"Excrement" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... (Fig. 41) again, wrongly accused of wanting judgment, is well aware that a pile of excrement at the foot of a tree announces a nest in the branches. It is careful to suppress this revealing sign, and every day takes it away in its beak ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay
... delivers over the galley to the contractor as complete: but he, among other faults and objections, observes the lion is not gilt, on which the builder or one of his assistants, runs to the head, and dipping a mop in the excrement, thrusts it into the face ...
— 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue • Captain Grose et al.
... the loathing which stamps as a perversion the use of the anus as a sexual aim. But it should not be interpreted as espousing a cause when I observe that the basis of this loathing—namely, that this part of the body serves for the excretion and comes in contact with the loathsome excrement—is not more plausible than the basis which hysterical girls have for the disgust which they entertain for the male genital because it ...
— Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex • Sigmund Freud
... nothing in common with plastic alimentation, and prove that animals weakened by a too long usage of dry fodder, are restored to health by the use of bran, which only seems to act by its presence, since the greater portion of it, as already demonstrated by Mr. Poggiale, is passed through with the excrement. ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 275 • Various
... is Time such a niggard of haire, being (as it is) so plentifull an excrement? S.Dro. Because it is a blessing that hee bestowes on beasts, and what he hath scanted them in haire, hee hath giuen ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... to the salines, or salt springs, that abound in all parts of America. At these they lick up quantities of earth along with the salt efflorescence, until vast hollows are formed in the earth, termed, from this circumstance, salt "licks." The consequence of this "dirt-eating" is, that the excrement of the animal comes forth in hard pellets; and by seeing this, the hunters can always tell when they are in ...
— The Hunters' Feast - Conversations Around the Camp Fire • Mayne Reid
... "bigger than the 'Night Watch,'" a blasphemy which had called forth an instant protest from Mme. Verdurin, who regarded the 'Night Watch' as the supreme masterpiece of the universe (conjointly with the 'Ninth' and the 'Samothrace'), and at the word "excrement," which had made Forcheville throw a sweeping glance round the table to see whether it was 'all right,' before he allowed his lips to curve in a prudish and conciliatory smile, all the party (save Swann) had kept their fascinated and adoring eyes ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... to have paid much attention to the natural history of the "Worm." Kirby, speaking of it, says, "the larvae of Crambus pinguinalis spins a robe which it covers with its own excrement, and does no little injury." Again, "I have often observed the caterpillar of a little moth that takes its station in damp old books, and there commits great ravages, and many a black-letter rarity, which in these days of bibliomania would have been valued at its weight in gold, has ...
— Enemies of Books • William Blades
... child is hardly recognized as existing until he has been given a name. In Gerbstadt in Mansfeld, Germany, the child before it receives its name is known as "dovedung," and, curiously enough, in far-off Samoa, the corresponding appellation is "excrement of ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... man; but the doctors were the most strenuous opposers of the measure, having no doubt very cogent reasons for wishing the continuance of the practice. They assured the inhabitants, that if human excrement was no longer to be accumulated in the streets, to attract the putrescent particles floating in the air, they would find their way into the human body, and a pestilential sickness would be ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... some five hundred barrels of caked excrement were taken from a single tower in one of the old Manila monasteries. The moat around the city wall, and the esteros, or tidal creeks, reeked with filth, and the smells which assailed one's nostrils, especially, ...
— The Philippines: Past and Present (vol. 1 of 2) • Dean C. Worcester
... thread, pin, or seat-worm, is round, very slender, and about half an inch in length. The habitation of this species is the rectum, and they are often found matted together in the excrement. They are very active, even after ejection, and have been known to cause great local irritation by entering the vagina and urethra. Their presence is an occasional cause of masturbation. It is impossible to estimate the number ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... variations. In either of these orders we have both vegetable and animal-feeders, aquatic, and terrestrial, and parasitic groups. Whole families are devoted to special departments in the economy of nature. Seeds, fruits, bones, carcases, excrement, bark, have each their special and dependent insect tribes from among them; whereas the Lepidoptera are, with but few exceptions, confined to the one function of devouring the foliage of living vegetation. We might therefore anticipate that their species—population would be only equal to ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace
... broken limb. If a charm is worn around the neck no poison can be harmful. For a sore throat it is sufficient to expectorate in the fire three times, making a cross. Lockjaw is effectually stopped by tying around the sufferer's jaws the strings from a virgin's skirt; and they say also that powdered excrement of a dog, taken in a glass of water, ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray
... ibid. i. 25: "I was dining this very day at the Hotel d'Ecquevilly, in the Rue Saint-Louis." He leaves the house on foot and witnesses the disturbance. "Fifteen to Sixteen hundred wretches, the excrement of the nation, degraded by shameful vices, covered with rags, and gorged with brandy, presented the most disgusting and revolting spectacle. More than a hundred thousand persons of both sexes and of all ages and conditions interfered ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 2 (of 6) - The French Revolution, Volume 1 (of 3) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... These shoats Bob now caught, and dropped into the bay, knowing that their instinct would induce them to swim for the nearest land. All this turned out as was expected, and the pigs were soon seen on the island, snuffing around on the rocks, and trying to root. A small quantity of the excrement of these animals still lay on the deck, where it had been placed when the launch was cleaned for service, no one thinking at such a moment of cleaning the decks. It had been washed by the sea that came aboard quite across the deck, but still formed a pile, ...
