"Excrement" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the Chinese doctors would not venture to assert, as the medical faculty of Madrid in the middle of last century assured the inhabitants, that "if human excrement was no longer to be suffered to accumulate as usual in the streets, where it might attract the putrescent particles floating in the air, these noxious vapours would find their way into the human body and a pestilential sickness would ...
— An Australian in China - Being the Narrative of a Quiet Journey Across China to Burma • George Ernest Morrison
... have arrived at sinks away from them, except as it results to their Bodies and Souls, So that often, to me, they appear gaunt and naked, And often, to me, each one mocks the others, and mocks himself or herself, And of each one, the core of life, namely happiness, is full of the rotten excrement of maggots; And often, to me, those men and women pass unwittingly the true realities of life, and go toward false realities, And often, to me, they are alive after what custom has served them, but nothing more, And often, ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... composed of brown hematite, decomposing to yellow (tertiary), and is very magnetic, the compass being useless. Bituminous pitch found oozing out of the rocks—probably the result of the decomposition of the excrement of bats. It contains fragments of the wing cases of insects, and gives reactions similar to the bituminous mineral or substance found in Victoria. Barometer 28.285; thermometer 63 degrees at 5 p.m. On summit of watershed, barometer ...
— Explorations in Australia • John Forrest
... on a spot where they suspect that treasure is buried; on the next morning they look to see what animal has left on the ashes the print of its feet, and this tells them what sacrifice the guardian of the treasure demands—sheep or hen or human being. Miss Durham says that human excrement and water is the sole emetic known to the Albanians; it is used in all cases of poisoning. But the Albanian's death is most frequently brought about by gun-shot. "In Toplana," as they say, "people are killed like ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... delivers over the galley to the contractor as complete: but he, among other faults and objections, observes the lion is not gilt, on which the builder or one of his assistants, runs to the head, and dipping a mop in the excrement, thrusts it into the ...
— 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue • Captain Grose et al.
... already explained, by keeping it in a warm place. Of the flesh-forming substance only five per cent. is retained in the increase, the rest is partly consumed in carrying on the movements of the animal—partly expelled from its body unaltered, or but slightly altered, in composition. The solid excrement of the animal contains all the undigested food; but of this only the mineral and nitrogenous constituents are valuable as manure. The nitrogen of the plastic materials which are expended in maintaining the functions of the body is eliminated from the lungs, through the ...
— The Stock-Feeder's Manual - the chemistry of food in relation to the breeding and - feeding of live stock • Charles Alexander Cameron
... can pasture on green herbage. They have the singular habit of going to a particular spot to drop their dung, which resembles that of goats or sheep; and this habit often costs them their lives, since the excrement points out to the hunter their place of resort. They keep a careful look-out against any danger, usually taking care to place old males as sentinels of the flock, who give warning of the approach of an enemy. When startled they run swiftly, but soon halt, stand gazing back, and then ...
— Quadrupeds, What They Are and Where Found - A Book of Zoology for Boys • Mayne Reid
... of dirt, somewhat disguised by the varying ways in which an animal may be said to define "dirt." Many animals spend more time and energy in the duties of cleanliness than human beings, and they often show well-marked anxiety to remove their own excrement, or to keep away from it.[35] Thus this element of modesty also may be said to have an ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... use of which I have not ascertained, though I feel quite sure that no silk comes from it. The large median papilla, just behind the posterior pair, surrounds the termination of the intestines, and through it the excrement is voided, the insect for this purpose turning back the abdomen as she hangs head downward, so that neither the web nor the spinners shall be contaminated. Now it has recently been ascertained that the minute globules with which ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... Excise officer oficisto. Excite eksciti. Excitement ekscitego. Exclaim ekkrii. Exclamation, point of signo ekkria. Exclude eksigi. Exclusion eksigeco. Exclusive ekskluziva. Excommunicate ekskomuniki. Excoriation defrotajxo. Excrement ekskremento. Excrescence elkreskajxo. Excruciate turmentegi. Exculpate senkulpigi. Excursion ekskurso. Excusable pardonebla. Excuse pardoni, senkulpigi. Execrable abomena. Execrate malbenegi. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... through closed windows and settles upon everything. In my London house I could not take up a book without soiled fingers. Even books which were protected by glass doors, and papers shut up in drawers, did not escape this filthy powder, composed of the fine-ground dust and excrement of the London streets. If I wiped a picture with a white silk handkerchief, a black stain showed itself upon the handkerchief, and this in spite of the most careful efforts to keep the house clean. I suppose Londoners get used to dirt, as eels are said to get ...
