"Fossil" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... some few specimens of fossil shells from the shingly beds of the Khyber Pass. They seem to be a Spirifer with a very square base, quite different from the common species of the Bolan Pass, which is like a large cockle, and of which I have one beautiful specimen. How I regret not seeing ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith
... who, as 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 he says, ...
— The Church, the Schools and Evolution • J. E. (Judson Eber) Conant
... 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 ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Twenty-Fifth Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association
... history of life upon the globe. According to the first of these hypotheses, living beings, such as now exist, have existed from all eternity upon this earth. We tested that hypothesis by the circumstantial evidence, as I called it, which is furnished by the fossil remains contained in the earth's crust, and we found that it was obviously untenable. I then proceeded to consider the second hypothesis, which I termed the Miltonic hypothesis, not because it is of any particular consequence whether ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... 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 ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... stood on the log and heaved while Wes stood on the shore 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 right," said we, "die then," with the embellishment of profanity. ...
— The Mountains • Stewart Edward White
... 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 cataclysms ...
— Rubur the Conqueror • Jules Verne
... monastic-like existence, simple and studious: "We have not even the distraction of neighbors and friends around. In this country everybody stays at home, to look after his oxen and his land. One would become a fossil ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... all the talk was about. It was not necessary. Words like revolution gave him his cue. Like a paleontologist, able to reconstruct an entire skeleton from one fossil bone, he was able to reconstruct a whole speech from the one word revolution. He did it that night, and he did it well; and since Martin had made the biggest stir, he put it all into his mouth and made him the arch-anarch of the ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... Science "is neither Christian nor science!" is to-day the fossil of wisdom- less wit, weakness, and superstition. "The fool hath said in his heart, There is no ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... series of minerals from Russia, such as red chromate of lead, white carbonate of lead, green phosphate of lead; native copper, green and blue carbonate of copper; gold ore from Berezof; iron ore, granitical rocks, fossil shells, in good preservation, from the banks of the Moscorika, and others in the siliceous state, jaspers, crystals of ...
— Paris As It Was and As It Is • Francis W. Blagdon
... 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
... of the lias clay there are large numbers of a fossil shell, Gryphea incurva, known locally as "devils claws"; they certainly have a demoniac claw-like appearance, and worry the drainers by catching on the blade of the draining tool, and preventing its penetration into ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... of fossil saurians, or animals of the lizard tribe, have, as our scientific readers are aware, been found at Lyme, in Dorsetshire; but the world would to this day have remained ignorant of the treasures England ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 382, July 25, 1829 • Various
... immense tracts in high latitudes, extending southward, on this continent, as far as the very boundary of the tropics, where they are found side by side with the Dwarf Palm of Florida. But in the region of the true Palms the Pine is wanting. It is worthy of remark, however, that in the fossil vegetation of the Eocene world these two vegetable tribes are found associated. This fact, it seems to me, should be attributed to the mixing of the mountain Pines with the Palms of the sea-level, during ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... hypothesis. Some facts may not be obtainable that are necessary to show the connection of others: as, for example, the hypothesis that all species of animals have arisen from earlier ones by some process of gradual change, can be only imperfectly verified by collecting the fossil remains of extinct species, because immense depths and expanses of fossiliferous strata have been destroyed. Or, again, the general state of culture may be such as to prevent men from tracing the consequences of an hypothesis; for which reason, ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... of those familiar conjunctions of things wherewith the inanimate world baits the mind of man when he pauses in moments of suspense, opposite Knight's eyes was an imbedded fossil, standing forth in low relief from the rock. It was a creature with eyes. The eyes, dead and turned to stone, were even now regarding him. It was one of the early crustaceans called Trilobites. Separated by millions of years in their lives, Knight ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... Carteia, whereas Florez (Medallas, Madrid, 1773) shows a total of only thirty-three. Amongst his antiquities there is a charming statuette of Minerva, a bronze miniature admirably finished. He has collected the rock fauna, especially the molluscs, fossil and modern. He is preparing an album of the Flora Calpensis. His birds' nests were lately sold to an Englishman. All these objects, of immense local interest, were offered by him at the lowest possible rate to the Military Library, but who is there to understand their value? I wonder how many ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... 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 of ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton
... whose huge apartments were all set out with horrible anatomical preparations and grisly skeletons; and, though the stately passages were paved with white marble, and led into rooms which would easily have accommodated crowds of guests, he went into no society save that of savants as old and fossil-like as himself; in other words, he was an old bachelor who lived entirely for his profession and the study of the great masters by the interpretation of a genuine old Stradivari. Yet the old professor had a memory; he recalled the time when he had been young who now was old—the ...
— Stories By English Authors: Germany • Various
... a mattock and a pick, they made an attack on their fossil, whose covering cracked. It was an ammonite nodosus, corroded at the ends but weighing quite six pounds; and ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert
... seems to me to be, if I may sum it up in my own words, that the modern pre-historic men—those of whom we have collected so many remains, and to whom are due the ancient, strange customs of historical nations (the fossil customs, we might call them, for very often they are stuck by themselves in real civilisation, and have no more part in it than the fossils in the surrounding strata)—pre-historic men in this sense were 'savages without the fixed habits of savages;' that is, that, like savages, they had ...
— Physics and Politics, or, Thoughts on the application of the principles of "natural selection" and "inheritance" to political society • Walter Bagehot
... noon; and by two, the people, dressed in holiday attire, muster at the trysting-spot, and march in a body to the castle, preceded by Tam Anderson, the duke's piper, a grave, old-fashioned man, in livery of green coat and black velvet breeches—a fossil specimen he of what the Border minstrel once was, when his art was in its prime. As Tam drones away on his bagpipe "Lumps o' Puddin'," and "Brose and Butter," they take their places at three long tables, ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume V. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... the geologist, from the 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," ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... know, has become a citizen of the United States, has had the Cuvierian prize awarded to him for his great work on fossil fishes—an honour approved by every lover of science. This distinguished writer says, in his latest publications on fossil zoology, that the number of fossil fishes distributed over the globe is more than 25,000 species; of mammifera, over 3000; reptiles, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 439 - Volume 17, New Series, May 29, 1852 • Various
... 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 only the records of lands and moneys, ...
