • Herman Melville
... of his big dynamo, and expatiated upon its size and power to Azuma-zi until heaven knows what odd currents of thought that and the incessant whirling and shindy set up within the curly black cranium. He would explain in the most graphic manner the dozen or so ways in which a man might be killed by it, and once he gave Azuma-zi a shock as a sample of its quality. After that, in the breathing-times of his labour—it was heavy labour, ...
— The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... late. In the quarter of an hour between six o'clock and a quarter past, Sophia suffered the supreme pangs of despair and verged upon insanity. It appeared to her that her cranium would blow off under pressure from within. Then the door opened silently, a few inches. Usually Jacqueline came into the room, but sometimes she stood behind the door and called in her soft, trembling voice, "Fossette! Fossette!" ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... costard (Contemptuous), noddle, pate. Associated Words: phrenology, phrenologist, craniology, craniologist, cephalology, sinciput, occiput, cephalism, behead, decapitate, decapitation, capitation, vertex, crown, skull, cranium, fontanel, trepan, coronal, microcephaly, craniometry, macrocephaly, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... name invented by Haeckel for the "missing link," and given by Dr. Eugene Du Bois, a Dutch physician, to certain remains discovered by him on the island of Java in 1891. The remains consist of "an imperfect cranium, a femur bearing evidence of prolonged disease, and a molar tooth." (Dana, "Manual of Geology," p. 1036.) The discoverer of these bones believed that they are the remains of a being between the man-apes and ...
— Evolution - An Investigation and a Critique • Theodore Graebner
... my stomach I felt a cold, hard knot. Take stainless steel alloyed with titanium and plate it with three inches of lead. Take a brain made up of super-charged magnetic crystals enclosed in a leaden cranium and shielded by alloy steel. A bullet wouldn't pierce it; radiations wouldn't derange it; an ...
— Robots of the World! Arise! • Mari Wolf
... was far from having attained the national fame which he has now achieved. He was a young but trusted member of the detective force, who had distinguished himself in several cases which had been intrusted to him. His tall, bony figure gave promise of exceptional physical strength, while his great cranium and deep-set, lustrous eyes spoke no less clearly of the keen intelligence which twinkled out from behind his bushy eyebrows. He was a silent, precise man with a dour nature and ...
— The Valley of Fear • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... small things constitute a faithful type of greater things." Another instance is afforded in the grand intuition of Oken, who, when rambling in the Hartz Mountains, lit upon the skull of a deer, and saw that the cranium was but an expansion of vertebrae, and that the vertebra is the theoretical archetype of the entire osseous framework,—the foundation of modern Osteology. And still another is the well-known instance of the change in polarization predicted by Fresnel from the mere ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 30, April, 1860 • Various
... In this case I open the cranium and remove the brain and medulla oblongata. . . . I thrust a pin through the nose and hang the animal thereby to a support, so that it can move its pendent legs without any difficulty. . . . I gently pinch the toes. . . . The leg of the same side is pulled up. . . . I pinch ...
— Ponkapog Papers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... into my head, caput, cranium, that I will read Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and as the only copy here is too poorly printed to read, and furthermore as I wish to own said work myself, I would that you make purchase of same and send it to ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... stove in. He fell out iv th' window iv a joolry store he was burglarizin' an' broke th' left junction iv th' sizjymoid cartilage. Th' throuble with th' Cap'n is he dhrinks too much. A man iv his age who has been a soak all his life always succumbs to anny throuble like hyperthroopily iv th' cranium. Docthor Muggers, dean iv th' Post Gradyate Vethrinary school iv Osteopathy says he had a similar case las' year in Mr. Hinnery Haitch Clohessy, wan iv th' best known citizens iv this city. Like th' Cap, Mr. Clohessy was a high liver, ...
— Observations by Mr. Dooley • Finley Peter Dunne
... overhear men whisper to each other in the street as he passed: 'See that extraordinary thought blazing away there in that fellow's brain?' It was, in fact, curious to him that people did not stop and gaze at his cranium, so much the thing felt like a hollowed turnip illuminated by this candle of an idea. But nobody with whom he came into contact appeared to be aware of the immense success of Love in Babylon. In the office of Powells were seven full-fledged solicitors and seventeen other clerks, without ...
