"Wingless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the rocky cliffs of the sea, halcyon,[144] dost chant thy mournful elegy, a sound well understood by the skilled, namely, that thou art ever bemoaning thine husband in song, I, a wingless bird, compare my dirge with thine, longing for the assemblies[145] of the Greeks, longing for Lucina, who dwells along the Cynthian height, and near the palm[146] with its luxuriant foliage, and the ...
— The Tragedies of Euripides, Volume I. • Euripides
... sit up like a dog, or fly in the air like a swallow. The variety and beauty of the birds, as well as the charm of their song, exceed all description. Most of them have iridescent feathers, several are wingless, and one at least has teeth. The insects are a match for the birds in point of beauty, if not also in size and musical qualities. Many of them are luminescent, and omit steady or flashing lights of every tint all through ...
— A Trip to Venus • John Munro
... Now over wood and river the evening drew in fast. And first the swallows, that had looked as if they would never stay their hunting, ceased; and the light, that had seemed fastened above the world, for all its last brightenings, slowly fell wingless ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... Leaves mostly in pairs, rarely in threes, 1 to 1 1/2 in. long, from short sheaths, light-colored, rigid, curved or straightish, spreading; cones sessile, globose or nearly so, 2 in. long; tips of scales thick, conical-truncate, no awns or prickles; seeds large, nut-like, wingless, edible. A low, round-topped tree, branching from near the base, 10 to 25 ft. high; from the Rocky Mountains. A fine small pine; cultivated in the East. It needs some protection at Boston. The figure shows the seed. Pinus monophylla, ...
— Trees of the Northern United States - Their Study, Description and Determination • Austin C. Apgar
... found a small gecko (Coleonyx variegatus), scorpions of two or three undetermined species, and certain insects (of the Order Orthoptera) to be very common inhabitants of the dens. With the exception of the parasitic insects the most common are wingless locustids (Ceuthophilus spp.) and the peculiar wingless females of a species of cockroach (Arenivaga erratica). These two are seldom absent when a burrow is excavated, the female cockroaches being abundant, although the winged males ...
— Life History of the Kangaroo Rat • Charles T. Vorhies and Walter P. Taylor
... light. Such are the "cocuyos", whose brilliant lamps of green and gold and flame, gleam through the aisles of the forest, until the air seems on fire. Such, too, are the "gusanitos", the female of which—a wingless insect, like a glow-worm—lies along the leaf, while her mate whirrs gaily around, shedding his most captivating gleams as he woos her upon the wing. But, though light is the life of these beautiful creatures, it is often the cause of their ...
— The Rifle Rangers • Captain Mayne Reid
... of the ants with the aphids is greatly facilitated by the gregarious and rather sedentary habits of the latter, especially in their younger, wingless stages, for the ants are thus enabled to obtain a large amount of food without losing time and energy in ranging far afield from their nests. Then, too, the ants may establish their nests in the immediate ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... man extremely, building and nestling and rustling about him,—prying and speculating, curiously watchful of him at his work, if likely to be profitable to themselves, or even sometimes in mere pitying sympathy, and wonder how such a wingless and beakless creature can ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... high, and could step over an ordinary man's head or kick his hat off; and his head, too, for that matter. He said it was wingless, but a swift runner. The natives used to ride it. It could make forty miles an hour, and keep it up for four hundred miles and come out reasonably fresh. It was still in existence when the railway was introduced into New Zealand; still in existence, and carrying the mails. The railroad ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... the bird, rode on in front. At length he made a sign that he saw emus in the distance, when the whole party, as had been arranged, dismounted and led on their horses, keeping them between themselves and the emus. They were thus able to get within a couple of hundred yards, when the wingless birds showed signs of alarm. Mr Hayward gave the signal to mount, and leaping on his horse the rest followed his example, and the emus set off running at a speed calculated to try the mettle of the fleetest horse and the endurance of the dogs. The pack, ...
— The Young Berringtons - The Boy Explorers • W.H.G. Kingston
... spread up and down Main street and was heralded to St. Paul, that three "Crowes" had perched on the banner of our village during the early morning of June 26th, 1859, when Mrs. Isaac Crowe gave birth to three white Crowes, two girls and one boy. The father of these three birds—wingless, though fairest of the fair, was a prominent attorney of St. Anthony ...
— Old Rail Fence Corners - The A. B. C's. of Minnesota History • Various
... green worm Bonellia, where the male appears like a remote ancestor of the female, on whom it lives parasitically. Somewhat similar is the cocus insect, among whom the males are very degenerate, small, blind and wingless. ...
— The Truth About Woman • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... condition! Several facts—namely, that beetles in many parts of the world are frequently blown out to sea and perish; that the beetles in Madeira, as observed by Mr. Wollaston, lie much concealed until the wind lulls and the sun shines; that the proportion of wingless beetles is larger on the exposed Desertas than in Madeira itself; and especially the extraordinary fact, so strongly insisted on by Mr. Wollaston, that certain large groups of beetles, elsewhere excessively numerous, which absolutely ...