— The Crater • James Fenimore Cooper
... which opulence owes to genius, and which, when paid, honours the giver and the receiver: and then he pleads his beggary as an excuse for his crimes. He melts with tenderness for those only who touch him by the remotest relation, and then, without one natural pang, casts away, as a sort of offal and excrement, the spawn of his disgustful amours, and sends his children to the hospital of foundlings. The bear loves, licks, and forms her young; but bears are not philosophers. Vanity, however, finds its account in reversing the train of our ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... stand but a few feet above the bottom of the canyon. They are narrow, and not very high, as the cavity in the rock is not very deep. Corrals for some kind of domestic animals are found by the side of these houses in the same hollows in the rock. This is proved by a mass of excrement, about a foot in depth, still there, whether of the goat or sheep cannot be stated, but this fact shows that they were inhabited subsequent to the period of European discovery, although they may have been built and used before. The canyon, ...
— Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines • Lewis H. Morgan
... and horns; for which passage it makes way by a whitish water, it casts upon the Silk, which moistning, and thereby in a manner putrefying it, the new creature thrusts out its head through the sharp end of the Case, by a Hole as big as its self. There is found no Excrement in the Case, but the two Skins only, just ...
— Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society - Vol 1 - 1666 • Various
... sufficient sand to set up for itself—barks across the border like a mangy fleabitten fice yawping at a St. Bernard. But Doane would have America swallow it all—just as the Thibetans swallow pastiles made of the excrement of their Dalai Lama. The Bish. evidently has John Bull's trademark branded on the rear elevation of his architecture. So Hingland is growing blawsted tired of our Hawmewikan himpudence. Aw! Vewy likely, don-cherknow. But we shoved it down ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... Lord of the weak and the lowly, Lord of the sage and the madman, of clean and unclean; Breeder of suns and of excrement, loathly and holy, Graving the skull with the pity of all that had been,— Death, oh thou graver of countenance knighted austerely, Yea, on the pitiful clay, such poor flesh in its fear Of God and the soul and the singing of stars that may teach us Wisdom at ...
— Perpetual Light • William Rose Benet
... noble pleasures of meat and drink and sex, thus generously treated; we must turn to another aspect of Rabelais' work—his predilection for excrement. This also, though few would admit it, is a symbolic secret. This also is a path of initiation. In this peculiarity Rabelais is completely alone among the writers of the earth. Others have, for various reasons, dabbled in this sort of thing—but none have ever piled ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... His complexion is of a dirty yellow, with a thin scattered beard, exactly agreeable to that of his diet upon its first declination, like other insects, who, having their birth and education in an excrement, from thence borrow their colour and their smell. The student of this apartment is very sparing of his words, but somewhat over-liberal of his breath. He holds his hand out ready to receive your penny, ...
— A Tale of a Tub • Jonathan Swift
... bodies; in the same manner as the secretion of tears is designed to preserve the cornea of the eye moist, and in consequence transparent; yet has this cutaneous mucus been believed by many to be an excrement; and I know not how many fanciful theories have been built on its supposed obstruction. Such as the origin of catarrhs, coughs, inflammations, ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... pinch, or tickle—or bite, or cut his nails, or hawk, or spit, or snift, or drum with his feet or fingers in company;—nor (according to Erasmus) shall he speak to any one in making water,—nor shall he point to carrion or excrement.—Now this is all nonsense again, quoth ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne
... the varying ways in which an animal may be said to define "dirt." Many animals spend more time and energy in the duties of cleanliness than human beings, and they often show well-marked anxiety to remove their own excrement, or to keep away from it.[35] Thus this element of modesty also may be said to have ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... authorities, dogmata, sentences of learneder writers which have been before me, when as that first-named sort clean otherwise judge of my labours to bee nothing else but a messe of opinions, a vortex attracting indiscriminate, gold, pearls, hay, straw, wood, excrement, an exchange, tavern, marte, for foreigners to congregate, Danes, Swedes, Hollanders, Lombards, so many strange faces, dresses, salutations, languages, all which Wolfius behelde with great content upon the Venetian Rialto, as he describes diffusedly ...
