"Fossil" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... steam power into that new region, connected with a highway across the isthmus of Panama, no one can calculate. The experiment along the shores of Chili and Peru has already commenced; and the cheap rate at which fossil fuel can be had has proved a great facility. Under circumstances so peculiarly propitious, to what an extent, then, may not steam navigation be carried on the smooth expanse of the Southern ocean? If ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... him ordering their excellent dinner she wondered what he would think of Ann's father. She could hear him calling Centralia a God-forsaken spot and Ann's father a benighted fossil. Doubtless he would speak of the Reverend Saunders as a type fast becoming obsolete. "And the quicker the better," she ...
— The Visioning • Susan Glaspell
... perennial liveliness. By their solitude in the pages of American literature their very title has acquired a certain gravity, and we are apt to regard them with respect rather than to read them for amusement. Fossil wits seem properly to be classed with the formation from which they are dug, and not with living types of the same order. Yet no picture of the times in which Webster lived would be complete without a slight reminiscence of this coterie, and the fact that Webster ...
— Noah Webster - American Men of Letters • Horace E. Scudder
... chief diet of the earliest representatives of the race who appeared in the Eocene period of geologic time. At that time, according to Prof. Elliot, the regions inhabited by man bore great forests of walnut, hickory, and other nut trees, the fossil relics of which are found in great abundance in association with the remains of prehistoric man. It is significant, also, that man's nearest relatives, the gorilla, orangutan, and chimpanzee still stick to the original bill of fare. I once made an ape so angry by offering him a bit of meat that ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Twenty-Fifth Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association
... PALAEONTOLOGICA.—The Literature of Zoology and Palaeontology, or a Systematic Catalogue of the Works on Zoology and Fossil Animals and Plants, Comparative Anatomy, &c., which have appeared in Europe to the end of 1845. Ed. by ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 52, October 26, 1850 • Various
... of these folk—the Cubans or Siboneyes—have vanished, save in the instance of the temple remains near Cobre, and an occasional caney or mound of the dead, a truncated cone of earth and broken stones. Some fossil skeletons found in caves, and of an alleged age of fifty thousand years, denote an ancient race of large, strong people. There are other skeletons of Siboneyes, Chinese, and negroes in the caves,—victims of herding, slavery, fever, cruelty, ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner
... the room lay shrouded in a mystery whose deepest folds were gathered around the dark oak cabinet which I now approached with a strange mingling of reverence and curiosity. Perhaps, like a geologist, I was about to turn up to the light some of the buried strata of the human world, with its fossil remains charred by passion and petrified by tears. Perhaps I was to learn how my father, whose personal history was unknown to me, had woven his web of story; how he had found the world, and how the world had left him. Perhaps I was to find ...
— Phantastes - A Faerie Romance for Men and Women • George MacDonald
... best is lost, the fiery life of the moment. But the conditions for eloquence always exist. It is always dying out of famous places, and appearing in corners. Wherever the polarities meet, wherever the fresh moral sentiment, the instinct of freedom and duty, come in direct opposition to fossil conservatism and the thirst of gain, the spark will pass. The resistance to slavery in this country has been a fruitful nursery of orators. The natural connection by which it drew to itself a train of moral ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... wife seemed to haunt all Mr. Arnold's contemplations of Lady Emily, and all his attentions to her. These were delicate in the extreme, evidently bringing out the best life that yet remained in a heart that was almost a fossil. Hugh made some fresh efforts to do his duty by Harry, and so far succeeded, that at least the boy made some progress — evident enough to the moderate expectations of his father. But what helped Harry as much as anything, was the ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... and pushed. Suddenly it occurred to me that if Tunemah made up his silly mind to come, he would probably do it all at once, in which case the Tenderfoot and I would have about as much show for life as fossil formations. I didn't say anything about it to the Tenderfoot, but I hitched my six-shooter around to the front, resolved to find out how good I was at wing-shooting horses. But Tunemah declared he would die for his convictions. "All ...
— The Mountains • Stewart Edward White
... the one who gropes along by guess and by tradition. A general diffusion of scientific knowledge saves the community from innumerable wasteful and foolish mistakes. In England, not many years ago, the partners in a large mining company were ruined from not knowing that a certain fossil belonged to the old red sandstone, below which coal is never found. In another enterprise, L20,000 were lost in the prosecution of a scheme for collecting the alcohol that distils from bread in baking, all of which might have been saved, had the parties known that less than one hundredth part by ...
— In the School-Room - Chapters in the Philosophy of Education • John S. Hart
... fossil in the village thought it was a queer sort of a break," he shouted. "He knew what he was talking about after all when he suggested cold-chisels, ...
