"Insect" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... beneath his Hat, He often thought he had it pat; The Violet-bed, the Myrtle-sprig, Had made his little Heart grow big. At last, with Joy he saw it venture Within a Tulip's Bell to enter, And snatch'd it with ecstatic rapture. But what, alas! was all his Capture? A lifeless Insect, like a Worm, Without one ...
— The Sugar-Plumb - or, Golden Fairing • Margery Two-Shoes
... fathers often went in their sense of sin. It is hard to forgive Jonathan Edwards when one reads in his famous Enfield sermon: "The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect, over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked; . . . you are ten thousand times so abominable in his eyes, as the most hateful and venomous serpent is in ours." Any one who understands human nature ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... one is professor of flies, and another one is professor of pinch-bugs, and another is professor of toads, and another is professor of lobsters, and so on until all the kinds of insects has each a professor to itself. And them they call specialists, and each one knows more about his own kind of insect than any other man in th' world knows. So mebbe the Frinchmin is professor of fleas, as ...
— Mike Flannery On Duty and Off • Ellis Parker Butler
... mossy couch the radiant Worm, Guard from cold dews her love-illumin'd form, 195 From leaf to leaf conduct the virgin light, Star of the earth, and diamond of the night. You bid in air the tropic Beetle burn, And fill with golden flame his winged urn; Or gild the surge with insect-sparks, that swarm 200 Round the bright oar, the kindling prow alarm; Or arm in waves, electric in his ire, The dread Gymnotus with ethereal fire.— Onward his course with waving tail he helms, And mimic lightenings scare the watery realms, 205 ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... than of a pursuing hate. They stood close together; their shoulders brushed companionably. Together they hearkened to a tiny voice thrilling through the emptiness, the monotonous vibrating cadences of some happy insect. The heat of the day had passed with the day, the perfect hour had come. It was one of those moments which Jim Kendric found to his liking. Many such still hours had he known under many skies and out of the night had always come something vague ...
— Daughter of the Sun - A Tale of Adventure • Jackson Gregory
... the fall, From a mighty Major-General To an insect most exceedingly small. 'T is marvellous, yet we have seen Such magic changes ...
— Stories of Many Lands • Grace Greenwood
... tobacco-shop in York—which has no authority, and on etymological grounds is indefensible. The derivation of "cigar" is not altogether clear; but the probabilities are strongly in favour of its connexion with "cigarra," the Spanish name for the cicada, the shrilly-chirping insect familiar in the southern countries of Europe, and the subject of frequent allusions by the ancient writers of Greece and Rome, as well as by modern scribes. A Spanish lexicographer of authority says that the cigar ...
— The Social History of Smoking • G. L. Apperson
... from Vegetables which are being washed, put a pinch of borax in the water. It will bring any live insect to the ...
— Fowler's Household Helps • A. L. Fowler
... loved. She was a great walker, spending all her leisure on the moors. She loved the freedom there, the large air. She loved the creatures, too. Never was a soul with a more passionate love of Mother Earth, of every weed and flower, of every bird, beast, and insect that lived. She would have peopled the house with pets had not Miss Branwell kept her niece's love of animals in due subjection. Only one dog was allowed, who was admitted into the parlour at stated hours, but out of doors ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson
... matin, chagrin," he said, involuntarily, while he watched the insect make good its escape over the top of ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... and the silence of high noon lay close and thick between the steep slopes of the canyons like an invisible, muffling fluid. At intervals the drone of an insect bored the air and trailed slowly to silence again. Everywhere were pungent, aromatic smells. The vast, moveless heat seemed to distil countless odors from the brush—odors of warm sap, of pine needles, and of tar-weed, and above all the medicinal ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... now, gaining on the tired human. Legs aching and bruised, stinging from insect bites, Alan tried to force himself to run holding his hands in front of him like a child in the dark. His foot tripped on a barely visible insect hill and a winged swarm exploded around him. Startled, Alan jerked sideways, crashing his head against ...
— Survival Tactics • Al Sevcik
... As the little coral insect, obeying the blind instinct of its nature, adds particle to particle, and builds a house for itself at the same time that it helps to construct a continent; so we, obeying the voice of God, in every little duty, performed not grudgingly, but with the heart, are adding ...
— The Elements of Character • Mary G. Chandler
... our reverence rather than our egotism. Science has disclosed some of the machinery of the universe, but science has not yet revealed to us the great secret—the secret of life. It is to be found in every blade of grass, in every insect, in every bird and in every animal, as well as in man. Six thousand years of recorded history and yet we know no more about the secret of life than they knew in the beginning. We live, we plan; we have our hopes, our fears; and yet in a moment a change may come over anyone of us and this ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... round the lake to see if the fish are moving; the still more anxious glance through your book to guess what they will choose to take; what extravagant bundle of red, blue, and yellow feathers, like no insect save perhaps some jewelled monster from Amboyna or Brazil—may tempt those sulkiest and most capricious of trout to cease for once their life-long business of picking leeches from among those Syenite cubes which will twist ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... is an insect strange, He loves to stand upon a red-hot range. Unlike his race, he's not an octoped, He has but three legs and he has no head. Had this but been the kind Miss Muffet saw 'Twould not have filled the maiden ...
— A Phenomenal Fauna • Carolyn Wells
... fabled armor of Homer's Iliad is not to be compared with this little insect's wing-shields. They are nothing but ...