— The Works of Charles Lamb in Four Volumes, Volume 4 • Charles Lamb
... streets, and to the sluttishness within doors. "The floors," says he, "are commonly of clay, strewed with rushes; under which lies, unmolested, an ancient collection of beer, grease, fragments, bones, spittle, excrement of dogs and cats, and everything that is nasty."[18] And NOW, certainly we are the cleanest nation in Europe, and the word COMFORTABLE expresses so peculiar an idea, that it has been adopted by foreigners to describe a sensation ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... lay the saint at rest, and glanced upon the nest of a bird within his room. Ah! cruel was his doom! Into his eye there went the sparrow's excrement. Tobiah's sight was gone! He had an only son, whom thus he now addressed: "When business ventures pressed, I passed from clime to clime. Well I recall the time, when long I dwelt in Ind, of wealth full stores ...
— The Book of Delight and Other Papers • Israel Abrahams
... sooner capitulate to the negro-hating sentiment of her neighbors. But firm in her resolve the fair Castellan never thought of surrendering the citadel of her conscience at the bidding of iniquitous power. Then, like savages, her foes defiled with the excrement of cattle the well whence the school drew its supply of water, attacked the house with rotten eggs and stones, and daubed it with filth. This drama of diabolism was fitly ended by the introduction of the fire fiend, and the burning of the detestable building devoted ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke
... will slay the other Moslem Knights, till not one is left. And I purpose this night to sacre you all with the Holy Incense." When the Emirs heard these words they kissed the ground before him. Now the incense which he designated was the excrement of the Chief Patriarch, the denier, the defiler of the Truth, and they sought for it with such instance, and they so highly valued it that the high priests of the Greeks used to send it to all the countries ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... infinite numbers, scarcely came out but in the night, when they made every thing in the cabins seem as if in motion, from the particular noise in crawling about. And, besides their disagreeable appearance, they did great mischief to our bread, which was so bespattered with their excrement, that it would have been badly relished by ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 16 • Robert Kerr
... adulterers, they are made sensible of the direful stenches mentioned above, n. 430, and recede a little. On account of the correspondence of filthy loves with dunghills and bogs, it was commanded the sons of Israel, "That they should carry with them a paddle with which to cover their excrement, lest Jehovah God walking in the midst of their camp should see the nakedness of the thing, and should return," Deut, xxiii. 13, 14. This was commanded, because the camp of the sons of Israel represented the church, and those unclean things corresponded to the lascivious principles ...
— The Delights of Wisdom Pertaining to Conjugial Love • Emanuel Swedenborg
... Olivier.) The larva of the three-lined leaf-beetle may be distinguished from all other insects which prey upon the potato by its habit of covering itself with its own excrement. In Figure 10, a, this larva is shown in profile, both full and half grown, covered with the soft, greenish excrementitious matter which from time to time it discharges. Figure 10, c, gives a somewhat magnified view of the pupa, and Figure 10, ...
— The $100 Prize Essay on the Cultivation of the Potato; and How to Cook the Potato • D. H. Compton and Pierre Blot
... eight weeks. Unground corn and water will fatten swine in good form. The same is true of barley and rye, ground and soaked. They may be fattened nicely while grazing on field peas. They may also be similarly fattened by hogging off corn or gathering it from the excrement of cattle that are being fattened on it. Swine well grown should make an average gain of a pound a day. Bacon swine may be best sold at 175 to 200 pounds in weight. Lard types are usually grown ...
— Pratt's Practical Pointers on the Care of Livestock and Poultry • Pratt Food Co.