— Behind the Line • Ralph Henry Barbour
... for believing that the appearance of fossil horses with a diminishing number of toes is caused by the creation at separate periods of a four-, a three-, a two-, and a one-toed horse are, he says, "personal, philosophical, historical," and he opposes them with the utmost apparent sincerity to Huxley's assertion that "there can be no ...
— Reflections and Comments 1865-1895 • Edwin Lawrence Godkin
... the Devonian period was the time of the origin of Amphibians. In other cases the geologist utilises the fossils in his attempt to work out the order of the strata when these have been much disarranged. For the simpler fossil forms of any type must be older than those that are more complex. There is no vicious circle here, for the general succession of strata is clear, and it is quite certain that there were fishes before there were amphibians, and amphibians before there ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... mind, the idea came into my head that one day perhaps, when my fossil bones were found, their discovery so far below the level of the earth might give rise to solemn and interesting ...
— A Journey to the Centre of the Earth • Jules Verne
... that the way that lank, pin-headed young man revived the soul of that old, worn-out harpischord, digging into its ribs, kicking at its knees with both feet, hand-massaging every one of the keys up, down, and crossways, until the ancient fossil fairly rattled itself loose with the joy of being alive once more, was altogether the most astounding miracle he has ever had to record. And Pestler with his violin was not ...
— Felix O'Day • F. Hopkinson Smith
... to discoveries made on the coast of Ecuador in 1860, by James S. Wilson, Esq. At various points along this coast he found "ancient or fossil pottery, vessels, images," and other manufactured articles, all finely wrought. Some of these articles were made of gold. The most remarkable fact connected with them is that they were taken from "a stratum of ancient surface earth" which was covered with a marine deposit ...
— Ancient America, in Notes on American Archaeology • John D. Baldwin
... of you to call me a fossil when I am only approaching that stage. Oh! I am glad to see you. I /am/ glad!" and she gave me both the ...
— The Ancient Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... to have discovered in Missouri the fossil remains of a bogged mastodon, which had been killed precisely in this way by human contemporaries. (See Lubbock, ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... doctor, fetching it up for inspection, with a galvanic fling of the limb. A sharp splinter had thrust itself into the flesh through a hole in his boot. My sandals were worse yet; their soles taking a sort of fossil impression ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... years ago some natives in Southern India were engaged in making an excavation under the superintendence of an English officer, when they discovered the remains of one of the largest fossil turtles ever found. They had penetrated the soil for several feet, when their implements struck against a hard substance which was at first supposed to be solid rock, but a bar sank through it, showing it to be either bone or wood. The earth being carefully removed, the remains of a ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... the modern copal varnishes consists principally of linseed oil with some turpentine. Their base is Copal, a fossil, resinous substance of vegetable origin. The gums of which they are made have been chemically altered by long exposure in the earth. Other gums, as mastic, dammar, sandarac, and even resin are sometimes mixed with copal to cheapen the product or to cause more rapid drying. Copal is a generic ...
— Handwork in Wood • William Noyes
... local distinctions had been effaced. The most familiar names had become obsolete. There was no longer a Normandy or a Burgundy, a Brittany and a Guienne. The France of Lewis the Sixteenth had passed away as completely as one of the Preadamite worlds. Its fossil remains might now and then excite curiosity. But it was as impossible to put life into the old institutions as to animate the skeletons which are imbedded in the depths of primeval strata. It was as absurd to think that France could again be placed under the feudal system, ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... mule deer with Laton A. Huffman in the wildest and most picturesque bad-lands of central Montana, we pitched our tent near the upper waterhole of Hell Creek. [Footnote: A few months later, acting upon the information of our fossil discoveries that we conveyed to Professor Henry Fairfield Osborn, an expedition from the American Museum of Natural History ushered into the scientific world the now famous Hell Creek fossil bed, and found, about five hundred feet ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... remaining property, with orders that everybody should return on the following day. At this height the temperature of the air was very delightful, the range at noon being only 79o. I spent the whole day specimen-hunting, and found the rocks were full of fossil shells. I killed a new snake or variety of Psammophis sibilans, and shot an interesting little antelope, Oreotragus saltatrix, the "klip-springer" of the Cape Colonist, as well as hyraxes and various small birds, ...
