"Tadpole" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... wait a minit till you git rested sorter, for it ain't good to take whiskey on a hot stomack. I've jest been readin' a piece in Grady's newspaper about a frog—the darndest frog that perhaps ever come from a tadpole. It was found up in Kanetucky, and is as big as a peck measure. Bill, do you take this paper and read it aloud to us. I'm a poor hand to read, and I want to hear it. I'll be hanged if it ain't the darndest ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VII. (of X.) • Various
... weep and wail, For little Tommy Tadpole had lost his little tail; And his mother didn't know him as he wept upon a log, For he wasn't Tommy Tadpole, but ...
— A Book for Kids • C. J. (Clarence Michael James) Dennis
... milk and was gravely washing its face with one of its forepaws, to the great admiration of the two children, who were sitting on the floor beside it. It was an artful-looking kitten, all black, with a very large head and a very small body. It reminded Owen of a tadpole. ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... gummy matter. The insect is caught, and the tongue returned with wonderful rapidity. The frog, when it is first hatched, has the constitution of a fish: it is purely aquatic; has a fish's heart, a fish's circulation, and a fish's gills. The tadpole swims as a fish does—by the movement, side-ways, of its tail. For the unassisted eye, and still more for the microscope, what spectacle can be more marvelous than the gradual process of change by which this tiny fish becomes ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... sculling about in the dark by the aid of their caudal extremities, instead of standing on their legs, and breathing by gills, instead of taking the free air of heaven into the lungs made to receive it. Of course we never try to keep young souls in the tadpole state, for fear they should get a pair or two of legs by-and-by and jump out of the pool where they have been bred and fed! ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... little tads," he went on coolly, waving his hand at the gathered group, "is a skate who teases this little girl. And you older boys are skates for letting the little ones do it, the whole pack of you—and I'm going to spank any little tadpole who does it hereafter, and I'm going to punch the head off any big one who allows it. It's got to stop NOW!" And as Hale dragged him off he added to the mountain boy, "and I'm going to begin with you whenever you say the word." Hale was ...
— The Trail of the Lonesome Pine • John Fox, Jr.
... which egg becomes a tadpole; the tadpole, after more or fewer intermediate stages, becomes ...
— Life and Habit • Samuel Butler
... record of a pianoforte solo shows this very clearly to the eye, because the impression made by a long note is a deeply-marked indentation succeeded by the merest shallow scratch—not unlike the impression made by a tadpole on mud—with a big head and an attenuated body. Every note marked long in pianoforte music is therefore essentially a sforzando followed by a rapid diminuendo. Anything in such music marked as a long note to be sustained ...
— Twentieth Century Inventions - A Forecast • George Sutherland
... brain of the average Christian and that of the average Jew—certainly in Europe—is about the difference between a tadpole's brain & an archbishop's. It is a marvelous race; by long odds the most marvelous race the ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... flattened-out shark. There are five species of shark-like rays, which have all the outward form and appearance and vagrant mode of life of their prototype, and four species of sharks that might pass as rays. One of them, with a big head, tadpole-like tail and generally frayed and sea-tattered appearance, is, in fact, accepted in some quarters as a ray, while the shovel-like skate is commonly ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... summer weather Gissing slept on a little outdoor balcony that opened off the nursery. The world, rolling in her majestic seaway, heeled her gunwale slowly into the trough of space. Disked upon this bulwark, the sun rose, and promptly Gissing woke. The poplars flittered in a cool stir. Beyond the tadpole pond, through a notch in the landscape, he could see the far darkness of the hills. That fringe of woods was a railing that kept the sky from flooding ...
— Where the Blue Begins • Christopher Morley
... plunging with Edith up to the saddle-girths in mire, drew from him a very unmannerly, though not the less hearty execration on the delicacy of "them thar persons who," as he expressed it, "stumped at a mud-hole as skearily as if every tadpole in it war a ...
— Nick of the Woods • Robert M. Bird
... stood there, erect and challenging, this miserable human tadpole, usurping the throne of Lais and crowned with the worship of such devotees ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... and probes a waterlogged stump in hope to recapture Brer Tarrypin, who once was ours for a short while. Gissing (the juvenile and too enthusiastic dog) has to be kept away from the pond by repeated sticks thrown as far as possible in another direction; otherwise he insists on joining the tadpole search, and, poking his snout under water, attempts to bark at the same time, with ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... and weigh two pounds each. In the top part of this enormous head, inside big cavities separated by cartilage, you'll find 300 to 400 kilograms of that valuable oil called "spermaceti." The sperm whale is an awkward animal, more tadpole than fish, as Professor Frdol has noted. It's poorly constructed, being "defective," so to speak, over the whole left side of its frame, with good eyesight only in ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... white paper a very black spot about half an inch in diameter, with a tail about an inch in length, so as to resemble a tadpole, as in Plate II.; look steadfastly for a minute on the center of this spot, and, on moving the eye a little, the figure of the tadpole will be seen on the white part of the paper; which figure of the tadpole will ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul." Nay—thunders Science—put away such childish superstition, smite such traditionary idols; man was first made after the similitude of a marine ascidian, and once swam as a tadpole in primeval seas. ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... they are not without interest here on account of the remarkable capacity which they show to adapt themselves to different surroundings. There are frogs, like the tree-frog of Martinique, and others in regions where water is scarce, which never pass through the tadpole stage; or, to be quite accurate, they lose the gills and tail in the egg, as higher land-animals do. On the other hand, there is a modern Amphibian, the axolotl of Mexico, which retains the gills throughout life, and never lives on land. Dr. Gadow has shown that the lake in which it ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... the one dedicated to that saint. It is well that in this quarrelsome world we quarrel furiously about tastes; since agreeing too closely about the objects to be liked and appropriated would breed much more fighting than is bred by disagreeing. That little human tadpole, which the old toad of a father would not suffer to stay ten minutes in his house, proved as welcome at the nunnery of St. Sebastian as she was odious elsewhere. The superior of the convent was aunt, by the mother's side, to the new-born ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... agreed. No satirist has ever struck off happier portraits of the ordinary British legislator, or been more alive to the stupefying influences of a parliamentary career. We have gone through a peaceful revolution since Disraeli first sketched Rigby and Taper and Tadpole from the life; but the influences which they embodied are still as powerful, and a parliamentary atmosphere as little propitious to the pure intellect, as ever. Coningsby, if he still survives, must have ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... having proved that legs can be induced to grow in tadpoles at any time, even in very young specimens, by feeding them with thyroid gland. Loeb writes: 'The earlier writers explained the growth of the legs in the tadpole as a case of an adaptation to life on land. We know through Gudernatsch that the growth of the legs can be produced at any time by feeding the animal with the thyroid gland.' Obviously he thinks that these two propositions are contradictory to each other, whereas there is ...