... what a ghastly picture the dead man's face presents! Glassy, and with vacant glare, those eyes, strange in death, seem wildly staring upward from earth. How unnatural those sunken cheeks—those lips wet with the excrement of black vomit—that throat reddened with the pestilential poison! "Call a warden, Daddy!" says Harry; "he has died of black vomit, I think." And he lays the dead body square upon the cot, turns the sheets from off the shoulders, unbuttons the collar of its shirt. ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... march to the river Nerico, which we reached at eight o'clock, all the people and asses very much fatigued. Face of the country during this day an open and level plain with bushes and Cibi trees, making the prospect rich, though not grand. Saw plenty of lions' excrement in the wood: they deposit it only in certain places, and like the cats, claw up the ground ...
— The Journal Of A Mission To The Interior Of Africa, In The Year 1805 • Mungo Park
... escort that watches over her by day and by night, that facilitates her maternal duties and gets ready the cells wherein the eggs shall be laid; she has loving attendants who pet and caress her, feed her and clean her, and even absorb her excrement. Should the least accident befall her the news will spread quickly from group to group, and the whole population will rush to and fro in loud lamentation. Seize her, imprison her, take her away from the hive at a time when the bees shall have no hope of filling her place, owing, it may be, to ...
— The Life of the Bee • Maurice Maeterlinck
... sleigh near the door, it having stood there all through the summer sunshine, and perhaps with weeds sprouting through the crevices of its bottom, the growth of the months since snow departed. Old barns, patched and supported by timbers leaning against the sides, and stained with the excrement ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various
... were at least one hundred and fifty camels of the kind that, for twelve mutkals of gold, or about twenty-five dollars, go from Timbuctoo to Tafilet with a load of five hundred pounds upon their backs. Each animal had dangling to its tail a bag to receive its excrement, the only fuel on which the caravans can depend ...
— Five Weeks in a Balloon • Jules Verne
... been looking, during a few walks, at excrement of small birds. I have found six kinds of seeds, which is more than I expected. Lastly, I have had a partridge with twenty-two grains of dry earth on one foot, and to my surprise a pebble as big as a tare seed; and I now understand how this is possible, for the bird scratches itself, [and ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... the nature and use of which I have not ascertained, though I feel quite sure that no silk comes from it. The large median papilla, just behind the posterior pair, surrounds the termination of the intestines, and through it the excrement is voided, the insect for this purpose turning back the abdomen as she hangs head downward, so that neither the web nor the spinners shall be contaminated. Now it has recently been ascertained that the minute globules with which the circles are ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... spent three hundred crowns in the liquor, they discovered that they were on the wrong track. They next tried alum and copperas; but the great secret still escaped them. They afterwards imagined that there was a marvellous virtue in all excrement, especially the human, and actually employed more than two years in experimentalizing upon it, with mercury, salt, and molten lead! Again the adepts flocked around him from far and near, to aid him with their counsels. He received them all hospitably, and divided his wealth among ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... Coliseum the soonest mended; and I have already spoken of the Forum. The streets near the Theatre of Pompey are almost impassable, and the so-called House of Rienzi is a stable, fortified against approach by a fosse of excrement. A noisome smell seems to be esteemed the most appropriate offering to the memory of ancient Rome, and I am not sure that the moderns are mistaken in this. In the rascal streets in the neighborhood of the most august ruins, the people ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... profits the enterprise as a whole must be kept in view. For example, if a man is producing milk, it may be cheaper, so far as the production of milk is concerned, to allow the liquid excrement to run to waste rather than to arrange for sufficient bedding. If, however, by using an abundance of bedding and saving all the high-priced nitrogen and the larger part of the potash in the manure, he is able to raise twelve tons of silage in place of eight tons, or three tons of hay in place ...
— The Young Farmer: Some Things He Should Know • Thomas Forsyth Hunt
... mesentery and the lacteal vessels there to its cistern, and from this into the blood by the thoracic duct, and so to its place. 7. Those who are not receptive are parted from those within the divine man, as excrement and urine ...
— Angelic Wisdom about Divine Providence • Emanuel Swedenborg
... of mud cave, man-made and door-less, the uneven earth floor covered with excrement, human and otherwise. I returned to peer into the mat-roofed yard with piles of corn-stalks and un-threshed beans, and met the man of the house just arriving with his labor-worn burros. He was a sinewy peasant ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck
... first place, Sancho, I enjoin thee to be cleanly in all things. Keep the nails of thy fingers constantly and neatly pared, nor suffer them to grow as some do, who ignorantly imagine that long nails beautify the hand, and account the excess of that excrement simply a finger-nail, whereas it is rather the talon of the lizard-hunting kestrel,—a foul and unsightly object. A slovenly dress betokens a careless mind; or, as in the case of Julius Caesar, it ...