— A Great Man - A Frolic • Arnold Bennett
... I joined the ranks of temperance workers in 1874, a thought so adventurous as that alcoholics in relation to medicine were a curse and not a blessing had never lodged within my cranium. But, as in duty bound, I studied the subject from the practical, which is the nineteenth ...
— Alcohol: A Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine, How and Why - What Medical Writers Say • Martha M. Allen
... that wild-cat girl altogether chimerical, then? Present appearances would indicate them not to have been altogether groundless; but really, when the fair Mary fled so precipitately, the idea of making Winnie Morris his bride had never entered her brother's cranium. He had regarded her as a pretty child, and delighted in her sunshiny, buoyant spirit, and felt he would like to keep her near to cheer and enliven his mansion; but from the moment he saw her presiding with ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... variations among themselves. The skulls figured by A and B are respectively brachycephalic and dolichocephalic. The former has an internal capacity of 1,400, the latter 1,214 cubic centimeters; but the facial angle of each is 80 deg., and in one Eskimo cranium it runs up to 84 deg.. If the facial angle be trustworthy, as a measure of the degree of intelligence, we have shown here a development far in excess of the negro, which is placed at 70 deg., or of the Mongolian at 75 deg., and exceeding that observed by me in many ...
— The First Landing on Wrangel Island - With Some Remarks on the Northern Inhabitants • Irving C. Rosse
... his face lighted with a smile that had in it something more than a conventional civility. I felt that there was a soul beneath that dignified and courtly exterior. His head displayed great elevation of the cranium, and unusual breadth of forehead. It was what is called an intellectual head; and the lines around the eyes showed the traces of thought, and, as it seemed to me, a tinge of that sadness that nearly always lends its ...
— California Sketches, Second Series • O. P. Fitzgerald
... caves spaded and hammered, to find relics of old, pre-historical races. Go to Labrador, and you find the object sought above ground. There he is, preserving all the characters of his extinct congeners,—small in stature, low and smooth in cranium, held utterly in the meshes of Nature, skilled only to meet ingeniously the necessities she imposes, and meeting them rudely, as man ever does till the ideal element comes in: for any fine feeling of even physical wants, any delicacy of taste, any high notion of comfort, is due less to the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 90, April, 1865 • Various
... borne in mind, that I have not here spoken of their personal appearance. That that generally is against them, cannot be doubted. If there is any truth in phrenology, they must have their share of the brutal passions. The whole appearance of the cranium indeed, would lead to the conclusion that they possess few of the intellectual faculties; but, in a savage state, these are seldom called forth. They are, nevertheless, capable of strong attachment, are indulgent parents, ...
— Expedition into Central Australia • Charles Sturt
... not the 'way of all beavers'—into the water—but to cover the cranium of the owner of this wretched 'tile;' and in vain shall I seek it; for 'this' and 'that' are now certainly as far as ...
— The Sketches of Seymour (Illustrated), Complete • Robert Seymour
... went in small amounts—$10 and $25 and $50, and a good many $2 and $3 lots. And the bald and inviolate cranium of President Atterbury shines with enthusiasm and demerit, while Colonel Tecumseh Pickens, the rude but reputable Croesus of the West, consumes so many apples that the peelings hang to the floor from the mahogany garbage chest ...
— The Gentle Grafter • O. Henry
... bowed and spoke to a waiting orderly. The prostrate figure of Karuska was wheeled down a corridor into the electrical laboratory, and with the aid of the laboratory technician the surgeon made his preparations. The Moss lamp was arranged to throw a flood of ultra-violet over the Russian's cranium while the leads from a deep therapy X-ray tube was connected, one to the front of Karuska's throat and the other to the base of his brain. At a signal from the major, a nurse began ...