— Hormones and Heredity • J. T. Cunningham
... one its meagre parcel of inhabitants packed up and moved away, as the summer waned and fall approached. Town lots were no longer salable, traffic ceased, a deadly lethargy fell upon the place once more, the "Weekly Telegraph" faded into an early grave, the wary tadpole returned from exile, the bullfrog resumed his ancient song, the tranquil turtle sunned his back upon bank and log and drowsed his grateful life away as in the old sweet days ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 4. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... Spanish, and yet the treatment is not Spanish. The more one studies the conception and the workmanship the more striking it grows in originality and daring. Mullgardt has succeeded in putting into architecture the spirit that inspired Langdon Smith's poem 'Evolution,' beginning 'When you were a tadpole and I was a fish.' In the chaotic feeling that the court gives there is a subtle suggestiveness. The whole evolution of man is intimated here from the time when he lived among the seaweed and the fish and the lobsters and the turtles and the crabs. Even the straight vertical lines used in the ...
— The City of Domes • John D. Barry
... was clear, they sent a snooper in first. It was a robot, looking slightly like a short-tailed tadpole, six feet long by three feet at the thickest. It transmitted a view of the tunnel as it went slowly in; the air, it found, was breathable, and there were no harmful radiations or other dangers. According to the plans, there should be a big room at the other end, slightly curved, a hundred feet ...
— The Cosmic Computer • Henry Beam Piper
... by some foolish tadpoles came wriggling along. 'I'll just try catching one of them for practice. Maybe they are good to eat,' thought Mr. Heron, and just as before darted his head and great bill downward and caught a tadpole. ...
— Mother West Wind "How" Stories • Thornton W. Burgess
... Aspredo, very much resembles her countrywoman the Surinam toad in her nursery arrangements. Of course you know the Surinam toad—whom not to know argues yourself unknown—that curious creature that carries her eggs in little pits on her back, where the young hatch out and pass through their tadpole stage in a slimy fluid, emerging at last from the cells of this living honeycomb only when they have attained the full amphibian honours of four-legged maturity. Well, Aspredo among cat-fish manages her brood in much the same fashion; only she carries her eggs beneath ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... urchin; bantling, bratling^; elf. youth, boy, lad, stripling, youngster, youngun, younker^, callant^, whipster^, whippersnapper, whiffet [U.S.], schoolboy, hobbledehoy, hopeful, cadet, minor, master. scion; sap, seedling; tendril, olive branch, nestling, chicken, larva, chrysalis, tadpole, whelp, cub, pullet, fry, callow; codlin, codling; foetus, calf, colt, pup, foal, kitten; lamb, lambkin^; aurelia^, caterpillar, cocoon, nymph, nympha^, orphan, pupa, staddle^. girl; lass, lassie; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... One variety, in the case with which the visitor is now engaged, is remarkable. Here are specimens of the tree frogs that can walk with their backs downwards on the most polished surfaces, and can slightly change their colour; the paradoxical frog from Surinam, which is larger as a tadpole than in its condition of maturity; the Brazilian horned toads; the American bull frogs; and the Brazilian pipa, the female of which deposits its eggs upon the back of the male, who carries them about till they burst from their shells; the repulsive siren of Carolina, ...
— How to See the British Museum in Four Visits • W. Blanchard Jerrold
... entered the gates out of the hot dust beneath the glitter of the dark-curtained windows. Seaton led me at once through the little garden-gate to show me his tadpole pond, swarming with what, being myself not the least bit of a naturalist, I considered the most horrible creatures—of all shapes, consistencies, and sizes, but with whom Seaton seemed to be on the most intimate of terms. I can see his absorbed ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... tracheae. Thus not only does nature pass from gills to lungs in allied classes and families, as seen in fishes and reptiles, but in the latter she passes even during the life of the same individual, which successively possesses each system. We know that the frog in the tadpole state respires by gills, while in the more perfect state of frog it respires by lungs. We never see that nature passes from a system with tracheae to a ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... sunshine, about six inches from a tangle of arrow-weed stems, a black tadpole lay basking. Light to him meant not only growth, but life. Whenever, with the slow wheeling of the sun, the shadow of a lily leaf moved over him, he wriggled impatiently aside, and settled down again on the brightest part of the ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts
... gut, between these two regions, is greatly lengthened, forming a loop with many minor loops borne at the periphery of an expanse of mesentery, recalling the Meckelian tract of birds and mammals. In the tadpole this region is spirally coiled and is still longer relatively to the length of the whole tract. In Hyla and Pipa there is a small caecum comparable with the colic caecum ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... to think that there is something in a tadpole after all," murmurs Lord Poldoodle to himself, as the author ...
— The Sunny Side • A. A. Milne
... ghastly, inhuman, blackened faces, with staring goggle eyes. The Bishop was most frightful of all. His horse was prancing and swaying wildly, and the Bishop's transformed features were diabolic. His whole profile had altered, seemed black and shapeless as the face of a tadpole. The amazing truth burst upon Bleak. Chuff and his paraders were wearing gas-masks. These were what they had carried in their knapsacks. Indomitable Chuff, ...
— In the Sweet Dry and Dry • Christopher Morley
... mermaid and a tadpole?" asked another in a loud voice, and without a pause continued, "Why, one drops its tail and the other holds onto it. Ha, ha! Ho, ho! ...