— The Quest of the Simple Life • William J. Dawson
... The solid excrement of the sheep is, therefore, weight for weight, the most valuable as a manure, as it contains more nitrogen and phosphates than the others, and at the same time is ...
— Manures and the principles of manuring • Charles Morton Aikman
... sell the wheat; feed all the corn, oats, and cowpea hay and half of the straw and corn fodder, and use the other half for bedding; and, if you save absolutely all of the manure produced, including both the solid and liquid excrement; then it would be possible to recover and return to the land about 173 pounds of nitrogen during the four years, compared with the 200 pounds taken ...
— The Story of the Soil • Cyril G. Hopkins
... were Phineus' doors Against them, and they had to leave the tables they had won. No monster woefuller than they, and crueller is none Of all God's plagues and curses dread from Stygian waters sent. A winged thing with maiden face, whose bellies' excrement Is utter foul; and hooked hands, and face for ever pale With hunger that no ...
— The AEneids of Virgil - Done into English Verse • Virgil
... assumption that the spores have passed a period of probation in the intestines of the horse, and by this process have acquired a germinating power, so that when expelled we have only to collect them, and the excrement in which they are concealed, and we shall secure a crop.[C] As to other species, we know that hitherto all attempts to solve the mystery of germination and cultivation has failed. There are several species which it would be most desirable to cultivate if the conditions could be discovered which ...
— Fungi: Their Nature and Uses • Mordecai Cubitt Cooke
... that they must all go out into the fields and bring her whatever they found. So the next day they went out in different directions and the old man found some human excrement and he thought "Well, my daughter-in-law told me to bring whatever I found" so he wrapped it up in leaves and took it home; and his daughter-in-law told him that he had done well and bade him hang up the packet at the back of the house. A few ...
— Folklore of the Santal Parganas • Cecil Henry Bompas
... glands, warms the limbs and, in a manner electrifies them. In the body, it suffuses the pancreas and other glands and the intestines, mingles with the fluids existing in the glands and with the oily salts of the bile; and whatever impurities (autotoxins), may be there it drives in the form of excrement and urine completely out of the body. Thus in its free and ample scope is all the ground of all the intricate vital processes of physiology covered in its course and the active principles of the excretions of skin, kidneys and intestines are ...
— Valere Aude - Dare to Be Healthy, Or, The Light of Physical Regeneration • Louis Dechmann
... us in these frothy paragraphs. Cambyses, Xerxes, Artaxerxes, Darius, are thrown in to make the gruel of rhetoric "thick and slab." The whole epistle ends in a long-drawn peroration of invective against "that excrement in human shape," who had had the ill-luck, by pretence to scholarship, by big gains from the Papal treasury, by something in his manners alien from the easy-going customs of the Roman Court, to rouse ...
— New Italian sketches • John Addington Symonds
... worked three years, and spent three hundred crowns in the liquor, they discovered that they were on the wrong track. They next tried alum and copperas; but the great secret still escaped them. They afterwards imagined that there was a marvellous virtue in all excrement, especially the human, and actually employed more than two years in experimentalising upon it with mercury, salt, and molten lead! Again the adepts flocked around him from far and near to aid him with their counsels. ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... doubtless that she would the sooner capitulate to the negro-hating sentiment of her neighbors. But firm in her resolve the fair Castellan never thought of surrendering the citadel of her conscience at the bidding of iniquitous power. Then, like savages, her foes defiled with the excrement of cattle the well whence the school drew its supply of water, attacked the house with rotten eggs and stones, and daubed it with filth. This drama of diabolism was fitly ended by the introduction of the ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... tongue, that scum and excrement of the mouth, is of all vices the most foolish and senseless. It makes a man's conversation unpleasant, his discourse fruitless, ...