— What Led To The Discovery of the Source Of The Nile • John Hanning Speke
... fossil bones lately dug from under the lava of the mountain of Boulade, in the neighbourhood of Issoire, in France, none have been discovered belonging to the human body. The same is the case in the other mountains ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, No. - 287, December 15, 1827 • Various
... this, in the East, where the short rein is very universal, the double part of the bridle is prolonged by a single strap; this strap is used as a whip, and hence the whip of the Hussar attached to the reins; hence, also, as I imagine, the Austrian driving rein described page 54. When fossil remains of the extinct postboy shall be discovered, it will be seen that he used the short rein, and with great propriety; since his horse may be said to have been always "au trot," and needed ...
— Hints on Horsemanship, to a Nephew and Niece - or, Common Sense and Common Errors in Common Riding • George Greenwood
... and I, sitting alone on the main hatch, in the rain, privately remembered our Fatherland. There was on board an American sea-captain, of Norwegian birth, as I afterwards found, who would gladly have joined us. The other passengers were three Norwegians, three fossil Englishmen, two snobbish do., and some jolly, good-natured, free-and-easy youths, bound to Norway, with dogs, guns, rods, fishing ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... between San Fiorenzo and the tower of Farinole, the tertiary deposits are seen in successive layers forming beds which in some places are in the aggregate from 400 to 500 feet thick, and the calcareous beds contain great quantities of fossil remains of marine animals of low organisation, such as sea-urchins, pectens, and other shells; forming a compact mass, of which the greater part of the formation consists. The singular phenomenon of the presence ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... innumerable ages, and exclaim: "This clay, upon which I gaze, was of the human period. This coin, this meerschaum, this china shepherdess, this prayer-book with gilt edges, this Sporting Times, were the inseparable companions of a fossil species of Englishmen who once colonised this globe, and minute traces of whom have been found in its most widely separated regions. Alas that the action of marine and subaerial denuding agents has deprived ...
— 'That Very Mab' • May Kendall and Andrew Lang
... the same types in the same areas; and in neither case does the similarity of the conditions by any means seem sufficient to account for the similarity of the forms of life. It is notorious that the fossil remains of closely consecutive formations are closely allied in structure, and we can at once understand the fact if they are likewise closely allied by descent. The succession of the many distinct species of the same ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Vol. I. • Charles Darwin
... accustomed to them before he started upon his manuscript that he rather slighted them. As I stood there beneath that tree—a tree which should have been part of a coal-bed countless ages since—and looked out across a sea teeming with frightful life—life which should have been fossil before God conceived of Adam—I would not have given a minim of stale beer for my chances of ever seeing my friends or the outside world again; yet then and there I swore to fight my way as far through this hideous land as circumstances ...
— The People that Time Forgot • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... OF INFUSORIAL ANIMALCULES, Living and Fossil, containing Descriptions of every species, British and Foreign, the methods of procuring and viewing them, &c., illustrated by numerous Engravings. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 231, April 1, 1854 • Various
... my hand. "I think they are only fossil sponges," I said; "there will only be a rusty ...
— Father Payne • Arthur Christopher Benson
... kind. Sometimes the entire shell or bone is changed into stone, losing all its animal substance, but retaining its old outline and its natural markings. Sometimes the fossil is merely the hardened impress of the outside of a shell or leaf, which has dented its picture on soft clay, and has itself disappeared, while the soft clay has become rock, and the indented picture remains fixed through after-centuries. Sometimes the fossil is the cast of the inside of ...
— Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) - Wonders of Earth, Sea and Sky • Various
... mill-owners. I swallowed the Union, though it was a bitter mouthful. There has never been a just complaint from one of my employees that wasn't attended to in short order, if it was in my power to do so. There's many an old fossil on my pay-rolls to-day who isn't worth his salt, but he stays there, and will continue to stay there, because he did his best when he could, and it's not his fault that he's dead wood now. I've given in, over and over again, in one way ...
— The Lieutenant-Governor • Guy Wetmore Carryl
... what attracted the man appeared to be the fact that its shores are literally covered by bones, and consequently by fossil ivory. He had conceived the plan of establishing himself there, and of collecting, during the summer months, all the ivory that he could find; then when, in winter, the arm of the sea which connects Ljakow with the continent should ...
— The Waif of the "Cynthia" • Andre Laurie and Jules Verne
... the reader may be surprised to see omitted. It is, that if these slow changes were always going on, why is not the present world full of, and the fossil-bearing rocks also abounding in, intermediate forms, creatures which are on their way to being something else? But there are reasons to be given on this ground which make the subject a less definite ...