— Debts of Honor • Maurus Jokai
... seated myself when an electric shock went through me. A voice told me, 'She is here!' I looked round, and saw the countess hidden in the shadow at the back of her box in the first tier. My look did not waver; my eyes saw her at once with incredible clearness; my soul hovered about her life like an insect above its flower. How had my senses received this warning? There is something in these inward tremors that shallow people find astonishing, but the phenomena of our inner consciousness are produced as simple as those of external vision; so I was not surprised, ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... Mr. Corntossel. "When a farmer is supposed to know the botanical name of what he's raisin' an' the zoological name of the insect that eats it, and the chemical name of what will kill it, ...
— More Toasts • Marion Dix Mosher
... punishments. Also, like all other Hindoos, he was of opinion that when a man dies his soul does not go direct to heaven or to hell, but that it passes into some other body: it may be the body of a human being, or it may be into that of a beast, a bird, a fish, or an insect. And then, after millions of migrations like these, the soul either finds a permanent state of existence according to its fate, or its identity is lost ...
— Old Daniel • Thomas Hodson
... beauty and significance to us. Day by day we sat on our front porch, and watched the clouds of blossoms thicken. If we walked in our garden we felt the creative loam throbbing beneath our feet. Each bird seemed as proud of the place as we. Each insect was in a transport ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... to be by those in a similar situation in some parts of Europe. The training of quails for the same cruel purpose of butchering each other furnishes abundance of employment for the idle and dissipated. They have even extended their enquiries after fighting animals into the insect tribe, in which they have discovered a species of gryllus, or locust, that will attack each other with such ferocity as seldom to quit their hold without bringing away at the same time a limb of their antagonist. These little creatures ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... educate him to Swinburne's level, even in technical appreciation; yet he often wondered whether there was nothing he had to offer that was worth the poet's acceptance. Certainly such mild homage as the American insect would have been only too happy to bring, had he known how, was hardly worth the acceptance of any one. Only in France is the attitude of prayer possible; in England it became absurd. Even Monckton Milnes, who felt the splendours of Hugo and Landor, was almost as helpless as an American private ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... friend that a question of so great magnitude to him had been decided by the last sting which he had received from an insect so contemptible as Mr. Bonteen, but he expressed the feeling as well as he knew how to express it. "Oh, I shall be with you. I know what you are going to say, and I know how good you are. But I could not stand it. Men are beginning already to say things which almost make me get ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... Denzil. "'Twere happy if the so-called superiors would remember that, and upon what a fertile ground they sow the seed of new vices. It is like the importation of a new weed or a new insect, which, beginning with an accident, may end in ruined ...
— London Pride - Or When the World Was Younger • M. E. Braddon
... sky with his open eyes, no paler than when he was alive; and a little way off Uma tumbled on her side. I got over to her the best way I was able, and when I got there she was broad awake, and crying and sobbing to herself with no more noise than an insect. It appears she was afraid to cry out loud, because of the aitus. Altogether she was not much hurt, but scared beyond belief; she had come to her senses a long while ago, cried out to me, heard nothing in reply, made out we were both dead, and had lain there ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 17 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... species of them—two indeed there were—both about the size of ordinary gadflies; but altogether different from each other in colour and habits. One was a sort of water-beetle that swam near the surface; while the other was a winged insect that occasionally rose into the air, but more generally crawled along the water—making short runs from place to place, then stopping a moment, and then darting on again. The whole surface of the bay—and even out for some distance into the lake—fairly swarmed with ...
— Bruin - The Grand Bear Hunt • Mayne Reid
... stampede to underground retreats from the region poisoned by sunshine. Next year you will find the grass growing fresh and green where the stone lay—the ground-bird builds her nest where the beetle had his hole—the dandelion and the buttercup are growing there, and the broad fans of insect-angels open and shut over their golden disks as the rhythmic waves of blissful consciousness pulsate through their ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... power to see, capacity to suffer, one may come Ito understand all things. In an insect's death are hinted all disasters. Through a knot-hole can be seen the ...
— Chantecler - Play in Four Acts • Edmond Rostand
... the world seemed so still. There was no sign of life, yet the warm air was thrilling with the unseen life of an insect world. The heat haze rose from the soft, deep surface sand of the trail, and the grass-lined edges looked parched beneath the glare of the summer sun. There was no breath from the mountains down here, where the forest trees crowded in on either side, forming a great screen against the cooling ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... concentrated in the one sense of hearing; sounds so faint as to be imperceptible reverberated in his ears like the crash of thunder; the plash of a distant waterfall, the rustling of a leaf, the movement of an insect in the grass, were like the booming of artillery. Was that the tramp of cavalry, the deep rumbling of gun-carriages driven at speed, that he heard down there to the right? And there on his left, what was that? was it not the sound of stealthy whispers, stifled voices, a party creeping ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... supplied the defects of her early education. Leslie became a naturalist—the most original and untrammelled of naturalists, for she proceeded upon that foundation of anecdotal and experimental acquaintance with herb and tree, insect, bird, and beast, and even atmospheric phenomena, whose unalloyed riches are peculiar to ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler
... to snow. So lightly at first that it seemed a mere passing whisper to the ear, the brush of some viewless insect upon the cheek, or the soft tap of unseen fingers on the shoulders. But by the time the porter returned from his hopeless and invisible chase of the "runaway," he came in out of a swarming cloud of whirling flakes, blinded and whitened. There was a hurried consultation with the landlord, ...