— Astounding Stories, February, 1931 • Various
... the top of his head, brains and all. Opposite to this great man, in an attitude of profound humility, stood his liveried servant—a very gentlemanly-looking person, with an intellectual baldness covering the entire top of his cranium. This deferential individual wore a coat beautifully variegated before and behind with gold lace; a pair of plush knee-breeches, white stockings, and white kid gloves; and was continually engaged in bowing to the great man, and otherwise ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... structure of the skull. These anthropoids are much more intelligent than the lower forms, which is a correlate of their larger and more convoluted brains. The increase in the total bulk of the brain has wrought considerable change, not only in the head, but also in the relation of head to the trunk. The cranium, or brain-case of bone, is relatively larger than the "face," and it bulges upward so as to lie no longer behind the latter as it does in the lower mammalia. In consequence of this cranial enlargement, the face and eyes are swung downward, as it were, so that the line of vision is not ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... Listerism would have been looked upon as almost tantamount to the patient's death-warrant. More particularly is this the case as to operations which involve opening into the abdomen, the chest, or the cranium. So little risk now attaches to such operations, properly performed, that the opening of the abdominal cavity for the mere purpose of ascertaining the condition of its contents—"exploratory laparotomy," ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord
... for the theories of causation. Atkinson, De Luna, and Keller report intrauterine fractures of the clavicle. Filippi contributes an extensive paper on the medicolegal aspect of a case of intrauterine fracture of the os cranium. Braun of Vienna reports a case of intrauterine fracture of the humerus and femur. Rodrigue describes a case of fracture and dislocation of the humerus of a fetus in utero. Gaultier reports an instance of fracture of both femora intrauterine. Stanley, Vanderveer, and Young cite instances ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... the great man was all but a negro in color. It was equally clear, however, from an examination of his mammoth cranium and extraordinary expression, that he was as highly developed along most mental lines as the greatest men on earth. It was the back of his head, however, so flat that it was only a continuation of his neck, or, rather, shoulders, that ...
— The Lord of Death and the Queen of Life • Homer Eon Flint
... and applied a poultice to his head, declaring, that he had no fever, nor any other bad symptom but the loss of speech, if he really had lost that faculty. But the young 'squire said this practitioner was an ignorantaccio, that there was a fracture in the cranium, and that there was a necessity for having him trepanned without loss of time. His mother, espousing this opinion, had sent an express to York for a surgeon to perform the operation, and he was already come with his 'prentice and instruments. ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... discoverer of hidden retreats, for never will you come upon a place more obviously disconcerted at being found out. The screams of the whistle day by day have inserted no modern ideas into this mountain-cranium, which, like Lord John Russell's, must be trepanned before it can be enlightened. The Glades are sacred to deer, bears, trout. But the fatal rails guide to them an unceasing procession of staring citizens, and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various
... and questions, "Who was your grandfather?" While Boston lifts her eye-glass, and, surveying our mental cranium, inquires, "What ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 4, Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 4, April, 1886 • Various
... to make a start. Godfrey felt the responsibility which rested on him, on him alone, for he could in no way depend on his companion. In that empty box which served the professor for a cranium there could be born no practical idea; Godfrey would have to think, ...
— Godfrey Morgan - A Californian Mystery • Jules Verne
... examples of Indian intelligence. If the higher traits popularly ascribed to the race are not to be found here, they are to be found nowhere. A palpable proof of the superiority of this stock is afforded in the size of the Iroquois and Huron brains. In average internal capacity of the cranium, they surpass, with few and doubtful exceptions, all other aborigines of North and South America, not excepting the civilized races ...
— The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century • Francis Parkman
... or disuse of parts. The cohesion of homologous parts. The variability of multiple parts. Compensation of growth; but of this law I have found no good instance in the case of man. The effects of the mechanical pressure of one part on another; as of the pelvis on the cranium of the infant in the womb. Arrests of development, leading to the diminution or suppression of parts. The reappearance of long-lost characters through reversion. And lastly, correlated variation. All these so-called laws ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... to do by slow degrees, a finger at a time, till the heavy work was supported only by the left and right forefingers, the rounded back exactly on the highest point of his cranium. ...
— Quicksilver - The Boy With No Skid To His Wheel • George Manville Fenn
... appears to be well developed, being rather high and arched, as compared with that of the average Bisya.[1] There is no flattening of the occiput. This roundness of the posterior part of the cranium, due, as Montano[2] states, to the prominence of the parietal bumps, becomes very apparent when comparison is made with the heads of Bisyas of other islands. The occipital arch of the latter is ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... considerably in size. I noted particularly that these variations bore no necessary relation to each other, so that a large temporal muscle and zygomatic aperture might exist either with a large or a small cranium; and thus was explained the curious difference between the single-crested and the double-crested skulls, which had been supposed to characterise distinct species. As an instance of the amount of variation in the skulls of fully adult male orangs, ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... under the microscope, as Dujardin, Brandt, Girard, Vogel, and other entomologists have done, the little uncouth and careworn head of the virgin worker side by side with the somewhat empty skull of the queen and the male's magnificent cranium, glistening with its twenty-six thousand eyes. Within this tiny head we should find the workings of the vastest and most magnificent brain of the hive: the most beautiful and complex, the most perfect, that, in another order and with a different organisation, is to be found ...
