"Reptilian" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... spread over the earth. From one of these early reptiles the birds were evolved. Geology furnishes the missing link between the bird and the reptile in the Archaeopteryx, a bird with teeth, claws on its wings, and a reptilian tail. From another primitive reptile the important group of the mammals was evolved. We find what seem to be the transitional types in the rocks of South Africa. The scales gave way to tufts of hair, the heart evolved a fourth chamber, and thus supplied purer blood (warm blood), ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... The place was a rookery of pterodactyls. There were hundreds of them congregated within view. All the bottom area round the water-edge was alive with their young ones, and with hideous mothers brooding upon their leathery, yellowish eggs. From this crawling flapping mass of obscene reptilian life came the shocking clamor which filled the air and the mephitic, horrible, musty odor which turned us sick. But above, perched each upon its own stone, tall, gray, and withered, more like dead and dried specimens than actual living creatures, sat the horrible males, absolutely ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the rude outline of sail in Fig. 3, and now considering it as a jib of one of our own sailing vessels, slightly exaggerate the loops at the edge, and draw curved lines from them to the opposite point, Fig. 4; and I have a reptilian or dragon's wing, which would, with some ramification of the supporting ribs, become a bat's or moth's; that is to say, an extension of membrane between the ribs (as in an umbrella), which will catch the wind, and flutter upon it, like a leaf; but cannot strike ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... and wipes out her surplus of human life as she destroys the overproduction of beast and bird, of insect and reptilian life. She inspires the minds of men with an overmastering desire for possessions. She hides her wealth in inaccessible places and sets her jealous, invisible forces to guard and determinedly hold all possible avenues of approach to them. But this world was given to man to conquer and ...
— Insights and Heresies Pertaining to the Evolution of the Soul • Anna Bishop Scofield
... There's probably another one," he said; and soon, by the same reptilian methods, was back for another try. There was another one, and yet another, and then a little fellow, barely hooked. "That's all," said Jonathan, as he rose to put him back into the pool, and we watched the pretty ...
— More Jonathan Papers • Elisabeth Woodbridge
... it makes any difference," Alexander said, "but it's mainly reptilian. Nothing over Group I. ...
— The Lani People • J. F. Bone
... has now quite a reptilian form, the oral cavity, m, has more or less of the adult outline. A transverse groove near the anterior end of the lower jaw marks off the tongue, tn; and the rudiments of teeth are seen but not shown in the figure because of the ...
— Development of the Digestive Canal of the American Alligator • Albert M. Reese
... vocation which amounted almost to a repugnance. Snake-charming, she had discovered, was far from an ideal profession for a woman of refinement. It possessed unpleasant features, and even such euphemistic titles as "Serpent Enchantress" and "Reptilian Mesmerist" failed to rob the calling of a certain odium, a suggestion of vulgarity in the minds of the more discriminating. This had become so distressing to Mrs. Strange's finer sensibilities that ...
— Heart of the Sunset • Rex Beach
... recently introduced and now overworked, meaning a task, or performance in one's trade, or calling,—doubtless a variant of stint, without that word's suggestion of allotment and limitation. It is still in the reptilian stage of evolution. ...
— Write It Right - A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults • Ambrose Bierce
... which seems to indicate best the mythical conception. Some figures evidently refer to the alligator, and others apparently to the iguana; that on plates 4 and 5 of the Dresden Codex is purely mythical, but contains reptilian characteristics. ...
— Day Symbols of the Maya Year • Cyrus Thomas
... recollect aright, once shot an imprudent stranger for remarking in print that the ancient Athenians, that inferior race, had got ahead in their time of the modern Loco-foco ticket. But several kinds of fish have undoubtedly got ahead in this respect of the common reptilian ticket; for instead of leaving about their eggs anywhere on the loose to take care of themselves, they build a regular nest, like birds, and sit upon their eggs till the fry emerge from them. All the sticklebacks, for instance, are confirmed nest-builders: but here once more it is the ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... out an expedition to the Wyoming fossil fields, but it was lamentably short of funds, appropriations—ah—and so on. Hambridge and I were talking of the matter. A very adequate man indeed, Hambridge. Possibly you've read some of his writings. He wrote Lesser Reptilian Life in the Jurassio. ...