— Phantastes - A Faerie Romance for Men and Women • George MacDonald
... white varnish. Copal is a term applied to oleo-resins soluble in turpentine, and used almost universally as varnishes. They come from the tropical regions of South America, Africa, and from the East Indies. Kauri is the fossil gum of a cone-bearing tree dug from the ground in northern New Zealand. Amber is the fossil gum of extinct cone-bearing trees found mainly along the Baltic coast of Prussia. It is used chiefly for the mouth-pieces of tobacco-pipes ...
— Commercial Geography - A Book for High Schools, Commercial Courses, and Business Colleges • Jacques W. Redway
... The fossil remains previously referred to are of course only a few of the most important, but it is remarked as a curious and notable fact that among the fossils of the lower orders of life in the Bad Lands, the heads have not ...
— Cave Regions of the Ozarks and Black Hills • Luella Agnes Owen
... might give me some kind of a job here so that my wife can't drag me off to that house party. I feel it in my very bones that old Hiram Leatherby will be there and he ALWAYS singles me out to talk about his fossil collection!" ...
— Tom Swift and His Giant Telescope • Victor Appleton
... the medical profession. As surgeon in the Army Medical Department from 1848 to 1873, he utilized his opportunities for the study of natural history in India and Kashmir, in Egypt, Malta, Gibraltar and Canada. His observations on the fossil vertebrata of the Maltese Islands led him eventually to give special study to fossil elephants, on which he became an acknowledged authority. In 1872 he was elected F.R.S. In 1873 he was chosen professor of zoology ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... was pale, and there was a curious look about her whole figure. It seemed as if shrinking from something, twisting itself rigidly, as a fossil tree might shrink in a wind that could ...
— Jane Field - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... tradition than upon any 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 ...
— Noah Webster - American Men of Letters • Horace E. Scudder
... among others, such men as Bosa and John, both Archbishops of York, and such a poet as Caedmon. The legend of his inspiration, however, may be placed beside the story of how the saintly Abbess turned the snakes into the fossil ammonites with which the liassic shores of Whitby are strewn. Hilda, who probably died in the year 680, was succeeded by Aelfleda, the daughter of King Oswiu of Northumbria, whom she had trained in the abbey, and there seems little doubt that her pupil carried ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home
... species is probably not half done; yet, when from a wider outlook the vast antiquity of the genus is considered, and its ancient richness in species and individuals; comparing our Sierra Giant and Sequoia sempervirens of the Coast Range, the only other living species of Sequoia, with the twelve fossil species already discovered and described by Heer and Lesquereux, some of which seem to have flourished over vast areas in the Arctic regions and in Europe and our own territories, during tertiary and cretaceous times,—then indeed it becomes plain that our two surviving species, restricted to ...
— The Mountains of California • John Muir
... absolutely the hypothesis of an original impetus, I mean an internal push that has carried life, by more and more complex forms, to higher and higher destinies. Yet this impetus is evident, and a mere glance at fossil species shows us that life need not have evolved at all, or might have evolved only in very restricted limits, if it had chosen the alternative, much more convenient to itself, of becoming anchylosed in its primitive forms. Certain Foraminifera ...
— Creative Evolution • Henri Bergson
... how Old Hickory, who was more or less busy at the time, had tried to shunt him off. "Go on, you old fossil," he told him. "You never could play a mashie-niblick, and I'll bet twenty-five you can't now. You always top 'em. Couldn't loft over a bow-legged turtle, much less a six foot bunker. Yes, it's a bet. Twenty-five even. But you'll have to ...
— Torchy As A Pa • Sewell Ford
... my whole time to arranging my huge pile of notes, to observing, and to experimenting in relation to the transmutation of species. During the voyage of the Beagle I had been deeply impressed by discovering in the pampean formation great fossil animals covered with armor like that on the existing armadillos; secondly, by the manner in which closely allied animals replace one another in proceeding southward over the continent; and thirdly, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... in the climate. At first the temperature of the earth was much warmer than now, and uniform in all parallels of latitude, as is shown by the fossil remains. Now we have a great diversity of climate, whether we contrast the polar with the torrid regions, or the different seasons of the temperate ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... interesting life of him, a delightful story which she told me about him. He came to her beaming one day, and demanded, "You know I have always held such and such an opinion about a certain group of fossil fishes?" "Yes, yes!" "Well, I have just been reading ———'s new book, and he has shown me that there isn't the least truth in my theory"; and he burst into a laugh of unalloyed pleasure ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... which combines in a remarkable degree the characters of the myriopods and the degraded wingless insects, such as the Smynthurus, Podura, etc. Some such forms may have been introduced late in the Silurian period, for the interesting discoveries of fossil insects in the Devonian of New Brunswick, by Messrs. Hartt and Scudder, and those discovered by Messrs. Meek and Worthen in the lower part of the Coal Measures at Morris, Illinois, and described by Mr. Scudder, reveal carboniferous myriopods ...
— Our Common Insects - A Popular Account of the Insects of Our Fields, Forests, - Gardens and Houses • Alpheus Spring Packard
... But experiments in air-breathing are no doubt in progress in this group—we already have tropical land-crabs—and as far as we know there is no reason why in the future these creatures should not increase in size and terrestrial capacity. In the past we have the evidence of the fossil Paradoxides that creatures of this kind may at least attain a length of six feet, and, considering their intense pugnacity, a crab of such dimensions would be as formidable a creature as one could ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... humorous Dean, the travelled cynic, and he, the one of his day, the iridescent Irishman, whose remembered repartees are a feast, sharp and ringing, at divers tables descending from the upper to the fat citizen's, where, instead of coming in the sequence of talk, they are exposed by blasting, like fossil teeth of old Deluge sharks in monotonous walls of our chalk-quarries. Nor are these the less welcome for the violence of their introduction among a people glad to be set burning rather briskly awhile by the most unexpected of digs in the ribs. Dan Merion, to ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... that this statement could not be gainsaid. God's truth must agree, whether discovered by looking within upon the soul or without upon the world. A truth written upon the human heart to-day in its full play of emotions or passions, cannot be at any real variance even with a truth written upon a fossil whose poor life was gone millions of years ago. And this being so, it would also seem a truth irrefragable; that the search for each of these kind of truths must be followed out in its own lines, by its own methods, ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various
... that," declared John. "If you stand for sense and experience and try to learn them, they think you're a fossil and out of sight of reality; and if you attempt to be young and interest yourself in their wretched little affairs and pay the boy with the boys and the girl with the girls, they think you're ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... and pretended to, but every one will exercise it at the peril of being banished from political communion with those who hold the reins and prescribe the policy to be pursued. Slavishness to party and obsequiousness to the popular whims go hand in hand. Political independence only occurs in a fossil state; and men's opinions grow out of the acts they have been constrained to do or sanction. Flattery, either of individual or people, corrupts both the receiver and the giver; and adulation is not of more ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... the Tertiary period monkeys must have been very abundant and very varied, yet it is but rarely that their fossil remains are found. This, however, is not difficult to explain. The deposits in which mammalian remains most abound are those formed in lakes or in caverns. In the former the bodies of large numbers of terrestrial ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 344, August 5, 1882 • Various
... a prosperous Western-style capitalist economy, with a per capita GDP comparable to levels in industrialized West European countries. Rich in natural resources, Australia is a major exporter of agricultural products, minerals, metals, and fossil fuels. Of the top 25 exports, 21 are primary products, so that, as happened during 1983-84, 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 ...