— The Argonauts of North Liberty • Bret Harte
... shifting our scene as we took the fancy, now encamping in some valley among the mountains, now by some pleasant lake or river. In fact, pic-nicing from day to day, and month to month, watching, I and my two sons, with ever new interest, all the varied life of beast, bird, and insect, and the equally varied world of trees, shrubs, and flowers. My mind was lying fallow, as it regarded my usual literary pursuits, but actually engaged with a thousand things of novel interest, both ...
— Study and Stimulants • A. Arthur Reade
... very far from an Eastern man's conception of a park. From Dome Peak it seems a plain; but, in fact, when clouds shut off the high summits to the west, this "valley" becomes a veritable mountain land, a tumbled, lonely country, over which an occasional horseman crawls, a minute but persistent insect. It is, to be exact, a succession of ridges and ravines, sculptured (in some far-off, post-glacial time) by floods of water, covered now, rather sparsely, with pinons, cedars, and aspens, a dry, ...
— The Forester's Daughter - A Romance of the Bear-Tooth Range • Hamlin Garland
... Exodus; all were hurrying toward the promised land—"the land flowing with milk and honey", where men and beasts would be secure, not only from the fevers of the south, but from that deadly enemy to camels and cattle, the fly. This terrible insect drove all ...
— In the Heart of Africa • Samuel White Baker
... away. During the next year he should be able to pay off what he owed, and then he would begin to put by. But, while he thus speculated, his eye fell upon his over-worked horses, and the anxious face of his old bailiff, and a vague fear crept, like a loathly insect, over the fluttering leaves of his hopes; for he had staked all on this cast; he had so mortgaged his land that at this moment he hardly knew how much of it was his own; and all this to raise still higher the social dignity ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... name for hemipterous insects of the family Cimicidae, of which the best-known example is the house bug or bed bug (Cimex lectularius). This disgusting insect is of an oval shape, of a rusty red colour, and, in common with the whole tribe to which it belongs, gives off an offensive odour when touched; unlike the others, however, it is wingless. The bug is provided ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... said the old squire, peering at her with his short-sighted eyes—a mode of looking at her which, as Mrs. Poyser observed, "allays aggravated me: it was as if you was a insect, and he was going to ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... fore-ground, no chiar'oscuro. Look you, he has attempted to paint a fly upon that rose-bud! Why, it is no more like a fly than I am like an ——' But as the connoisseur approached his finger to the picture, the fly flew away. It happened to be the real insect!' Is not the following a forcible picture of a mercurial, hero-loving Frenchman? 'Has he property? An edict from the Grand Monarque can take it, and he is satisfied. Pursue him to the Bastile, or the dismal dungeon ...
— The Knickerbocker, or New-York Monthly Magazine, January 1844 - Volume 23, Number 1 • Various
... blurr all life. The hemlocks no longer chanted riotous gladness. There was a dirge to-night of futility, monotonous age-old eons of useless effort, the useless fall of the forest giant to the dry rot of slug and insect. It was as if Wayland's spirit stood back and listened to the conflicting contentions of two other men, the one who wanted to breast the stream and the one who wanted to go with the current; one full of blind, red-blood courage, the other full of cold white-corpuscled ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... Not yet! When Mrs. Gallilee is angry, she doesn't get over it so soon as you seem to think. Leave her to dabble in science first," said the governess in tones of immeasurable contempt. "When she has half stifled herself with some filthy smell, or dissected some wretched insect or flower, she may be ...
— Heart and Science - A Story of the Present Time • Wilkie Collins
... One enterprising and annoying insect, the chigoe, or "jigger," is able to bore a hole through the sole of a shoe and attack ...
— A Little Journey to Puerto Rico - For Intermediate and Upper Grades • Marian M. George
... catastrophe of large ideas, the father gazed sadly at the son, and the son reproachfully reflected the paternal gaze. How little availed it to have come up here, wearily going on upon yellow waters, in a barge where the fleas could man the helm, without aid of the stouter insect, and where a fresh run sailor was in more demand than salmon; and even without that (which had largely enhanced the inestimable benefit of having wooden legs), this pair of tars had got into a state of mind to return the whole way upon horseback. ...
— Mary Anerley • R. D. Blackmore
... one. The habit of the whole specimen is very rigid, with the exception of the flowers, which are slightly nodding; the tallest growths need no stakes, and the species enjoys a happy immunity from insect pests, probably by reason of its hispid character. As already stated, as a garden subject this is one of the most useful; it shows grandly in front of evergreens, and associates well with lilies. ...
— Hardy Perennials and Old Fashioned Flowers - Describing the Most Desirable Plants, for Borders, - Rockeries, and Shrubberies. • John Wood
... fragments of men that we have amongst us to-day,—the physical joy in existence of the western hunter, the intellectual keenness of the man of science, the love of Nature of the artist or poet, the love for each little bird and insect of the naturalist, the justice of a Washington, the love for God and man of a Florence Nightingale, and then we gain some glimpses of the men of the future whom God has willed shall possess the planet at last. For assuredly the race is safe, though nations or individuals may fail and perish. ...