— Creation and Its Records • B.H. Baden-Powell
... the birth of geology, and fossil paleontology, concurring with vast strides ahead in the science of comparative anatomy, it is a well-established fact, that oftentimes the most scientific museum admitted as genuine fragments of the human osteology what in fact belonged to the gigantic brutes of our ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... of Germany history, he will probably be aware of the fact that Germany is a land of many famous universities, and that these universities have always played a leading part in the national life. It is so to-day; it was so in the eighteenth century. In England a Professor may easily become a fossil; in Germany he often guides the thought of the age. For some years that scoffing writer, Voltaire, had been openly petted at the court of Frederick the Great; his sceptical spirit was rapidly becoming fashionable; and now the professors at the Lutheran Universities, ...
— History of the Moravian Church • J. E. Hutton
... yards distant in hopes that the change of scene might make him more sociable. But he showed no more sign of life than a fossil would have shown. So again they all waited. And they waited and waited and waited. They spoke in whispers ...
— Tom Slade on Mystery Trail • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... repetitions may be counted in a thickness of 4,515 feet. The age of the trees is proved by their size, some being four feet in diameter. Round them, as they gradually went down with the subsiding soil, calamites grew, at one level after another. In the Sydney coal-field fifty-nine fossil forests occur ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... was Sam's closest friend, McCloud. It's good to see him getting the recognition he deserves, isn't it? Do you know, I send him an annual every year? Yes, sir! And one year I had the whole blooming faculty out here on a fossil expedition; but, by Heaven, McCloud, some of them looked more like megatheriums than what ...
— Whispering Smith • Frank H. Spearman
... began to find fossil remains of animals in the rocks, a severe shock was given to the prevailing doctrine of the recent creation of the earth. The adherents of the old theology made strenuous efforts to explain away this unwelcome circumstance. ...
— Man And His Ancestor - A Study In Evolution • Charles Morris
... was!—morning and evening bearing their newly established significance of geological epochs. The famous tracing of the Creator's footsteps, undertaken by a gifted compromiser, was felt by even the most bigoted to be a lame rejoinder. His ASTEROLEPSIS, the giant fossil-fish from the Old Red Sandstone, the antiquity of which should show that the origin of life was not to be found solely in "infusorial points," but that highly developed forms were among the earliest created—this single prop was admittedly not strong enough to carry the whole ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... "Anbar" pronounced "Ambar;" wherein I would derive "Ambrosia." Ambergris was long supposed to be a fossil, a vegetable which grew upon the sea-bottom or rose in springs; or a "substance produced in the water like naphtha or bitumen"(!): now it is known to be the egesta of a whale. It is found in lumps weighing several pounds upon the Zanzibar Coast and is sold at a high ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... vegetable forms, considering that vegetables appear to us as forming the necessary first link in the chain of nutrition; but it is probable that there were sea plants, and also some simpler forms of animal life, before this period, although of too slight a substance to leave any fossil trace of ...
— Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation • Robert Chambers
... birds, and fishes, and insects, scattered with lavish prodigality over land and sea;—but what is the living wealth of that Fauna as compared to the winged words which fill the air with unceasing music! What are the scanty relics of fossil plants and animals, compared to the storehouse of what we call the dead languages! How then can we explain it that for centuries and centuries, while collecting beasts, and birds, and fishes, and insects, while studying their ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... AMBER, a fossil resin much used for the manufacture of ornamental objects. The name comes from the Arab. anbar, probably through the Spanish, but this word referred originally to ambergris, which is an animal substance ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... and dungeons, pepper-box turrets, and machicolated towers. And in truth these Bad Lands are an immense ossuary where lie bleaching in the sun myriads of fragments of pachyderms, chelonians, and even, some would have us believe, fossil men, overwhelmed by unknown ...
— Rubur the Conqueror • Jules Verne
... bone, chicahuac, strong. A specimen made of the bone of a fossil elephant is possessed by Senor A. Chavero, of Mexico. See Tezozomoc, Cronica Mexicana, cap. 55, and the note of Orozco y Berra to that passage in the Mexican edition. Also Sahagun, Hist. de Nueva Espana, Lib. VIII, cap. 20, who likewise ...
— Ancient Nahuatl Poetry - Brinton's Library of Aboriginal American Literature Number VII. • Daniel G. Brinton
... results. Yet therein lay the germ of the electric telegraph, which binds the intelligence of continents together, and, probably before many years have elapsed will "put a girdle round the globe." So, too, little bits of stone and fossil, dug out of the earth, intelligently interpreted, have issued in the science of geology and the practical operations of mining, in which large capitals are invested and vast numbers of persons ...