— The Humour of Homer and Other Essays • Samuel Butler
... steaks; but he felt that this particular customer was proof against his blandishments. He took Gilbert an evening paper, and then subsided into a pensive silence until the fowl appeared in an agreeable frizzling state, fresh from the gridiron, but a bird of some experience notwithstanding, and wingless. It was a very hasty meal. Gilbert was eager to return to those chambers in the Temple—eager to be listening once more for some chance words of meaning that might be dropped from John Saltram's pale parched lips in the midst of incoherent ravings. Come what might, he wanted to be near at hand, ...
— Fenton's Quest • M. E. Braddon
... living reservoirs of honey for the use of the community. In the equally wonderful case of the termites, or so-called "white ants" (which belong, however, to an entirely different order of insect from the ants and bees) the neuters are blind and wingless, and are divided into soldiers and workers, each class possessing the requisite instincts and structures adapting it for its tasks. Seeing that natural selection can form and maintain the various structures and the exceedingly complicated instincts of ants ...
— Are the Effects of Use and Disuse Inherited? - An Examination of the View Held by Spencer and Darwin • William Platt Ball
... cobwebs, that forces us to remember that we are enwrapped by the supernatural, is helpful and stimulating. A human life lived only in the seen and felt, with no sense of the invisible, is a fatally impoverished life, a poor, blind, wingless life, but to believe that ever around us is a whole world full of spiritual beings; that this life, with its burdens, is but the shadow which precedes the reality; that here we are but God's children at school, is an invigorating conviction, full of hope, ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting
... three days we were passing over an arid desert. The only vegetation was a few tufts of short grass, dried and shriveled by the heat. There was an abundance of strange insects and reptiles. Huge crickets, black and bottle green, and wingless grasshoppers of the most extravagant dimensions, were tumbling about our horses' feet, and lizards without numbers were darting like lightning among the tufts of grass. The most curious animal, however, was that commonly called the horned frog. I caught one of ...
— The Oregon Trail • Francis Parkman, Jr.
... of the pendentive are worthy of notice. Three little creatures are frolicking on the clouds below the saints' feet, and two are perched on the upper part of the arches. They are wingless sprites, playful as human children, but with a grace and beauty not of earth. Two seem to be emerging from a hiding-place in the clouds, and gaily hail their comrade on the arch above. The lovely ...
— Correggio - A Collection Of Fifteen Pictures And A Portrait Of The - Painter With Introduction And Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll
... by drowning the leading multitudes, until a bridge—not "of sighs," but—of death is formed, of size sufficient to carry them over. They even cross the great Orange River thus in places where its flow is calm. In Africa they pass in such countless swarms, both winged and wingless, that their approach is viewed with dismay, for where they rest they devour every green thing, and flocks and herds are left utterly destitute, so that starvation or change of ground is unavoidable. They usually begin their march, or flight, after sunrise, and encamp ...
— The Settler and the Savage • R.M. Ballantyne
... rather more than thirty, most of which I have kept in confinement. Their life is comparatively long: I have had working ants which were seven years old, and a queen ant lived in one of my nests for fifteen years. The community consists, in addition to the young, of males, which do no work, of wingless workers, and one or more queen mothers, who have at first wings, which, however, after one marriage flight, they throw off, as they never leave the nest again, and in it wings would of course be useless. The workers do not, except occasionally, lay eggs, but carry on all the affairs ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... dainty girl; would that I had come to thee now, a wingless sleep, upon thine eyelids, that not even he, even he who charms the eyes of Zeus, might come nigh thee, but myself had held thee, ...
— Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology • J. W. Mackail
... Island. All the species which he found on the island—viz. a moth, several flies, and numerous beetles—he found to be incapable of flight; and therefore, as Wallace observes, "as these insects could hardly have reached the islands in a wingless state, even if there were any other known land inhabited by them, which there is not, we must assume that, like the Madeiran insects, they were originally winged, and lost their power of flight because its possession was injurious to them"—Kerguelen Island being "one of the stormiest ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... not a God's, could in the rounded sky Hang thus in solitary poise? What need, Ye proud Immortals, that my balanced plumes Should grow, like yonder eagle's, from the nest? It may be, ere my crafty father's line Sprang from Erectheus, some artificer, Who found you roaming wingless on the hills, Naked, asserting godship in the dearth Of loftier claimants, fashioned you the same. Thence did you seize Olympus; thence your pride Compelled the race of men, your slaves, to tear The temple from the mountain's marble womb, To carve you shapes ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... incarnate. He had been so shut off from her by the dignity of her look and the pride of her speech, except at that one blissful interval when he was allowed to hold her hand, that he had hardly deemed her a woman, wingless and earthly, subject to household conditions and domestic jars. The inner details of her life he had only conjectured. She had been a lovely wonder, predestined to an orbit in which the whole of his own was but a point; and this sight of her leaning like a helpless, despairing creature ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... above, wingless angels are hovering with the cross, the column, and other instruments of Christ's agony, which they clasp with a loving devotion. In the lower right-hand corner, Charon appears (taken from pagan mythology) with a boat-load of sinners, whom he smites with his ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... the opening skies Some angel form had spared Us wingless mortals to surprise, The little maid with light-blue eyes, White necked ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... crowing away in the depths of the forest, and at first I kept imagining that I was close to some village. I also obtained some good duck shooting on a lake high up in the mountains, and Ratu Lala described to me what must be a species of apteryx, or wingless bird (like the Kiwi of New Zealand), which he said was found in the mountains and lived in holes in the ground, but I never came across it, though I had many a weary search. Ratu Lala also assured me that the wild chickens were indigenous ...