— Galusha the Magnificent • Joseph C. Lincoln
... representatives of these earliest Vertebrates. Of these two groups one consists chiefly now of the Gar-Pikes of our Western waters, though the Sturgeons share also in some of their features. In these fishes there is a singular union of reptilian with fish-like characters. The systems of circulation and of respiration in them are more complicated than in the common fishes; the structure of the skull resembles that of the skull in reptiles, and they have other reptilian characters, such as their ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... were not like the adults of either in their frog-like attitudes and heavy ways. Frankly, they were not beautiful, even at that stage; and a fortnight before, when they had been larger than the eggs they had come out of, they were positively reptilian ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... fish-eating cannibal fish there are in Reelfoot. Here, bigger than anywhere else, you find the garfish, all bones and appetite and horny plates, with a snout like an alligator, the nearest link, naturalists say, between the animal life of today and the animal life of the Reptilian Period. The shovel-nose cat, really a deformed kind of freshwater sturgeon, with a great fan-shaped membranous plate jutting out from his nose like a bowsprit, jumps all day in the quiet places with mighty splashing sounds, as though a horse had fallen into the water. On every stranded log the huge ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... mythical. The only reptiles in New Zealand are lizards, and a lizard-like animal called Tuatara. It is about 18 inches long, and is allied to crocodiles and turtles, as well as lizards. It is the sole representative of an ancient reptilian order named Rhyncocephalia.] ...
— John Rutherford, the White Chief • George Lillie Craik
... say, from the evidence before us, that there have been two Augustan Ages of big animals in the history of our earth—the Jurassic period, which was the zenith of the reptilian type, and the Pliocene, which was the zenith of the colossal terrestrial tertiary mammals. I say on purpose, 'from the evidence before us,' because, as I shall go on to explain hereafter, I do not myself believe ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... the old sea bottom of Syrtis. Four hundred miles from Kukan, and at fifteen thousand feet lower altitude, he shot a bird. At least, it was a something with wings and what were almost but not quite feathers, though it was more reptilian than avian in general characteristics. He and Ivan Fitzgerald skinned and mounted it, and then dissected the carcass almost tissue by tissue. About seven-eighths of its body capacity was lungs; it certainly breathed air containing at least half enough oxygen to support human life, ...
— Omnilingual • H. Beam Piper
... Frisbie. He was standing a little apart from the turmoil, talking to a man on horseback; a man with half-closed, beady, black eyes, drooping mustaches, and a face reptilian in ...
— Empire Builders • Francis Lynde
... urged that this idea is contradictory to the previous suggestion that the absorption of nourishment by the intra-uterine embryo was the cause of the gradual decline of the process of yolk-secretion by the ova in the ovary, but it is not really so. Originally in the reptilian ancestor, or in the Monotreme, the ovum in the follicle secreted yellow-coloured yolk. The materials for this, at any rate, passed through the follicle cells, and it is probable that these cells were not entirely passive, but actively secretory in the process. Substances diffusing from ...
— Hormones and Heredity • J. T. Cunningham
... stolid, immobile countenance, the mysterious reptilian gleam of his shifty black eyes, and the soulless expression always lurking in them, kept a fascinating hold on the girl's memory. They blended curiously with the impressions left by the romances she had read in M. ...
— Alice of Old Vincennes • Maurice Thompson
... rather than saw a hideous head rolling from side to side at the end of a long and sinuous neck, and writhing, reptilian coils lashing the rock at the edge of the water, like the tentacles of an octopus, only many times larger. The body itself was larger than that of any animal I had ever seen, and blacker ...
— Under the Andes • Rex Stout
... springs, a structure only one hundred and twenty-fifth of an inch in size, compress into a few weeks the results of millions of years, and set before us the history of his development from fish-like and reptilian forms, and of his more immediate descent from a hairy, tailed quadruped. That which is individual or peculiar to him, the physical and mental character inherited, is left to the ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... pedestrian, not to say reptilian, metres, this is perhaps the most intolerable; indeed, it was not until touched to new life by the genius of Blake that it deserved to be called a ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... stared without attraction; the weather-worn colours conveying no meaning to comprehension at a huge canvas poster depicting the chief his torpid eye. Then, little by little, the poster became more vivid to his consciousness. There was a greenish-tinted person in the tent, it seemed, who thrived upon a reptilian diet. ...
— Penrod • Booth Tarkington
... or first part of the reptilian time shades insensibly into the second part, called the Cretaceous, which immediately follows it. During this period the lands were undergoing perpetual changes; rather deep seas came to cover much of the land surfaces, and there is some reason to believe that the climate ...
— Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) - Wonders of Earth, Sea and Sky • Various
... England, and all the English to Belgium. It is therefore assumed that the migration of species westward having been the work of time, there was not sufficient lapse of ages to complete the fusion of the continental and British reptilian fauna, before France was separated from England ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell
... The spirit of 1877 was behind it. If, in an embryo, some cells should not live up to the phenomena of their era, the others will sustain the scheduled appearances. Not until an embryo enters the mammalian stage are cells of the reptilian stage false cells. ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... suggested tentatively, forming a mind picture of the vicious reptilian danger which the colonists tried to kill on sight whenever and wherever encountered. His hand went to the knife at his belt. One met with weapons only that hissing hatred motivated by a brainless ferocity ...
— Star Born • Andre Norton
... saurian continued, its tail lashing the water into foam, as through its gagged jaws a stream rushed constantly down its throat, causing suffocation. But, in spite of its amphibious nature, drowning was inevitable; and soon after became an accomplished fact—the huge reptilian carcass drifting down stream, towards the all-absorbing ocean, to become food for sharks, or some other marine monster more hideous and ravenous ...
— The Castaways • Captain Mayne Reid
... blood is; and every marsh-born mosquito, piping of the hunger gnawing its vitals, and every forest tick, blindly feeling with its grappling-irons for the beast that never brushes by, seems to tell us of a world peopled with gigantic forms, mammalian and reptilian, which once afforded abundant pasture to the parasite, and which the parasite perhaps ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson
... and ther seed, an' it shell brooze ther head." And with a singleness of purpose and a rapt attention to detail that would have done credit to a lean porker garnering the strewn kernels behind a deaf old man who plants his field with corn, he started in upon that reptilian host, and exterminated it with a careful thoroughness ...
— The Fiend's Delight • Dod Grile
... The main structure consists of a series of four groups of heroic-sized figures, carved in pierced relief, each flanked by colossal bronze Hermes, their arms reaching around the structure and held together by animal forms of reptilian or fishy origin. All these forms and figures surround a globe of enormous size, typifying the Earth, over the surface of which streams of water are thrown from ...
— The Art of the Exposition • Eugen Neuhaus
... a single land mammal—sea mammals swarm in these waters—not even of the batrachian or reptilian kinds. A few insects only—butterflies or others—and even these did not fly, for before they could use their wings, the atmospheric currents carried the tiny bodies away to the surface of ...
— An Antarctic Mystery • Jules Verne
... woman sat beside him stricken, shrivelled, almost reptilian in her red-eyed, motionless misery. Only her eyes moved in her wrinkled, brown face, and reflected the candle standing on the mantelpiece above his head. She sat with her hands crooked over one another in her lap, like some image wrought of ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... concerned with the intercalary types which occupy the intervals between Families or Orders of the same class; but the investigations which have been carried on by Professor Gegenbaur, Professor Cope, and myself into the structure and relations of the extinct reptilian forms of the Ornithoscelida (or Dinosauria and Compsognatha) have brought to light the existence of intercalary forms between what have hitherto been always regarded as very distinct classes of the vertebrate sub-kingdom, namely Reptilia and Aves. Whatever ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... reptilian movement, which Tartlet imitated as well as he could, he managed, without showing his head above the grass, to reach the bend ...
— Godfrey Morgan - A Californian Mystery • Jules Verne
... been asserted, most frequently by superficial observers, however, that the reptilian psychos is exceedingly low; this is a popular error, for many reptiles give evidence, on occasions, of a, comparatively speaking, high degree of intelligence. Especially is this true in regard ...
— The Dawn of Reason - or, Mental Traits in the Lower Animals • James Weir
... pale, and ascetic-looking, retaining something of the professor in his features. His shoulders are rounded from much study, and his face protrudes forward, and is forever slowly oscillating from side to side in a curiously reptilian fashion. He peered at me with great curiosity in his ...
— Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... forward with an indescribable gait, cat-like yet awkward, carrying his high shoulders almost hunched. He placed the lantern in a niche in the wall, never turning away the reptilian gaze of those eyes which must haunt my dreams forever. They possessed a viridescence which hitherto I had supposed possible only in the eye of the cat—and the film intermittently clouded their brightness—but I can speak of them ...
— The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... is half-way to Redding," mocked a reptilian and red-headed giant on the log, "and Redding is the ...
— The Riverman • Stewart Edward White |