— How to Get on in the World - A Ladder to Practical Success • Major A.R. Calhoon
... at this time the discovery of the first known (?) fossil monkey, but its tail was missing. "Depend upon it, Daniel O'Conell's got hold of it!" said 'Adam' briskly.[15] Yule was very happy with Mr. Hamilton and his kind wife, but on his tutor's removal to Cambridge other arrangements became necessary, and in 1835 ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... record begins. Further embryological study, and possibly the discovery of surviving primitive forms, of which Central Africa may yet yield a number, may enlarge our knowledge, but it is likely to remain very imperfect. The fossil records of the long ages during which the Mollusc, the Crustacean, and the Echinoderm slowly assumed their characteristic forms are hopelessly lost. But we are now prepared to return to the record which survives, and we shall find the remaining story of the earth a very ample and interesting ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... of testing the theory of evolution is by the study of fossil forms, and our knowledge of these has progressed enormously during the period under review. Not only have a number of new and strange types of ancient life come to light, but in some cases, e.g. in that of the horse and elephant, ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... probability towards the artiodactyle. Finally, it appears that this very recently extinct beast presents a highly generalized type of structure, uniting in one organic form both artiodactyle and perissodactyle characters, and that in a manner not similarly found in any other known creature living, or fossil. At the same time the differentiation of artiodactyle and perissodactyle forms existed as long ago as in the period of the Eocene ungulata, and that in a marked degree, as ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... noted above, is a geologist, and therefore speaks according to first-hand knowledge, shows that fossil remains are deposited over many thousands of square miles in widely separated sections of the earth, not only in the opposite order from that required to prove the theory of evolution, but in a great variety of orders, demonstrating, as ...
— The Church, the Schools and Evolution • J. E. (Judson Eber) Conant
... Iceland, and accumulated a mass of particulars concerning this little-known country. It was he, indeed, who gave the earliest authentic account of "geysers," those springs of warm water which occasionally reach to such great heights, and he also supplied curious details of the existence of fossil wood, which prove that at an early geological period, Iceland, now entirely devoid of ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... nuts of a similar plant abounding in the tertiary formations at the mouth of the Thames, and having floated about there in as great profusion as here, till buried deep in the silt and mud that now forms the island of Sheppey.* [Bowerbank "On the Fossil Fruits and Seeds of the Isle of Sheppey," and Lyell's "Elements of Geology," 3rd ed. ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... the neighbourhood geologically and geographically. The sledge team found some remarkable ice structures and new and interesting glaciers. They had, a crop of small adventures, and found sandstone rock containing fossil wood and many other excellent fossils, garnets, etc., besides which Campbell did good work surveying. A new glacier was named after Priestley and ...
— South with Scott • Edward R. G. R. Evans
... a profound student of history, and the history of the present interests him just as much—he has those Balkans under a microscope; and collects all the data on every important strike here and elsewhere. And yet where women are concerned he is a fossil. An American fossil—worst sort. Some of the young ones are just as bad...I'll have to give in. I can't break his heart. I suppose I'll ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... the antediluvian affairs I ever beheld, the old fellow now coming towards us is the queerest; he looks like a fossil edition of Methuselah, dug up and modernised some hundred years ago at the very least. Holloa! he's going mad I believe; I ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... importance when we learn that to these spicula we must turn for an explanation of the isolated masses of flint which abound in various chalk formations. "The mere assertion," says Rhymer Jones, "that flints were sponges, would no doubt startle the reader who was unacquainted with the history of these fossil relics of a former ocean;" and yet a little reflection "will satisfy the most skeptical." For long ages the sponge is imbedded in the chalk, through which water is continually percolating. A well-known law of chemistry explains why ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... like the feathers on an arrow's shaft. The name expresses exactly what they are like—diminutive kangaroos—but, of course, they are rodents and not marsupials. During the glacial period of the early Pleistocene, about one hundred thousand years ago, we know from fossil remains that there were great invasions into Europe of most of these types of tiny mammals, which we were catching during this delightful summer on ...
— Across Mongolian Plains - A Naturalist's Account of China's 'Great Northwest' • Roy Chapman Andrews
... is a fossil, you see, and I'm called Fossell: and so he sends it to me. He has made a good deal of fun out of my name before now, in his humorous way. Not that ...
— Major Vigoureux • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... (Lam.), a species of Terebratula, and many others most interesting to the conchologist, and not less so to the geologist, as some forms are now found living abundantly in the Australian seas which are only known in the old world as occurring in a fossil state. ...
— The History of Tasmania, Volume I (of 2) • John West
... dark, that the landing there was dangerous even in daylight, and that this was the only safe harbor on the way to it. While camp was being made. I strolled along the shore to examine the rocks and the fossil timber that abounds here. All the rocks are freshly glaciated, even below the sea-level, nor have the waves as yet worn off the surface polish, much less the heavy scratches and grooves and ...