— An Essay Upon Projects • Daniel Defoe
... a mere rock, the retreat of boobies (Pelecanus fiber, Linn.) and turtles of the hawks-bill species. Some slight vegetation was perceived upon it but it was so entirely covered with the excrement of birds that it had the appearance of being white-washed. The number of these birds was almost incredible, and they hovered over and about us as we passed, as if to drive ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia - Performed between the years 1818 and 1822 • Phillip Parker King
... is thrown into heaps, it often ferments so rapidly as to produce sufficient heat to set fire to some parts of the manure, and cause it to be thrown off with greater rapidity. This may be observed in nearly all heaps of animal excrement. When they have lain for some time in mild weather, gray streaks of ashes are often to be seen in the centre of the pile. The organic part of the manure having been burned away, nothing but the ash remains,—this is ...
— The Elements of Agriculture - A Book for Young Farmers, with Questions Prepared for the Use of Schools • George E. Waring
... the other hand, present far greater and more essential variations. In either of these orders we have both vegetable and animal-feeders, aquatic, and terrestrial, and parasitic groups. Whole families are devoted to special departments in the economy of nature. Seeds, fruits, bones, carcases, excrement, bark, have each their special and dependent insect tribes from among them; whereas the Lepidoptera are, with but few exceptions, confined to the one function of devouring the foliage of living vegetation. We might therefore anticipate that their species—population would be only ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace
... the road we observed immense quantities of locusts; the trees were quite black with them. These insects devour every vegetable that comes in their way, and in a short time completely strip a tree of its leaves. The noise of their excrement falling upon the leaves and withered grass, very much resembles a shower of rain. When a tree is shaken or struck, it is astonishing to see what a cloud of them will fly off. In their flight they yield to the current of the wind, ...
— Life and Travels of Mungo Park in Central Africa • Mungo Park
... of it. I am the savant untamed; they the savants civilized. Doctors cavil at the learned. False science is the excrement of the true, and is employed to the destruction of philosophers. Philosophers, as they produce sophists, produce their own scourge. Of the dung of the thrush is born the mistletoe, with which is made birdlime, with which the thrush is ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... corpse is interred."[25] Again, speaking of the aborigines of Victoria, another writer observes: "All deaths from natural causes are attributed to the machinations of enemies, who are supposed to have sought for and burned the excrement of the intended victim, which, according to the general belief, causes a gradual wasting away. The relatives, therefore, watch the struggling feet of the dying person, as they point in the direction whence the injury is thought to come, and ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... dung, n. ordure, excrement, faeces, dejections, lesses, muck; puer, fumet, fiants, treddle, spraints, coprolite (petrified), mute, guano, ornithocopros. Associated Words: coprophagy, coprophagous, Augean, dungmeer, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... of antelopes, cranes, some geese, and a few redheaded ducks. The small birds of the plains and the curlew are still abundant: we saw but could not come within gunshot of a large bear. There is much of the track of elk but none of the animals themselves, and from the appearance of bones and old excrement, we suppose that buffaloe have sometimes strayed into the valley, though we have as yet seen no recent sign of them. Along the water are a number of snakes, some of a brown uniform colour, others ...
— History of the Expedition under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark, Vol. I. • Meriwether Lewis and William Clark
... the sound of their departure to their feeding-grounds resembled thunder. For nearly two hours there was one incessant roar, as flock after flock took its departure eastward. The ground under the trees was whitened with their excrement, and strewn with broken ...