— A Lecture on Physical Development, and its Relations to Mental and Spiritual Development, delivered before the American Institute of Instruction, at their Twenty-Ninth Annual Meeting, in Norwich, Conn • S.R. Calthrop
... examination that disclosed nothing. Hoofs, legs, bit, mouth, body—everything was as it should be. The saddle and saddle-cloth were innocent of bur or sticker; the back was smooth and unbroken. They searched for sign of snake-bite and sting of fly or insect, ...
— Moon-Face and Other Stories • Jack London
... do not know that I have a right to kill that spider. Suppose, when you are going in your coach to Westminster Hall, a superior Being, who perhaps may have as much power over you as you have over this insect, should say to his companion, 'Kill that lawyer, kill that lawyer!' how should you like that, Jones? and I am sure, to most people, a lawyer is a more ...
— The Book of Three Hundred Anecdotes - Historical, Literary, and Humorous—A New Selection • Various
... illustrated volume for young people, in which the habits, humors, and eccentricities of insects are delightfully described. The secrets and charms of insect-land are laid open by her vivacious pen, and the astonishing insects are described in a manner that makes them ...
— Sara Crewe - or, What Happened at Miss Minchin's • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... I believe verily for the first time, I have been able to put before you some means of guidance to understand the beauty of the bird which lives with you in your own houses, and which purifies for you, from its insect pestilence, the air that you breathe. Thus the sweet domestic thing has done, for men, at least these four thousand years. She has been their companion, not of the home merely, but of the hearth, and the threshold; companion only endeared by ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... they help us to keep in mind that he is, after all, our brother, having to endure the petty every-day ills of life as we have; with this difference, that his heightened sensibility converts what are mere insect stings for us ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... in 1744, pp. 102, 103, &c., it is shown that they have seen some who have been under water forty-eight hours, others during three days, and during eight days. He adds to this the example of the insect chrysalis, which passes all the winter without giving any signs of life, and the aquatic insects which remain all the winter motionless in the mud; which also happens to the frogs and toads; ants even, against the common opinion, are during the winter ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... from Europe, have increased so rapidly that they have overrun the cities and villages of the country and are doing inestimable damage both by driving out native insect eating birds and by their own destructiveness. They nest in all sorts of places but preferably behind blinds, where their unsightly masses of straw protrude from between the slats, and their droppings ...
— The Bird Book • Chester A. Reed
... so acute, that, in a panic of fear—ridiculous, puerile fear, I forcibly withdrew my gaze and concentrated it abstractedly on the ground at my feet. I then listened, and in the rustling of a leaf, the humming of some night insect, the whizzing of a bat, the whispering of the wind as it moaned softly past me, I fancied—nay, I felt sure I detected something that was not ordinary. I blew my nose, and had barely ceased marvelling at the loudness of its ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... the next day. They place their greatest hope of salvation in abstaining from killing any creature whatever, and even use no light at night, lest any moth should fly into the flame; and always carry a broom to sweep the ground they tread on, that they may not trample any worm or insect to death. The third race consists of the Resbuti or Rajputs, who are good soldiers, and to whom formerly the kingdom belonged. These people acknowledge one God in three persons, and worship the blessed Virgin, a doctrine which they ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VI - Early English Voyages Of Discovery To America • Robert Kerr
... him that this could not be so; and he determined that he, at all events, would go about the world as a patient learner, grasping at any hint that was offered him, whether it came by the waving of grasses on the waste, by the droop of flower-laden boughs over a wall, from the strange horned insect that crawled in the dust of the highway, or from the soft gaze of loving eyes, flashing a message into the ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... afford them all the enjoyment their nature is capable of, that after every examination you rise with increased astonishment and admiration at the condescension and goodness of the Master Hand, thus to calculate and provide for the necessities of the smallest insect; and you are compelled to exclaim with the Psalmist, 'O God, how manifold are thy works; in wisdom hast thou made ...
— The Mission; or Scenes in Africa • Captain Frederick Marryat
... just towards the close of the rainy season, when everything was in full verdure, and new to me. The luxuriant foliage expanding in magnificent variety, the brightness of the stars above, the dazzling brilliancy of the fireflies around me, the breeze laden with balmy smells, and the busy hum of insect life making the deep woods vocal, at first oppress the senses with a feeling of novelty and strangeness till the mind appears to hover between the realms ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 1 (of 2) • George Grey
... hidden springs of existence and life. Can one resist the melancholy, the sense of tears in things when we reflect that, like our own bodily frame, the whole visible world is hastening to dissolution? From the infinitesimal insect whose earthly career is rounded off in a few moments, hardly come before gone, to the longest-lived of living beings, to the oaks that stand beyond a thousand years, to the hills that seemed so enduring that the Hebrew poet called them "everlasting," to this earth, to planets away in the ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... dipping in a water solution of a reliable coal tar disinfectant. This should not be practised during cold weather, as the fleece does not dry out. Insect powder may be dusted into the fleece when it is impossible to dip ...
— Common Diseases of Farm Animals • R. A. Craig, D. V. M.