— The 1992 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... 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 trees, possessed ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... is impregnated with silica, as in Diatomaceae, or carbonate of lime, as in Corallinaceae, Characeae and some Siphonales, it is perhaps not surprising that algae should not have been extensively preserved in the fossil form. Considering, however, that it is generally believed that Bryophyta and vascular plants are descended from an algal ancestry, it is natural to suppose that, prior to the luxuriant vegetable growths of the Carboniferous period, there must have existed ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... of general novel material and construction are provided in a manner not yet noticed. The Pastoral may seem to be the most obsolete, the most of a mere curiosity. But the singular persistence and, in a way, universality of this apparently fossil convention has been already pointed out; and it is perhaps only necessary to shift the pointer to the fact that the novels with which one of the most modern, in perhaps the truest sense of that word, of modern novelists, though one of the eldest, Mr. Thomas ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... call their own. And a reminiscence of his first 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 motherly kindness, even ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... ditch, some thirty feet deep by sixty or eighty wide, cut out of the solid rock, and the precipice-like wall above, with towers crested with forked battlements set along it at due intervals. The rock is a soft and crumbling limestone, containing "fossil creatures still so like the creatures they were once, that there it first occurred to the human brain to imagine that the buried shapes were not mockeries of life, but had indeed once lived; and, under those ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... being above all things a controversialist. Naturally enough, the public knew little and cared less for the unspectacular researches among the Invertebrates, which had won such high scientific fame. They were only stirred when the results of study in geology, in fossil forms and simian anatomy, clashed with long-established popular conceptions. There was also a gladiatorial delight in watching controversy not simply abstract, but fanned by personal conviction, which marked the champions above all as ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley - A Character Sketch • Leonard Huxley
... "Fossil history has no doubt still some obscure passages; and these have been partially adverted to. Fuci, the earliest vegetable fossils as yet detected, are not, it has been remarked, the lowest forms of aquatic vegetation; neither are the plants of the coal-measures ...
— An Expository Outline of the "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation" • Anonymous
... diminished. Poor Mr. Glastonbury had never looked into a newspaper in his life, save the County Chronicle, to which he occasionally contributed a communication, giving an account of the digging up of some old coins, signed Antiquarius; or of the exhumation of some fossil remains, to which he more boldly ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... of the cascade I discovered a cavern, or rather huge hole in the water-course, into which, thinking it might contain fossil bones, I descended as far as the first ledge, and I then perceived that the water pouring through this cavern in the rainy season was cutting off another rock of sandstone similar to the remarkable pillar in front of the cascade. The water in the basin below must have ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 1 (of 2) • George Grey
... least that the study of Natural History has become now-a-days an honourable one. A Cromarty stonemason was till lately - God rest his noble soul! - the most important man in the City of Edinburgh, by dint of a work on fossil fishes; and the successful investigator of the minutest animals takes place unquestioned among men of genius, and, like the philosopher of old Greece, is considered, by virtue of his science, fit company for dukes and princes. Nay, the study ...
— Glaucus; or The Wonders of the Shore • Charles Kingsley
... earth turned up; a workman's tin mug stuck and roasted and hardened into what looks like solid rock—a fossil, as though it had been there ...
— A Diary Without Dates • Enid Bagnold
... circle comprised a maiden aunt of Sir James, Miss Patricia, a stern and awful specimen of the female sex in its fossil state; her ward, Miss Henderson, who, having long passed her pupilage, remained at Collingham-Westmore in the capacity of gouvernante and companion to the young heiress; the heiress aforesaid, and myself. A priest—did I say that the Collinghams still professed the old religion?—came on Sundays ...
— A Stable for Nightmares - or Weird Tales • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... could be finer or more beautiful to see Than the first six months' proceedings of that same Society, Till Brown of Calaveras brought a lot of fossil bones That he found within a tunnel near the tenement ...
— Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte • Bret Harte
... a fine specimen of a fossil. It is a piece of a palm-leaf, ... which was found in a stratum of Siberian rock.... Thus one must become in order to endure the ice-storms. Then one is not harmed. But your brother! In him lived yet the whole murmuring, singing palm-forest.... As regards you, ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... 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 he ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... of Australia are all of the oldest rocks, in which there are either no fossil traces of past life, or the traces are of life in the most ancient forms. Resemblance of the Australian cordilleras to the Ural range, which he had especially been studying, caused Sir Roderick Murchison, in 1844, ...
— Early Australian Voyages • John Pinkerton
... in Norfolk, I discovered that the rustics belonging to the part of it in which I was staying, particularly regarded a kind of fossil-stone, which much resembled a sea-egg petrified, and was found frequently in the flinty gravel of that county. They esteemed such stones sacred to the elfin train, and termed them fairy loaves, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 10, Issue 285, December 1, 1827 • Various
... not feel a bitter craving to eat bread; but did, by way of substitute, feel a fresh, original craving to eat brass fenders or mahogany tables, poetry could not express him. If a man, instead of falling in love with a woman, fell in love with a fossil or a sea anemone, poetry could not express him. Poetry can only express what is original in one sense—the sense in which we speak of original sin. It is original, not in the paltry sense of being new, but in the deeper sense of being old; it ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... been asserted that the flints of the chalk are merely fossil sponges. No explanation of the origin of flint, however, can be satisfactory, unless it embraces the origin of chert in almost all great limestones from the Silurian upwards, as well as the common phenomenon of the silicification of organic bodies (such as corals ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... reckoned it up this way, d'ye see, Middlebrook—the man who'd left it there had used it on the beach—maybe he'd cut his toe, bathing, or something o' that sort, or likely a cut finger, gathering a shell or a fossil—and had thrust it carelessly into a side-pocket, for a thorn to catch hold of as he passed. But there it was, ...