— Twenty-Seven Years in Canada West - The Experience of an Early Settler (Volume I) • Samuel Strickland
... the streets, and to the sluttishness within doors. "The floors," says he, "are commonly of clay, strewed with rushes; under which lies, unmolested, an ancient collection of beer, grease, fragments, bones, spittle, excrement of dogs and cats, and everything that is nasty."[18] And NOW, certainly we are the cleanest nation in Europe, and the word COMFORTABLE expresses so peculiar an idea, that it has been adopted by foreigners to describe a sensation experienced nowhere ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... birds is not so uncommon as it might at first seem. It is indeed almost an invariable rule among all land birds. With woodpeckers and kindred species, and with birds that burrow in the ground, as bank swallows, king-fishers, etc., it is a necessity. The accumulation of the excrement in the nest would prove most fatal ...
— In the Catskills • John Burroughs
... alimentation, and prove that animals weakened by a too long usage of dry fodder, are restored to health by the use of bran, which only seems to act by its presence, since the greater portion of it, as already demonstrated by Mr. Poggiale, is passed through with the excrement. ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 275 • Various
... district. The latter was stupefied on hearing Francis command the guilty one to eat a lump of ass's dung which lay there, adding: "The mouth which has distilled the venom of hatred against my brother must eat this excrement." Such indignation, no less than the obedience of the unhappy offender, filled him ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... enter them for the purpose of cleansing them. It has been necessary, therefore, to provide inlets with a separating apparatus called "gully" or "catch basin," which retains as completely as possible all solid matter, mud, excrement, and debris of every kind which maybe floated in by street washing or by rain-water, and which may be capable of causing stoppages in the sewers, the choking up being followed by fermentation and the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 455, September 20, 1884 • Various
... suffice. In camp of longer duration, and when it is not possible to provide latrine boxes, as for permanent camps, deeper trenches should be dug. These may be used as straddle trenches or a seat improvised. When open trenches are used the excrement must be kept covered at all times with a layer of earth. In more permanent camps the trenches should be 2 feet wide, 6 feet deep, and 15 feet long, and suitably screened. Seats with lids are provided and covered to the ground to keep flies from reaching ...
— Manual of Military Training - Second, Revised Edition • James A. Moss
... excrement from a black horse. A small quantity of water is mixed with it, then pressed out through a piece of cloth and ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz
... return to Mr. Mivart's other objections. Insects often resemble for the sake of protection various objects, such as green or decayed leaves, dead twigs, bits of lichen, flowers, spines, excrement of birds, and living insects; but to this latter point I shall hereafter recur. The resemblance is often wonderfully close, and is not confined to colour, but extends to form, and even to the manner in which the insects hold themselves. ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... His complexion is of a dirty yellow, with a thin scattered beard, exactly agreeable to that of his diet upon its first declination, like other insects, who, having their birth and education in an excrement, from thence borrow their colour and their smell. The student of this apartment is very sparing of his words, but somewhat over-liberal of his breath. He holds his hand out ready to receive your penny, and immediately upon receipt withdraws to his former occupations. Now is it not amazing to ...
— A Tale of a Tub • Jonathan Swift
... unborn," but who never would have been born at all, had he not inculcated into their unwilling fathers the simplest laws of physical health, decency, life—laws which the wild cat of the wood, burying its own excrement apart from its lair, has learnt by the light of nature; but which neither nature nor God Himself can as yet teach to a selfish, ...
— Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... every little bit of thread, and it is curious to observe with what eagerness and method he sets to work, and how completely he effects his object. He then attacks every kind of dirt and filth, horse-dung, his own dung, and human excrement. Some breeds of spaniels are very filthy feeders without its being connected with disease, but the rabid dog eagerly selects the excrement of the horse, and his own. Some considerable care, however, must be exercised here. At the ...