— Travels in Alaska • John Muir
... this size, which must have been submerged during an immensely long period in order to accumulate formations of such a thickness, should not contain numerous remains of the animals formerly inhabiting it.[B] The only fossil remains of any kind truly belonging to it, which I have found in the formation, are the leaves mentioned above, taken from the lower clays on the banks of the Solimoens at Tomantins; and these show a vegetation similar in general character to ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... by Kachins in the Hukawng valley beyond the administrative border, but the quality of the fossil resin is not very good. The amount exported varies considerably. Tourmaline or rubellite is found on the borders of the Ruby Mines district and in the Shan State of Moeng Loeng. Steatite is extracted from the Arakan hill quarries. Salt is manufactured at various places in Upper Burma, notably ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... the account of the marriage of the tulasi shrub (Ocymum sanctum) with the salagram stone, or fossil ammonite, in ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... of two classes—called putrescent and fossil. The putrescent are composed of decayed, or decaying, vegetable and animal substances. The fossil are those dug from the earth, as lime, marl, and gypsum. All vegetable substances not useful for other purposes are valuable for manure. Rotten wood, leaves, straw, and all the vegetable ...
— Soil Culture • J. H. Walden
... dome go back to the time of Anthony J. Chaucer. But—he's always talking about that literature chair of his—why couldn't he stay at home and sit in it? Anyhow, I got the bundle all right, all right. I wonder what the little fossil wants with it." ...
— Seven Keys to Baldpate • Earl Derr Biggers
... has a prosperous Western-style capitalist economy, with a per capita GDP at the level of the highly industrialized West European countries. Rich in natural resources, Australia is a major exporter of agricultural products, minerals, metals, and fossil fuels. Commodities account for 57% of the value of total exports, so that a downturn in world commodity prices can have a big impact on the economy. The government is pushing for increased exports of manufactured goods, but competition in international markets continues ...
— The 1998 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... differs from its kindred, in a certain shady, grave, old-fogy, fossil aspect, just touched with a pensive solemnity, as if it thought to itself, "I'm getting old, but I'm highly respectable; that's a comfort." It has, moreover, a dejected, injured air, as if it brooded solemnly on the wrong done to it by taking away its original name and calling it Bowdoin; but ...
— Little Classics, Volume 8 (of 18) - Mystery • Various
... suggested that the suns were "fictions of mythological astronomy, modified either by obscure reminiscences of some great revolution suffered by our planet, or by physical hypotheses, suggested by the sight of marine petrifactions and fossil remains,"[216-1] while the Abbe Brasseur, in his late works on ancient Mexico, interprets them as exaggerated references to historical events. As no solution can be accepted not equally applicable to the same myth as it appears in Yucatan, Peru, and the hunting tribes, and to the exactly ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... he does not recognise a word he is very likely to turn it into something he does understand. Thus the title of a paper in the Philosophical Transactions was curiously changed in an advertisement, and the Calamites, a species of fossil plants of the coal measures, with but slight change appeared as "The True Fructification of Calamities.'' This is a blunder pretty sure to be made, and within a few days of writing this, the author ...
— Literary Blunders • Henry B. Wheatley
... "thoughts that wander through eternity." Symbol was his native tongue, his first form of speech—as, indeed, it is his last—whereby he was able to say what else he could not have uttered. Such is the fact, and even the language in which we state it is "a dictionary of faded metaphors," the fossil poetry ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton
... phrase, with which every serious Frenchman will reply to opponents, especially in public matters. But not even the comic dramatist is aware of the last state of refuse commonplace that a word of this kind represents. Refuse rhetoric, by the way, rather than Emerson's "fossil poetry," would seem to be the right name for human language as some of the processes of the several ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... name to it." He took a little bone the size of a bean out of a pill-box. "So far as I am a judge this human bone is the analogue of the one which you hold in your hand. That will give you some idea of the size of the creature. You will observe from the cartilage that this is no fossil specimen, but recent. What do ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... I revisited Oropa, near Biella, to see what connection I could find between the Oropa chapels and those at Varallo. I will take this opportunity of describing the chapels at Oropa, and more especially the remarkable fossil, or petrified girl school, commonly known as the Dimora, or Sojourn of the Virgin Mary in ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... gain lawsuits, and a Roman citizen was put to death in the reign of Claudius for bringing such an amulet into court. Pliny had seen this "egg." It was about the size of an apple, with a cartilaginous skin covered with discs.[1137] Probably it was a fossil echinus, such as has been found in Gaulish tombs.[1138] Such "eggs" were doubtless connected with the cult of the serpent, or some old myth of an egg produced by serpents may have been made use of to account for their formation. This is the more likely, ...