— The Sea Fairies • L. Frank Baum
... in the midst of our Museums and Scientific Schools, how little we yet know of the common things before our eyes. Our savans still confess their inability to discriminate with certainty the egg or tadpole of a frog from that of a toad; and it is strange that these hopping creatures, which seem so unlike, should coincide so nearly in their juvenile career, while the tritons and salamanders, which border so closely on each other in their maturer state as sometimes ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 • Various
... along with the 7th H.L.I. were the leading battalions. As Queant and Pronville were found to be unoccupied the barrage was cancelled and these places were occupied without a fight and a section of the Hindenburg Line near Tadpole Copse was held. This line was held until the 7th when we were relieved and went into a bivouac area near St. Leger. The day we came out we got heavily shelled with gas and had a number of casualties. We had a good rest at St. Leger, ...
— The Fifth Battalion Highland Light Infantry in the War 1914-1918 • F.L. Morrison
... Suddenly he stopped, sat down by his tub, pulled some dead grass out of it, plunged the frog in, and began to scrub it—began to scrub the frog in the oozy contents of that tub, when the poor amphibian had been soaking in spring-water ever since it was a tadpole! ...
— Roof and Meadow • Dallas Lore Sharp
... poem hugged to her breast, the child fairly flew out of the room, leaving Straws a prey to conflicting emotions. He experienced in those moments of suspense all the doubts and fears of the nestling bard or the tadpole litterateur, awaiting the pleasure and sentence of the august editor or the puissant publisher. Tortier had been suddenly exalted to the judge's lofty pedestal. Would he forthwith be an imperial autocrat; turn tyrant or Thersites; or become critic, one of "those graminivorous animals ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... pinnacle of which is erected a signal station, called the Vigia, which, at the instant I saw it, was telegraphing to some craft out at sea. As for the city, to assume our friend Mr Bang's mode of description, it was shaped like a tadpole, the body representing the city, and the suburb the tail; or a stewpan, the city and its fortifications being the pan, while the handle, tending obliquely towards us, was the Raval, or long street, extending ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... writes a pose novel—at least I hope so for the sake of my self-respect. Most, after my fashion, burn the thing, or benevolent publishers lose it. It is an ill thing if by some accident the tadpole tale survives the tadpole stage. The authoress does the feminine equivalent, but I should judge either that she did it more abundantly or else that she burned less. Has she never swept past you with a scornful look, disdained you in all the pride ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... them up and began to fish. In a moment a tadpole swallowed the hook. Pinkie Whiskers jerked him out of the water and ...
— Hazel Squirrel and Other Stories • Howard B. Famous
... the facts of nature, it vanishes like a baseless vision. Man is sui generis, sole and exclusive in organization, without pre-existing type or affinity to other species; and his alleged recent metamorphosis from a monkey, and his first and far more distant one from a snail or a tadpole, are paradoxes only worthy of idle ...
— An Expository Outline of the "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation" • Anonymous
... activities. True play never practises what is phyletically new; and this, industrial life often calls for. It exercises many atavistic and rudimentary functions, a number of which will abort before maturity, but which live themselves out in play like the tadpole's tail, that must be both developed and used as a stimulus to the growth of legs which will otherwise never mature. In place of this mistaken and misleading view, I regard play as the motor habits and spirit of the past of the race, persisting ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... a queer organization, the 1st D.C. Vols., composed as it was of a cloud of independent companies—thirty-five, or thereabout, in all, I think—all made up of men from everywhere, largely in the tadpole stage of Unionism, and all sworn in for service in the District, not to go beyond the District. Early in May they were organized into eight battalions of four or five companies each, commanded by lieutenant-colonels, majors, or the senior ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 3, September 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... a lesson we learned 'when you were a tadpole and I was a fish,' It is a bit of wisdom that lies deep in our hearts; but we shrink from it and refuse to heed it, clinging ...
— The Silver Butterfly • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... An enormous aquatic animal mentioned by Job. Some suppose it to have been the whale, but that distinguished ichthyologer, Dr. Jordan, of Stanford University, maintains with considerable heat that it was a species of gigantic Tadpole (Thaddeus Polandensis) or Polliwig—Maria pseudo-hirsuta. For an exhaustive description and history of the Tadpole consult the famous monograph of ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... aback the stranger laughed. It was as though a curious little tadpole which he held under his glass should suddenly lift its tail and begin to ...
— The Story of an African Farm • (AKA Ralph Iron) Olive Schreiner
... quiet conviction inherited from his forefathers, and common to all labourers on the land, that just as in the world of plants and animals nothing ceases to exist, but continually changes its form, the manure into grain, the grain into a food, the tadpole into a frog, the caterpillar into a butterfly, the acorn into an oak, so man also does not perish, but only undergoes a change. He believed in this, and therefore always looked death straight in the face, and bravely bore the sufferings that lead towards it, but did not care and did not know how ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... it is in vain for him to open his eyes and his ears; nothing is to be seen but one or two hideous bats, which flap their wings in his face, and frighten him in the midst of a reverie. Nothing is on the move; no newt or tadpole is playing in the water, and nothing can be descried there but the rays of the moon, as she moves slowly o'er its surface; nor is anything to be heard except the wind whistling through the trees, or an occasional shot from the rifle of a brother sportsman, who, more happy, more clever, and better ...
— Le Morvan, [A District of France,] Its Wild Sports, Vineyards and Forests; with Legends, Antiquities, Rural and Local Sketches • Henri de Crignelle
... to have Lords over running the nation, As plenty as frogs in a Dutch inundation; No shelter from Barons, from Earls no protection, And tadpole young Lords too in every direction,— Things created in haste just to make a Court list of, Two legs and a coronet all they consist of! The prospect's quite frightful, and what Sir George Rose (My particular friend) ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... belong to a small number of species, some of which were referred by Agassiz to the genera Leuciscus, Aspius, and Perca. The remains of frogs also, of extinct species, have been discovered in the paper-coal; and a complete series may be seen in the museum at Bonn, from the most imperfect state of the tadpole to that of the full-grown animal. With these a salamander, scarcely distinguishable from the recent species, has been found, and the ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell
... your authority—' ventured to observe Mr. Tadpole, emboldened by the presence of a duke, his patron, to struggle against the despotism of ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... ordinary toad. Though descended from the frog, and originally a creature of the water, the toad has long since adapted itself to live upon the dry ground. It still produces its young in the water as it did when a frog. Whereas the childhood of the frog, that is, its tadpole stage, is very long and it assumes its adult form comparatively late, just the reverse is the case of the toad. The young hasten through their tadpole stage within a few weeks, and assume the shape ...
— The Meaning of Evolution • Samuel Christian Schmucker
... mocking-bird. "Daddy Longlegs," the Shanghai rooster, crowed louder than ever, with one eye on the poor jaded bird, and said: "What a contemptible little thing you are, to be sure!" Gander White, Esq., the portly barn-yard alderman, hissed at him, and even Duck Waddler, the tadpole ...
— Queer Stories for Boys and Girls • Edward Eggleston
... But, as Mr. Tadpole observed, with much originality, at the Carlton, they were dancing on a volcano. It was December, and the harvest was not yet all got in, the spring corn had never grown, and the wheat was rusty; there was, he well knew, another deficiency in ...
— Endymion • Benjamin Disraeli
... quarry now is, as you pass from Rydal to Grasmere, there was formerly a length of smooth rock that sloped towards the road on the right hand. I used to call it tadpole slope, from having frequently observed there the water bubbles gliding under the ice, exactly in the shape ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... excitement, with Hannah blaming me and giving her vinigar to swallow to soften the pin. Well, it turned out all right, for she kept on living, but she pretended to have sharp pains all over her here and there, and if the pin had been as lively as a tadpole and wriggled from spot to spot, it could not have hurt ...
— Bab: A Sub-Deb • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... implicating tadpole! Wasn't I ordhered to hold convarse wid me prisoner? Spake win Ye're spoke ter and be civil, Or I'll jolt the teeth ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... arid region, where rain-making forms a dominant element in their ritual, water animals are eagerly adopted as symbols. Among these the tadpole occupies a foremost position. The figures of this batrachian are very simple, and are among the most common of those used on ceremonial paraphernalia in Tusayan at the present time. In none of these ...
— Archeological Expedition to Arizona in 1895 • Jesse Walter Fewkes
... starts to think, give him a chance," said Happy Mather. "Who asked your opinion? You're nothing but a tadpole, anyhow." ...
— Skippy Bedelle - His Sentimental Progress From the Urchin to the Complete - Man of the World • Owen Johnson
... life's unfolding powers constitutes a religious program. For even those primitive instincts which pass and perish often stir into consciousness and operation other more noble functions or are transmuted into recognized virtues. Popularly speaking, the tadpole's tail becomes his legs. Success in suppressing the precivilized qualities of the boy results in a "zestless automaton" that is something less than a man. Everything that characterizes the boy, however bothersome ...
— The Minister and the Boy • Allan Hoben
... replied, snatching a bridle and running up the orchard, where old Tadpole had been left in case of emergency. I clapped a side-saddle on his back, a hat on my head, jumped on just as I was, and galloped for my life in the direction of Bimbalong, seven miles distant. I eased my horse a little ...
— My Brilliant Career • Miles Franklin
... such is the meaning officially attached to the word "vivisection," the teacher would be debarred from showing the circulation in a frog's foot or in a tadpole's tail; he must not show an animalcule, uncomfortably fixed under the microscope, nor prick his own finger for the sake of obtaining a drop of living blood. The living particles which float in that liquid undoubtedly feel as much (or as little) as a frog under the influence of anaesthetics, ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... effort carried on from generation to generation to inspire the air of heaven direct, they have slowly acquired the lung-function. In the young organism, true to the ancestral type, the gill still persists—as in the tadpole of the common frog. But as maturity approaches the true lung appears; the gill gradually transfers its task to the higher organ. It then becomes atrophied and disappears, and finally respiration in the adult is conducted by lungs alone.[80] We may be far, in the meantime, from saying that this ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... of a higher animal is precisely similar to the adult condition of any lower animal. It is quite correct to say that a frog passes through the condition of a fish, inasmuch as at one period of its life the tadpole has all the characters of a fish, and if it went no further, would have to be grouped among fishes. But it is equally true that a tadpole is very ...
— Note on the Resemblances and Differences in the Structure and the Development of Brain in Man and the Apes • Thomas Henry Huxley
... writer has as yet made the attempt to define the change —as profound as that of the tadpole to the frog—between the lover and the husband. An author of ideals would not dare to proclaim that this change is inevitable: some husbands—and some wives are fortunate enough to escape it, but it is not unlikely ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... about a month or so, a tadpole comes out of the egg. There are swarms of them wriggling about the water, with heads and bodies and tails, but no legs. In about six weeks more the legs begin to grow, and gradually the tadpole changes into a frog. See what a ...
— Woodside - or, Look, Listen, and Learn. • Caroline Hadley
... from a height of 5,000 feet. British shells were bursting like little bits of cotton wool over the German batteries. A German attack developed, and the airman likens the enemy's advance formation to a "large human tadpole"—a long dense column with the head spread out ...
— Tommy Atkins at War - As Told in His Own Letters • James Alexander Kilpatrick
... sayings which, according to tradition, the philosopher bequeathed to posterity in rhythmical form and sententious brevity, this is notably recorded: "Humble yourselves, my descendants; the father of your race was a 'twat' (tadpole): exalt yourselves, my descendants, for it was the same Divine Thought which created your father that develops itself ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... he to be such a fine swordsman?" I demanded fretfully. "Damn him! 'Tis no right of a little tadpole like him to be a great cut-throat. One could never have told from the look of him, and yet it simply teaches one to be always cautious ...
— The O'Ruddy - A Romance • Stephen Crane
... Doctor Blecker; I may advise. But, as I was going to say, that father of Grey's seemed to me such a tadpole of a man, rooting after tracks of lizards that crept ages ago, while the country is going to mash, and his own children next door to starvation, I thought a little plain talk would try if it was blood or water in his veins. So I went over to spend the day ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... in another. Looking up as they passed under a horizontal bough they sometimes saw objects like large tadpoles lodged diametrically across it, which Giles explained to be pheasants there at roost; and they sometimes heard the report of a gun, which reminded him that others knew what those tadpole shapes represented ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... any other living thing in all the 2,500 to 3,000 square miles of beautiful and mysterious waters, except the yearly increasing swarms of summer bathers. Not a shark, or a stingaree, to scare the timid swimmer or floater; not a minnow, or a frog, a tadpole, or a pollywog—nothing that lives, moves, swims, crawls or wiggles. It is the ideal sea-bathing place of ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... you what I thought last night, now, going home. Says I, 'Tis just like the look of a tadpole: if I saw A tadpole silver as a dace that swam Upside-down towards me through black water, I'ld see the plain spit of ...
— Georgian Poetry 1913-15 • Edited by E. M. (Sir Edward Howard Marsh)
... boxing-gloves; the Notonecta, or water-boatman, rows round and round it, sometimes on his breast, sometimes on his back; queer caddis-worms trail their self-made homesteads of leaves or twigs beside it; the Dytiscus, dorbug of the water, blunders clumsily against it; the tadpole wriggles his stupid way to it, and rests upon it, meditating of future frogdom; the passing wild-duck dives and nibbles at it; the mink and musk-rat brush it with their soft fur; the spotted turtle slides over it; the slow larvae ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... the sense of a one-eyed tadpole, Billy," he said. "That's Miss Minerva's beau. He's been loving her more 'n a million years. My mama says he ain't never going to marry nobody a tall 'thout he can get Miss Minerva, and Miss Minerva she just turns up her nose at anything that ...
— Miss Minerva and William Green Hill • Frances Boyd Calhoun
... are,) we should think he might consider his education completed, and his head would even then be as great a wonder as that of the schoolmaster in the "Deserted Village." In the same way, a man might have seen a horse, (if only a clothes-horse,) a dog, a cat, and a tadpole, and yet never have seen the elephant,—a most blame-worthy neglect of opportunities. But let us apply Mr. Choate's syllogistic process to the list of this extraordinary nameless person's acquirements. The Republican ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... attitude, during this discussion of her recent culinary experiments, was indicative of the change that was slowly taking place in her point of view. The Careys had a large sense of humor, from mother down as far as Peter, who was still in the tadpole stage of it. They chaffed one another on all occasions, for the most part courteously and with entire good nature. Leigh Hunt speaks of the anxiety of certain persons to keep their minds quiet lest any motion be clumsy, and Julia's concern had been of this variety; ...
— Mother Carey's Chickens • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... work. The Rebellion is an unborn tadpole. Let us not fall into the delusion of mistaking a local commotion for a revolution. A strong active pull together will do our work in thirty days. We have only to send a column of twenty-five thousand ...
— The Victim - A romance of the Real Jefferson Davis • Thomas Dixon
... baby!" said the dowager, with the indifference of a woman who has never had a child, and cannot conceive why a little sprawling tadpole in long clothes should make such a difference. "Yes, I suppose that's a novelty," she said, "to be mother of a bit of a thing like that naturally turns a girl's head. It is inconceivable the airs they give themselves, as if there was nothing so wonderful in creation. And so far as I can see you are ...
— Sir Tom • Mrs. Oliphant
... animals the Jerboa, sent to Macleod by Mr. Mackenzie, of the Artillery, several specimens having been caught here: presenting affinities obviously with the hare, and analogies with the Kangaroo. Macleod has just given me, from his namesake of the 3rd Cavalry, a tadpole-like animal, very similar to one from the Khasiya Hills. I fear it is a tadpole, but I keep the specimen lest ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith
... Th' Ascidian tadpole, young and gay, Doth Life with one bright eye survey, His consciousness has easy play. He's sensitive to grief and pain, Has tail, and spine, and bears a brain, And everything that fits the state Of creatures we call vertebrate. But age ...
— Rhymes a la Mode • Andrew Lang
... writer of this is a tadpole of the Lakes, a young disciple of the six or seven new schools, in which he has learnt to write such lines and such sentiments as the above. He says, 'easy was the task' of imitating Pope, or it may be of equalling him, I ...
— Life of Lord Byron, With His Letters And Journals, Vol. 5 (of 6) • (Lord Byron) George Gordon Byron
... made serious {17} errors in describing Indian life. They applied European standards of judgment to things Indian. A tadpole does not look in the least like a frog. An uninformed person who should find one in a pool, and, a few weeks later, should find a frog there, would never imagine that the tadpole had changed into the frog. Now, Indian society was in what we may call the tadpole stage. It was quite ...
— French Pathfinders in North America • William Henry Johnson
... eccentric, even for a snake, and wears his teeth on his backbone, where they may break the egg-shell so that he may spit it away. When he first stretched his head round an egg, the viperine snakes in the same case hastily assumed him to be a very large tadpole; and since tadpoles are regarded with gastronomical affection by viperine snakes, they began an instant chase, each prepared to swallow the entire phenomenon, because a snake never hesitates to ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 28, April 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... alteration. In its earliest form the young batrachian, living in the water, breathes as a fish does by gills, either free and projecting as in the water-newt, or partially covered by integument as in the tadpole. But the gills disappear as the lungs gradually become developed: the duration of the process being on an average one hundred days from the time the eggs were first deposited. After this important change, the ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent
... of Mavis the elder girls were not entirely in sympathy with the new movement. They considered the Pioneers exhibited signs of swollen head, and nicknamed their society the 'Tadpole Club,' declaring its members to be still in that elementary stage of their development. They made very merry at their expense, and poked fun at Merle for ...
— Monitress Merle • Angela Brazil
... isn't too bad," said Bill, furiously. "Here we've had all the worry and trouble of fightin' puddin'-thieves night and day, and, on top of it all, here's this Tooralooral tadpole of a Mayor shovin' his nose into the business and arrestin' our Puddin' ...
— The Magic Pudding • Norman Lindsay
... other. Both are superior to the Serpents and Caecilians, for in them the head moves freely on the neck and they creep on short imperfect legs. But the Lizard is clothed with scales, while the body of the Salamander is naked, and the young of the former is complete when hatched, while the Tadpole born from the Salamander has a life of its own to live, with certain changes to pass through before it assumes its mature condition; during the early part of its life it is even destitute of legs, and has gills like the Fishes. Above the Lizards and Salamanders, highest in the class of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... point. "Under the microscope, the germ of, say, tetanus is a minute bar with spore at the end like the head of a tadpole. Of ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... you are neither the one nor the other—like a tadpole with legs, neither frog nor pollywog. But ...