— The Dog - A nineteenth-century dog-lovers' manual, - a combination of the essential and the esoteric. • William Youatt
... and will slay the other Moslem Knights, till not one is left. And I purpose this night to sacre you all with the Holy Incense." When the Emirs heard these words they kissed the ground before him. Now the incense which he designated was the excrement of the Chief Patriarch, the denier, the defiler of the Truth, and they sought for it with such instance, and they so highly valued it that the high priests of the Greeks used to send it to all the countries of the Christians in silken wraps after mixing it with musk and ambergris. Hearing of ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... owes to genius, and which, when paid, honors the giver and the receiver; and then he pleads his beggary as an excuse for his crimes. He melts with tenderness for those only who touch him by the remotest relation, and then, without one natural pang, casts away, as a sort of offal and excrement, the spawn of his disgustful amours, and sends his children to the hospital of foundlings. The bear loves, licks, and forms her young: but bears are not philosophers. Vanity, however, finds its account in reversing ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... observations; for instance, the closed tube within the stomach, described by M. Martin St. Ange (to whose excellent paper I am greatly indebted), as indicating an affinity to the Annelides, is, I am convinced, nothing but a strong epithelial lining, which I have often seen ejected with the excrement. Again, a most distinguished author has stated that the Cirripedia differ from the Crustacea:—1st. In having "a calcareous shell and true mantle;" but there is no essential difference, as shown by Burmeister, in the ...
— A Monograph on the Sub-class Cirripedia (Volume 1 of 2) - The Lepadidae; or, Pedunculated Cirripedes • Charles Darwin
... blossoming trees. And, O king, immediately on seeing that mass of energy, flaming and brilliant as fire, seated with upraised arms, facing the sun, my friend, the graceful lord of the Rakshasas, Maniman, from stupidity, foolishness, hauteur and ignorance discharged his excrement on the crown of that Maharshi. Thereupon, as if burning all the cardinal points by his wrath, he said unto me, "Since, O lord of treasures, in thy very presence, disregarding me, this thy friend hath thus affronted ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 2 • Translated by Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... kind, for there was the dainty crib, set on a high tuft of sod raised by the winter's frosts, a little island castle in the wet marsh, cosey and dry. It was my first savanna sparrow's nest, whether eastern or western. The miniature cottage was placed under a fragment of dried cattle excrement, which made a slant roof over it, protecting it from the hot rays of the sun. Sunken slightly into the ground, the nest's rim was flush with the short grass, while the longer stems rose about it in ...
— Birds of the Rockies • Leander Sylvester Keyser
... to do he works like a dog ... the day we had nettoyage de chambre, for instance, and Surplice and The Hat did most of the work; and B. and I were caught by the planton trying to stroll out into the cour ... every morning he takes the pail of solid excrement down, without anyone's suggesting that he take it; takes it as if it were his, empties it in the sewer just beyond the cour des femmes or pours a little (just a little) very delicately on the garden where Monsieur le Directeur is growing a flower for his daughter—he has, in fact, an unobstreperous ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings
... cellars, and many were buried there. Others crawled into a big drain-pipe—there were wounded women and children among them, and a young French interpreter, the Baron de Rosen, who tried to help them—and they stayed there three days and nights, in their vomit and excrement and blood, until the bombardment ceased. Ypres was a city of ruin, with a red fire in its heart where the Cloth Hall and cathedral smoldered below their broken arches and high ribs of masonry that had been ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... examine for apples with masses of sawdust-like material projecting from the sides or blossom end. By removing this brown deposit which is the excrement of the worm, you will find a hole leading into the apple. Cut open one of these and determine the course of the tunnel. Where do you find the worm? Do all such apples contain worms? Where have they gone? How does the feeding of the worms injure the fruit? Do any of the wormy apples show rot? Are ...
— An Elementary Study of Insects • Leonard Haseman
... appetites and peculiar longings of pregnant women furnish curious matter for discussion. From the earliest times there are many such records. Borellus cites an instance, and there are many others, of pregnant women eating excrement with apparent relish. Tulpius, Sennert, Langius, van Swieten, a Castro, and several others report depraved appetites. Several writers have seen avidity for human flesh in such females. Fournier knew a woman with an appetite for the blood of her husband. She gently cut him while he lay asleep by her ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... appear to have paid much attention to the natural history of the "Worm." Kirby, speaking of it, says, "the larvae of Crambus pinguinalis spins a robe which it covers with its own excrement, and does no little injury." Again, "I have often observed the caterpillar of a little moth that takes its station in damp old books, and there commits great ravages, and many a black-letter rarity, which in these days of bibliomania would have been ...
— Enemies of Books • William Blades |