— The Religion of the Ancient Celts • J. A. MacCulloch
... first command universal assent even among those naturalists whose lives had been devoted with the greatest success to the study of organisms. Take, for instance, that great naturalist, Professor Owen, by whose labours vast extension has been given to our knowledge of the fossil animals which dwelt on the earth in past ages. Now, though Owens researches were intimately connected with the great labours of Darwin, and afforded the latter material for his epoch-making generalization, yet Owen deliberately refused to accept the new doctrines. Like Tycho, he kept on ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... which lies lowest of the fourth order, to the most recent beds of the tertiary, and to so much of the diluvium as has been examined in the old continent. And although in the isolated case of the diluvium at New-York, no fossil remains have been found, we are yet unprepared to admit this as more than an exception, and are inclined to think that the remains of the mastodon, for instance, must be diluvian, or pre-diluvian. In this opinion, however, we know that we are ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... read another's thoughts is like taking the leavings of a meal to which we have not been invited, or putting on the clothes which some unknown visitor has laid aside. The thought we read is related to the thought which springs up in ourselves, as the fossil-impress of some prehistoric plant to a plant as it buds forth ...
— The Art of Literature • Arthur Schopenhauer
... dreary inflated nonsense one is compelled to listen to from their better educated townsmen, it is refreshing to talk with them. From the Belleville pothouse I went to the Faubourg St. Germain. In this solemn abode of a fossil aristocracy I have a relative—a countess. She is, I believe, my cousin about sixteen times removed, but as she is the only person of rank with whom my family can claim the most distant relationship, we stick to the cousinship and send her every year cheap presents, ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... I'm quite an old fossil," dowager lady Chia observed. "I'm no good whatever. My eyesight is dim; my ears are deaf, my memory is gone. I can't even recollect any of you, old family connections. When therefore any of our relations come on a visit, I don't see them for fear lest I should ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... more marked as the publication proceeded. In speech, article, song and essay, the spell of Davis's extraordinary genius and embracing love was felt. Historic memories, forgotten stories, fragments of tradition, the cromlech on the mountain and the fossil in the bog supplied him substance and spirit wherewith to mould and animate nationality. Native art, valour, virtue and glory seemed to grow under his pen. All that had a tendency to elevate and ennoble, he rescued from the past to infuse into the future. His songs, so soft and tender, and yet ...
— The Felon's Track • Michael Doheny
... subject of Fossil Whales, I present my credentials as a geologist, by stating that in my miscellaneous time I have been a stone-mason, and also a great digger of ditches, canals and wells, wine-vaults, cellars, and cisterns of all sorts. Likewise, by way of preliminary, I desire ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... will, uncle,' said Owen, 'and we will have an especial corner for you, called "The Claudia," where the little hypocrite shall talk to you of all the druidical remains, and fossil mammoths, that she pretends to be so ...
— Gladys, the Reaper • Anne Beale
... I didn't," he admitted. "I had intended to, but you see—Dear me, dear me, I hope you will feel that I did right. You see, our paleontological department had been hoping to fit out an expedition to the Wyoming fossil fields, but it was lamentably short of funds, appropriations—ah—and so on. Hambridge and I were talking of the matter. A very adequate man indeed, Hambridge. Possibly you've read some of his writings. He wrote Lesser Reptilian Life ...
— Galusha the Magnificent • Joseph C. Lincoln
... regency, which was composed of three clerical leaders,—General Almonte, of whom Marshal Bazaine was wont to say that he meant well, but il se prend trop au serieux, General Salas, a conservative old fossil unearthed for the occasion, and Archbishop Labastida,—to foreshadow an era of reaction ...
— Maximilian in Mexico - A Woman's Reminiscences of the French Intervention 1862-1867 • Sara Yorke Stevenson
... in shallow mines in North and South Carolina, Georgia, Florida and Tennessee, and also as pebbles in the river beds. They are the fossil remains of animals. After being dug from the mines the rock is kiln dried and then ground to a very fine powder called "floats" which is used on the soil. The phosphoric acid in the floats is insoluble and becomes available only as the phosphate decays. This is too slow for most plants ...