... 'It did not produce a twitter in me,' he wrote to his sister; 'I died long ago, and it will not make any difference to me; I am prepared to follow the unrolling of the scroll.' The world, perhaps, was not big enough for him; and yet how clearly he recognised that he was 'a poor insect!' 'My heart tells me that, and I am glad ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... rudiment; vanishing point; thinness &c. 203. dwarf, pygmy, pigmy[obs3], Liliputian, chit, pigwidgeon[obs3], urchin, elf; atomy[obs3], dandiprat[obs3]; doll, puppet; Tom Thumb, Hop-o'-my- thumb[obs3]; manikin, mannikin; homunculus, dapperling[obs3], cock-sparrow. animalcule, monad, mite, insect, emmet[obs3], fly, midge, gnat, shrimp, minnow, worm, maggot, entozoon[obs3]; bacteria; infusoria[obs3]; microzoa[Microbiol]; phytozoaria[obs3]; microbe; grub; tit, tomtit, runt, mouse, small fry; millet seed, mustard seed; barleycorn; pebble, grain of sand; molehill, button, bubble. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... how they grow; Hear the winds that gently blow. Bird and insect, flower and tree, Know they must not idle be; Each has something it must do— Little children, ...
— My Flower-pot - Child's Picture Book • Unknown
... far as he could gather from the descriptions she gave him from time to time, was going to be rather difficult to find. He feared also that it would be a very insect-ridden place, and that their calm pursuits would often be interrupted by things like earwigs. It was to be ancient, and much thatched and latticed and rose-overgrown. It was, too, to be very small; the smallest of labourers' cottages. Yet though so small and so ancient it was to have ...
— The Princess Priscilla's Fortnight • Elizabeth von Arnim
... and having caught an ant on the end of a severed blade of grass, she amused herself by making it go from one end to the other of the sprig, which she tipped up whenever the insect reached one of the ends. She listened with mute and contented attention to all the wonderful details of the life of these frail creatures: their subterranean homes; the manner in which they seize, ...
— Yvette • Henri Rene Guy de Maupassant
... and Vaudreuil drew the first smoke, then the Iroquois deputies, and then all the tribes in turn. The treaty was duly signed, the representative of each tribe affixing his mark, in the shape of some bird, beast, fish, reptile, insect, plant, ...
— Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV • Francis Parkman
... castle has ever gone to work more deliberately or fiendishly to entrap his victims while offering them hospitality, than does this plant-ogre. Attracted by the bizarre yellowish hoods of the tall, nodding flowers, the foolish insect alights upon the former and commences his exploration ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various
... that infinite variety of decoration in which she revels, binding tree to tree in a tangle of anaconda-like lianas, and dwindling down from these huge cables to airy webs and hair-like fibres that vibrate to the wind of the passing insect's wing. ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson
... only was he thus handicapped by his birth; he had for tutor that arch-scoundrel Dubois—the "grovelling insect" who rarely opened his mouth without uttering a blasphemy or indecency, and who initiated his charge, while still a boy, into every ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... the Southern United States, display the same beautiful diversity and proportion of kinds as in the surrounding virgin forests. What a struggle between the several kinds of trees must here have gone on during long centuries, each annually scattering its seeds by the thousand; what war between insect and insect—between insects, snails, and other animals, with birds and beasts of prey—all striving to increase, and all feeding on each other or on the trees, or their seeds and seedlings, or on the other plants which first clothed the ground and thus checked the ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... have seen the land! Like a purple fringe upon the golden sea, "while parting day dies like the dolphin," there it lay upon the fair horizon—the great young free new world! and every tree, and flower, and insect on it new!—a wonder and a ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... said with men, and with the thoughts of men, 60 I held but slight communion; but instead, My joy was in the wilderness,—to breathe The difficult air of the iced mountain's top,[131] Where the birds dare not build—nor insect's wing Flit o'er the herbless granite; or to plunge Into the torrent, and to roll along On the swift whirl of the new-breaking wave Of river-stream, or Ocean, in their flow.[132] In these my early strength exulted; or To ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... two or three years, that the roots have rotted in the ground, several oxen are attached by a chain to each, and pull it out. Generally this is done by means of a "logging bee." I must explain this term, as it refers neither to the industrious insect nor the imperial bee of Napoleon. The very name reminds me of early rising, healthy activity, ...
— The Englishwoman in America • Isabella Lucy Bird
... into various channels; the gall insects turn it into channels to suit their ends when they sting the leaf of a tree or the stalk of a plant, and deposit an egg in the wound. "Build me a home and a nursery for my young," says the insect. "With all my heart," says the leaf, and forthwith forgets its function as a leaf, and proceeds to build up a structure, often of great delicacy and complexity, to house and cradle its enemy. The current of life ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... visited. But of all the places of which they told me, none captivated and charmed my imagination so much as the Coral Islands of the Southern Seas. They told me of thousands of beautiful, fertile islands that had been formed by a small creature called the coral insect, where summer reigned nearly all the year round, where the trees were laden with a constant harvest of luxuriant fruit, where the climate was almost perpetually delightful; yet where, strange to say, men were wild, bloodthirsty savages, excepting in those favoured isles to which the Gospel ...
— The Coral Island • R.M. Ballantyne
... to the Deity; A beam etherial, sullied, and absorbt! Though sullied and dishonoured still divine! Dim miniature of greatness absolute! An heir of glory! a frail child of dust! Helpless immortal! insect infinite! A worm! a god!—I tremble at myself, And in myself am lost. At home a stranger, Thought wanders up and down, surprised, aghast, And wondering at her own: How reason reels! O what a miracle to man is ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... frightened—frightened out of my senses. Confess that you lied, when you used Miss Lockwood's name just now! No! I don't believe you on your oath; I will believe nobody but Miss Lockwood herself. Where does she live? Tell me that, you noxious stinging little insect—and you may go.' Terrified as she was, Mrs. Ferrari hesitated. Lady Montbarry lifted her hands threateningly, with the long, lean, yellow-white fingers outspread and crooked at the tips. Mrs. Ferrari shrank at the sight of them, and gave the address. Lady Montbarry pointed contemptuously ...
