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Offspring   Listen
noun
Offspring  n.  
1.
The act of production; generation. (Obs.)
2.
That which is produced; a child or children; a descendant or descendants, however remote from the stock. "To the gods alone Our future offspring and our wives are known."
3.
Origin; lineage; family. (Obs.)






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Offspring" Quotes from Famous Books



... determining the totem has all the appearance of extreme antiquity. For it ignores altogether the intercourse of the sexes as the cause of offspring, and further, it ignores the tie of blood on the maternal as well as the paternal side, substituting for it a purely local bond, since the members of a totem stock are merely those who gave the first ...
— The Euahlayi Tribe - A Study of Aboriginal Life in Australia • K. Langloh Parker

... light-heartedly on the delicious curves of the outer edge, I reflected that he was evidently a persevering pot-hunter who would not be easily discouraged, and that I could count upon his engrossing the attention of my offspring for a considerable period. Accordingly, I was surprised some five minutes later to observe the fisherman (who wore no skates) shambling across the pond toward the shore. Glancing from him to his late station I perceived a little group of skaters gathered around my son and ...
— The Opinions of a Philosopher • Robert Grant

... improbable in Hesiod's description of two or three arial monsters appearing at or about the same time, or of one being the apparent offspring of the other, since a large comet may, like Biela's, have broken in two before ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly

... being begins as a microscopic fertilised egg-cell, within which there is condensed the long result of time—Man's inheritance. The long period of nine months before birth, with its intimate partnership between mother and offspring, is passed as it were in sleep, and no one can make any statement in regard to the mind of the unborn child. Even after birth the dawn of mind is as slow as it is wonderful. To begin with, there is in the ovum and ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson

... Embraced, caressed it, kissed its snow-white wings, And laughed; when, with its rose-red bill, it pecked, As if with longing for her fresh young lips. How she'd caress it, said I to myself, Were this her child, the offspring of her love! And now a voice resounded through the woods, And cried, "Griselda," cried it, "Come, Griselda!" While she, the distant voice's sound distinguished, Sprang quickly up, and scarcely lingering ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss

... which agitated the breast of her mother, when she parted with her darling daughter, we cannot pretend to describe. We know that maternals usually give indications of unbounded grief at parting from their tender offspring, even upon the consummation of their earthly happiness. It may possibly arise from grief at the segregation of one not only made dear by the ties of parental and filial affection, but from the mutual companionship, reliance, ...
— Fern Vale (Volume 1) - or the Queensland Squatter • Colin Munro

... questioned me in regard to my knowledge of the affair, and the use I intended to make of that knowledge; and he, not deeming my replies satisfactory, abused and struck me. My duty to your lordship prevented any retaliation on my part; and that duty, (the offspring of humble gratitude for your lordship's many acts of generous kindness to me, both in this country and in France,) now impels me to communicate these unpleasant facts—which I do, with sincere sorrow for her ladyship's indiscretion, and every desire for the preservation of ...
— Venus in Boston; - A Romance of City Life • George Thompson

... birth from yourself and others of your noble family, and much honour from your own person in the performance, now returns again to make a final Dedication of itself to you. Although not openly acknowledged by the Author, yet it is a legitimate offspring, so lovely and so much desired that the often copying of it hath tired my pen to give my several friends satisfaction, and brought me to a necessity of producing it to the public view; and now to offer ...
— Milton's Comus • John Milton

... the product of their age, though not the offspring of the French revolution, Scott and Byron, were equally in revolt against conventional diction. Scott elevated ballad-poetry to a level which it had never before attained, and composed some of the most beautiful songs ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick

... understand it, dear and magnanimous 1365, you are going to recreate Tom Sawyer dramatically, and then do me the compliment to put me in the bills as father of this shady offspring. Sir, do you know that this kind of a compliment has destroyed people before ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... a heartless, as she was a vicious and a miserable woman. Instead of the yearnings of maternal love, she regarded her innocent child merely as the offspring of that monster, whom she execrated and feared with a preternatural hate. If she looked upon him with any feeling more lively than that of indifference, it was with one of positive ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 3, February, 1851 • Various

... displayed them in front of his establishment, marked with prices which, as he explained to those unwary enough to venture within the radius of his personality, brought him as near to nervous prostration as was possible for the parent of such inconsequent offspring. ...
— The Flaw in the Sapphire • Charles M. Snyder

... unseemliness lies, do you see, not in himself, but somewhere outside in space. And so—an ingenious idea!—it is not only he who is dissolute, false, and disgusting, but we . . . 'we men of the eighties,' 'we the spiritless, nervous offspring of the serf-owning class'; 'civilisation has crippled us' . . . in fact, we are to understand that such a great man as Laevsky is great even in his fall: that his dissoluteness, his lack of culture and of moral purity, is a phenomenon of natural history, sanctified by inevitability; that ...
— The Duel and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov

... powers restored her exiled dynasty and exhausted Europe sought peace and repose in the unquestioned ascendency of monarchical principles. Let us learn wisdom from her example. Let us remember that revolutions do not always establish freedom. Our own free institutions were not the offspring of our Revolution. They existed before. They were planted in the free charters of self-government under which the English colonies grew up, and our Revolution only freed us from the dominion of a ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, Volume - V, Part 1; Presidents Taylor and Fillmore • James D. Richardson

... doubt that the term had much improved Agatha even in appearance and manner. She held herself better, pronounced better, uttered no slangish expressions, and twice she repressed little discourtesies on the part of her sisters, and neglects such as were not the offspring of tender familiarity, but of an indifference akin to rudeness. Magdalen had endured, knowing how bad it was for their manners, but unwilling to become more of an annoyance than could be helped. The indescribable difference in Agatha's ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge

... inflaming blessed Jane Frances with love, didst endow her with a marvellous fortitude of spirit to pursue the way of perfection In all the paths of life, and wast pleased through her to enrich Thy Church with a new offspring, grant by her merits and intercession that we, who, knowing our own weakness, trust in Thy strength, may by the help of Thy heavenly grace overcome all things that oppose us. Through our Lord" (Collect of St. Jane Frances ...
— The Divine Office • Rev. E. J. Quigley

... of travel; and Johann, meeting a ragged woman, bent on self-destruction, takes from her a box with papers, disclosing a revolting story, baldly told. German mediocrity, imitating Yorick in this regard, and failing of his delicacy and subtlety, brought forth hideous offspring. An attempt at whimsicality of style is apparent in the "Furth Catechismus in Frage und Antwort" (pp. 71-74), and genuinely sentimental adventures are supplied by the death-bed scene (pp. 70-71) and the village ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer

... the way." I have mentioned this same Goodrich, once before. He is well known as one accustomed to sell runaway negroes, as a kidnapper, who lives with a wench, and has several mulatto children, and probably does a profitable business in selling his own offspring. ...
— Secret Band of Brothers • Jonathan Harrington Green

... he could and caught the falling basket. It was not more than a five feet drop and the basket landed squarely in his arms. He placed it in the boat. Loud barking overhead announced that Lassie was displeased and worried over the sudden departure of her offspring. ...
— The Boy with the U. S. Weather Men • Francis William Rolt-Wheeler

... flying away with a duck, or a fowl, or a rabbit. I observed where the others went to, and followed them till I reached a tolerably accessible cliff, at the top of which a whole colony seemed to reside; big and little, sires and offspring, were circling round, and making themselves quite at home. Having a fancy to examine the nature of their habitations, I looked about me to see how I could get up the cliff, and with my pole alone in hand commenced ...
— Dick Onslow - Among the Redskins • W.H.G. Kingston

... substitute is a life aimless and unbroken. And so we have to say to communists what George Eliot might have said: Be not blinded by the passions of the moment, but when you prate about your own wrongs and the sufferings of your offspring, take heed lest in the long run you make a worse time of it for your own generation, and leave a bad ...
— The Altruist in Politics • Benjamin Cardozo

... prosperity at home and with peace and respect abroad. I can indulge the proud reflection that the American people have reached in safety and success their fortieth year as an independent nation; that for nearly an entire generation they have had experience of their present Constitution, the offspring of their undisturbed deliberations and of their free choice; that they have found it to bear the trials of adverse as well as prosperous circumstances: to contain in its combination of the federate and ...
— A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents - Section 4 (of 4) of Volume 1: James Madison • Edited by James D. Richardson

... certain Dame Elizabeth Ashol, second wife of Gilbert Ashol, lived in the latter part of the seventeenth century. She had one son, Laurence, to whom his father left the estate, to the exclusion of his eldest son, Gilbert, the offspring of the first marriage. This youth, to his father's intense indignation, had reverted to the faith of his ancestors; soon after his conversion he had entered a monastery on the continent, with a view to returning, ...
— Up in Ardmuirland • Michael Barrett

... while she was showing the Ashland dairyman the bull calf, child of Red Rover VII and Buttercup IV, Mrs. Egg saw her oldest daughter's motor sliding across the lane from the turnpike. It held all three of her female offspring. Mrs. Egg groaned, drawling commonplaces to her visitor, but he stayed a full hour, admiring the new milk shed and the cider press. When she waved him good-bye from the veranda she found her daughters in a stalwart group by the sitting-room fireplace, pink eyed and comfortably ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various

... for their mistakes, and pilloried for their faults. Twenty years difference in age turns many an elegance into a barbarism; many a virtue into a vice-versa. I do not perform at breakfast for the edification of my offspring upon the mustache cup, but I chew my strawberry seeds, which they claim is worse. My grandpapa and grandmama used to pour the coffee from their cups and drink it from their saucers and they were—nevertheless—rated AA1 in Boston's Back Bay Blue Book. And now my ...
— By Advice of Counsel • Arthur Train

... pages that tell the story of Mathieu and Marianne, it must be admitted, are as charming as possible. They have a bloom, a beauty, a fragrance we never expected to find in M. Zola's work. The tale is a simple one: the cheerful conquest of fortune and the continual birth of offspring."** ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola

... a puzzle to me for a good many years—in fact until Despoina explained to me many things. For Mrs. Ventris had a permanent human shape, and spoke as freely as you or I. I thought at one time that she might be the offspring of a mixed marriage, like Elsie Marks (whose mother, by the way, was another case of the sort); but in fact Mrs. Ventris and Mrs. Marks were both fairy wives, and the wood-girl, Mabilla King, whose case I am going to deal with was another. But this particular relationship is one which ...
— Lore of Proserpine • Maurice Hewlett

... Sir Wilton did not venture a single look: he was ashamed of his son, and already a little afraid of his wife, whom he had once seen close her rather large teeth in a notable way. As she turned toward the window, however, he stole a glance at his offspring: the creature was not quite so ugly as before—not quite so repulsive as he had pictured him! But, good heavens! he was on the lap of the same woman whose fierceness had upset him almost as much as his child's ugliness! He walked to the window after his wife. ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald

... years, rather suggesting the generous good-nature of the mother, but in the most shocking condition, a thing I should have spoken strongly to her about at once had I known her better. Queer it seemed to me that a woman of her apparently sound judgment should let her offspring reach this terrible state without some effort to alleviate it. The poor thing, to be blunt, was grossly corpulent, legs, arms, body, and face being wretchedly fat, and yet she now fed it a large slice of bread thickly spread with butter and loaded ...
— Ruggles of Red Gap • Harry Leon Wilson

... interrupted them. This was Cecil Rolleston, the eldest daughter of the house, or rather she stood in that relation to the Colonel, being the offspring of ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston

... the more when one thinks that it was the offspring of sickness and suffering. The time at which Wagner wrote it was one of the saddest in his life. It often happens so in art. One goes astray in trying to interpret an artist's life by his work, for it is exceptional to find one a counterpart ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland

... the dominant character, Piney Woods is, I think, the central character. She is central in this story just as little Aglaia is central in Tennyson's "Princess," or Eppie in George Eliot's "Silas Marner," or the baby offspring of Cherokee Sal in "The Luck of Roaring Camp." Bret Harte had just written the last-named story when he began the composition of "The Outcasts of Poker Flat." The same great theme, the radiating and redeeming power of innocence and purity, ...
— Short Stories Old and New • Selected and Edited by C. Alphonso Smith

... and difficulty; and the labor squandered on poetical forms, on metrical experiments and intricate problems of translation, as well as the occasional affectations of the prose style, might well have convinced the critical bystander that the mind of which these things were the offspring could have no real importance, no ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... expression however of English discontent or disappointment is reactionary opposition. Reaction, or the attempt of one party in a state to reverse a fundamental policy deliberately adopted by the nation, is one of the worst among the offspring of revolution, and is almost, though not entirely, unknown to the history of England. Yet there is more than one reason why if the Home Rule Bill be carried, reaction should make its ill-omened ...
— A Leap in the Dark - A Criticism of the Principles of Home Rule as Illustrated by the - Bill of 1893 • A.V. Dicey

... care of two women. Indeed, the children of the landlady were so well behaved and prepossessing that, compared with Mrs. Basil's shabby hauteur and garrulity, the legend of the Judge seemed to require no other foundation than offspring of such good ...
— Short Story Classics (American) Vol. 2 • Various

... upward from the instinct of the brute creation, or is it an offspring from God? Man's reasoning intelligence separates him from the brute by a chasm that no man can carry the reasoning powers of mind across. All on that side is brutish. The science of the Bible, dealing with intelligence as its subject, is the highest order of science known to man. ...
— The Christian Foundation, February, 1880

... have wept for shame But had he your fiendish cunning, he might have done the same. But the hated Saxon balked you and the desperate fighting Frank Hurled back our super devils and took us on the flank. Your inbred tainted offspring lost his chances at Verdun Where curtained steel just saved the world from ...
— Rhymes of a Roughneck • Pat O'Cotter

... assure you, whatever may be the pride of our own, you being its offspring, we would not object. With your merit we are all well acquainted, your character has our highest esteem, and your fortune exceeds even our most sanguine desires. Strange at once and afflicting! that not all these requisites for the satisfaction ...
— Cecilia vol. 3 - Memoirs of an Heiress • Frances (Fanny) Burney (Madame d'Arblay)

... holding to the ideal of the library as an educational force, refuse to supply this intellectual pap, well-to-do parents may be counted upon to present the same in quantities sufficient to weaken the mental digestion of their offspring beyond cure by teachers ...
— Library Work with Children • Alice I. Hazeltine

... was excessive. The most youthful of his offspring was not remarkable for personal pulchritude. Henry Clay expressed a preference for being on the right side of public questions to occupying the position of President of the United States of America. He who passes at an accelerated pace may nevertheless be capable of perusing. ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor

... practically unaltered examples being the cathedrals of Speyer and Worms, in Germany, although our Anglo-Saxon cathedrals of Peterborough, Ely and Norwich may, so far as regards their naves, be justly regarded as the offspring of the vaulted basilica ...
— Our Homeland Churches and How to Study Them • Sidney Heath