— Wit and Wisdom of Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... tube within the stomach, described by M. Martin St. Ange (to whose excellent paper I am greatly indebted), as indicating an affinity to the Annelides, is, I am convinced, nothing but a strong epithelial lining, which I have often seen ejected with the excrement. Again, a most distinguished author has stated that the Cirripedia differ from the Crustacea:—1st. In having "a calcareous shell and true mantle;" but there is no essential difference, as shown by Burmeister, in the shells in these ...
— A Monograph on the Sub-class Cirripedia (Volume 1 of 2) - The Lepadidae; or, Pedunculated Cirripedes • Charles Darwin
... astonishing to see with what eagerness every one caught at every thing he saw. It even went so far as to become the ridicule of the natives, who offered pieces of sticks and stones to exchange. One waggish boy took a piece of human excrement on the end of a stick, and held it out to every one ...
— A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World, Volume 1 • James Cook
... stretched on the ground, one savage-looking and hideously mutilated, the other graceful and pleasing. The two prisoners offered him a share of their straw, and this, rotten and swarming with vermin as it was, was better than having to lie on the earth, which was befouled with excrement. Brotteaux sank down on a bench in the pestiferous darkness and sat there, his head against the wall, speechless and motionless. So intense was his agony of mind he would have dashed out his brains against the ...
— The Gods are Athirst • Anatole France
... a big drain-pipe—there were wounded women and children among them, and a young French interpreter, the Baron de Rosen, who tried to help them—and they stayed there three days and nights, in their vomit and excrement and blood, until the bombardment ceased. Ypres was a city of ruin, with a red fire in its heart where the Cloth Hall and cathedral smoldered below their broken arches and high ribs of masonry that had been their ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... my window. If I would drink water, I must quaff the maukish contents of an open aqueduct, exposed to all manner of defilement; or swallow that which comes from the river Thames, impregnated with all the filth of London and Westminster — Human excrement is the least offensive part of the concrete, which is composed of all the drugs, minerals, and poisons, used in mechanics and manufacture, enriched with the putrefying carcasses of beasts and men; and mixed with the scourings ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... intended to return by the same route, he concealed here for his homeward journey, in what is called a cache, a barrel of pork. They encamped in the evening upon the open prairie. As there was no wood at hand, they built their fires of the dry excrement of the buffalo. This substance, which was called buffalo chips, burns like turf and forms a very good substitute for wood. Immense numbers of wolves surrounded the camp at night, with an incessant and hideous howling and barking. In the morning, while the explorers were sitting ...
— Christopher Carson • John S. C. Abbott
... that bitterest day, when my death calls for me, What's 'twixt thine excrement and blood[FN50] I still may smell of thee! Yea, so but Selma in the dust my bedfellow may prove, Fair fall it thee! In heaven or hell I reck not ...
— Tales from the Arabic Volumes 1-3 • John Payne
... am not naturally honest, I am so sometimes by chance. Let me pocket up my pedlar's excrement. [Takes off his false beard.]—How now, rustics! ...
— The Winter's Tale - [Collins Edition] • William Shakespeare
... purpose of cleansing them. It has been necessary, therefore, to provide inlets with a separating apparatus called "gully" or "catch basin," which retains as completely as possible all solid matter, mud, excrement, and debris of every kind which maybe floated in by street washing or by rain-water, and which may be capable of causing stoppages in the sewers, the choking up being followed by fermentation and ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 455, September 20, 1884 • Various
... what their servile apes gesticulate, I should not then much muse their shreds were liked; Since ill men have a lust t' hear others' sins, All good men have a zeal to hear sin shamed. But when it is all excrement they vent, Base filth and offal; or thefts, notable As ocean-piracies, or highway-stands; And not a crime there tax'd, but is their own, Or what their own foul thoughts suggested to them; And that, in all their heat of taxing others, ...
— The Poetaster - Or, His Arraignment • Ben Jonson
... Album Graecum. The excrement of dogs and some other animals which from exposure to air and weather becomes whitened like chalk. It was ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn
... well we eliminate, that decides the issues of health and disease. Do the egesta pass out in the form of normal feces? Three times in twenty-four hours foodstuffs are taken, and as many times the bowels should be freed of accumulated excrement and gases. Does Nature have her way, or do neglect and bad habits rule the assimilative and eliminative functions of ...