— Ravensdene Court • J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher
... results of special creation has no scientific standard whatever. There is not one fact tending to prove special or separate creation; the evidence, which is overwhelming, is all of it on the other side. The hypothesis of special creation is a mere fossil of the past. Evolution is the only theory which is in harmony with facts and with all branches of science: life ...
— Manhood of Humanity. • Alfred Korzybski
... people go, and when there is a funeral the coffin has to be slung in order to be carried up the steps. Whitby is famous for its jet, which is worked into numerous ornaments: this is a variety of fossil wood, capable of being cut and taking a high polish. It is also celebrated for its production of iron-ore, which indeed is a product of all this part of Yorkshire; while at night, along the valley of the Tees, not far north of Whitby, the blaze of the myriads of furnaces light up the heavens ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... which Mr. Darwin would bring us is, that all the various forms of vegetable and animal life with which the globe is now peopled, or of which we find the remains preserved in a fossil state in the great Earth-Museum around us, which the science of geology unlocks for our instruction, have come down by natural succession of descent from father to son,—"animals from at most four or five progenitors, and plants from an equal or less number" (p. 484), as ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... Alexander: 'We must first know that Mr Walpole has any dishonest intentions, which in a person of quality like him is scarce reasonable to suppose,' and then the author of The History of the Deluge pulled from his capacious waistcoat pocket a bit of fossil, which he handed round for inspection in support of ...
— Bristol Bells - A Story of the Eighteenth Century • Emma Marshall
... no moss, young man, an' not become a fossil like some of the fellers in big cities, but I git a heap of rubbin' with me rollin', an' that keeps me ...
— Glen of the High North • H. A. Cody
... Cape Byron, an interesting addition to zoology was made in a small floating shellfish, which has since proved to constitute a new genus,* throwing light, I am informed, upon many fossil univalves in the older formations; and a rare bird of the noddy kind (Anous leucocapillus) perched on the rigging towards evening, and was added to the collection; for even the beauty and innocence of a tired wanderer like it was insufficient ...
— Narrative Of The Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Commanded By The Late Captain Owen Stanley, R.N., F.R.S. Etc. During The Years 1846-1850. Including Discoveries And Surveys In New Guinea, The Louisiade • John MacGillivray
... sacred beetle, bound upon the breast Of the blind heathen! Snatch the curious prize, Give it a place among thy treasured spoils, Fossil and relic,—corals, encrinites, The fly in amber and the fish in stone, The twisted circlet of Etruscan gold, Medal, intaglio, poniard, poison-ring,— Place for the Memphian beetle with ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... make no money out of science, and am a lover of the fossil records of ancient life in our planet, but, above all, I assure you that I would no more think of betraying your confidence than of picking your pocket. If you have any doubts, do not make me ...
— Two Knapsacks - A Novel of Canadian Summer Life • John Campbell
... chiefly connected with the sciences of geology and palaeontology, and were directed especially to the elucidation of the characters, classification, history, geological and geographical distribution of recent and fossil Brachiopoda. On this subject he brought out an important work, 'British Fossil Brachiopoda,' 5 vols. 4to. (Cooper, 'Men of the Time,' 1884.)) Down, April ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... poetry, thinking that my progenitor's name might have been therein embalmed. 'The stony science'—mind you—reveals to us the former existence of the huge reptile, the fragmentary, mighty mastodon, and, imperfect, the mail-clad fish. But, wonder of wonders, we find the whole insect preserved in that fossil gum amber. And even so in verse, characters are preserved for all time, that could not make their mark in history, and that had none of the elements of an earthly immortality. Did I wish immortality I would choose a poet for my friend;—an ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I., No. IV., April, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... a fossil Rue. Habib-ullah of Khotan. Habsh (Abash), see Abyssinia. Hadhramaut (Sessania Adrumetorum). Hadiah. Haffer. Hai-nan, Gulf of. —— language of. Hairy men in Sumatra. Hajji Mahomed. Hakeddin. Half-breeds, see Argon. Hamd Allah Mastaufi, the geographer. ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... was a chart of the Pacific Islands," answered Brown. "Put a feather with a fossil and a bit of coral and everyone will think it's a specimen. Put the same feather with a ribbon and an artificial flower and everyone will think it's for a lady's hat. Put the same feather with an ink-bottle, a book and a stack of writing-paper, ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... down, and thus to say, for instance, that 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 were reptiles, ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... paleoanthropological, paleoanthropic[obs3], paleolithic, ; primordial, primordinate[obs3]; aboriginal &c. (beginning) 66; diluvian[obs3], antediluvian; protohistoric[obs3]; prehistoric; antebellum, colonial, precolumbian; patriarchal, preadamite[obs3]; paleocrystic[obs3]; fossil, paleozoolical, paleozoic, preglacial[obs3], antemundane[obs3]; archaic, classic, medieval, Pre-Raphaelite, ancestral, black-letter. immemorial, traditional, prescriptive, customary, whereof the memory of man runneth not ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... volcanoes. Looking, however, at the fact that at the time when these islands were probably connected with the continents of Asia on the one side and Australasia on the other, namely, at the close of the pliocene period, England was connected with the continent; Malta, as shown by its fossil elephants, with Africa; the West Indies with Yucatan and Venezuela; it seems to me more probable that the cause was not a local one, but a general lowering of the waters of the ocean all over the world to at least one thousand feet, ...
— The Naturalist in Nicaragua • Thomas Belt
... that old fool of a mick down at the station told me. How the devil does the company happen to have such an old fossil ...
— Desert Conquest - or, Precious Waters • A. M. Chisholm
... multitudes of organic remains, the fossilised exuviae of animals and plants which lived and died while the mud of which the rocks are formed was yet soft ooze, and could receive and bury them. It would be a great error to suppose that these organic remains were fragmentary relics. Our museums exhibit fossil shells of immeasurable antiquity, as perfect as the day they were formed; whole skeletons without a limb disturbed; nay, the changed flesh, the developing embryos, and even the very footsteps of primaeval ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... 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
... influenced by the counsels, the representations and the menaces of certain fossil politicians from the Border Slave States, knowing as you do, that the loyal citizens of these States do not expect that Slavery shall be upheld, to the prejudice ...