— Wanderings Among South Sea Savages And in Borneo and the Philippines • H. Wilfrid Walker
... loosened rein, into a rousing gallop, and Philip went dashing down the country road, past the soft, rolling landscape, and under cool caves of foliage, vivid with emerald greens of May, thoughts and dreams all dissolved in exhilaration of the glorious movement, the nearest thing to flying that the wingless animal, ...
— The Militants - Stories of Some Parsons, Soldiers, and Other Fighters in the World • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews
... know, O Lord, so little what is best; Wingless, we move so lowly; But in thy calm all-knowledge let us rest— Oh, holy, ...
— Songs, Merry and Sad • John Charles McNeill
... I was! I will rehearse my fault: I, wingless, thought myself on high to lift Among the winged—I set these feet that halt To ...
— Poems by Jean Ingelow, In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Jean Ingelow
... rounds up between 5100 and 5300 (altitude). To-day five combats, four of them at less than 25 meters, and the fifth at 50 meters. In the first, gun jammed at 50 meters. In the second, at 5200, the Boche in his excitement lost his wings, and descended on his aerodrome in a wingless coach; his ears must be humming (16th). The third was a nose-to-nose combat with a fighting Aviatik. Too much impetus: I failed to hammer him hollow. In the fourth, same joke with an L.V.G. in a group of three: I failed to hammer him, I lurched: pan, a ...
— Georges Guynemer - Knight of the Air • Henry Bordeaux
... brings quickening, too, to the love and respect that I have for mankind. As I rise aloft, you rise with me. But if, the better to love you, I deem it my duty to tear off the wings from my love, your love being wingless as yet; then shall I have added in vain to the plaints and the tears in the valley, but brought my own love thereby not one whit nearer the mountain. Our love should always be lodged on the highest peak we can attain. Let our love not spring from pity when it can be born of love; let us not ...
— Wisdom and Destiny • Maurice Maeterlinck
... neither painter nor poet has any true conception, . . long, dazzling rays such as encircled God's maiden, Edris, with an arch of roseate effulgence, so that the very air was sunset-colored in the splendor of her presence! How if she were a wingless angel,— made woman? ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... what is the use of this claw I was never able to discover. When startled or hunted, the weka glides, for it can scarcely be called running, with incredible swiftness and in perfect silence, to the nearest cover. A tussock, a clump of flax, a tuft of tall tohi grass, all serve as hiding-places; and, wingless as she is, the weka can hold her own very well against her enemies, the dogs. I really believe the great desire of Brisk's life was to catch a weka. He started many, but used to go sniffing and barking round the ...
— Station Amusements • Lady Barker
... at last, when for her sake No wing may fly to me nor song may flow; When, wandering round my life unleaved, I The bloodied feathers scattered in the brake, And think how she, far from me, with like eyes Sees through the untuneful bough the wingless skies? ...
— The House of Life • Dante Gabriel Rossetti
... delicate than air, because it fears recoil and hurt. There were Roxy and her husband, he too well content with life as it is, to be greatly moved by its counterfeit; she sparkling back some artless reply to the challenge of feeble romance and wingless wit. There was Uncle Eli, a little dazed by these strange doings, the hand on his knee shaking, from time to time, under the stimulus of unshared thought. There was Miss Lucindy, with Ellen and all the McNeils, ...
— Meadow Grass - Tales of New England Life • Alice Brown
... hands and knees And crawled by childlike dim degrees Up toward his brother, as a breeze Creeps wingless over sluggard seas When all the wind's heart fails it: so Beneath their mother's eyes had he, A babe that laughed with joy to be, Made toward him standing by her knee For ...
— The Tale of Balen • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... peculiar odour and taste, we find it much more easy to understand their chief characteristics—their great abundance, their slow flight, their gaudy colours, and the entire absence of protective tints on their under surfaces. This property places them somewhat in the position of those curious wingless birds of oceanic islands, the dodo, the apteryx, and the moas, which are with great reason supposed to have lost the power of flight on account of the absence of carnivorous quadrupeds. Our butterflies have been protected in a different way, but quite as effectually; and the result has ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace
... multitude of smaller-winged creatures, like great dragon-flies and moths and flying beetles, and across the greensward brilliantly-coloured gigantic ground-beetles crawled lazily to and fro. Moreover, on the causeways and terraces, large-headed creatures similar to the greater winged flies, but wingless, were visible, hopping busily upon their hand-like ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... a gesture, then flung herself on the turf, and broke down helplessly. The outlaw went to the edge and looked over. The gulf of air told no story except the obvious one. No wingless living creature could make that descent without forfeiture of life. He stepped back to the girl and touched her on ...