— The Maid-At-Arms • Robert W. Chambers
... milfoil and crowfoot bed. Do you see a grey film around that sprig? Examine it through the pocket lens. It is a forest of glass bells, on branching stalks. They are Vorticellae; and every one of those bells, by the ciliary current on its rim, is scavenging the water—till a tadpole comes by and scavenges it. How many millions of living creatures are there on that one sprig? Look here!—a brown polype, with long waving arms—a gigantic monster, actually a full half-inch long. He is Hydra fusca, most famous, and earliest described (I think by Trembley). Ere we go home ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... of life. Enclosed in each side of those great heads, they have gills, and they breathe in the same manner as fishes. Presently the two hind feet begin to bud out and grow, little by little; then the fore feet; finally, the tail wastes away till it disappears; and thus insensibly the tadpole is transformed into a frog. Observe here that the tadpole's gills share the same fate as his fish-tail; they wither and disappear by slow degrees, and gradually as they do so, his lungs are developed. The animal changes his class very quietly, and without ceasing to be genuinely the same, although ...
— The History of a Mouthful of Bread - And its effect on the organization of men and animals • Jean Mace
... his head the hair was long and flowing. But if his shoulders were broad the rest of his body was not in the same proportion—for he narrowed as he descended, his hips being very small, and his legs as thin as those of a goat. His real name was Todpoole, but the people invariably called him Tadpole, and he certainly in appearance somewhat reminded you of one. He was a facetious little fellow, and, it was said, ...
— Poor Jack • Frederick Marryat
... home guards in the saloons, a group of lumberjacks would remember meeting each other in the camps of Paul Bunyan. With painful accuracy they established the exact time and place, "on the Big Onion the winter of the blue snow" or "at Shot Gunderson's camp on the Tadpole the year of the sourdough drive." They elaborated on the old themes and new stories were born in lying contests where the heights of extemporaneous invention ...
— The Marvelous Exploits of Paul Bunyan • W.B. Laughead
... then—if that young man did n't go him one better 'n' say as he believed in tadpoles himself. Luther Law was flat agin' tadpoles, but Rufus never let up till he got him to admit that if the Lord could make a man out of a monkey He could make him out of a tadpole, too. 'N' then, when he'd got him so far, what do you think, Mrs. Lathrop,—what do you think!—Mrs. Macy said as Mrs. Kitts said as Mrs. Grummel said if that young man did n't look right square ...
— Susan Clegg and Her Neighbors' Affairs • Anne Warner
... Lorna. For in my sick distracted mind (stirred with many tossings), like the bead in the spread of frog-spawn carried by the current, hung the black and central essence of my future life. A life without Lorna; a tadpole life. All stupid head; ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... Croydon. The Japanese had torpedoed another Russian ironclad and a British cruiser was ashore in the East Indies. A man had been found murdered in an empty house in Hoxton and the King had had a conversation with General Booth. Tadpole was in for North Winchelsea, beating Taper by nine votes, and there had been a new cut in the Atlantic passenger rates. He was expected to be interested and ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... suppose we shall lose General Hunter, for even if not recalled I don't see how he could stay after Lincoln's proclamation. I must say I think his, Hunter's action, premature and uncalled for. It seemed to me very like the tadpole resolution in "Festina lente." In this case, too, the tadpoles were quite out of our reach except the small number in these islands, who had virtually shed their tails in course of nature already. I have great faith in Lincoln and am ready to leave ...
— Letters from Port Royal - Written at the Time of the Civil War (1862-1868) • Various
... he intrusts the investigation of that remarkable batrachian, the Aaeolotel, the mode of development of which is still unknown, but which remains in its adult state in a condition similar to that of the tadpole of the frog during the earlier period of its life. Latreille describes the insects, and Valenciennes the shells and the fishes; but yet to show that he might have done the work himself, he publishes a memoir on the anatomical structure of the organs of breathing in the animals he has ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... he was well and happy, and went on talking. "Did you know that I was once a tadpole just like those ...
— Buttercup Gold and Other Stories • Ellen Robena Field
... so appeared the child's equipment; the lilac silk pelisse, the small swansdown boa, the white bonnet—the whole holiday toilette, in short, was the gala garb of a cherub but too well known, of that tadpole, Desiree Beck—and Desiree Beck it was—she, or an ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... to be sumfin else dat grows? Jess stick to de place yo're planted, and do de bes yo knows; Be de sunflower or de daisy, de melon or de rose. Don't be what yo ain't, jess yo be what yo is, If yo am not what yo are den yo is not what you is, If yo're jess a little tadpole, don't yo try to be de frog; If yo are de tail, don't yo try to wag de dawg. Pass de plate if yo can't exhawt and preach; If yo're jess a little pebble, don't yo try to be de beach; When a man is what he isn't, den he isn't ...
— It Can Be Done - Poems of Inspiration • Joseph Morris
... Darwin when he says that function precedes structure? Are not the potentials dependent upon the variation which has determined this function? I am speaking now in the broadest possible terms and not confining myself to the cerebrum. Do we not find it in the tadpole who is prepared for breathing not because he wants to breathe, but because he is going to have a new kind of breathing apparatus and the duck who takes to the water because he has the mechanism ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... seated many moments, and had scarcely pushed off the shore of silence into a new sea of talk, when we were interrupted by the invasion of half a dozen dogs. They were of all sorts down to no sort. Mr. Skymer called one of them Tadpole—I suppose because he had the hugest tail, while his legs were not ...
— A Rough Shaking • George MacDonald
... and effective as a romance than anything Disraeli had previously written. There are scenes and characters in the story which will live in English literature. Thackeray could hardly have created more living portraits than "Rigby," "Tadpole," and "Taper," or "Lord Monmouth." These are characters which are household words with us like "Lord Steyne" and "Rawdon Crawley." The social pictures are as realistic as those of Trollope, and now and then as bright as those of Thackeray. The love-making is tender, pretty, and not nearly ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... point of the knife, and in its struggles to free itself it attracted the attention of a creeper—the larva of one of the aquatic flies called drakes (Ephemerae)—which pounced upon it as fiercely as the water staphylinus does on the luckless tadpole, but, fortunately for the Minnow, either the glittering of the knife-blade or the motion of my hand, scared it away ...