— The Southerner - A Romance of the Real Lincoln • Thomas Dixon
... Of character pleasant, Once lived in a hut with his wife. He was cheerful and docile, But such an old fossil You wouldn't meet twice in your life. His notions were all without reason or rhyme, Such dullness in any one else were a crime, But the folly pig-headed To which he was wedded Was so deep ...
— Grimm Tales Made Gay • Guy Wetmore Carryl
... dedicated to George the Fourth. The literary historian must rove in other hunting grounds. He is the geologist of literature, whose study lies among the buried strata of forgotten generations, among the fossil remnants of the past. The great men with whom he must deal are the great men who are no longer great—mammoths and ichthyosauri kindly preserved to us, among the siftings of so many epochs, by the impartial benignity of Time. It is for him ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... has come down practically unchanged from the steaming days of the Carboniferous period, when ferns grew one hundred feet high, and thronged with other rank tropical growths in matted masses to form the coal measures. The fossil remains of cycads in the rocks of that period prove that they once flourished in the tropic swamps where now are the hills of Wyoming ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... must have been a gigantic one to have flung up that fossil tooth from strata far beneath the level of the earth's surface. More, there were even traces of archaean deposits around the borders of the pool, whose depth, in the center, was ascertained to be ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, May, 1930 • Various
... 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 of the vicinity. But, although ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, No. - 287, December 15, 1827 • Various
... prepared by treating with sulphuric acid, and afterwards with ammonia, the hydrocarbon oil containing sulphur obtained by the dry distillation of the fossil remains of fish and sea-animals, which form a bituminous mineral deposit in Germany. This product has been admixed with soap for many years, the quantity generally used being about 5 per cent.; the resultant soap is possessed of a characteristic empyreumatic ...
— The Handbook of Soap Manufacture • W. H. Simmons
... want an interesting and delightful nature lesson that is a little out of the ordinary, get, if you can, a fossil fern. If you are in the city, doubtless you can get one from the museum, or, better yet, you may find that among your pupils there is someone who has such a specimen carefully treasured away. In some localities where the limestone rock ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... issues: air pollution resulting in acid rain in both the US and Canada; the US is the largest single emitter of carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels; water pollution from runoff of pesticides and fertilizers; limited natural fresh water resources in much of the western part of the country require ...
— The 2004 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... due the different sorts of coal, of which industry makes use. Thus in the lowest layers of the coal ground appears the anthracite, which, being almost destitute of volatile matter, contains the greatest quantity of carbon. In the higher beds are found, on the contrary, lignite and fossil wood, substances in which the quantity of carbon is infinitely less. Between these two beds, according to the degree of pressure to which they have been subjected, are found veins of graphite and rich or poor coal. It may be asserted that it is for want of sufficient pressure ...
— The Underground City • Jules Verne
... a prosperous Western-style capitalist economy, with a per capita GDP at the level of the four dominant West European economies. 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 ...
— The 2000 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... that a discerning eye might have seen that some form or other of the doctrine of transmutation was inevitable, from the time when the truth enunciated by William Smith that successive strata are characterised by different kinds of fossil remains, became a firmly established law of nature. No one has set forth the speculative consequences of this generalisation better than the ...
— The Reception of the 'Origin of Species' • Thomas Henry Huxley
... geography, all these explorations have added to our knowledge of African geology. A vast portion of the interior is supposed to have been an inland sea, of which Ngami and other lakes are the remains; fossil bones of most peculiar character have been found, but only of terrestrial and fresh-water animals. A name is already given to a creature of a remote secondary period; Professor Owen, from the examination of a few relics, pronounces it to be a Dicynodon. According to Sir B. Murchison, such have ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 452 - Volume 18, New Series, August 28, 1852 • Various
... extents of which are covered by a sandstone formation ("Beacon Sandstone," Ferrar), on the whole horizontally bedded, which is at least 1,500 feet thick, and in which Shackleton found seams of coal and fossil wood (a coniferous tree). This, as it belongs to the Upper Devonian or Lower Carboniferous, determines a lower limit for the age of the sandstone formation. Shackleton also found in lat. 85deg. 15' S. beds of limestone, which ...
— The South Pole, Volumes 1 and 2 • Roald Amundsen
... he should come to Brisbane and take a more important position. It was when this patronage was declined that the Premier (dropping for a moment into that bushman's jargon which came naturally to him) said, irritably, that Louis Bachelor was a "old fossil who didn't know when he'd got his dover in the dough," which, being interpreted into the slang of the old world, means, his knife into the official loaf. But the fossil went on as before, known by name to the merest handful ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... lowest—from a voice in legislation to a finger in Jack Horner's pie. I looked for a department of Fish, with your lordship's name at the head of it; but I did not find it. It would be a fine department. It would divide itself naturally into three classes—living fish, fossil fish, and fish in ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... 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, and suicide. There ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner
... dragon and its history. But when the Keeper of the Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities in the British Museum, in a book that is not intended to be humorous,[135] seriously claims Dr. Andrews' discovery of a gigantic fossil snake as "proof" of the former existence of "the great serpent-devil Apep," ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... keen-witted human foes like "Jack the Giant-killer." It may be that traditions of pre- historic peoples have sometimes given birth to legends of giants. Another source of stories concerning them has been the discovery of huge fossil bones, such as those of the mammoth or mastodon, which were formerly supposed to be bones of gigantic men. The ogres, who sometimes figure in folk tales, are giants with a taste for human flesh. They recall the cannibals of ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... of his Moorish and Syrian slave-boys as they played 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 ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... be charlatanism for a paleontologist to construct a fish out of a single fossil scale, then there may be something of that ability in me. For truly, Clive, I am often at a loss where to draw the line between what I see and what I reason out—between my clairvoyance and my deductions. And if I made mistakes I certainly should be deeply alarmed. But—I ...
— Athalie • Robert W. Chambers
... say, the series in any given individual or species may come to an end; species may be exterminated, but we know of no instance of individuals coming into existence except by the process of reproduction or generation from pre-existing individuals. Further, we know from the evidence of fossil remains that the animals existing in former periods were very different from those existing now, and that many of the existing forms, such as man, mammals, birds, bony fishes, can only be traced ...