— Mavericks • William MacLeod Raine
... of several species of New Zealand and Australian birds, from 2 to 14 ft. high, and quite wingless; almost extinct since the 17th century; two living ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... for the abode of the genii led me to the wingless side of the house, a side I rarely visited. At the foot of the ivy-covered walls and straight in their centre was laid a wide bed of flowers, every one of which was white. But why white? Again and again I asked myself this ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... on woodland ways your sires Flashed like fires; Fair as flame and fierce and fleet As with wings on wingless feet Shone and sprang your mother, free, Bright and ...
— Astrophel and Other Poems - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne, Vol. VI • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... spot, she climbs to the top of some object and spins out a fine, long web; this floats in the air, and after a while becomes so long and light that the wind will bear the thread and the spinner for a considerable distance, no one knows how far. These facts about lice and spiders show how wingless insects can go long distances without wings of ...
— Seed Dispersal • William J. Beal
... you dare to look me through and through, as though I had laid my confidence at your feet? Who are you that you dare to descend wingless into the abysms of my soul, that you can smile away my torture and ...
— The Indian Lily and Other Stories • Hermann Sudermann
... and again they put on the rapt look of mystery, but a smile also, and their admiration and applause were more and more. To England they soon turned, and contemplated the round, many-colored globe of Shakspeare's works. As playful swallows sometimes dart round and round a lithe and wondering wingless animal, so they, admiringly and timidly, attracted, yet hesitating, delighting in his alertness, but not quite understanding it, flitted like a troubled and beautiful flock around the great magician of modern ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... remains of such buildings, at Ephesus, Priene, etc., belong to the fourth century or later. In Greece proper there is no known instance of a peripteral Ionic temple, but the order was sometimes used for small prostyle and amphiprostyle buildings, such as the Temple of Wingless Victory in Athens (Fig. 70). Furthermore, Ionic columns were sometimes employed in the interior of Doric temples, as at Bassae in Arcadia and (probably) in the temple built by Scopas at Tegea. In the Propylaea or gateway of the Athenian Acropolis we even find the Doric and Ionic orders juxtaposed, ...
— A History Of Greek Art • F. B. Tarbell
... the rough, reddish-brown road, which wound along the hillside, under great trees, through dense groves of jack oaks, with treetops' far below him on his left hand, and the hills far above him on his right. He crawled along like some minute wingless variety of fly. ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... his eye bedewed As thus his speech the bird renewed; "Alas my brother, slain in fight By Ravan's unresisted might! I, old and wingless, weak and worn, O'er his sad fate can only mourn. Fled is my youth: in life's decline My former strength no more is mine. Once on the day when Vritra(765) died, We brothers, in ambitious pride, Sought, mounting with adventurous flight, The ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... what I have called complemental males, which differ wonderfully from the ordinary hermaphrodite form. With ants we have males and females, and two or three castes of sterile females or workers. With Termites there are, as Fritz Muller has shown, both winged and wingless males and females, besides the workers. But in none of these cases is there any reason to believe that the several males or several females of the same species differ in their sexual powers, except in the atrophied condition of the reproductive organs in the workers of ...
— The Different Forms of Flowers on Plants of the Same Species • Charles Darwin
... go out. A moth had flown down its chimney, was sizzling, charring, inside ... Paul lifted off the globe. Burnt his hands, but said nothing ... flicked the wingless, ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... fallen, even we, whose passion On earth is nearest thine; Who sing, and cease from flying; Who live, and dream of dying: Grey time, in time's grey fashion, Bids wingless creatures pine: We are fallen, even we, whose passion ...
— Poems and Ballads (Third Series) - Taken from The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles - Swinburne—Vol. III • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... this was that he should slay and bring unto him the head of a certain horned dragon, called in Micmac Chepichealm. [Footnote: Vide "Supernatural Beings." The Chepichealm (M.) is an immense horned serpent or wingless dragon. It is probably identical with the Wiwillmekq' (P. and Pen.), which is a singular horned worm found on trees or by water. It is believed to be capable of assuming a vast size and to be gifted with supernatural powers.] So this was agreed ...
— The Algonquin Legends of New England • Charles Godfrey Leland
... pass months scanning the empty sea-line and counting the steps of death's invisible approach. There is no help but in the boats, and what a help is that! There heaved the Currency Lass, for instance, a wingless lump, and the nearest human coast (that of Kauai in the Sandwiches) lay about a thousand miles to south and east of her. Over the way there, to men contemplating that passage in an open boat, all kinds of misery, and the fear of death ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 13 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... is no doubt whatever that, if the four had been ordinary wingless children, that black and fierce dog would have had a good bite out of the brown-stockinged leg of Robert, who was the nearest. But at first growl there was a flutter of wings, and the dog was left to strain at his chain and stand on his hind-legs ...
— Five Children and It • E. Nesbit
... strangest of all the strange creatures she had ever met. It must have had at least a hundred legs along each side of its body—so she thought at first glance. It was about three times her size, and slim, low, and wingless. ...
— The Adventures of Maya the Bee • Waldemar Bonsels
... all his fertile queens are deprived of their wings, so as to be unable to lead off new swarms. As an old queen never leaves the hive except to accompany a new swarm, the loss of her wings does not, in the least interfere with her usefulness, or with the attachment of the bees. Occasionally, a wingless queen is so bent on emigrating, that in spite of her inability to fly, she tries to go off with a swarm; she has "a will," but contrary to the old maxim she can find "no way," but helplessly falls upon the ground instead of gaily ...
— Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-Bee - A Bee Keeper's Manual • L. L. Langstroth
... My joys are wingless all, and dead; My dumps are made of more than lead; My flights soon find a fall; My fears prevail, my fancies droop, Joy never cometh with a hoop, And seldom with ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 281, November 3, 1827 • Various
... was a wingless bird. I afterwards learnt that the hooting of an owl is a favourite signal among the ...
— Allan Quatermain • by H. Rider Haggard
... With wingless seeds the main distinction is found in the spermoderm, which is entire in one species only, P. koraiensis. In P. cembra it is wanting on the ventral surface of the nut, but on the dorsal surface, it is adnate partly to the nut, partly ...
— The Genus Pinus • George Russell Shaw
... given, a thunder peal and through the air you saw a wingless, black object in a faint curve against the soft blue sky, which it seemed to sweep with a sound something like the escape of water through a break in the garden hose multiplied by ten, rising to its zenith and then ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... then by rushing wings, as the myriad paroquets settled among the shadowy branches. The soft murmuring of the reeds that fringed the shores told where the waterfowl had already found resting-places. The swaying of the cane-brakes—near and far—signalled the secret movements of the wingless wild things which had only stealth to guard them against the cruelty of nature and against one another. The heaviest waves of cane near the great Shawnee Crossing might have followed a timid red deer. For the Shawnees had vanished from their town ...
— Round Anvil Rock - A Romance • Nancy Huston Banks
... hospitably entertained at the shepherd's hut just mentioned, which he reached on Monday, December 1. He told the shepherd in charge of it that he had come to see if he could find traces of a large wingless bird, whose existence had been reported as having been discovered among the extreme ...
— Erewhon Revisited • Samuel Butler
... incomparable edifice, built of Pentelic marble, received the name of Propylaea from its forming the vestibule to the five-fold gates by which the citadel was entered. In front of the right wing there stood a small Ionic temple of pure white marble, dedicated to Nike Apteros (Wingless Victory). ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... in guileless youth, Flies tow'rds her Love with trusting wing, Bruises her heart 'gainst broken truth, And falls, like thee, a crippled thing. How man in bacchanalian sphere Soars to the heat of Pleasure's sun, Then, by gradations dark and drear, Sinks low as thee, poor wingless one: How hearts from proud Ambition's height Have drooped to darkest, lowest hell— From blazing noon to pitchy night, With pangs a demon-tongue may tell: How aspirations glory-fraught Have gained the goal in dark despair; How golden hopes have come ...
— The Death of Saul and other Eisteddfod Prize Poems and Miscellaneous Verses • J. C. Manning
... ornamental, and even attractive. If with her angles she will also renounce some hundreds of other equally harassing absurdities of attire, she may consider her position assured, and her claim to masculine toleration reasonably well grounded. A Wingless Insect. ...
— The Fiend's Delight • Dod Grile
... the rapacity of the first settlers in the Mauritius, who, finding the dodo excellent eating and an easy prey, demolished every specimen of the species. Near these wrecks of the dodo, and in the same case, is the New Zealand wingless bird, now almost extinct, but to scientific men an interesting link between the bird and the mammalia. The Bustards occupy the two next cases (110, 111) to which the visitor should direct his attention. ...
— How to See the British Museum in Four Visits • W. Blanchard Jerrold
... respects it diverges widely. On Egyptian monuments the sphinx never appears standing as in this fresco, but crouching in the attitude of reposeful observation. Its form also was always fuller and more rounded than the long-legged, attenuated spectre before us, and it was invariably wingless; whereas the Etruscan sphinx had short wings with curling points, spotted and barred with stripes of black, red, and yellow. This strange mixture of the human and the brutal might be regarded as a symbol of the religious state of the people. We see in it higher conceptions ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... sleepeth there Before this wanderer, seated on their stools; Not women they, but Gorgons I must call them; Nor yet can I to Gorgon forms compare them; I have seen painted shapes that bear away The feast of Phineus. Wingless, though, are these, And swarth, and every way abominable. They snort with breath that none may dare approach, And from their eyes a loathsome humour pours, And such their garb as neither to the shrine Of Gods is meet to bring, nor mortal roof. Ne'er have I seen a race that owns this tribe, ...
— Story of Orestes - A Condensation of the Trilogy • Richard G. Moulton
... A word within that hovereth without wings.]—i.e. a presentiment. "Winged words" are words spoken, which fly from speaker to hearer. A 'wingless' word is unspoken. The phrase occurs ...
— Agamemnon • Aeschylus
... It was wingless and covered smoothly with pastel-blue feathers. It stood solidly on carefully manicured yellow feet and stared at him ...
— Traders Risk • Roger Dee
... a wicker cage, That hung and swung 'mid fruits and flowers, Had learnt the song-charm, to assuage The drearness of its wingless hours. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... sunlight. And they cried to me for life, life, life. But in taking life for myself, In seizing and crushing their souls, As a child crushes grapes and drinks From its palms the purple juice, I came to this wingless void, Where neither red, nor gold, nor wine, Nor the rhythm of life ...