— The Haunted Hotel - A Mystery of Modern Venice • Wilkie Collins
... stimulation of the various ticklish regions of the body; the entire skin surface of the body contains delicate ticklish receptors. These receptors are closely related to the nociceptors for pain, and their adequate stimulation by an insect-like touch causes a discharge of energy,—a nerve-muscular reaction,— resembling that developed for the purpose of brushing off insects. This reflex is similar to the scratch reflex in the dog. The discharge of energy is almost wholly independent of the will and is a self-protective ...
— The Origin and Nature of Emotions • George W. Crile
... laid himself at her feet. The soft autumn sunshine played here and there upon her form and face through the leaves, while the occasional note of a bird or hum of an insect were the only sounds that broke the stillness of the lonely place. What an exquisite pleasure to lie there and breathe in all this wonderful peace, for it was like a taste of heaven. Far away from all perplexities and cares, she could have lost herself in sweet forgetfulness but for this one ...
— The Right Knock - A Story • Helen Van-Anderson
... the wilds of the New World. His trunk was always full, not of money and valuables, but of natural history specimens; and while we were lying on the grass on the alert for the least noise which might reveal the approach of the enemy, he would be absorbed in the analysis of some plant or insect. He was an admirable young man, as pure as an angel, as unselfish as a stoic, as patient as a savant, and withal cheerful and affectionate. When we were in danger of being surprised, he could think and talk of nothing but the precious pebbles and the invaluable ...
— Mauprat • George Sand
... beauty, and seek for no other. There will be grief and trouble in that wilful little heart; Unfold thy leaves, my daughter, and let the fly depart." But the proud little bud would have her own will, And folded the fire-fly more closely still; Till the struggling insect tore open the vest Of purple and green, that covered her breast. When the sun came up, she saw with grief The blooming of her sister bud leaf by leaf. While she, once as fair and bright as the rest, Hung her weary head down on her wounded breast. Bright grew the sunshine, and the soft summer ...
— Flower Fables • Louisa May Alcott
... angry cow, rendered furious by the sting of some insect, plunged frantically into the wedding circle, bellowing, tossing her head, and flourishing her tail in a terrific and antinuptial manner. The Rev. Mr. Sifter was the first one to leave, and, being very spare, he passed swiftly through ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... to be crushed like an insect. The little local gearing of the big party machine was to crush him. Jennie dimly sensed the tragedy of it, but very dimly. Mainly she thought of Mr. Peterson's suggestion as to "lining up" Jim Irwin as so ...
— The Brown Mouse • Herbert Quick
... A white-curved bud Opening its petals slowly in the warmth of heaven.... The air is full of odours And languorous warm sounds.... A flute drones its insect music to the night Below the curving moon-petal ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... the Devil, philosophically, "I never caught anybody yet who didn't say that; but tell me, ain't you getting somewhat fastidious down there? Here is one of my most popular flies, the greenback," he continued, exhibiting an emerald-looking insect, which he drew from his box. "This, so generally considered excellent in election season, has not even been nibbled at. Perhaps your sagacity, which, in spite of this unfortunate contretemps, no one can doubt," added the Devil, with a graceful ...
— Legends and Tales • Bret Harte
... over to the cliff edge. Here the gorse is aflame with blossom; the short dry grass is full of tiny insect life. Various larks are singing; each one seems to sing the same song differently; perhaps each never ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 4, April, 1891 • Various
... lion is not tormented by hunger, and when no wild beast challenges him to fight, his unemployed energy creates an object for himself; full of ardour, he fills the re-echoing desert with his terrible roars, and his exuberant force rejoices in itself, showing itself without an object. The insect flits about rejoicing in life in the sunlight, and it is certainly not the cry of want that makes itself heard in the melodious song of the bird; there is undeniably freedom in these movements, though it is not emancipation ...
— Literary and Philosophical Essays • Various
... and as in the case of the buds, are like eggs to be hatched by the warmth of spring. The present season is always the mother of the next, and the inception takes place long before the sun loses his power. The eggs that hold the coming crop of insect life are mostly laid in the late summer or early fall, and an analogous start is made in the vegetable world. The egg, the seed, the bud, are all alike in many ways, and look to the future. Our earliest ...
— Ways of Nature • John Burroughs
... waters of the lake, "the populous solitude of bees and birds," as of some divine presence, too sublime for personality. And they were always benign, standing in relief with the malignity or folly of the hurtful insect, Man. He was never a manichaean towards nature. To him she was all good and bounteous. The demon forces that so fascinated Byron were to Rousseau invisible. These were the compositions that presently inspired the landscapes of Paul and Virginia (1788), of Atala and Rene (1801), ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... lost their beauty. A few years since, a severe frost killed the trees to the ground, and when they sprouted again from the roots, a new enemy made its appearance—an insect of the coccus family, with a kind of shell on its back, which enables it to withstand all the common applications for destroying insects, and the ravages of which are shown by the leaves becoming black and ...
— Letters of a Traveller - Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America • William Cullen Bryant
... Arthur, the servant arrived with the required bottle, into which the ferocious insect was ...