— The Life of the Bee • Maurice Maeterlinck
... instrumentality of the public school is another demonstration that the factors which form the significant characteristics in the lower animals possess but a minimum of significance to man,—that color, race, stature, and even brain weight and the shape of the cranium, have very little to do with human worth or human efficiency save ...
— Craftsmanship in Teaching • William Chandler Bagley
... up his head, howled a howl so full of hopeless, cruel yearning, so vibrant with desolation, that it sounded like the cry of a soul doomed forever to seek something it could never find. It was a lugubrious yowl there, in that setting, and it made one's scalp creep all over one's cranium. ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... beneath the shady trees by the Faky's grave, watching our passage of the Atbara. Beating his own head and tearing his hair were always the safety valves of Mahomet's rage, but as hair is not of that mushroom growth that reappears in a night, he had patches upon his cranium as bald as a pumpkin shell, from the constant plucking, attendant upon losses of temper; he now not only tore a few extra locks from his head, but he shouted out a tirade of abuse towards the far-distant Achmet, calling him a "son of ...
— The Nile Tributaries of Abyssinia • Samuel W. Baker
... battering-ram might have outweighed the damage it received in inflicting it. As it was, Peter—so Uncle Moses called the Sweep—was for one moment defenceless, being preoccupied in seizing his opponent by the ankles; and although his cranium had no sinuses, and was so thick it could crush a quart-pot like an opera-hat, it did not court a fourth double concussion, and this time he was destined to disappoint ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... short an' something that should've knocked my cranium down my windpipe missed me by inches. ...
— The Ambulance Made Two Trips • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... Madeleine was on the right of the countess, Jacques on her left. The graceful curly heads, between which rose the smooth braids of the mother, and above all three the perfectly white hair and yellow cranium of the father, made a picture which repeated, in some sort, the ideas aroused by the melody of the prayer. As if to fulfil all conditions of the unity which marks the sublime, this calm and collected group were bathed in the fading light of the setting sun; ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... polls in which the marksmen were interested had the Red Cross—a useful talisman—waving over them, the better to enable the gunners to devastate Kimberley with impunity. Whether this was true is not certain; at any rate, the finesse did not deceive; every cranium that loomed upon the horizon received a volley. Sometimes the gun would be fixed partially into position, and, as the bullets whistled by, lowered, jerked up again, and fired. Even these hide and seek tactics did not long nonplus the "snipers"; their adaptability was equal to the occasion. ...
— The Siege of Kimberley • T. Phelan
... the frame, wondering at the backbone, sixteen times stronger, it is said, than if the Creator had made it straight (why sixteen times exactly?). The metacarpals drove Bouvard crazy; and Pecuchet, who was in a desperate state over the cranium, lost courage before the sphenoid, although it resembles a ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert
... desirable to remark that the statements in this Essay respecting the forms of Native American crania need rectification. On this point, I refer the reader who is interested in the subject to my paper "On the Form of the Cranium among the Patagonians and the Fuegians" published in the Journal of Anatomy and ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... the bodily organization, such that in a given young animal or human form the developing effort ceases before completion of the full structure; the individual remaining without certain fingers or limbs, sometimes without cranium or proper brain. They name this result one of 'arrest of development.' Is it not barely possible that our studies and recitations are yet in general so mal-adapted to the habitudes of the tender brain ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... just the same thing! These two round balls were twins! There was even upon M. Batifol's cranium an eruption of little red pimples, grouped almost exactly like an ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... large-statured and complete; the framework and the form of the pelvis were masculine. The skin adhered to the cranium except behind, where the bone protruded, probably the effect of long resting upon the ground. Near the right temporal was another break in the skin, which here appeared much decayed. All the teeth were present, but they were not particularly white nor good. The left forearm and hand were ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... later, in time to meet Julia at Beresford Duff's, where she was sure to be. So he walked among the rocks, the lonely rocks, and sat and pondered in the famous cave where the skull was found—that simple prehistoric cranium which could never have been so pathetically nonplussed by such a dilemma as this when ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... it was said that his head was hard, and that celestial truths, could not penetrate his thick cranium. He was harsh and avaricious, and quite embedded in material interests. He thought only of ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... realizes that his body is a kingdom, governed by Emperor Soul on the throne of the cranium, with subsidiary regents in the six spinal centers or spheres of consciousness. This theocracy extends over a throng of obedient subjects: twenty-seven thousand billion cells-endowed with a sure if automatic intelligence by which they perform all duties of bodily growths, transformations, ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... was saluted by the said bridge on his knowledge-box. I had prostrated myself like a pagan before his idol, but heard the dull, leaden sound of the contact, and fully expected to see the treasures of the poor man's cranium scattered about the deck. However, as there was no harm done, except a large bump on the head, and probably a corresponding dent in the bridge, the rest of us exchanged glances and laughed quietly. O, bow pitiless ...