— Spoon River Anthology • Edgar Lee Masters
... but got them to talk about their plans, and watched them closely. Then he took them out to see his bees. He showed them his ingenious hives and a bee-house which he had built to keep out the moths by drawing chalk-lines about it, for over these lines the wingless grub of the moth could not crawl. Then he showed them a glass hive, in which all the processes of the bees' housekeeping could be observed. After that, he took the boys to the old log-house, and pointed out some holes in the roof that would ...
— The Hoosier School-boy • Edward Eggleston
... the Leader of God's people in war, and around it gathered memories of wonderful deliverances and glorious triumphs, making it seem the banner of wingless victory. When the Saracens besieged the city the eikon was carried round the fortifications, and the enemy had fled. It led Zimisces in his victorious campaign against the Russians; it was borne round the fortifications when Branas assailed the capital in the reign of Isaac Angelus, ...
— Byzantine Churches in Constantinople - Their History and Architecture • Alexander Van Millingen
... reminds me of the editor of the Outlook, good old Lyman Abbott, although his is unfortunately the kind that is tastelessly pure. He's as wholesome and good as oatmeal is, but the salt was left out. An excellent person but wingless; not stupid, but dull. Yet—there's something about him—he has an attractive integrity. He puts on no airs. He is simple, unpretentious, and he's so straightforward he makes ...
— The Crow's Nest • Clarence Day, Jr.
... laughed in the face of the goddess with insatiable impudence, and flung to the immortal forehead the flick of her shameless foot. White and austere gleamed the Venus (if Venus she be, for some say she is a Wingless Victory, and Rickman, when sober, inclined to that opinion). White and austere gleamed the little camp-bed in the corner. He ignored Mr. Spinks' discreet suggestion. He wasn't going to undress to please Spinks or anybody. He'd see Spinks in another world first. ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair
... the cruel sport has a different termination, by the cormorant being deprived of the prey it seemed so sure of. Not through the efforts of the fish itself, which now, badly damaged, swims but feebly; nor do the gulls appropriate it, but a wingless biped—no other ...
— The Land of Fire - A Tale of Adventure • Mayne Reid
... glittering beetles, of equally beautiful tints, crept along the ground or up the stems of the trees. In one or two open spots we startled several kangaroos of a small species which went hopping away, looking back curiously at us every now and then. Suddenly also we came upon a cassowary, a wingless bird, the body of which is about twice the size of a large turkey, but its long legs raise it to the height of five or six feet from the ground. It is covered with long close black hair like feathers. The skin of the neck is bare, ...
— The Mate of the Lily - Notes from Harry Musgrave's Log Book • W. H. G. Kingston
... general public. The points of resemblance betwixt the Gorilla and the Boy are numerous and striking. In most cases, the two animals have an equally pleasing exterior. They both have the ability to climb giddy heights, inaccessible to any other wingless biped. Their language is not dissimilar, the same unintelligible chatter being characteristic of both. As the argument proceeds, it will be seen that distinctive traits belonging to lower classes of the ...
— Punchinello, Vol.1, No. 4, April 23, 1870 • Various
... the wild and wandering Ostrich, say, have ye never heard? The type of the restless soul of man, the weary, wingless bird. ...
— Autumn Leaves - Original Pieces in Prose and Verse • Various
... in this autumnal life of our little Boy. But he has employments in abundance; and these make the permitted open air, under any terms, a delight. He can rove about with Duhan among the gorse and heath, and their wild summer tenantry winged and wingless. In the woodlands are wild swine, in the meres are fishes, otters; the drowsy Hamlets, scattered round, awaken in an interested manner at the sound of our pony-hoofs and dogs. Mittenwalde, where are shops, is within riding distance; we ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Volume IV. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—Friedrich's Apprenticeship, First Stage—1713-1728 • Thomas Carlyle
... less fragmentary skeletons, and the solitary, which inhabited the islands of Bourbon and Rodriguez, but has not been seen for more than a century. A parrot and some other birds of the Norfolk Island group are said to have lately become extinct. The wingless auk, Alca impennis, a bird remarkable for its excessive fatness, was very abundant two or three hundred years ago in the Faroe Islands, and on the whole Scandinavian seaboard. The early voyagers found either the same or a closely allied ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... something, he adopted measures that he had heard of as being used in other lands. He ordered a trench to be cut and filled with water on the side of his garden nearest the approaching plague, which might—if thoroughly carried out—have been of some use against wingless grasshoppers but could be of no use whatever against a flying foe. It would have taken an army of men to carry out such an order promptly, and his men perceived this; but the master was so energetic, so violent in throwing off his coat and working with his own hand at pick ...
— The Buffalo Runners - A Tale of the Red River Plains • R.M. Ballantyne
... boreal light. My soul is destiny and immortality; It flashes in the eyes of the tempest, glows along The phosphorescent billows where the hand of the Almighty Is laid for a moment on the breast of the sea, And the sea smiles; My soul is the wingless word That flies from zone to zone and speaks suddenly out ...