— Intestinal Ills • Alcinous Burton Jamison
... tannin, while the root of wild sorrel (Rumex acetosella) contains 12 per cent. For removing the hair from hides, a lye made from wood ashes is still employed. The softening of the leather is effected by means of the excrement of dogs, which acts on the leather by means of the biliary acid present, which forms with soda a kind of soap. After tanning, white Russia leather is coated with a mixture of tar and seal oil. Black Russia leather is dyed with alum, extract of sanders, and ferrous sulphate. Horse hides are ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 561, October 2, 1886 • Various
... away towards evening, and finally became quite calm. We cooked our fish on a rock named "Satan," about forty feet long and twenty broad, irregular in its shape, and of uneven surface, with pools of water here and there, left by the tide,—dark brown rock, or whitish; there was the excrement of sea-fowl scattered on it, and a few feathers. The water was deep around the rock, and swelling up and downward, waving the sea-weed. We built two fires, which, as the dusk deepened, cast a red gleam over the rock and the waves, and made the sea, ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 1 • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... them that they must all go out into the fields and bring her whatever they found. So the next day they went out in different directions and the old man found some human excrement and he thought "Well, my daughter-in-law told me to bring whatever I found" so he wrapped it up in leaves and took it home; and his daughter-in-law told him that he had done well and bade him hang ...
— Folklore of the Santal Parganas • Cecil Henry Bompas
... trees. And, O king, immediately on seeing that mass of energy, flaming and brilliant as fire, seated with upraised arms, facing the sun, my friend, the graceful lord of the Rakshasas, Maniman, from stupidity, foolishness, hauteur and ignorance discharged his excrement on the crown of that Maharshi. Thereupon, as if burning all the cardinal points by his wrath, he said unto me, "Since, O lord of treasures, in thy very presence, disregarding me, this thy friend hath thus affronted me, he, together with thy forces, shall meet with destruction at the ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 2 • Translated by Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... Harpies grim, since shut were Phineus' doors Against them, and they had to leave the tables they had won. No monster woefuller than they, and crueller is none Of all God's plagues and curses dread from Stygian waters sent. A winged thing with maiden face, whose bellies' excrement Is utter foul; and hooked hands, and face for ever pale With hunger that no ...
— The AEneids of Virgil - Done into English Verse • Virgil
... indeed the soil is extremely loose; for otherwise the seed is lifted up, instead of the radicle penetrating the surface. But seeds often get covered by earth thrown up by burrowing quadrupeds or scratching birds, by the castings of earth-worms, by heaps of excrement, the decaying branches of trees, etc., and will thus be pressed down; and they must often fall into cracks when the ground is dry, or into holes. Even with seeds lying on the bare surface, the first developed root-hairs, by becoming attached to stones or ...
— The Power of Movement in Plants • Charles Darwin
... country and about it's size. none of these species are poisonous I examined their teeth and fund them innosent. they all appear to be fond of the water, to which they fly for shelter immediately on being pursued.- we saw much sign of Elk but met with none of them. from the appearance of bones and excrement of old date the buffaloe sometimes straggle into this valley; but there is no fresh sighn of them and I begin think that our harrvest of white puddings is at an end, at least untill our return to the buffaloe country. our trio of pests still invade and obstruct ...
— The Journals of Lewis and Clark • Meriwether Lewis et al
... instrumentality that material in the soil is so changed as to be available as plant food; by their action many of the important foods of man, often those especially delectable, are produced; they are constantly with us on all the surfaces of the body; masses live on the intestinal surfaces and the excrement is largely composed of bacteria. It has been said that life would be impossible without bacteria, for the accumulation of the carcasses of all animals which have died would so encumber the earth as to prevent its use; ...
— Disease and Its Causes • William Thomas Councilman
... so uncommon as it might at first seem. It is indeed almost an invariable rule among all land birds. With woodpeckers and kindred species, and with birds that burrow in the ground, as bank swallows, kingfishers, etc., it is a necessity. The accumulation of the excrement in the nest would prove most fatal ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... the cultivated species we proceed on the assumption that the spores have passed a period of probation in the intestines of the horse, and by this process have acquired a germinating power, so that when expelled we have only to collect them, and the excrement in which they are concealed, and we shall secure a crop.[C] As to other species, we know that hitherto all attempts to solve the mystery of germination and cultivation has failed. There are several species which it would be most desirable to cultivate ...
— Fungi: Their Nature and Uses • Mordecai Cubitt Cooke |