— Hormones and Heredity • J. T. Cunningham
... thank Professor E. Raymond Hall and Dr. Robert W. Wilson for their permission to examine this material and for critical comments and advice on the manuscript. The drawings were made by Miss Lucy Remple. The specimens are a part of the collection of fossil vertebrates formerly belonging to the California Institute of Technology, but now the property of the Los Angeles County Museum. The specimens had been lent by the late Professor Chester Stock to Professor Hall and Dr. ...
— Pleistocene Pocket Gophers From San Josecito Cave, Nuevo Leon, Mexico • Robert J. Russell
... with any sense would take to Miss Mariner. If I told you how near I came to spilling the sauce-boat accidentally over that old fossil's head, you'd be surprised, Ellen. She just sat there brooding like an old eagle. If you ask my opinion, Miss Mariner's a long sight too ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... young hyenas, visiting mosques and mausoleums. In every land he made collections of its greatest curiosities in art, literature, science, natural history, and politics. A sphinx, an obelisk, a winged bull from Nineveh, stuffed porcupines, live monkeys, fossil remains, a pinchbeck president of the United States, and many rare specimens even more curious, did he collect, and after years of wandering, by land and by sea, carry with him to his native village. There he converted an old barn into a museum, ...
— The Magician's Show Box and Other Stories • Lydia Maria Child
... mimicry of a vehicle the murderer was to be sent to the Potomac river, while the man he had murdered was moving in state across the mourning continent. The old negro geared up his wagon by means of a set of fossil harness, and when it was backed to Garrett's porch, they laid within it the discolored corpse. The corpse was tied with ropes around the legs and made fast to the wagon sides. Harold's legs were tied to stirrups, ...
— The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth • George Alfred Townsend
... its time, ponders its own ideals, not of literature and art only—not of men only, but of women. The idea of the women of America, (extricated from this daze, this fossil and unhealthy air which hangs about the word lady,) develop'd, raised to become the robust equals, workers, and, it may be, even practical and political deciders with the men—greater than man, we may admit, through their divine maternity, ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... 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
... (FIGURE 2.248. Fossil Permian primitive fish (Pleuracanthus Dechenii), from the red sandstone of Saarbrucken. (From Doderlein.) I Skull and branchial skeleton: o eye-region, pq palatoquadratum, nd lower jaw, hm hyomandibular, ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.2 • Ernst Haeckel
... some roses and jessamine for the Princess, and to collect some of the curious fossil echini, which he believed to be olives turned to stone by the Prophet Elijah, as a punishment to a churlish peasant who refused him a meal. He thought that such treasures would be a welcome addition to the store he was accumulating for the good old Grand Prior. ...
— The Prince and the Page • Charlotte M. Yonge
... what, think you, had the man in view? I tell you, Jack, you are a fossil beside him. You talk of making good citizens, quite in the old Hellenic style. Oh yes, I recognised the incurable Aristotle in your exhortation, though you did address it to two score of rustic British children. But, my dear fellow, you are a philosopher in ...
— Shining Ferry • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... "drowned" it, he would say. And there was sally-lunn and Maryland biscuit; here, at last, Aunt Hannah was supreme— her elbows told the story. And last of all there was a great dish of escalloped oysters cooked in fossil scallop shells thousands of years old, that Malachi had himself dug out of the marl-banks at Yorktown when he was a boy, and which had been used in the Horn family almost as many times as they were years old. Oh, for a revival of this extinct conchological comfort! But no! It is just ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... vehicle of 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 ...
— Handwork in Wood • William Noyes
... Magdalena River of late. You have a hunch that we may just be unlucky enough to run across some of those ragged chaps, who want to upset the present government of Colombia, and seat some old ex-president fossil in the ...
— The Aeroplane Boys on the Wing - Aeroplane Chums in the Tropics • John Luther Langworthy
... return I received orders instructing me to accompany Professor Marsh on a fossil-hunting expedition into the rough lands of the Big Horn Basin. The party was to consist of a number of scientists besides Professor Marsh, together with twenty-five students from Yale, which institution was sending out ...
— An Autobiography of Buffalo Bill (Colonel W. F. Cody) • Buffalo Bill (William Frederick Cody)
... reached by disregarding the liberal statutes of our State, passed for the sole purpose of extending the rights of married women, and forever removing from our law, relating to their power to contract in regard to their earnings and property, the fossil foot-prints of the feudal system, and following the strictest ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... 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 ...
— Little Classics, Volume 8 (of 18) - Mystery • Various
... 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 ...
— South with Scott • Edward R. G. R. Evans
... The "dear old fossil" referred to by Miss Sally was one of those occurrences—auxiliaries or encumbrances, as may be—whom one is liable to meet with in almost any family, who are so forcibly taken for granted by all its members that the infection of their acceptance ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... called ambrit), n. Mineral [from amber ite, mineral formative, 'O.E.D.'], a fossil resin found in masses amidst lignite coals in various parts of New Zealand. Some identify it with the resin of Dammara australis, generally called ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... other 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 or another, sometimes against my convictions, ...
— The Lieutenant-Governor • Guy Wetmore Carryl
... exception of tattered breech-clouts are absolutely naked. Their mouths and eyes are encircled with black rings; their hair is gathered in knots upon the tops of their heads, from which rise bunches of corn husks; a string of deer-hoofs dangles from each wrist; fragments of fossil wood hang from the loins; and to the knees are fastened tortoise-shells. Nothing is worn with a view to ornament. These seeming monstrosities, frightful in their ugliness, move about quite nimbly, and are boldly impudent to a degree approaching sublimity. Notwithstanding their uncouth figures ...
— The Delight Makers • Adolf Bandelier
... twenty-four hours each and the universality of the Noachian deluge was accepted by everybody, it would have been something like a miracle if he had at once fathomed the true meaning of the shark's teeth, elephant's bones, and other fossil remains which came under his notice. His idea was that all these things were mere concretions "generated by fermentation in the spots where they were found," as he very quaintly and even absurdly put it. The accusation, ...
— Science and Morals and Other Essays • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle
... at the bookshelf, where he looked to see the life of Jesse James, he was astonished and somewhat reassured to discover a title like "Fossil Fishes of the Old Red Sandstone of the British Isles." It was unlikely, he reasoned, that a man who voluntarily read, for instance, "Contributions to the Natural History of the United States," would split his skull when his back was turned. ...