— Pan and Aeolus: Poems • Charles Hamilton Musgrove
... to dreams, in which he was happy beyond the happiness of duke or king, dreams of Blennerhassett's island in May, and of wandering with a wingless Yankee angel in that earthly Paradise. Next morning, in payment for lodging and breakfast, he offered a ...
— A Dream of Empire - Or, The House of Blennerhassett • William Henry Venable
... rose and lit the ripples on the lake that lay below my window as the last of the diners came from the cafe car. Along the shore of the sleeping lake our engine swept like a great, black, wingless bird of night. Presently I felt the frogs of South Parkdale; and when, from her hot throat she called "Toronto," the fat and fretful traveller opened his great gold watch. He did not snap it now, but looked into its open face and almost smiled; for ...
— The Last Spike - And Other Railroad Stories • Cy Warman
... since the night of the meeting on the Sok, and no rain had yet fallen. The eggs of the locust might be hatched at any time. Then the wingless creatures would rise on the face of the earth like snow, and the poor lean stalks of wheat and barley that were coming green out of the ground would wither before them. The country people were in despair. They were all but stripped of their ...
— The Scapegoat • Hall Caine
... after the immaterial, had been repelled by the large presence of the natural man. It had been afraid to trust itself to his strength, lest its wings should suffer for it. It had not been afraid to trust itself to Arthur; and his weakness had made it a wingless thing, dragged down by the ...
— The Judgment of Eve • May Sinclair
... animals of the garden may be mentioned the apteryx, the only bird existing belonging to the same family as the Dinornis giganteus and the still larger Epyornis maximus of Madagascar—monstrous wingless birds now extinct. One of the eggs of the latter in a fossil condition is preserved in the museum of the Garden of Plants in Paris. Its longer axis is sixteen inches, I think. It is, for an egg, a most wonderful thing, and on ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various
... also known as the Bean Plant Louse, or Black Dolphin (Aphis rumicis). Our illustration shows the wingless female and pupa natural size and magnified. The pupa is black with greyish white mottlings, while the female is deep greenish black in colour. This insect commonly attacks the young shoots and tops of Broad Beans. ...
— The Culture of Vegetables and Flowers From Seeds and Roots, 16th Edition • Sutton and Sons
... there in their fluttering to escape to night and the mates they sought not only had wrecked the other specimens of the case, but torn themselves to fringes on the pins. A third of the rarest moths of the collection for the man of India were antennaless, legless, wingless, and often headless. ...
— A Girl Of The Limberlost • Gene Stratton Porter
... "moas" belonging to the species of "dinornis," which many naturalists class with the extinct birds. This, if Paganel was right, would confirm the opinion of Dr. Hochstetter and other travelers on the present existence of the wingless giants of ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... petrify the blood in their veins. Not finding the object of his search, he came streaming down from the nest to a lower limb, and commenced extending his researches in other directions, sliding stealthily through the branches, bent on capturing one of the parent birds. That a legless, wingless creature should move with such ease and rapidity where only birds and squirrels are considered at home, lifting himself up, letting himself down, running out on the yielding boughs, and traversing with marvellous celerity the whole length and breadth of the thicket, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... mouldings and pilasters to enhance the terrible and massive forms that brood above the Medicean tombs. The result is a product of picturesque and plastic art as true to the Michelangelesque spirit as the Temple of the Wingless Victory to that of Pheidias. But where Michelangelo achieved a triumph of boldness, lesser natures were betrayed into bizarrerie; and this chapel of the Medici, in spite of its grandiose simplicity, proved a stumbling-block to subsequent architects by encouraging them to despise ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds
... insects are now shown "all over the house," conducted from one "winding stair" to another, taught to know friends from foes, fed and petted, until they take their airy flight beyond the reach of the wingless caretakers of their ...
— Twilight And Dawn • Caroline Pridham
... arrow-worm, and such active Protozoa as Noctiluca, whose luminescence makes the waves sparkle in the short summer darkness. Very striking as an instance of the insurgence of life are the sea-skimmers (Halobatidae), wingless insects related to the water-measurers in the ditch. They are found hundreds of miles from land, skimming on the surface of the open sea, and diving in stormy weather. They feed ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... time of War the poet gets his chance, When even wingless Pegasi will prance; Yet We, whose pinions oft outsoared the crow's, Have hitherto confined Ourself to prose. But who shall doubt that We could sing as well as That Warrior-bard TYRTAEUS, late of Hellas, Who woke the Spartans up with words and chorus Twenty-six centuries B.U. (Before ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, September 30, 1914 • Various
... escape there was no hope for that wingless old man. His fate was certain, his end was already come. Within five minutes at most the great doors would have slammed on him for ever. And here he sat chuckling like ...
— The Gentleman - A Romance of the Sea • Alfred Ollivant
... opening where the Adriatic rushes into Cattaro at the hidden end of the great sheet of lakes, can't be more than fifteen miles as the crow flies; but so does the course twist that it is much longer for mere wingless things, going by water. How I wished for a motor-boat! But we did not do badly in the big fishing smack. I feared at last that in the straits the wind might die, but instead it blew as through a funnel. We were swept finely ...