— Essays in Natural History and Agriculture • Thomas Garnett
... slippery partitions. I'm a civilised man. I keep thinking of old Albrecht and the Barbarossa.... I feel I want a wash and kind words and a quiet home. When I look at you, I KNOW I want a wash. Gott!"—he stifled a vehement yawn—"What a Cockney tadpole of ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... coming to my chief trouble. I want her, and I want her bad. I hardly sleep at night for thinking about her sweet, pretty face, and industrious habits, and what a bang-up wife she'd make, but I don't get nowhere. The minute I come down to hard-pan she wiggles away like a scared tadpole in shallow water. I done a thing, and I don't know whether it was a big mistake or not, and that is the main thing I want to see you about. It was just before I left, an' we was standin' at the gate, nigh my hoss and buggy. It had got sorter dark, and—well, I'll ...
— Dixie Hart • Will N. Harben
... accordance with this view there would be also some probability in favour of regarding the collar nerve-tube of the Enteropneusta as the equivalent of the cerebral vesicle only of Amphioxus and the Ascidian tadpole, and also of the primary ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... and ever kind to crabs, And be not disrespectful to cuttle-fish or dabs; Chase not the Cochin-China, chaff not the ox obese, And babble not of feather-beds in company with geese. Be tender with the tadpole, and let the limpet thrive, Be merciful to mussels, don't skin your eels alive; When talking to a turtle don't mention calipee— Be always kind to animals wherever ...
— A Nonsense Anthology • Collected by Carolyn Wells
... of my early childhood, is still a sight whereof my old eyes never tire. What animation in that verdant world! On the warm mud of the edges, the frog's little tadpole basks and frisks in its black legions; down in the water, the orange-bellied newt steers his way slowly with the broad rudder of his flat tail; among the reeds are stationed the flotillas of the caddis worms, half protruding from their tubes, which ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... famous swimmer, having been used to the water from the time he was a tadpole. And now he swam so fast, with the help of the current, that he reached the river by the ...
— The Tale of Ferdinand Frog • Arthur Scott Bailey
... man's body below, and thought, at first, he was killed by the bursting of his rifle; but when his companion, who had leaped down to his assistance, helped him, reeking and muddy, from the dominions of the tadpole, and placed him, uninjured, though stunned, on his legs, we could not resist a burst of merriment at his countenance of unmitigated disgust, as the liquid filth oozed from the tips of ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... had been sitting up all night in neighbourly converse with an echo of elegant leisure, went out in the grey of the morning to obtain a cheap breakfast. Seeing a tadpole approach, ...
— Cobwebs From an Empty Skull • Ambrose Bierce (AKA: Dod Grile)
... rummiest way of offerin' to give a fellow a glass as I ever did come across since I was a tadpole, as sure as my name's Dick Jones," remarked the sailor, sitting down opposite the captain, and turning up the ...
— The Red Eric • R.M. Ballantyne
... spoke Nigel saw the brown little fellow shooting about like a galvanised tadpole, with a small harpoon in ...
— Blown to Bits - or, The Lonely Man of Rakata • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... living organisms, before they are fully developed. Thus, the tadpole is the larva of the frog. A great many insects are bred from what are called grubs, or caterpillars. ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Adventures on Strange Islands • Roger Thompson Finlay
... born he was little bigger than a tadpole; then he grew to be as big as a mouse; then he arrived at the size of a cat; and then he jumped off the palette, and, turning head over heels, asked the poor painter what he wanted ...
— The Paris Sketch Book Of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh • William Makepeace Thackeray
... brief span of life. In a few cases in the familiar life about us we see the evolutionary process abridged, and transformations like those of unrecorded time take place before our eyes, as when the tadpole becomes the frog or the grub becomes the butterfly. These rapid changes are analogous to those which in the depths of geologic time have evolved the bird from the fish or the reptile, or the seal and the manatee ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... Lizard; Ah niver see thim aboot here. It must a been a two-striped Spelerpes. A Spelerpes is nigh kin to a Frog—a kind of dry-land tadpole, while a Lizard is ...
— Two Little Savages • Ernest Thompson Seton
... Black Friars sitting back to back Fished from the bridge for a pike or a jack. The first caught a tiddler, the second caught a crab, The third caught a winkle, the fourth caught a dab, The fifth caught a tadpole, the sixth caught an eel, And the seventh ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, June 7, 1916 • Various
... baboon, or some other yet stranger monster which has sensation, is the measure of all things; then he might have shown a magnificent contempt for our opinion of him by informing us at the outset that while we were reverencing him like a God for his wisdom, he was no better than a tadpole, not to speak of his fellow-men—would not this have produced an overpowering effect? For if truth is only sensation, and no man can discern another's feelings better than he, or has any superior right to determine whether his opinion is true or false, but each, as we have several times repeated, ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... not begin his great work on truth with a declaration that a pig, or a dog-faced baboon, or any other monster which has sensation, is a measure of all things; then while we were reverencing him as a god he might have produced a magnificent effect by expounding to us that he was no wiser than a tadpole. For if truth is only sensation, and one man's discernment is as good as another's, and every man is his own judge, and everything that he judges is right and true, then {90} what need of Protagoras to be our instructor at a high figure; ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall
... out of the ground by the women, or caught in the marshes, and used in every stage from the tadpole upwards. ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... is what you are always figuring on. Debts don't mean anything to you, because you aren't worth a damn. But debts count with me. You owe me $40,000 on this bright idea of yours, and your leases aren't worth a tadpole ...
— The Desert Fiddler • William H. Hamby
... "Zoonomia" ("Zoonomia, or the Laws of Organic Life", 2 vols. London, 1794; Osborn op. cit. page 145.) might serve in part at least to-day. "When we revolve in our minds the metamorphoses of animals, as from the tadpole to the frog; secondly, the changes produced by artificial cultivation, as in the breeds of horses, dogs, and sheep; thirdly, the changes produced by conditions of climate and of season, as in the sheep of warm climates being covered with hair instead of wool, and the hares and partridges ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... his teeth a passage eat: We'll rouse him from the deep retreat. But who the shelter's forced to give? 'Tis sacred Virgil, as I live! 20 From leaf to leaf, from song to song, He draws the tadpole form along, He mounts the gilded edge before, He's up, he scuds the cover o'er, He turns, he doubles, there he pass'd, And here we have him, caught ...