— Dawn • H. Rider Haggard
... light, prodding them with spears of flame. Drops of nightly dews, drops from the coursing clouds, trickle down to them, moistening the dryness, closing up the little hollows of the ground, drawing the particles of maternal earth more closely. Suddenly—as an insect that has been feigning death cautiously unrolls itself and starts into action—in each seed the great miracle of life begins. Each awakens as from a sleep, as from pretended death. It starts, it moves, it bursts its ashen woody shell, it takes two opposite ...
— The Reign of Law - A Tale of the Kentucky Hemp Fields • James Lane Allen
... to perceive this distinction between fundamental and superficial resemblances. I remember once reading a very comical disquisition in one of Buffon's works on the question as to whether or not a crocodile was to be classified as an insect; and the instructive feature in the disquisition was this, that although a crocodile differs from an insect as regards every conceivable particular of its internal anatomy, no allusion at all is made to this fact, while the whole discussion is made to turn on the hardness of the external casing of ...
— The Scientific Evidences of Organic Evolution • George John Romanes
... brute, and you may make a great discovery, for instance, it has been discovered that the mosquito dislikes certain colours. Why? It may be that he would show more distinctly on one colour than on another, and so fall an easy victim to an insect-eating bird. But it may be that the leaves of some plant of a particular hue, or the juices of the plant, are distasteful to the insect. Flies don't like the leaves of the blue-gum, and I guess mosquitoes have their likes and dislikes. Find ...
— In Search of the Okapi - A Story of Adventure in Central Africa • Ernest Glanville
... making you look like a bale of hay that has been dumped by mistake on an athletic field. And when he gets a team in the gymnasium between halves, with the game going wrong, and stands up before them and sizes up their insect nerve and rubber backbone and hereditary awkwardness and incredible talent in doing the wrong thing, to say nothing of describing each individual blunder in that queer nasal clack of his—well, I'd rather be tied up in a great big frying-pan over a good ...
— At Good Old Siwash • George Fitch
... hurriedly put down her needlework. "Miss," she whispered with a smile, "you came upon me so unawares that you gave me quite a start! You don't know, Miss, that though there be no flies or mosquitoes there is, no one would believe it, a kind of small insect, which penetrates through the holes of this gauze; it is scarcely to be detected, but when one is asleep, it ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... broad humanitarianism—beneficence to the lower grades of life. When love transcends the bounds of the human family it does not rise up toward God, it descends toward the lower orders of the animal world. "Show pity toward everything that exists," is its motto, and the insect and the worm hold a larger relative place in the Buddhist than in the Christian view. The question "Are ye not of more value than many sparrows?" might be doubtful in the Buddhist estimate, for the teacher himself, in his pre-existent states, had often been ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... dingy-looking fly that was crawling over his pantaloons, to come into a close prison, when he had the choice of so many airy situations—a course of meditation which led him to the irresistible conclusion that the insect was insane. After settling this point, he began to be conscious that he was getting sleepy; whereupon he took his nightcap out of the pocket in which he had had the precaution to stow it in the morning, and, leisurely ...
— The Pickwick Papers • Charles Dickens
... makes that special person the veritable Rose of the World to us exists but in our imagination. It is no rose that we adore—only at the best a bedeguar, of which the origin is a disagreeable little insect. We believe in the exquisite harmony of those atoms which have arranged themselves to form the thing we love. And we marry our human ideal, expecting the unbroken continuance of that harmony. But the discord comes; colours clash; the jarring ...
— The Idler, Volume III., Issue XIII., February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly. Edited By Jerome K. Jerome & Robert Barr • Various
... woodland seemed! Sometimes a twig would snap, or a buzzing insect would pause, as if to look at her, but no one ...
— Dorothy Dainty at the Mountains • Amy Brooks
... you can take them in your hands with perfect safety. This tradition may have truth at the bottom of it, or it may not. I cannot tell, and I shall not stop to debate the question now. It is certain that there is an insect, very much resembling the bumble-bee, and of about the same size, who, nevertheless, is a very different fellow. This is the chap that bores holes into dry wood, as nicely as you can bore with a gimlet, on which account he is sometimes called the borer. This insect does not sting. No thanks to him, ...
— Mike Marble - His Crotchets and Oddities. • Uncle Frank
... when it opens its eyes on the first snowy morning of winter. Not only has the whole aspect of the country been changed, but the old sources of food have passed away. Not a caterpillar is to be found on the dead leaves, and not a winged insect is left to come flying {87} by; hence other food must be looked for in new directions. Emboldened by hunger, the Starlings alight at the kitchen door, and the Juncos, Sparrows, Downy Woodpeckers, and Nuthatches ...
— The Bird Study Book • Thomas Gilbert Pearson
... him in the devious course we were about to pursue. I had had too recent a lesson of the dangers of coral reefs not to feel anxious as I found myself again among them. Coral islands have always struck me as one of the most interesting curiosities of nature. A minute marine insect builds up from the bottom of the sea the solid foundation. The waves break the summit into sand. The birds of the air come and rest there, and bring seeds, which in time spring up and decay, till a soil is formed to give nourishment to more lofty trees, such as we ...
— Mark Seaworth • William H.G. Kingston
... and the active forms of monkeys and even of leopards darted among the trees. But the country—whether forest, mud-flat, or prairie—was always damp and feverish: a wet land steaming under a burning sun and humming with mosquitoes and all kinds of insect life. ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill
... fundamental principles of physiology must be understood before the study of Bionomics can begin. We must know the essential nature of the process of respiration before we can appreciate the different modes of respiration in a whale and a fish, an aquatic insect and a crustacean. The more we know of the physiology of reproduction, the better we can understand the sexual and parental habits of different ...