— The First Book of Farming • Charles L. Goodrich
... fire—appealed to inanimate matter with an earnestness that is pathetic; they have employed in the worship of blind force a faith greater than religion requires, but their God is asleep. How long will they allow the search for strata of stone and fragments of fossil and decaying skeletons that are strewn around the house to absorb their thoughts to the exclusion of the architect who planned it all? How long will the agnostic, closing his eyes to the plainest truths, cry, "Night, night," when the sun in ...
— In His Image • William Jennings Bryan
... it was a grindlestone, another he said "Nay; It's nought but an' owd fossil cheese, that somebody's ...
— The Three Jovial Huntsmen • Randolph Caldecott
... The geologist proves that the world has stood many thousands of years, and we cannot deny it. He points to fossil remains, and tells us of orders of animals that lived many years before the Mosaic period of the creation of man. The Bible tells us that MAN was created about six thousand years ago. Now, the material fact is, that amid ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... will you?" broke out Bluff, laughing. "Honest, now, I believe he expects to run across a few of those old fossil pirates, Blackbeard, Captain ...
— The Outdoor Chums on the Gulf • Captain Quincy Allen
... or, the Shell Cabinet arranged according to the Modern System: With a detailed Account of the Animals, and a complete Descriptive List of the Families and Genera of Recent and Fossil Shells. Second Edition, improved; with 405 ...
— First Impressions of the New World - On Two Travellers from the Old in the Autumn of 1858 • Isabella Strange Trotter
... knuckle-bones on the beach, his enjoyment of the cool breeze which swept through his villa even in summer or of the cool plash of water from the fountain in the peristyle, his curiosity about the big fossil bones dug up in the island which he sent to Rome to be placed in the galleries of his house on the Palatine, his fun in quizzing the pedants who followed him by Greek verses of his own making. But in the midst of his idleness the indefatigable energy which marked the man was seen in the buildings ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... pleasanter looking spot than Port Galant. The usual hydrographical surveys were there brought to a satisfactory issue by the officers under the direction of Dumoulin. A boat was despatched to Cape Remarkable, where Bougainville said he had seen fossil shells, which, however, turned out to be nothing but little pebbles ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne
... was left, while his companions went fossil-hunting, and stayed so long as to excite their compunction, and quicken their steps when they at length detached themselves from the enticing ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... had been angular. But on examining the nodules with a lens, they no longer appeared water-worn, for their surfaces were pitted through unequal corrosion, and minute, sharp points, formed of broken fossil shells, projected from them. It was evident that the corners of the original fragments of chalk had been wholly dissolved, from presenting a large surface to the carbonic acid dissolved in the rain-water and to that generated in soil containing vegetable matter, as well as to the ...
— The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the action of worms with • Charles Darwin
... (no letter.)—1. and 2. Garnetiferous quartz rock. 3 and 4. Micaceous quartz rock. 5. Granite. 6. Basalt with traces of chalcopyrite.—L. C. G.—They are fossil sharks' teeth, common in marl beds.—J. E. C.—1. Iron sulphide and lead sulphide. 2. Quartzite, with traces of galena and molybdic sulphide. 3 and 4. Dolomite. 5. Fossiliferous argillaceous limestone, containing traces of lead sulphide. 6. Lead sulphide ...
— Scientific American, Volume XLIII., No. 25, December 18, 1880 • Various
... will, perhaps, never be known, until they are dead and gone, and same curious eye lights on an old yellow letter with the fossil footprints of the extinct passion trodden ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
... of similar sort; but, nevertheless, if the primitive Yankee should become extinct, as now seems very probable, Lowell's masterly portrait of him will remain, and future generations can reconstruct him from it, as Agassiz reconstructed an extinct species of mammal from fossil bones. ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... thin old man, clad in duck, turning yellow with age. When he threw the helmet back it exposed a wrinkled brow and a baldish head, except for a few wisps of hair at the temples. He appeared to be of great age—a fossil, an animated mummy, a relic from an ancient graveyard; and the stoop of his lean shoulders accentuated these impressions. It was plain that the tropics were fast making an end ...
— The Devil's Admiral • Frederick Ferdinand Moore
... France. An aristocratic Englishman may live years in Paris without really knowing anything about it. In the first place, he goes there with letters of introduction to the Faubourg St. Germain, where he finds only the fossil remains of the old noblesse, intermixed with a slight proportion of the actual intelligence of the country, and here he moves round in the stagnant circles of historical France, and it is a wonder if he gets so much as a glimpse of ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... Report on the Sandstone of the Connecticut Valley, especially its Fossil Footmarks, made to the Government of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. By Edward Hitchcock, Professor in Amherst College. Plates, etc. Boston. William White, Printer to the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various |