— Sketches From Memory (From "Mosses From An Old Manse") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... to Thessaly, where dwelt the giant Termerus, who with his skull knocked to death every traveler that he met; but on the mighty cranium of Hercules the head of the giant ...
— Famous Tales of Fact and Fancy - Myths and Legends of the Nations of the World Retold for Boys and Girls • Various
... slight middle-aged man, with fluffy straw-coloured hair which he grew long above his ears, to compensate for the baldness of his cranium—answered that he was glad Mr Pamphlett took it in so hearty a fashion, but for his part, if it wasn't for the Missus, he was dying to enlist and have a slap at the Germans. Mr Pamphlett laughed and entered his private office. Here every morning ...
— Nicky-Nan, Reservist • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch (Q)
... of the hollow sphere of his cranium came into contact with a solid timber angle where, an infinitesimal but sensible fraction of a second later, a painful sensation was located in consequence of antecedent sensations transmitted ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... was not a long one. Presently I saw the top of the pole moving again, and in another moment a fourth head appeared. This savage, however, was a clever one; he was not going to be shot through the head if he could help it, for when his cranium rose into view it was being rapidly jerked from side to side, so I waited until his body appeared, and then plugged him through the lungs. So the attack continued, the enemy displaying the most dogged and indomitable determination, as well as the most extraordinary and disconcerting cunning, ...
— The First Mate - The Story of a Strange Cruise • Harry Collingwood
... both sides, which in the European skull is impossible, as the lateral portions of the frontal bone are more developed. The summit of the head rises in a longitudinal ridge in the direction of the sagittal suture; so that from the sagittal suture to that portion of the cranium where the diameter is greatest the head slopes like the roof of a house. The forehead is generally flat; the upper jaw rather prominent; the frontal sinuses large; the occipital bone is flat, and there is a remarkable receding of the bone from the posterior insertion of the 'occipitofrontalis' ...
— The Bushman - Life in a New Country • Edward Wilson Landor
... rustic, though he felt the skepticism around him. He tapped his cranium with his forefinger, which he then extended towards the house. "Take that insect there," he said, indicating a little beast that ran along the plaster. "What does it say? It says, 'I am the spider that spins the Virgin's thread.'" And the archaic simpleton added, "One must never judge what people ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse
... without my hat. It was one of those nice soft ones with a dent down the middle to collect the rain; one of those soft hats which wrap themselves so lovingly round the cranium that they ultimately absorb the personality of the wearer underneath, responding to his every emotion. When people said nice things about me my hat would swell in sympathy; when they said nasty things, or when I had had my hair cut, it would adapt itself ...
— The Holiday Round • A. A. Milne
... of their eyes, as Madame Depine recognised that the "Princess's" skull was hopelessly long, and Madame Valiere recognised that Madame Depine's cranium was hopelessly round. Decidedly either head would be a bad block for the other's ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... tenacity. Why they should show such a marked preference for human hair we could not conjecture, till it occurred to us that the natives habitually shaved their heads, and that these beetles must naturally consider a hair-covered cranium a curious novelty deserving of careful examination. Like all children of nature they were decidedly indiscreet and troublesome in their curiosity, but when the light was extinguished they ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... here and there upon the walls. A striking feature of the decorations consisted of several engaged columns set into the walls at no regular intervals, the capitals of each supporting a human skull the cranium of which touched the ceiling, as though the latter was supported by these grim reminders either of departed relatives or of some hideous tribal rite—Bradley could not ...