— Poetical Works of Johnson, Parnell, Gray, and Smollett - With Memoirs, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Samuel Johnson, Thomas Parnell, Thomas Gray, and Tobias Smollett
... shows that the rudimentary and perfect pistils are essentially alike in nature. An animal may possess various parts in a perfect state, and yet they may in one sense be rudimentary, for they are useless: thus the tadpole of the common salamander or water-newt, as Mr. G.H. Lewes remarks, "has gills, and passes its existence in the water; but the Salamandra atra, which lives high up among the mountains, brings forth its young full-formed. This animal never lives in the water. Yet if we open a gravid female, ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... as though the intestines were seated there. These little creatures adhered strongly to any substance that they were laid on, and caused an irritating feeling to the skin if placed on it; they swam with great rapidity when put into seawater, and in their movements in swimming much resembled a tadpole; their tails were merely ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 2 (of 2) • George Grey
... the brain." Now if man, as they say, once lived the life of the brute, and his superiority now is simply quantitative, why is it that his inferiors of to-day are not passing into real manhood? They are far superior to any creature which is "not far from the tadpole stage of evolution." If we were once there, and evolutionists say we were, why not take all brutes in ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, - Volume I, No. 10. October, 1880 • Various
... me," I said, "to be anything else. You talk like a tadpole. Haven't you any other interest in life? What about home, and patriotism, and Shakespeare—all those sort of things? Why not give it a square meal, and silence it for an hour or two; leave yourself free to ...
— They and I • Jerome K. Jerome
... grow! no longer a slim little fish, but quite a portly tadpole with rounded body and long tail, but still with no expression in his blunt-nosed face, and only two black-looking pits where the ...
— The Stories Mother Nature Told Her Children • Jane Andrews
... be generally known that the tadpole acts the same part with fish that ants do with birds; and that through the agency of this little reptile, perfect skeletons, even of the smallest fishes may be obtained. To produce this, it is but necessary to suspend the fish by ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 19. Issue 539 - 24 Mar 1832 • Various
... to the edge of the pond to look at the pink and white lotus. One summer day, as a little frog, hardly out of his tadpole state, with a small fragment of tail still left, sat basking on a huge round leaf, one ...
— Japanese Fairy World - Stories from the Wonder-Lore of Japan • William Elliot Griffis
... frog or a tadpole come within reach, the duck would snap it up in an instant; and even fish are ...
— Friends in Feathers and Fur, and Other Neighbors - For Young Folks • James Johonnot
... members. The Zoological Society are fortunate enough to possess specimens of both the black and white axolotl. This creature, which is a native of Mexico, has a strange life-history not unlike that of the frog. It has a sort of tadpole stage of existence, in which it is furnished with a collar of gills and lives in the water. After a while it loses its gills, and its tail and legs grow much less fish-like. There is a kind of lizard look about its permanent form. In ...
— Little Folks (Septemeber 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... said Ducky Waddles. "Now I can take a swim without worrying about my new necktie." And he flopped into the water with a splash that almost frightened to death a little tadpole who was swimming ...
— Little Jack Rabbit's Adventures • David Cory
... principle, or spermatozoa, is exactly like a little tadpole, and you no doubt recall that a tadpole has a minute tail, the movement of which enables it to swim around. So has the spermatozoa, and by the incessant movement of this microscopic tail they all move upward as soon as discharged by the male. I told you that God gave the male-germ ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol 2 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... must, my eyes are awful tale-tellers, and they might be saying something you wouldn't like to hear, and that might make you mad, and then you'd shut up school, and send me home feeling about as small as a tadpole with his ...
— Our American Cousin • Tom Taylor
... into its new element, changed in everything save its nature, but still unchanged in that, and rendering itself as formidable to the moth and the butterfly as it had been before to the newt and the tadpole. There is, I daresay, an analogy here also. It is in the first state of our own species, as certainly as in that of the dragon-fly, that the character is fixed. Further, I used to experience much interest ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... a panting little fiend, in the form of a tadpole with hairy arms and legs like a monkey's, as he ran up with four bundles of faggots, "we are doing the very best we can for your discomfort. But you damned have no consideration for us, and do not remember that we are on our feet day and night, waiting upon you," said the little ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... instead of whitewash, coloured the walls and ceiling. No glass hung on the wall to reflect the visage of the Arctic beauty, but there were several pegs, from one of which hung Nootka's seal-skin bad-weather jacket, the tadpole-tail of which reached to the ground, while from another depended a pair of her long waterproof boots. One half of the floor being raised about eight inches, constituted the Eskimo maiden's couch—also her chair and sofa. There was no ...
— The Walrus Hunters - A Romance of the Realms of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... the case of comparative anatomy almost any form will disclose the meaning of development, for animate nature is uniform and consistent in its methods of operation throughout its wide range. We shall begin with the familiar frog which every one knows is a product of a tadpole; passing on to the chick we will learn more facts that will enable us to formulate the main principle of comparative embryology in definite terms; we will then be prepared to extend our survey so as to include somewhat less familiar facts and animals that are even ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... Mr Tadpole that you shall stand for the old borough. With the government in our hands, as I had anticipated at the general election, success I think was certain: under the circumstances which we must encounter, the struggle will be more severe, ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... operation for six months, and the water is as clear as it was the day it was put in. If, spite of everything, the seawater fail, then try a fresh-water aquarium. Use your tank for the pond instead of the ocean; and in the spotted newt, the tortoise, the tadpole, the caddis-worm, and the thousand other inhabitants of our inland ponds and brooks, with the weeds among which they live, you will find as much entertainment as in watching the wonders of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Number 9, July, 1858 • Various
... that they are larvae. There is, I believe, in Nature no instance of a transition by this species of metamorphosis from a more perfect to a less perfect animal. The tadpole has a resemblance to a fish before it becomes a frog; the caterpillar and the maggot gain not only more perfect powers of motion on the earth in their new state, but acquire organs by which they inhabit a new element. This animal, I dare ...
— Consolations in Travel - or, the Last Days of a Philosopher • Humphrey Davy |