... translated themselves into uncontrollable acts of violence; they showed themselves in all the rancorous hatred that could be put into words—the fire smouldered in that sad heart of his. Those big bones and huge muscles and the strong brain were never to be reproduced in an offspring to be proud of. How if he were the Narses of Literature—one who could be only what he was, though we are always inclined to lament that he was not something ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow

... is commonly regarded as the offspring of an Aryan religion, brought into India by invaders from the north and modified by contact with Dravidian civilization. The materials at our disposal hardly permit us to take any other point of view, for the literature of the ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot

... husband, the match is never concluded. On the other hand, ambition, avarice, and the other passions, so common with us, never stifle in the breasts of the fathers those dictates of nature, which make us desire to see ourselves perpetuated in our offspring, nor influence them to thwart their children, improperly, and much less to force their inclinations. By an admirable harmony, very worthy of our imitation, they only marry those who love one another, and those who love one ...
— History of Louisisana • Le Page Du Pratz

... are able to appreciate the amount of gratuitous labor performed by the officers and committees of private book clubs. It is erroneous to suppose that beautiful books are a purely natural offspring of the book club. The preparation of the material for publication and successfully following it through all the various stages of manufacture requires an enormous amount of detail work, as well as an accurate knowledge ...
— Book-Lovers, Bibliomaniacs and Book Clubs • Henry H. Harper

... essential feature in brotherhood of the profession is common pursuit; in brotherhood of the family, common parentage; in conjugal affection, attraction for opposite sex; in parental and filial love, love of offspring and love of parent; while in friendship the essential feature is harmony ...
— Questionable Amusements and Worthy Substitutes • J. M. Judy

... assistance the sea was strewed with the spars which composed the raft, with men, women, and children clinging to them. Loud were the yells of despair, and the shrieks of the women, as they embraced their offspring, and in attempting to save them were lost themselves. The spars of the raft still close together, were hurled one upon the other by the swell, and many found death by being jammed between them. Although all the boats hastened to their assistance, there ...
— The Phantom Ship • Captain Frederick Marryat

... was the laconic reply; and as though embarrassed by the personal nature of the inquiry, the man rose and repaired to a remote corner, where he began a solemn waltz with his offspring in his arms. ...
— Peak and Prairie - From a Colorado Sketch-book • Anna Fuller

... advantages of a permanent home—is hopeless from the start. This, however, obviously applies only to the couples who have children. Formerly those who married expected to have a family, and were disappointed if this hope were not fulfilled. That it was possible to limit the number of their offspring, or even to avoid parenthood entirely, was of course unknown to them. Nowadays all this is changed, and the doctrines of Malthus ...
— Modern marriage and how to bear it • Maud Churton Braby

... desire, however, being the offspring of one and the same faculty, whoever desires, loves, and whoever desires from the motive of charity is able to love from the same motive. But how, you ask, shall we know whether or not we have this true desire for the love of God, and having it, whether it proceeds from the motions of grace ...
— The Spirit of St. Francis de Sales • Jean Pierre Camus

... the languid life of Kona for this sheep station, 6000 feet high on the desolate slope of the dead volcano of Hualalai, ("offspring of the shining sun,") on the invitation of its hospitable owner, who said if I "could eat his rough fare, and live his rough life, his house and horses were at my disposal." He is married to a very attractive native woman who eats at his table, but does not know a word of English, ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird

... having now been an accomplice so far that she must be an accomplice to the end. The two ladies went down to Rome—Georgina was in wonderful trim—to finish the season, and here Mrs. Portico became convinced that she intended to abandon her offspring. She had not driven into the country to see the nursling before leaving Genoa,—she had said that she could n't bear to see it in such a place and among such people. Mrs. Portico, it must be added, had felt the force of this plea,—felt it as regards a plan of her own, given up after being ...
— Georgina's Reasons • Henry James

... self-esteem and a poor and empty vanity. All other feelings and interests were overwhelmed by an excessive idolatry of self, and he claimed (I now quote his own words to Dickens) a soul whose nutriment is love, and its offspring art, music, divine song, and still holier philosophy. To the last this super-refined creature seemed undisturbed by remorse. What place can we fancy for such a reptile, and what do we learn from such a career? ...
— Yesterdays with Authors • James T. Fields

... hereditary freedom into strange and unusual servitude; it was as natural that the Fronde should end again in subjection as that the Belgian troubles should issue in republican independence. The revolt of the Parisians was the offspring of poverty; unbridled, but not bold, arrogant, but without energy, base and plebeian, like the source from which it sprang. The murmur of the Netherlands was the proud and powerful voice of wealth. Licentiousness and hunger inspired the former; revenge, life, property, and ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller

... my father must then have gone through a moment of fierce conflict between his desire to keep the old lord alive and his hope of the immediate birth of his offspring. But his choice ...
— The Woman Thou Gavest Me - Being the Story of Mary O'Neill • Hall Caine

... burial. Soon, the moonlight fell upon the church's first monument, beside which the tearless and kneeling figure of a woman often prayed. It was not so very long before the widow was carried to rest beside her husband; it seemed but little longer when the offspring of her love stood before the altar with ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte

... my powers over you? I know the first generous impulse of your heart is always good; but then ambition,—let me speak truth to you,—avarice, the offspring of ambition, leads you astray, and contaminates the source of ...
— The Lawyers, A Drama in Five Acts • Augustus William Iffland

... obsessions illustrates his idea of criticism.' Genetically, it is a continuation of the shoddy element in Coleridge's Shakespeare criticism, a continual bias towards transcendental interpretation of the obvious. To take the origin a phase further back, it is the portentous offspring of the feeble constituent of German philosophy (a refusal to see the object) after it had been submitted to an idle process of ferment in the ...
— Aspects of Literature • J. Middleton Murry

... extinct. In 1891 some Jats in the Muzaffarnagar District of the United Provinces sacrificed a boy in a very painful manner for some unascertained magical purpose. It was supposed that the object was to induce the gods to grant offspring to a childless woman. Other similar cases have occurred in recent years. One occurred close to Calcutta in 1892. In the hill tracts of Orissa bordering on the Central Provinces the rite of human sacrifice was practised by the Khonds on an awful scale, and ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman

... strongest appeal to the attraction of one sex for another. However, there is an abundance of sentiment, and the home feelings are recognized again and again; the love of parents for each other and for their offspring, the love of brother and sister, friendship, the pure affection of young people, love of home, of God, of country, all are subjects of the finest selections the language contains. Such are to ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester

... his beloved mistress out-of-doors, was appeased with the slice of bread. He was a patriarch now, with a lovely mate and a line of waddling offspring to claim his devotion. But not an inch did he swerve from his loyalty to Anne. She had brought him with her from Bower's, and he lived in the barn with his family. Twice a day, however, he made a pilgrimage to the Crossroads school. It was ...
— Mistress Anne • Temple Bailey

... divined the thought that he did not complete, and my eyes filled with tears. Oh, how much I feel and imagine all the ennui given to the King by these barren and unfortunate politics! I detest them more even than the King detests them. Ungrateful offspring of the times, they fly away, rarely leaving even a memory. How much I ...
— The Duchess of Berry and the Court of Charles X • Imbert De Saint-Amand

... when you get summonses out against boys—a practice to which I have a very great objection—it is the parents who suffer more than their offspring." ...
— Patience Wins - War in the Works • George Manville Fenn

... rushed violently into the hut, shouted Eeduck with a boisterous smile, seized the baby in his arms, and carried it off to its mother. Edith was accustomed to have it thus torn from her by the boy, who was usually sent as a messenger when Kaga happened to desire the loan of her offspring. ...
— Ungava • R.M. Ballantyne

... have been especially inclined toward Lamarck's ideas. Until Weissmann startled the scientific world with his sharp denial of the possibility of transmitting to offspring any growth acquired by the parents, all seemed well. There is a tendency now to insist once more that slowly and gradually, in some perhaps as yet unexplained way, external factors do influence even egg cells, ...
— The Meaning of Evolution • Samuel Christian Schmucker

... bed, between her and the little ones;" and the fisherman entered the hut with the child, which was undressed, and received by his wife with all the sympathy which maternal feelings create, even towards the offspring of others. To the delight of Forster, in a quarter of an hour Robertson came out of the cottage with the intelligence that the child had moved and cried a little, and that there was every chance of ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat

... Medina [26] were protected by the Arabian desert; but the Moguls spread beyond the Tigris and Euphrates, pillaged Aleppo and Damascus, and threatened to join the Franks in the deliverance of Jerusalem. Egypt was lost, had she been defended only by her feeble offspring; but the Mamalukes had breathed in their infancy the keenness of a Scythian air: equal in valor, superior in discipline, they met the Moguls in many a well-fought field; and drove back the stream of hostility to the eastward of the Euphrates. [261] But it ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon

... as fundamentally theoretic, as those more specific notions which they are used to supplant, though far less operative on the minds of those who maintain them, except indeed, in so far as a conceited indolence is concerned, of which, it is often difficult to say, whether they are the parent or the offspring. But at best, your transcendental philosophers are very like those general admirers of the fair sex, who are ready enough to pay compliments which cost them just as little as they signify, but who are too fond of themselves, to ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 14 • Robert Kerr

... that we are God's children; yes, even the most debased of mankind. Paul could say to the idolaters of Athens, "We are His offspring." Now, if we are really His children, and therefore infinitely dearer to Him than our children are to us, will not the present suffering of even one of us be a source of pain to the eternal Father? On that ground we cannot think of suffering as being endless. ...
— Love's Final Victory • Horatio

... the offspring of illicit lust, and brought up in the depraved atmosphere of the Papal court, was a reprobate; but Sixtus' vaulting ambition stopped not at character and reputation. He was bent upon the permanent ...
— The Tragedies of the Medici • Edgcumbe Staley