— Out of Time's Abyss • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... maintain, My cranium may have grown, Owing to stretch of brain, Or thickening of bone. "The hat has shrunk?" Eh? What? That nonsense will not do! My head has grown, a lot, Since this old ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 98, March 22, 1890 • Various
... coming to resemble the beak of a Bird. Some of the recognised species of Pteranodon are very small; but the skull of one species (P. Longiceps) is not less than a yard in length, and there are portions of the skull of another species which would indicate a length of four feet for the cranium. These measurements would point to dimensions larger than those ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... which prevented him from accepting readily the suggestions of Spurzheim, who with less boldness of character and greater accuracy of perception, was better fitted for minute observation and anatomical analysis. His own cranium has been preserved, in which I found these perceptive organs distinctly marked by their digital impressions on the superorbital plate over the eye. It is a remarkable fact that the intellectual faculties ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, October 1887 - Volume 1, Number 9 • Various
... insignificant remark to him now and again, but nobody really took any notice of what he had to say. He had survived his strength, his usefulness, his very wisdom. He wore long, green, worsted stockings pulled up above the knee over his trousers, a sort of woollen nightcap on his hairless cranium, and wooden clogs on his feet. Without his hooded cloak he looked like a peasant. Half a dozen hands would be extended to help him on board, but afterward he was left pretty much to his own thoughts. Of course ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad
... distinguished for thy fiery rays (for the effulgent path by which the righteous proceed is identical with thee). Thou art he that appears in the firmament in the heart encased in the body of every creature.[119] Thou art he who enters into the cranium (brain) of every creature. Thou bearest the wrinkles of age. Thou bearest the bamboo flute. Thou hast also the tabour. Thou bearest the musical instrument called Tali. Thou hast the wooden vessel used for husking grain. Thou art he who covers that illusion which covers Yama.[120] Thou art ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... poor animal's legs do their duty so badly that he falls and exposes his rider to be trodden into a mummy; or losing his presence of mind, the rider may allow the horse to dash under a tree, and crack his cranium against a branch. As one charge of an elephant has often been enough to make embryo hunters bid a final adieu to the chase, incipient Nimrods would do well to try their nerves by standing on railways till the engines are within a few yards of ...
— Hunting the Lions • R.M. Ballantyne
... truly valuable history of the British quadrupeds, traces him to the wolf. He says, and it is perfectly true, that the osteology of the wolf does not differ materially from that of the dog more than that of the different kinds of dogs differs; that the cranium is similar, and they agree in nearly all the other essential points; that the dog and wolf will readily breed with each other, and that their progeny, thus obtained, will again mingle with the dog. [The relative length of the intestines is a strong distinctive mark both ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt
... thy letter that thou thyself hadst had a good horn from the contents of the cider barrel, a part being written one side up and a part the other way, and it would need some one in nearly the same predicament to keep track of it. We hope thy cranium will get straightened when the answer to this is penned, so that we may follow thy varied thoughts with less trouble. A little advice perhaps would be good on both sides, and they that give should ...
— The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 1 of 2) • Ida Husted Harper
... my greatest curiosity. They extend in two vast, oval patches from the center of the top of the cranium down either side of the head to below the roots of the horns, so that these weapons really grow out from the lower part of the eyes, which are composed of several thousand ...
— Warlord of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... souls; they provide waifs for the remotest colonies of the empire. So, as it chanced, Bagg had been exported to Newfoundland—transported from his native alleys to this vast and lonely place. Bagg was scrawny and sallow, with bandy legs and watery eyes and a fantastic cranium; and he had a snub nose, which turned blue when a cold wind struck it. But when he was landed from the mail-boat he found a warm welcome, just the same, from Ruth Rideout, Ezekiel's wife, by whom he ...
— Billy Topsail & Company - A Story for Boys • Norman Duncan
... could have had an idea on the subject of campaigns. Fancy that black enormity of weighty felt, with flapping brim well-nigh a foot in width, absorbing the fiery heat of an Arizona sun, and concentrating the burning rays upon the cranium of its unhappy wearer! No such head-gear would our troopers suffer in the days when General Crook led them through the canyons and deserts of that inhospitable Territory. Regardless of appearances or style ...
— Starlight Ranch - and Other Stories of Army Life on the Frontier • Charles King
... she knew. Bending over her, within a few inches of her face, was another face, the ghastly caricature of a human face. It was on a larger scale than that of any mortal Lady Adela had ever seen; it was long in proportion to its width—indeed, she could not make out where the cranium terminated at the back, as the hinder portion of it was lost in a mist. The forehead, which was very receding, was partly covered with a mass of lank, black hair, that fell straight down into space; there were no neck nor shoulders, at least none had materialised; the skin was leaden-hued, ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... of trying on American clothes; making love to little girls; eating sugar-candy, and having a good time generally; and scarcely any bump at all for getting up early in the morning, working hard, or taking medicine; in fact, that his cranium was as full as the Metropolitan Hotel, of all sorts of good things; which flattering description delighted Tommy so much, that he wrote Mr. Fowler of his own accord, and without any assistance from Captain Porter or any other dictionary, ...
— The Fairy Nightcaps • Frances Elizabeth Barrow
... at a bargain. There was nothing slow about the grey matter in her cranium. If there was buying to do, or a commodity to sell, Alma was the one of the restaurant firm to do it, enjoying well the bargaining, where she was ...
— A Woman who went to Alaska • May Kellogg Sullivan
... glittered with gold embroidery. This apparel, still in vogue among old people, became his face, which was not unlike that of Frederick the Great. He never put on his three-cornered hat lest he should destroy the effect of the half-moon traced upon his cranium by a layer of powder. His right hand, resting on a hooked cane, held both cane and hat in a manner worthy of Louis XIV. The fine old gentleman took off his wadded silk pelisse and seated himself in an armchair, ...
— An Historical Mystery • Honore de Balzac
... disgusting scene, and, passing on, was met by Monsieur Charlie, who, order-book in hand, with his dark-skinned, woolly—covered cranium and squat figure, resembled more a toad than a human being. "Anything, Senor Captain, you vant?—me got in my store, all so cheap and so excellent," he said, making an attempt to bow, his keen, twinkling eyes fixed on his ...
— The Three Commanders • W.H.G. Kingston
... sensual, cruel mouth with a loosely projecting under-lip,—eyes that appeared to be furtively watching each other across the thin bridge of nose,—a receding chin and a narrow cranium, combined with an expression which was hypocritically humble, yet sly,—this was the type Angela Sovrani had chosen to delineate, sparing nothing, softening no line, and introducing no redeeming point,—a type mercilessly true to the life; ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... remarkable for perceiving resemblances and differences than Oken. This is the poetical side of the scientific mind; and he shares with Goethe the honor of that startling and far-reaching discovery, the vertebral character of the bones of the cranium. At this very time the four vertebral cranial bones recognized by Owen are the same Oken has described. But notwithstanding the generous tribute of Mr. Agassiz to his great merits, the writer who assigns special colors to the persons in the Trinity, (red, blue, and green,) and then allots to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... adorned with the triple crown, is placed on the balustrade that runs horizontally across the base of the picture. It is impossible to find a representation of pontifical sovereignty of greater fervour, grandeur, and truth. His cranium is bald and has only a crown of grey hair remaining. His emaciated face is full of ardour and power: his eyes penetrate straight into the splendour of God; and his mouth, although partially hidden by the grey beard that covers the lower part of his face, ...
— Great Pictures, As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Esther Singleton
... mammals and birds; potsherds; broken flints, with the debris of chipping work; mortars, pestles, hammers, and mullers. Near the west wall, 14 feet from the mouth, imbedded in the ashes and a foot below their surface, was a well-preserved cranium, shown in plate 17, e, f. There were no other bones, not even the lower jaw; it seems to have been thrown here and covered with the ...
— Archeological Investigations - Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 76 • Gerard Fowke
... German I ever knew. If he had been content with stating certain remarkable coincidences between the moral qualities and the configuration of the skull, it would have been well; but when he began to map out the cranium dogmatically, he fell into infinite absurdities. You know that every intellectual act, however you may distinguish it by name in respect of the originating faculties, is truly the act of the entire man; the notion of distinct material organs, ...
— Specimens of the Table Talk of S.T.Coleridge • Coleridge
... whom they live. On the other hand, there are authentic instances of a people originally well-formed and good-looking, being brought, by imperfect diet and a variety of physical hardships, to a meaner form. It is remarkable that prominence of the jaws, a recession and diminution of the cranium, and an elongation and attenuation of the limbs, are peculiarities always produced by these miserable conditions, for they indicate an unequivocal retrogression towards the type of the lower animals. Thus we see nature alike willing to ...
— Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation • Robert Chambers
... hair, cultivated to a great length and plastered by means of pomade across his cranium, concealed a certain poverty of undergrowth thereabouts; while a pair of whiskers, sandy in colour and stiff in texture, and a clean-shaven upper lip and chin, threw out a challenge that Mr. Peter Farrell could grow hair ...
— Foe-Farrell • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... ecclesiastical vessels, missals and vestments, and two fine religious pictures from the masterly worldly hand of Tiepolo. Among the sacred objects enshrined in gold and silver reliquaries are a piece of the jawbone of S. Barbara, a piece of the cranium of S. Martin, a tiny portion of the veil of the Madonna, and a tooth of S. Apollonius held in triumph in a pair of forceps by a little golden cherub. And now, descending again, let us look once ...
— A Wanderer in Venice • E.V. Lucas
... recall Putois! Of all the faces I saw as a child that of Putois remains the clearest in my remembrance. All the features of his face and his character are fixed in my mind. He had a pointed cranium..." ...
— Putois - 1907 • Anatole France
... his emotions! Our doctor, after staring at the confession, took hold of the top of his blue tasseled night-cap, pulled it off his head and threw it violently upon the floor! Then remembering that he was exposing a cranium as bald as a peeled potato, he suddenly caught it up again, clapped it upon his ...
— Capitola's Peril - A Sequel to 'The Hidden Hand' • Mrs. E.D.E.N. Southworth
... what dim and tawdry conceptions of passion and desire were in that blond cranium, what romance-begotten dreams of intrigue and adventure! but they sufficed, when presently Ann Veronica went out into the darkling street again, to inspire a flitting, dogged ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... and under the impression that I was placing my clothes, &c., on the ledge, I was in reality dropping them on to the unfortunate occupant of the nether berth, hence the muffled snoring, and when my forty guinea repeater descended upon some unprotected portion of his cranium it put the closure on his dreams in a ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... now more enraged than ever. It had not only been a second time baulked in its vengeance, but had received three fresh bullet-wounds; which, though mere scratches upon the skin of its huge cranium, were sore enough to irritate it to an extreme degree. Uttering its shrill, trumpet-like screech, it flourished its proboscis high in the air; and seizing the branches that were within its reach, it snapped them ...
— The Cliff Climbers - A Sequel to "The Plant Hunters" • Captain Mayne Reid
... ghosts), must be spoken to a little before they will explain themselves; and Toots had long left off asking any questions of his own mind. Some mist there may have been, issuing from that leaden casket, his cranium, which, if it could have taken shape and form, would have become a genie; but it could not; and it only so far followed the example of the smoke in the Arabian story, as to roll out in a thick cloud, and there hang and hover. But ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens
... the mansion between a bear and a wolf, amid a salvo of pistol-shots; sitting up to all hours, talking politics, philosophy, poetry; hearing stories of the dead lords, and the ghost of the Black Brother; drinking their wine out of the skull cup which the owner had made out of the cranium of some old monk dug up in the garden; breakfasting at two, then reading, fencing, riding, cricketing, sailing on the lake, and playing with the bear or teasing the wolf. The party broke up without having made themselves responsible for any of the orgies of which Childe Harold raves, and which ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... from all parts of the compass, coming forth at length (quadrupedally) with a double handful of the treasure-trove and a very lively appreciation of the resistant qualities of a cast-iron table-stand when applied to the human cranium. ...
— The Mystery of 31 New Inn • R. Austin Freeman
... spite of every possible means of congestion or effusion within the cranium, constant and forced motion is necessary for the foot soldier to save him from surprise. The horseman must dismount as quickly as possible and constrain himself to walk. Commanders of divisions should not order halts in winter, and they should ...
— Napoleon's Campaign in Russia Anno 1812 • Achilles Rose |