— The Man from the Bitter Roots • Caroline Lockhart
... the ice begins to thaw, new mines or deposits of fossil ivory—a perfect treasure of mammoths' tusks—are discovered in the marsh-lands of Eastern Siberia. There are no mammoths now—unless we call elephants by that name; yet their remains have been found upon both continents. In the year 1799, the perfect ...
— Reading Made Easy for Foreigners - Third Reader • John L. Huelshof
... history, could give anecdotes of each, and enumerate their various performances. Opera girls and their keepers, musicians and musical dilletanti, connoiseurs and their jackalls, (picture dealers and auctioneers) collectors, shell fossil and fiddle fanciers, in short every class of idlers that I have since found swarming in this miscellaneous town ranked among ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... The physicist, the chemist and the biologist re-related their discoveries in the light of his governing principle and supplied an immense body of fact for further consideration. Geology was reborn, the records of the rocks came to have a new meaning, every broken fossil form became a word, maybe a paragraph, for the retelling of the past of ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins
... regarded as friendly to the human race. Religions, laws, sciences, arts, theories, and histories, instead of passing Ariel-like into the elements when their task is done, are made perpetual prisoners in the alcoves of dreary libraries. They have a fossil immortality, surviving themselves in covers, as poems have survived minstrels. The memory of man is made omni-capacious; its burden increases with every generation; not even the ignorance and stolidity of the past are allowed the final grace of being ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... rate of bombardment of that atmosphere by high-velocity particles, and several other factors, the information on the radioactivity of the specimens meant nothing. There was also the likelihood that the carbon in the various polymer resins came from oil or coal, and fossil ...
— Dead Giveaway • Gordon Randall Garrett
... found 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 ...
— The First Book of Farming • Charles L. Goodrich
... contrast. A learned Pharisee, conscious of a power that would one day place the highest dignities at his disposal, he was a man of great and manifold possessions. A curious and interesting inventory of his goods has been preserved like a fossil in the Scriptures (Phil. iii. 5, 6). These things he highly valued and fondly loved; but another and opposing love came against them, and the strong man succumbed to the stronger. "What things were gain to me, these I counted loss for Christ:" he parted with all and purchased ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... and Horses are first found in the middle Tertiaries; the grains, the Rosaceae, with their variety of fruits, the tropical fruit-trees, Oranges, Bananas, etc., the shade- and cluster-trees, so important to the comfort and shelter of man, are added to the vegetable world during these epochs. The fossil vegetation of the Tertiaries is, indeed, most interesting from this point of view, showing the gradual maturing and completion of those conditions most intimately associated with human life. The earth had already its seasons, its spring and summer, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... and other fossils are plentiful in it, often cemented together with veins of gypsum. Both these pits are mentioned in the Government Geological Survey (pp. 152, 153) of “The country around Lincoln.” Close by the latter pit the writer once found a curious fossil, which was for some time a puzzle to all who saw it. It is now in the British Museum, and was pronounced to be an ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter
... Christian symbols and Christian ceremonies speak as plainly to the student of ancient religions as the stars speak to the astronomer, and the rocks to the geologian; Christian Churches are as full of the fossil relics of the old creeds as are the earth's strata of the bones of extinct animals. We shall expect to find, then, a family resemblance running through all Eastern creeds—of which Christianity is one—and we shall not be surprised to find similar symbols expressing similar ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant
... successive levels the long lines of cliffs, or escarpments, which separate the different plains as they rise like steps one behind the other. What a history of geological change does the simply constructed coast of Patagonia reveal! In some red mud, capping the gravel, I discovered fossil bones which showed the wonderful relationship in the same continent between the dead and the living, and will, I have no doubt, hereafter throw more light on the appearance of organic beings on our earth and their disappearance ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various
... tendencies of science should result in the overthrow of the Bible. They seem, somehow, to be fully persuaded that the inspired word of God has no inherent power to stand alone,—that it has fallen among thieves and robbers,—is being pelted with fossil coprolites, suffocated with fire-mist and primitive gases, or beaten over the head with the shank-bones of Silurian monsters, and is bawling aloud for assistance. Therefore, not stopping to dress, they dash out into the public notice without hat or coat, in such unclothed intellectual ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • 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 Kidd and ...
— The Outdoor Chums on the Gulf • Captain Quincy Allen
... its ears those of an ox;" but some have no ears, the organ of hearing being said to be in the horns, or the creature "hears through its horns." These various properties are supposed to indicate the "fossil remnants of primitive worship of many animals." The small dragon is like the silk caterpillar. The large dragon fills the Heaven and the earth. Before the dragon, sometimes suspended from his neck, ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... "Hi, old fossil," cried the man who had first called on him for assistance, "did je think we wanted of you to read the bloomin' notis to yourself? Come back here and read it ...
— Tarzan of the Apes • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... You must have been reading a tremendous lot lately. Of course you would, with that learned old fossil about. No my dear, I've come simply to see if you ...
— The Princess Priscilla's Fortnight • Elizabeth von Arnim
... and visited the different licks. One, long named Big Bone Lick, was famous because there were scattered about it in incredible quantity the gigantic remains of the extinct mastodon; the McAfees made a tent by stretching their blankets over the huge fossil ribs, and used the disjointed vertebrae as stools on which to sit. Game of many kinds thronged the spaces round the licks; herds of buffalo, elk, and deer, as well as bears and wolves, were all in sight at once. The ground round about some of them was ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume One - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1769-1776 • Theodore Roosevelt
... surely distance 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 ...
— In the School-Room - Chapters in the Philosophy of Education • John S. Hart
... department was shown the most complete collection of the State's minerals that has ever been made. Entered as "a collection of ores, gold, silver, copper; minerals, fossil collection, coal and coke; building materials, iron, lead, antimony arsenic; roadmaking and cement materials, clay and clay products, limestone and lime, soils, mineral waters, illustrations." Awarded gold medal on "collective exhibit of ores and minerals;" silver ...
— Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission • Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission
... they come? Have they been blown on to the lake, or left behind by man? or are they fossil trees, integral parts of the vegetable stratum below which is continually rolling upward? or are they of both kinds? I do not know. Only this is certain, as Messrs. Wall and Sawkins have pointed out, that not only 'the purer varieties of asphalt, such as approach or ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... times we know primeval birds had teeth, three fingers with claws on each hand, and a long lizard-like tail provided with nearly twenty pairs of well-formed true feathers. But unfortunately neither this lizard-tailed bird, nor yet the fossil birds found in America, throw any light on the origin of feathers. Ornithologists and others who have devoted much time to the study of birds have as a rule assumed that feathers were made out of scales, that the scales along the margin of the hand and forearm and along each side of the tail ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... solution, which for a time seemed satisfactory, assumed several successive creations and destructions of the world to have taken place in the interval between the first and second verses of Genesis. To these all the fossil remains were ascribed, while the present state of things was supposed to be the result of the operations recorded in the remainder of the chapter. But as geological knowledge advanced, it soon became clear that there were no breaks in the chain of life; no points at which one set ...
— The Story of Creation as told by Theology and by Science • T. S. Ackland
... also, who examined the place himself, mentions the recent accumulation which occurs at St. Hospice, about sixty feet above the present level of the sea, as containing marine shells in a scarcely fossil state (a peine fossiles) and he describes the mass in which they occur, as belonging to a formation still more recent than the upper marine beds of ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia] [Volume 2 of 2] • Phillip Parker King
... axes and flint spears from the Island of Cozumel. Next follow fossil shells, collected by Mrs. Alice Le Plongeon from an excavation at Chichen-Itza, which may be useful in ...
— The Mayas, the Sources of Their History / Dr. Le Plongeon in Yucatan, His Account of Discoveries • Stephen Salisbury, Jr.
... we reproduce on our celestial maps are the fossil remains of a luxuriant mythological vegetation, and besides our classic sphere the ancients knew another, the "barbarian" sphere, peopled with a world of fantastic persons and animals. These sidereal monsters, ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... temporary, the caravans of camels, oxen, horses, boats and sledges will converge to a movable entrepot that will assume more and more an inter-Asiatic instead of an inter-national character. The furs, fossil ivory, sheepskins and brick tea brought by them after voyages often reaching a year and eighteen months, come, strictly enough, under the head of raw products. Still, it is the best they can bring; which cannot be said of what Europe ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. XVII, No. 99, March, 1876 • Various
... red soil, resembling more the chaos of some primary elemental upheaval than the work of man; while, half-way down, a long flume straddled its narrow body and disproportionate legs over the chasm, like an enormous fossil of some forgotten antediluvian. At every step smaller ditches crossed the road, hiding in their sallow depths unlovely streams that crept away to a clandestine union with the great yellow torrent below, and here and there were the ruins of ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... instructions of the celebrated Werner; and, when there, he devoted himself, with the characteristic ardour of his disposition, to make himself master of geology and botany, and prosecuted in an especial manner the study of the fossil remains of plants in the rocks around that place. In 1792, he published at Berlin a learned treatise, entitled Specimen Florae, Friebergensis Subterraniae; which procured for him such celebrity, that he was soon after appointed ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... answered any one in my life, not even you, or Esther, or the man who said that my fossil bird was a crocodile. Why do you want me to ...
— Esther • Henry Adams
... no thought of evolution; in later years, however, his researches upon fossil crocodilians led him to consider the possibility that the living species were descended from the antediluvian. For the factors of the transformation he refers to Lamarck's hypotheses.[98] In a memoir of 1828,[99] dealing with the possible genetic relation of living to ...
— Form and Function - A Contribution to the History of Animal Morphology • E. S. (Edward Stuart) Russell
... Coanza, and received true Portuguese hospitality from Senhor Lubata. The town has more than a thousand inhabitants; the district has 28,063, with only 315 slaves. It stands on a mound of calcareous tufa, containing great numbers of fossil shells, the most recent of which resemble those found in the marly tufa close to the coast. The fort stands on the south side of the town, on a high perpendicular bank overhanging the Coanza. This river is here a noble stream, about a hundred and fifty yards wide, admitting navigation ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... up in the same school of philosophy as his father, belonged to another generation. The time of my history is the beginning of the latter half of the present century, and Michael was already considered somewhat of a fossil. Robert was inconsistent, as the old doctrine when it is decaying, or the new at its advent always is; but the main difference between Michael and Robert was not any distinct divergence, but that truths believed by Michael, and admitted by Robert, failed to impress Robert ...
— Miriam's Schooling and Other Papers - Gideon; Samuel; Saul; Miriam's Schooling; and Michael Trevanion • Mark Rutherford
... not threatened with social ostracism for daring to follow her own conscience instead of that of her nearest male relative—then will be the time to judge her. It is not for me to betray the confidence reposed in me by a suffering woman, but you can tell that interesting old fossil, Colonel Maxim, that he and the other old women of the Bermondsey Branch of the Primrose League may elect Mrs. Clifton Courtenay for their President, and make the most of it; they have only got the outside of the woman. ...
— Sketches in Lavender, Blue and Green • Jerome K. Jerome
... too pretty, and I don't look like a fossil, certainly; but after all, what matter ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... invariable and nature more fixed; for the inferior species have, as we have said, experienced in a perceptible manner all the effects of different causes of degeneration. Only it should be remarked in regard to these greater species, such as the elephant and hippopotamus, that in comparing their fossil remains with the existing forms we find the earlier ones to have been larger. Nature was then in the full vigour of her youth, and the interior heat of the earth gave to her productions all the force and all the extent of which they were capable ... if there have been lost ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... leisure. The people of those isles call the bird 'Rukh.'" Yule has an interesting note (vol. II, p. 348) showing how old and widespread the fable of the Rukh was, and is of opinion that the reason that the legend was localized in the direction of Madagascar was perhaps that some remains of the great fossil Aepyornis and its colossal eggs were found in that island. Professor Sayce states that the Rukh figures much—not only in Chinese folk-lore—but also in the old, Babylonian literature. The bird is of course familiar to readers of The ...
— The Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela • Benjamin of Tudela
... of the most valuable of gums, and is furnished by many countries in the districts of Africa explored by Mr. H. M. Stanley, the discoverer of Livingstone. Copal is found in a fossil state in very large quantities. The natives collect the gum by searching in the sandy soil, mostly in the hilly districts, the country being almost barren, with no large tree except the Adansonia, and occasionally a ...
— French Polishing and Enamelling - A Practical Work of Instruction • Richard Bitmead |