— My Friend the Chauffeur • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... caves of Brazil extinct species of nearly all the territorial quadrupeds now inhabiting this region occur. The Australian caverns contain fossil bones of a large extinct kangaroo. In New Zealand the wingless apteryx is still found in the wilds, and the caves of that country show us that it was preceded by other wingless birds of gigantic stature; among them the moa, which, when alive, must have stood about thirteen or fourteen feet high. A complete leg of the bird has been discovered ...
— The Mines and its Wonders • W.H.G. Kingston
... fezzes; wiry mountaineers in dirty, full, white kilts, shouldering long guns and one hand on their pistols, stalk untamed past a dozen Turkish soldiers, who look sheepish and brutal in worn cloth jacket and cotton trousers. A headless, wingless lion of St. Mark still stands upon a gate, and has left the mark of his strong clutch. Of ancient times when Crete was Crete not a trace remains; save perhaps in the full, well-cut nostril and firm tread of that mountaineer, and ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... miracles. The crickets appeared in May, and they ate the country clear before them. In a wheat-field they would average two or three to a head of grain. Even ditches filled with water would not stop them. Kane described them as "wingless, dumpy, black, swollen-headed, with bulging eyes in cases like goggles, mounted upon legs of steel wire and clock spring, and with a general personal appearance that justified the Mormons in comparing them to a cross of ...
— The Story of the Mormons: • William Alexander Linn
... in the absence of any predatory enemies—there being no carnivorous quadrupeds to hunt them or their young—a tendency to lose the power of flight, and some had done so altogether. The gigantic, wingless Moas—allied to the ostrich and the cassawary—had grown up there, and were the masters of the situation. There were many species of these—one of great height—one fourth taller than the biggest known ostrich; others with short ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... well worthy of being carefully studied; for they all show the design of their Creator. The extraordinary creature represented in the engraving is the "Apteryx," or "wingless bird" of New Zealand. It was not known to European naturalists till of late years, and for a long time the accounts which the natives of New Zealand gave of it were discredited. A specimen of it, preserved in brine, was, however, brought to this country, and a full description ...
— Happy Days for Boys and Girls • Various
... leagues south of the capital. At night I experienced an attack (for it deserves no less a name) of the Benchuca, a species of Reduvius, the great black bug of the Pampas. It is most disgusting to feel soft wingless insects, about an inch long, crawling over one's body. Before sucking they are quite thin, but afterwards they become round and bloated with blood, and in this state are easily crushed. One which I caught at Iquique, (for they are found in Chile and Peru,) was very empty. When placed ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... women they, But Gorgons rather; nay, that word is weak, Nor may I match the Gorgons' shape with theirs! Such have I seen in painted semblance erst— Winged Harpies, snatching food from Phineus' board,— But these are wingless, black, and all their shape The eye's abomination to behold. Fell is the breath—let none draw nigh to it— Wherewith they snort in slumber; from their eyes Exude the damned drops of poisonous ire: And such their garb as none should dare to bring To ...
— The House of Atreus • AEschylus
... answered, saying:— Mind and strength Thy creature give, Form him in our very image, Lord, but wingless let him live! ...
— Songs of Labor and Other Poems • Morris Rosenfeld
... is never found except in the arctic regions; the great grizzly bear is only found in the neighborhood of the Rocky Mountains. Nearly all the species of mammals found in Australia are confined to that country, as the wingless birds of New Zealand are confined to that, and the sloth, armadillo, and other animals, to ...
— The Deluge in the Light of Modern Science - A Discourse • William Denton
... in spite of the fact that any chance Wieroo flying above the stream might easily see him, when again a floating object bumped against him from behind and lodged across his back. Turning quickly he saw that the thing was what he had immediately guessed it to be—a headless and wingless Wieroo corpse. With a grunt of disgust he was about to push it from him when the white garment enshrouding it suggested a bold plan to his resourceful brain. Grasping the corpse by an arm he tore the garment from it and then let the body float downward toward the temple. With ...
— Out of Time's Abyss • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... The birds seemed to know as well as the children that it was the first of May. The country village in which Mrs. Chilton lived was as noisy as a martin box, at break of day, when doubtless, though we poor wingless bipeds don't understand what the birds are chattering about, they are planning their work and their amusements ...
— Two Festivals • Eliza Lee Follen
... because they will find stories of old friends among the Bush birds; and of English children, because I hope that they will be glad to make new friends, and so establish a free trade between the Australian and English nurseries—wingless, and laughing birds, in exchange for fairy godmothers, and ...
— Australian Legendary Tales - Folklore of the Noongahburrahs as told to the Piccaninnies • K. Langloh Parker
... jarbling gumps ride hydras green, And utter sharp, a curdling curse, And wingless zimbs that storm each dell, Glare at each shatter'd dome and wall That speak of prowling apes in dream, Of dragons drawing Horror's hearse When bloody lanes of soulless hell Bathed monstrous ...
— Betelguese - A Trip Through Hell • Jean Louis de Esque
... one hundred feet long, cigar-shaped, and wingless," he described it. "It was about twice the diameter of a B-twenty-nine, ...
— The Flying Saucers are Real • Donald Keyhoe |