... 'Ye see, sur,' said the shepherd, 'au drownt a' her whelps i' the pond the day, and she's busy greeting for them.' Of course, I had no objection to offer to this explanation, but resolved to watch her future operations. She was not long in setting off to the pond and fishing out her offspring. One strong brindled pup she seemed to lament over the most. After looking at it for some time, she again set off at a quick rate to a new house then in the course of erection, and scooped out a deep hole among the rubbish. She then, one by one, deposited ...
— Anecdotes of Dogs • Edward Jesse

... by any possibility predict what will fall from the lips of that inexpressibly fatuous individual who sits in the middle." This is funny, but it is vulgar, and it is not given in good faith. It is the offspring of anger and spite mixed with a desire to ...
— Interludes - being Two Essays, a Story, and Some Verses • Horace Smith

... with the care of her in the momentous work of her education. Inspire them with just conception of the absolute necessity of religious instruction and principles. Forbid that they should ever forget that this offspring belongs to Thee, and that, if through their criminal neglect or bad example Thy reasonable creature be lost, Thou wilt require it at their hands. Give them a deep sense of the divinity of her nature, of the worth of her soul, of the dangers to which she will be ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser

... tiger-mother passes through an Indian crowd, bearing the cherished offspring of her fierce but affectionate nature, which some stray arrow has destroyed—terrible in her anguish and awful in her despair—her foes appalled at her sufferings and the bravery of her spirit, though still panting for her destruction—their arrows are on the string—yet the untaught, ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall

... Jack Roper, the blacksmith at the "Crossing," was concerned at the plaintive appearance before his forge of a little girl clad in a bright-blue pinafore of the same color as her eyes, carrying her monstrous offspring in her arms. Jack recognized her and instantly divined the situation. "You haven't," he suggested kindly, "got another head at home—suthin' left over," Mary shook her head sadly; even her prolific maternity was not equal to the creation of children in detail. "Nor ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte

... of Latimer, the song of Milton, the solemn imagery of Bunyan, the political treatises of Locke and Sidney, the political measures of Hampden and Pym. The noblest type of modern European statesmanship, as represented by Mazzini and Stein, is the spiritual offspring of seventeenth-century Puritanism. To speak of Naseby and Marston Moor as merely English victories would be as absurd as to restrict the significance of Gettysburg to the state of Pennsylvania. If ever ...
— The Beginnings of New England - Or the Puritan Theocracy in its Relations to Civil and Religious Liberty • John Fiske

... to say that he refused it, but the offer seems to degrade these poor forlorn savages more than any thing in their appearance or manner of life: It must be a strange depravity of nature that leaves them destitute of affection for their offspring, or a most deplorable situation that impresses necessities upon them by which it is surmounted. Some hills, which, when, we first came to this place, had no snow upon them, were now covered, and the winter of this dreary and inhospitable region seemed to ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr

... should a grandmother be made By such a rascal!—Sure the king forgets When in a pudding, by his mother put, The bastard, by a tinker, on a stile Was dropp'd.—O, good lord Grizzle! can I bear To see him from a pudding mount the throne? Or can, oh can, my Huncamunca bear To take a pudding's offspring to ...
— Miscellanies, Volume 2 (from Works, Volume 12) • Henry Fielding

... broad back was bent; her hands as they shifted the infant tenderly were knotted and work-worn. Mavity Bence was a widow, living at home with her father, Gideon Himes; she had one child left, a daughter; but the clothing for which she had sent was an outfit made for a son, the posthumous offspring of his father; and the babe had not lived long enough to ...
— The Power and the Glory • Grace MacGowan Cooke

... Who is there that shall tell The purport of the tribe of Israel?— In the wild welter of races on that earth Which spins in space where thousand other spin— The casual offspring of the Cosmic Mirth Perhaps—what is there any man can win, Or any nation? Ultimates aside, Men have their aims, and Israel her pride. She stands among the rest, austere, aloof, Still the peculiar people, armed in proof Of ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various

... this garment, the illicit offspring of an old chine wrapper of Madame Piedefer's and a gown of the late lamented Madame de la Baudraye, the emissary considered the man, the dressing-gown, and the little stove on which the milk was boiling in a tin saucepan, as so homogeneous and ...
— The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac

... the borders of Kamtchatka, he was suddenly recalled, driven with speed day and night in a closed carriage, on a return journey of several thousand miles, and set down in Poland, penniless, and utterly broken in health. This strange action was the offspring of jealousy on the part of the Empress Catharine, who feared that the energy of the young and vigorous government of the United States would absorb the north-west coast of America, upon which the Russian Government had ...
— Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Gillespie Blaine

... knowledge of the causes, but from experience of the events themselves. The probabilities of life at different ages or in different climates; the probabilities of recovery from a particular disease; the chances of the birth of male or female offspring; the chances of the destruction of houses or other property by fire; the chances of the loss of a ship in a particular voyage, are deduced from bills of mortality, returns from hospitals, registers of births, of shipwrecks, etc., that is, from the observed frequency not of the ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill

... the moon tends to ratify this inference. The dimensions of the earth did not differ (according to our present authority) very greatly from what they now are when her solitary offspring came, somehow, into existence. This is found not to have been the case with any other of the planets. It is unlikely that the satellites of Jupiter, Saturn, or Mars (we may safely add, of Uranus or Neptune) ever revolved in much narrower orbits than those they now ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke

... of deep scarlet-blossomed creepers, so thickly interlaced in their living cordage, that neither sun nor storm could penetrate them; or if a wandering beam found entrance through the thick natural trellice-work, it was only enough to cover some little tuft of violets or strawberries, its own offspring, growing up in its genial warmth with a strength and vigour pre-eminent amidst the pale and sickly brood of the neglected children of the shade. Nothing I had ever imagined of the loveliness of nature equalled the reality ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19. No. 538 - 17 Mar 1832 • Various

... thus: "Oh, glory of Haemonia, that hast the power to divulge the fates of men, or canst turn aside fate itself from its prescribed course, I pray thee to exercise thy gift in disclosing events to come. Not the meanest of the Roman race am I, the offspring of an illustrious chieftain, lord of the world in the one case, or in the other the destined heir to my father's calamity. I stand on a tremendous and giddy height: snatch me from this posture of doubt; let me not blindly rush on, and blindly fall; extort this secret from the gods, or force ...
— The Haunters & The Haunted - Ghost Stories And Tales Of The Supernatural • Various

... my courage was the offspring of a no less erring principle. Pleyel was for ever lost to me. I strove in vain to assume his person, and suppress my resentment; I strove in vain to believe in the assuaging influence of time, to look ...
— Wieland; or The Transformation - An American Tale • Charles Brockden Brown

... and a few hybrid nuts are produced. They are termed (C. crenata x C. dentata). It is expected that the characteristics of the offspring will be somewhere between those of the two parents in blight resistance and nut size and quality. But what of the grandparents, the many ancestors of the American chestnut sprout that have not even ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Incorporated 39th Annual Report - at Norris, Tenn. September 13-15 1948 • Various

... marred his happiness. He had lived over half a century and had, as yet, no male offspring around his knees. He had one only child, a daughter, whose infant name was Ying Lien. She was just three years of age. On a long summer day, on which the heat had been intense, Shih-yin sat leisurely in his library. Feeling his hand tired, he dropped the book he held, leant his ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin

... old Caroline Siner berated her boy for his stupidity in ever trading with that low-down, twisting snake in the grass, Henry Hooker. She alternated this with floods of tears. Caroline had no sympathy for her offspring. She said she had thrown away years of self- sacrifice, years of washing, a thousand little comforts her money would have bought, all for nothing, for less than nothing, to ship a fool nigger up North and ...
— Birthright - A Novel • T.S. Stribling

... of the Pharisees and Sadducees coming to his baptism he said unto them, "Ye offspring of vipers, who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bring forth therefore fruits worthy of repentance, and begin not to say within yourselves, 'We have Abraham to our father': for I say unto you, that God is able of these stones to raise up children ...
— His Life - A Complete Story in the Words of the Four Gospels • William E. Barton, Theodore G. Soares, Sydney Strong

... their calves into one of the secluded and natural corrals with which the range abounds, rope the calves, brand them with his own brand, hobble and sometimes kill the mother cows to prevent them following their offspring, and drive the latter to his home corral, where in the course of a few weeks they would forget their mothers and be successfully weaned. They would then be turned out to graze on the Range. Sometimes when the rustler did not kill the mother cow the calf proved not to have been successfully ...
— Arizona's Yesterday - Being the Narrative of John H. Cady, Pioneer • John H. Cady

... its origin, many wonderful things are attributed to the Santo Nino of Cebu. It is to him that childless women pray for offspring; to him that mothers bring their little ones, and beg a thousand blessings upon them; from him that distracted parents beseech renewed health and strength for their children, ill unto death with diseases that baffle the doctors, for the Santo ...
— A Woman's Journey through the Philippines - On a Cable Ship that Linked Together the Strange Lands Seen En Route • Florence Kimball Russel

... decided on this occasion that he should found there a monastery of prebendaries, such as now exists; and this the more so, as he had always venerated St. Columba with special honour from his youth; and chiefly because his own parents were for several years childless and destitute of the solace of offspring, until, beseeching St. Columba with suppliant devotion, they gloriously obtained what they sought for so long a time with anxious desire. Hence the ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson

... they worked with or the air they breathed or the water they drank or the bit of ground that they were buried in at last, any more than did the cattle of those self same masters. The slave system owned the minds and bodies of its victims, who loved but had no legal title to their mates, or to the offspring who were born to them any more than did the cattle of the masters own their mates or the young which were born to them. The slaves were rated as so many human machines by the masters for the production of wealth for themselves and to add to their liberty and leisure ...
— The Ultimate Criminal - The American Negro Academy. Occasional Papers No. 17 • Archibald H. Grimke

... holy bell And thousand-throated priesthood, loud and high, Pealing Te Deums to the shuddering sky, "Thanks to the Lord, who giveth victory!" What prove these, but that crime was ne'er so black As ghostly cheer and pious thanks to lack? Satan is modest. At Heaven's door he lays His evil offspring, and, in Scriptural phrase And saintly posture, gives to God the praise And honor of the monstrous progeny. What marvel, then, in our own time to see His old devices, smoothly acted o'er,— Official ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier

... might have tempted the avarice of some of the numerous and savage followers of an Indian army. In the cooler and calmer hours of reflection since, I have often thought that this appearance was a mere phantom, an illusion—the offspring of weakness: I saw it but for a moment, and too imperfectly to be assured of reality; and whatever I believed at the time seems now to have been a painting on the mind rather than an object of vision; but how that image started ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 344 (Supplementary Issue) • Various

... constant competition for the necessaries of life. Those that can hold their ground hold it; those that cannot hold it are destroyed. But as it also happens that slight changes of food, of habit, of climate, of circumjacent accident, and so forth, produce a slight tendency to vary in the offspring of any plant or animal, it follows that among these slight variations some may be favourable to the individual in whom they appear, and may place him in a better position than his fellows as regards the enemies with whom his interests come into collision. In this case he will have a better ...
— Samuel Butler's Canterbury Pieces • Samuel Butler

... representative men of their time, the creation in a great measure of the national spirit. They were the offspring of long generations of seamen and lovers of the sea. They could not have been great but for the nation which gave them birth, and imbued them with their worth and spirit. The great sailors, for instance, could not have originated in a nation of ...
— Men of Invention and Industry • Samuel Smiles

... longer time than a day. She loved it with an intense love. The world beyond it was nothing to her; she scarcely believed in it as existing. She could neither read nor write. She told the truth, reared her offspring in honesty, and praised God always—had praised Him when starving in a bitter winter after her husband's death, when there had been no field work, and she had had five children to feed and clothe; and praised Him now that her sons were all dead before her, and all she had living ...
— Stories By English Authors: France • Various

... (since the death of Mrs. Gracedieu) who knew how the Minister had concealed the sad secret of her parentage; and I wanted to discover if the hereditary taint had begun to show itself in the innocent offspring of the murderess. Just as I was considering how I might harmlessly speak of Miss Helena's "sister," Miss Helena herself introduced ...
— The Legacy of Cain • Wilkie Collins

... with intent to meet the postman and sniff the cool air. Nor was he disappointed of either purpose. Before he had had time to answer more than ten or eleven of the miscellaneous questions propounded to him in the lightness of their hearts by his young offspring, who had accompanied him, the postman was seen approaching; and among the morning's budget was one letter bearing a foreign postmark and stamp (which became at once the objects of an eager competition among the ...
— Ghost Stories of an Antiquary • Montague Rhodes James

... In the face of the evidence, she felt the jury could not find any other verdict, or the judge pass any other sentence than had been done. The case had been got up, she argued, to expose a system which was wrong. Parents wished to get rid of their ill-gotten offspring. Their one thought was to hide their own shame. "They," she concluded, "are the real sinners. If it were not for their sin, we should not ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies

... to die away, yielding gently to the twilight that came creeping on. It was so very quiet that the soft and stealthy moss about the trunks of some old trees, seemed to have grown out of the silence, and to be its proper offspring. Those other trees which were subdued by blasts of wind in winter time, had not quite tumbled down, but being caught by others, lay all bare and scathed across their leafy arms, as if unwilling to disturb ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens

... together through ten patriarchal lifetimes we would die strangers to each other. For you, dear clean-souled girl that you are, were born that you might be the wife of a strong man and the mother of his sturdy children. The world was made for you and for your offspring; and in time your children will occupy this world and make the laws for us irrelevant folk that scribble and paint and design all useless and beautiful things, and thus muddle away our precious lives. No, you may not wisely ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al

... Marriages are the natural Effects of these anniversary Assemblies. I must therefore very much approve the Method by which my Correspondent tells me each Sex endeavours to recommend it self to the other, since nothing seems more likely to promise a healthy Offspring or a happy Cohabitation. And I believe I may assure my Country Friend, that there has been many a Court Lady who would be contented to exchange her crazy young Husband for Tom Short, and several Men of Quality who would have parted with a ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele

... came to go, leave their young broods behind them to perish? They all did it. Never was an old goose known to stay behind when the call came. That voice was louder and stronger than was even the love for their offspring. Can any of you tell old Kinesasis ...
— Winter Adventures of Three Boys • Egerton R. Young

... ALCOHOL:—"The use of beer as a medicine during pregnancy is without doubt perilous to the health and vigor of the offspring. Children born under such conditions are sickly and feeble, and suffer from disease more severely than others, or die early. Alcoholic prescriptions to pregnant women are, from all present knowledge of the facts, both dangerous and reprehensible ...
— Alcohol: A Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine, How and Why - What Medical Writers Say • Martha M. Allen



Words linked to "Offspring" :   hatchling, illegitimate child, fauna, successor, by-blow, animal, child, kid, beast, animate being, heir, grandchild, upshot, materialisation, bastard, creature, relation, brute, spat, young, issue, materialization, effect, result, young fish, firstborn, outcome, eldest, baby, female offspring, male offspring, progeny, orphan, young bird, consequence, whoreson



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