— Hormones and Heredity • J. T. Cunningham
... Brave Nautilus afar, doth fearless ride, With sails of gossamer. So, too, doth spread, To summer airs, his silken gleaming thread, The water-spider fleet, free sailor true That in the sunshine floats, beneath the blue, Glad skies. And through the deep, all sparkling, slip A thousand insect-swarms, that, rippling, dip Amid the merry waves. Bright voyagers That roam the sultry seas! Look, the wind stirs Our creaking sails! Thy pinnace flying o'er The ocean's swell, fast leaves the fading shore; Yet faster still the Nautilus sails by, And darts the spider ...
— Lilith - The Legend of the First Woman • Ada Langworthy Collier
... great-grandmother, stopping her wheel, breaking her thread, and letting the end twist madly up amongst the revolving iron teeth, emerging from the mist of their own speed, in which a moment before they had looked ethereal as the vibration-film of an insect's wings. ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... the utmost tenderness, pressing her the while. Then, with eyelids closed, she answered him in a voice thin as the voice of in insect:— ...
— In Ghostly Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... roar fiercely in a small round stove, like a gnome with a pipe growing out of his head. I had a sponge, changed, and descended to the salon, only to learn that the eating arrangements were carried on in another building, at some distance from the hotel. Feeling like a belated insect of summer overtaken by winter cold, I darted down the path indicated, to the restaurant, where I found the Americans, already seated at just such a long table as I had pictured, and still in their knickerbockers. There was, in the big room, a sprinkling ...
— The Princess Passes • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... of tiny insect, however, which seemed to drop from the little cotton-wood trees which grew at the edge of the acequia, and myriads of them descended and crawled all over us, so we had to have our beds moved still farther out on to the open ...
— Vanished Arizona - Recollections of the Army Life by a New England Woman • Martha Summerhayes
... the head and body of the insect became singularly suggestive of Pawkins, just as the chess ...
— The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... mouse come under the same condemnation; they have fleas. They make dirt. They tend to increase and maintain our insect pests and terrors. They penetrate to all unsavory places. They acquire disease themselves, or carry the germs of it in their blood or on their fur. Their parasites gather them up and give them to us. The rats will leave a sinking ship, the fleas will leave a sinking ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... tavern; the people there are after all better than Sophya's people. And you, young man, you should have learned to discriminate one person from another. Take Sophya, for instance: What does she represent? An insect for the adornment ...
— Foma Gordyeff - (The Man Who Was Afraid) • Maxim Gorky
... of the marshes was poison to white men, and earwigs, ants, mosquitoes, sandflies, beetles, scorpions, snakes, and every imaginable insect and reptile seemed to do their best to make things ...
— The Story of General Gordon • Jeanie Lang
... organ. This dying, however, is of a kind we may aptly call a 'dying into being'. Life in its mere vegetative form is here seen withdrawing in order that a higher manifestation of the spirit may take place. The same principle can be seen at work in the insect kingdom, when the caterpillar's tremendous vitality passes over into the short-lived beauty of the butterfly. In the human being it is responsible for that metamorphosis of organic processes which occurs on the path from the metabolic to the nervous system, and which we came ...
— Man or Matter • Ernst Lehrs
... either an insect which gathers honey, or it represents the verb "to be" which means to exist. Again, it may be the first part of a verb like "be-come" or "be-have." In this particular instance it is followed by {illust.} which means a "leaf" or "leave" or "lieve" ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... the enjoyment of a plainly-finished house, instead of one full of gingerbread work and finery. None but the initiated can tell the affliction that chiseled finishing entails on housekeepers in the spider, fly, and other insect lodgment which it invites—frequently the cause of more annoyance and daily disquietude in housekeeping, because unnecessary, than real griefs from which we may not expect to escape. Bases, casings, sashes, doors—all should be plain, and painted or stained a quiet russet color—a ...
— Rural Architecture - Being a Complete Description of Farm Houses, Cottages, and Out Buildings • Lewis Falley Allen
... hostility of the young gentry had become an intolerable nuisance in my daily life. So, with such pedestrian reasons in my mind, I could have none of the heady enthusiasm of passion. I wanted him and his kind cleared out of my way, like a noisome insect, but I had no flaming hatred of him ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan
... self-control further, he and his guests might have separated with at least a semblance of good feeling, but the fatal word which he had feared in his forebodings came from Mrs. J. Harry Stott, who majestically descended the broad staircase carrying before her a small reddish-brown insect impaled on a darning-needle. She walked to the desk and presented it for Mr. Cone's consideration. It was a most indelicate action, but the knowledge that it was such did not lessen the horror with which the guests ...
— The Dude Wrangler • Caroline Lockhart
... the nation at large, except as they involved Fairbridge. Fairbridge, to its own understanding, was a nucleus, an ultimatum. It was an example of the triumph of the infinitesimal. It saw itself through a microscope and loomed up gigantic. Fairbridge was like an insect, born with the conviction that it was an elephant. There was at once something ludicrous, and magnificent, and terrible about it. It had the impressiveness of the abnormal and prehistoric. In one sense, it was prehistoric. It was as a giant survivor ...
— The Butterfly House • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman |
