"Fossil" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Treatise of the Fossil, Vegetable and Animal Substances used in Physick, &c. J. Innys, ...
— The Annual Catalogue (1737) - Or, A New and Compleat List of All The New Books, New - Editions of Books, Pamphlets, &c. • J. Worrall
... Amber, the fossil resin of a pine tree, was found in Sicily, the shores of the Baltic, and other parts of Europe. It was a precious stone then as now, and an article of trade with the Phoenicians, those early merchants of the Mediterranean. The attractive power might enhance the value of the gem in ...
— The Story Of Electricity • John Munro
... delighting our age with the same startle of newness and beauty that pleased our youth. Is it his thought? It has the shifting inward lustre of diamond. Is it his feeling? It is as delicate as the impressions of fossil ferns. He seems to have caught and fixed for ever in immutable grace the most evanescent and intangible of our intuitions, the very ripple-marks on the remotest shores of being. But this intensity of mood ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... which a few clumps of trees spotted with dark green. Of the ancient city one could see the sunburnt tower of the Capitol, the black cypresses of the Palatine, and the ruins of the palace of Septimius Severus, suggesting the white osseous carcase of some fossil monster, left there by a flood. In front, was enthroned the modern city with the long, renovated buildings of the Quirinal, whose yellow walls stood forth with wondrous crudity amidst the vigorous crests of the garden trees. And to right and left ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... formation of these caves, I may add that I noticed, imbedded in a boulder of rock in the upper caves, two pieces of coral and several fossil marine shells, ...
— British Borneo - Sketches of Brunai, Sarawak, Labuan, and North Borneo • W. H. Treacher
... and deer, "just below Cedar Island," adds the journal, "on a hill to the south, is the backbone of a fish, forty-five feet long, tapering towards the tail, and in a perfect state of petrifaction, fragments of which were collected and sent to Washington." This was not a fish, but the fossil remains of a reptile of one of the earliest geological periods. Here, too, the party saw immense herds of buffalo, thousands in number, some of which they killed for their meat and skins. They also saw elk, ...
— First Across the Continent • Noah Brooks
... experience. By the study of the Christian revelation it is always finding new meanings in old truths, new modes of application of familiar practices. This simply means that the Christian is alive and not a fossil. It means that his relation to our Lord is such that it opens to him inexhaustible depths of experience. It is easy to see this in the concrete by taking up the life of almost any saint. It is easy to trace the growth of S. John from the young fisherman, fiery, ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... characters of the myriopods and the degraded wingless insects, such as the Smynthurus, Podura, etc. Some such forms may have been introduced late in the Silurian period, for the interesting discoveries of fossil insects in the Devonian of New Brunswick, by Messrs. Hartt and Scudder, and those discovered by Messrs. Meek and Worthen in the lower part of the Coal Measures at Morris, Illinois, and described by Mr. Scudder, reveal carboniferous ...
— Our Common Insects - A Popular Account of the Insects of Our Fields, Forests, - Gardens and Houses • Alpheus Spring Packard
... characterises the real lovers of science, and knowledge of what is worthy of being collected. They are such collections as would be made by school-boys and school-girls, not those of erudite professors and scientific men. Side by side with the most interesting and valuable specimens, such as the fossil mammoth, etcetera, you have the greatest puerilities and absurdities in the world—such as a cherry-stone formed into a basket, a fragment of the boiler of the Moselle steamer, and Heaven knows what besides. Then you invariably have a large collection of daubs, ...
— Diary in America, Series One • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... its mode of being complete) that all things were possible to him, even emotion. In every savant there is something of the corpse, and this man was a savant. Only to see him you caught science imprinted in the gestures of his body and in the folds of his dress. His was a fossil face, the serious cast of which was counteracted by that wrinkled mobility of the polyglot which verges on grimace. But a severe man withal; nothing of the hypocrite, nothing of the cynic. A tragic dreamer. He was one of those whom crime leaves pensive; he had the brow of an incendiary ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... piled together. These layers, beginning at the bottom, are as follows; (1) igneous granite, unstratified; (2) limestone laid down from life in the ocean, metamorphosed by heat and all fossils thereby destroyed; (3) limestone highly crystallized, composed of fossil shells and very hard; (4) sandstone, made under the sea from previous rock powdered, having huge concretionary masses with a shell or a pebble as a nucleus around which the concretion has taken place; (5) shale from the sea also; (6) conglomerate, or drift, deposited by ice in the famous glacial ...
— Among the Forces • Henry White Warren
... "Fossil history has no doubt still some obscure passages; and these have been partially adverted to. Fuci, the earliest vegetable fossils as yet detected, are not, it has been remarked, the lowest forms of aquatic vegetation; neither are the plants of the coal-measures the very lowest, ...
— An Expository Outline of the "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation" • Anonymous
... his waist, and whose face is furrowed by a thousand storms; Anthony Jenkinson by name, the great Asiatic traveller, who is discoursing to the Christ-church virtuoso of reindeer sledges and Siberian steppes, and of the fossil ivory, plain proof of Noah's flood, which the Tungoos dig from the ice-cliffs of the Arctic sea. Next to him is Christopher Carlile, Walsingham's son-in-law (as Sidney also is now), a valiant captain, afterwards general of the soldiery in Drake's triumphant West Indian raid of 1585, with ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... what do you suppose the old fossil is up to?" Clancy went on, just a shade of anxiety sifting into his tones. "It's four days now, since he suddenly made up his mind to go over Gold Hill. What did he go for? And why is he staying away? We haven't heard a word from ...
— Frank Merriwell, Junior's, Golden Trail - or, The Fugitive Professor • Burt L. Standish
... observer, but of much to the geologist, from the nuts of a similar plant abounding in the tertiary formations at the mouth of the Thames, and having floated about there in as great profusion as here, till buried deep in the silt and mud that now forms the island of Sheppey.* [Bowerbank "On the Fossil Fruits and Seeds of the Isle of Sheppey," and Lyell's "Elements of Geology," 3rd ed. ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... dollars) he organized a regular academy of natural history, with its museum, managing by one expedient or another to employ artists, secretaries, and assistants, and to keep a lithographic and printing establishment of his own employed with the work that he put forth. Fishes, fossil and living, echinoderms and glaciers, transfigured themselves under his hand, and at thirty he was already at the zenith of his reputation, recognized by all as one of those naturalists in the unlimited sense, ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... Spaniards attack three men and a boy who are ashore boiling the fossil pitch; kill one man, and carry off the boy. Raleigh, instead of going up to Port of Spain and demanding satisfaction, as he would have been justified in doing after this second attack, remains quietly where he is, expecting daily to ...
— Sir Walter Raleigh and his Time from - "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... time, ponders its own ideals, not of literature and art only—not of men only, but of women. The idea of the women of America, (extricated from this daze, this fossil and unhealthy air which hangs about the word lady,) develop'd, raised to become the robust equals, workers, and, it may be, even practical and political deciders with the men—greater than man, we may admit, ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... Shell Cabinet arranged according to the Modern System: With a detailed Account of the Animals, and a complete Descriptive List of the Families and Genera of Recent and Fossil Shells. Second Edition, improved; with 405 ...
— First Impressions of the New World - On Two Travellers from the Old in the Autumn of 1858 • Isabella Strange Trotter
... science. Two years ago there was a collection of the fossils of Solenhofen to be sold in Bavaria; the best in existence, containing many specimens unique for perfectness, and one, unique as an example of a species (a whole kingdom of unknown living creatures being announced by that fossil). This collection, of which the mere market worth, among private buyers, would probably have been some thousand or twelve hundred pounds, was offered to the English nation for seven hundred; but we would not give seven hundred, ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... has put into her interesting life of him, a delightful story which she told me about him. He came to her beaming one day, and demanded, "You know I have always held such and such an opinion about a certain group of fossil fishes?" "Yes, yes!" "Well, I have just been reading ———'s new book, and he has shown me that there isn't the least truth in my theory"; and he burst into a laugh of unalloyed ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... reminiscent—others merely SENSIBLE, as the phrase is,—others prophetic. Some forms of disease, even, may prophesy forms of health. The geologist has discovered that the figures of serpents, griffins, flying dragons, and other fanciful embellishments of heraldry, have their prototypes in the forms of fossil species which were extinct before man was created, and hence "indicate a faint and shadowy knowledge of a previous state of organic existence." The Hindus dreamed that the earth rested on an elephant, ...
— Walking • Henry David Thoreau
... a well there, a fossil cowrie (Cypraea eximia) of an extinct species was once found at the depth of sixty feet. Another specimen of the same shell was dug up at Franklin village near Launceston, from a hundred and forty feet below the surface of the soil. Count Strzelecki gives ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 1. • J Lort Stokes
... woman with any sense would take to Miss Mariner. If I told you how near I came to spilling the sauce-boat accidentally over that old fossil's head, you'd be surprised, Ellen. She just sat there brooding like an old eagle. If you ask my opinion, Miss Mariner's a long sight too good for her ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... three or four elephants. What end did he propose to himself in giving this fictitious representation? Presumably to give a prehistoric origin to these ruins, since it is an ascertained fact that elephants in a fossil state only have been found on the American continent. It is needless to add that neither Catherwood, who drew these inscriptions most minutely, nor myself who brought impressions of them away, nor living man, ever saw these elephants and ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... adopted by most naturalists, five categories include the evidences bearing upon the fact of evolution. These are Classification; Comparative Anatomy, or Morphology; Comparative Development, or Embryology; Palaeontology, which comprises the facts provided by fossil relics of animals and plants of earlier geological ages; and Geographical Distribution. Each of these divisions includes a descriptive and analytical series of facts, whose characteristics are "explained" or summarized ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... fossils, and if we had a natural history, also fossil, setting forth to us the customs and habits of these animals; if the savages that are said to be the nearest neighbors to monkeys were all fossils; we should find ourselves in presence of a progressive and continued development of beings, ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... battles: Fort Sumter, First Manassas, Yorktown, New Stone Point, West Point, Seven Pines, Mechanicsville, Chancellorsville, Riddle's Shop, Darby's Farm, Fossil's Mill, Petersburg, Jerusalem, Plank Road, Reams' Station, Winchester, Port Republic, and Cedar Run. Severely wounded in leg at Mechanicsville and again at Cedar Run, October ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... and such an hour "as shall seem good" to the majority of the passengers. The difference of a day in the journey from London to York was a small matter, and Thoresby was even accustomed to leave the coach and go in search of fossil shells in the fields on either side the road while making the journey between the two places. The long coach "put up" at sun-down, and "slept on the road." Whether the coach was to proceed or to stop at some favourite inn, was ...
— The Life of Thomas Telford by Smiles • Samuel Smiles
... dome-shaped roof, which became lower the farther we penetrated; this was rather a disappointment, as we had fancied there was something more to be seen than a mere cave. A heap of reddish earth in one corner attracted Sumichrast's attention, who examined it to see if he could discover some fossil bones. Standing all together, we must have formed, by the smoky light of our odoriferous torches, rather a fantastic-looking group. More than half an hour elapsed without discovering any results from our digging. ...
— Adventures of a Young Naturalist • Lucien Biart
... 1663, p. 49): "There was found near the island of Jolo a piece [of amber] which weighed more than eight arrobas, of the best kind that exists, which is the gray [el gris]." Retana and Pastells regard Combes's ambar as meaning amber, the vegetable fossil; but it is possible that all these writers mean rather ambergris, which is supposed to be a morbid secretion of the sperm whale, and has been ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume 41 of 55, 1691-1700 • Various
... examination of some of the lower strata demonstrated the presence of fossil ants and tumble-bugs (the latter accompanied by their peculiar goods), and with high gratification the fact was enrolled upon the scientific record; for this was proof that these vulgar laborers belonged to the first and lowest orders ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... the two had a happy time together, recalling old Comstock days. Every morning, for a month or more, they used to tramp over the farm. They fell into the habit of visiting the old quarry and pawing over the fragments in search of fossil specimens. Both of them had a poetic interest in geology, its infinite remotenesses and its testimonies. Without scientific knowledge, they took a deep pleasure in accumulating a collection, which they arranged on boards torn from an old fence, until they had enough specimens to fill ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... the fossil remains of the greater quadrupeds is more satisfactory," he writes, "by the clear results which it affords, than that of the remains of other animals found in a fossil state, it is also complicated with greater and more numerous difficulties. Fossil ...
— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... glances at the bookshelf, where he looked to see the life of Jesse James, he was astonished and somewhat reassured to discover a title like "Fossil Fishes of the Old Red Sandstone of the British Isles." It was unlikely, he reasoned, that a man who voluntarily read, for instance, "Contributions to the Natural History of the United States," would split his skull when his back was turned. Yet they smacked of affectation ...
— The Man from the Bitter Roots • Caroline Lockhart
... he started upon his manuscript that he rather slighted them. As I stood there beneath that tree—a tree which should have been part of a coal-bed countless ages since—and looked out across a sea teeming with frightful life—life which should have been fossil before God conceived of Adam—I would not have given a minim of stale beer for my chances of ever seeing my friends or the outside world again; yet then and there I swore to fight my way as far through this hideous land ...
— The People that Time Forgot • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... Governor in the States of Indiana and Pennsylvania, respectively, were especially active and persistent, and their appeals were undoubtedly effective. When Seward was defeated many an anti-slavery man poured out his tears over the result, while deploring or denouncing the conservatism of old fossil Whiggery, which thus sacrificed the ablest man in the party, and the real hero of its principles. Time, however, led these men to reconsider their estimate both of Seward and Lincoln, and convinced them that the action of the ...
— Political Recollections - 1840 to 1872 • George W. Julian
... comb. Though I applied to several such in London, I could never meet with an entire specimen; nor could I ever find in books any engraving from a perfect one. In the superb museum at Leicester-house, permission was given me to examine for this article; and though I was disappointed as to the fossil, I was highly gratified with the sight of several of the shells themselves in high preservation. This bivalve is only known to inhabit the Indian Ocean, where it fixes itself to a zoophyte, known by the name Gorgonia. ...
— The Natural History of Selborne • Gilbert White
... not the case. Quatrefages, speaking of this wonderful genealogical tree which Haeckel has drawn up with such scientific accuracy of description, observes: "The first thing to remark is that not one of the creatures exhibited in this pedigree has ever been seen, either living or in fossil. Their existence is based entirely upon theory." (Les Emules de Darwin, ii. p. 76). "Man's pedigree as drawn up by Haeckel," says the distinguished savant, Du Bois-Reymond, "is worth about as much as is that of Homer's heroes for ...
— At the Deathbed of Darwinism - A Series of Papers • Eberhard Dennert
... to one-third of the size of nature. A small additional amount of flattening and lengthening, with a corresponding increase of the supraciliary ridge, would convert the Australian brain case into a form identical with that of the aberrant fossil. ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... consequences, therefore, of a more general introduction of steam power into that new region, connected with a highway across the isthmus of Panama, no one can calculate. The experiment along the shores of Chili and Peru has already commenced; and the cheap rate at which fossil fuel can be had has proved a great facility. Under circumstances so peculiarly propitious, to what an extent, then, may not steam navigation be carried on the smooth expanse of the Southern ocean? If there are two sections of the globe more pre-eminently ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... often seen The impress of some southern sheen, The brightness of a warmer bloom, Unknown to winter's frost and gloom. The fossil flower of epoch fair Has left its lasting impress there. So in some men whose hearts are cold You find a ...
— Gleams of Sunshine - Optimistic Poems • Joseph Horatio Chant
... fallen into an error which recent discoveries place in a singularly clear light. They say that the argument they are dealing with would lead to leaving the earth to the brutes without human inhabitants. But the recent discoveries in Fossil Osteology have proved that the earth, for ages before the last 5,000 or 6,000 years, was left to the lower animals; nay, that in a still earlier period of its existence no animal life at all was maintained upon its surface. So that, in fact, the foundation is removed ...
— The Fallen Star; and, A Dissertation on the Origin of Evil • E. L. Bulwer; and, Lord Brougham
... The fundamental element and special glory of popular literature. A thought that snores in words that smoke. The wisdom of a million fools in the diction of a dullard. A fossil sentiment in artificial rock. A moral without the fable. All that is mortal of a departed truth. A demi-tasse of milk-and-mortality. The Pope's-nose of a featherless peacock. A jelly-fish withering on the shore of the sea of thought. The ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... Kolliker remarks that the absence of transitional forms in the fossil world, though not necessarily fatal to Darwin's ...
— Criticisms on "The Origin of Species" - From 'The Natural History Review', 1864 • Thomas H. Huxley
... daring to follow her own conscience instead of that of her nearest male relative—then will be the time to judge her. It is not for me to betray the confidence reposed in me by a suffering woman, but you can tell that interesting old fossil, Colonel Maxim, that he and the other old women of the Bermondsey Branch of the Primrose League may elect Mrs. Clifton Courtenay for their President, and make the most of it; they have only got the outside of the woman. Her heart is beating time to the tramp of an onward-marching ...
— Sketches in Lavender, Blue and Green • Jerome K. Jerome
... axes and flint spears from the Island of Cozumel. Next follow fossil shells, collected by Mrs. Alice Le Plongeon from an excavation at Chichen-Itza, which may be useful in ...
— The Mayas, the Sources of Their History / Dr. Le Plongeon in Yucatan, His Account of Discoveries • Stephen Salisbury, Jr.
... anecdotes of each, and enumerate their various performances. Opera girls and their keepers, musicians and musical dilletanti, connoiseurs and their jackalls, (picture dealers and auctioneers) collectors, shell fossil and fiddle fanciers, in short every class of idlers that I have since found swarming in this miscellaneous town ranked among ...
— The Adventures of Hugh Trevor • Thomas Holcroft
... aversion to scientific information given by unscientific persons, such as clergymen and men of letters, I must go in that direction far enough to make it clear that the word Dolomite does not describe a kind of fossil, nor a sect of heretics, but a formation of mountains lying between the Alps and the Adriatic. Draw a diamond on the map, with Brixen at the northwest corner, Lienz at the northeast, Belluno at the southeast, and Trent at the southwest, and you will have included the region ...
— Little Rivers - A Book Of Essays In Profitable Idleness • Henry van Dyke
... grindlestone, another he said "Nay; It's nought but an' owd fossil cheese, that somebody's ...
— The Three Jovial Huntsmen • Randolph Caldecott
... of those familiar conjunctions of things wherewith the inanimate world baits the mind of man when he pauses in moments of suspense, opposite Knight's eyes was an imbedded fossil, standing forth in low relief from the rock. It was a creature with eyes. The eyes, dead and turned to stone, were even now regarding him. It was one of the early crustaceans called Trilobites. Separated by millions of years in ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... within her borders long before the day of the very earliest races to which history points us. These fragments have sometimes been preserved in the most fortuitous manner, and afford unique illustrations of the remarkable accidents to which man is occasionally indebted for his knowledge. The fossil man of Denyse, whatever his age may have been, has been preserved for our inspection by becoming overwhelmed in a volcanic eruption. The skeleton of Mentone was found by Riviere while engaged in a systematic search among French caves. Other caves in France have preserved evidences sufficiently ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... will prove it: they are the same shapes, and of the same substance; but as a still surer proof, we find exactly the same fossils in them; sponges, choanites (which were something like our modern sea-anemones), corals, and "shepherds' crowns" as the boys call the fossil sea-urchins. The species of all these, and of other fossils, in the chalk-pit and in the gravel-pit, are absolutely identical. The natural conclusion is, then, that the gravel has been formed from the washings of the chalk. The white lime ...
— Scientific Essays and Lectures • Charles Kingsley
... exclaimed scoffingly. "Pooh! some old fossil who'll come here—I'll tell you how! He'll ask for the responsible authorities. That's Simon Crood and Company. He'll hear all they've got to say. They'll say what they like. He'll examine their documents. The documents will be all ready for him. Everything will be nice ...
— In the Mayor's Parlour • J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher
... years old. He received the very best training to be had in Switzerland, France and Germany, and early attracted attention for original work of the most important description. He came to be recognized as the greatest authority on fishes in Europe, and his work on fossil fishes, published in 1843, was a contribution to ...
— American Men of Mind • Burton E. Stevenson
... of rocks, mines, volcanic products and organised fossil bodies, the most essential thing is to mark well their latitude, that is to say the nature of the earth where they are found and their relative position to the ...
— Movement of the International Literary Exchanges, between France and North America from January 1845 to May, 1846 • Various
... universal, was Cree, into which every half-breed in common talk lapsed, sooner or later, with undisguised delight. It was his mother tongue, copious enough to express his every thought and emotion, and its soft accents, particularly in the mouth of woman, are certainly very musical. Emerson's phrase, "fossil poetry," might be applied to our Indian languages, in which a single stretched-out word does duty ...
— Through the Mackenzie Basin - A Narrative of the Athabasca and Peace River Treaty Expedition of 1899 • Charles Mair
... — N. hardness &c adj.; rigidity; renitence^, renitency; inflexibility, temper, callosity, durity^. induration, petrifaction; lapidification^, lapidescence^; vitrification, ossification; crystallization. stone, pebble, flint, marble, rock, fossil, crag, crystal, quartz, granite, adamant; bone, cartilage; hardware; heart of oak, block, board, deal board; iron, steel; cast iron, decarbonized iron, wrought iron; nail; brick, concrete; cement. V. render hard &c adj.; harden, stiffen, indurate, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... especially is this the case in relation to everything in France. An aristocratic Englishman may live years in Paris without really knowing anything about it. In the first place, he goes there with letters of introduction to the Faubourg St. Germain, where he finds only the fossil remains of the old noblesse, intermixed with a slight proportion of the actual intelligence of the country, and here he moves round in the stagnant circles of historical France, and it is a wonder if he gets so much as a glimpse ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... a design or revision that has been badly compromised by a requirement to be compatible with {fossil}s or {misfeature}s in other programs or (esp.) previous releases of itself. "MS-DOS 2.0 used as a path separator to be bug-compatible with some cretin's choice of / as an option ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... That "swopping" bird, still justly respected, was thought, for many ages, to linger in the college of which he is the protector. But now all hope of recovering him alive is lost, and it is reserved for the excavator of the future to marvel over the fossil bones of the ...
— Oxford • Andrew Lang
... does not recognise a word he is very likely to turn it into something he does understand. Thus the title of a paper in the Philosophical Transactions was curiously changed in an advertisement, and the Calamites, a species of fossil plants of the coal measures, with but slight change appeared as "The True Fructification of Calamities.'' This is a blunder pretty sure to be made, and within a few days of writing this, the author has seen a reference to "Notes on some Pennsylvanian Calamities.'' ...
— Literary Blunders • Henry B. Wheatley
... the ivory throughout Northern Russia," says Lyell, Principles, vol. 1, p. 183, "that, according to Tilesius, thousands of fossil tusks have been collected and used ...
— The Christian Foundation, April, 1880
... idly listening to the prattle of his Moorish and Syrian slave-boys as they played knuckle-bones on the beach, his enjoyment of the cool breeze which swept through his villa even in summer or of the cool plash of water from the fountain in the peristyle, his curiosity about the big fossil bones dug up in the island which he sent to Rome to be placed in the galleries of his house on the Palatine, his fun in quizzing the pedants who followed him by Greek verses of his own making. But in the midst of his idleness the ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... and visited the different licks. One, long named Big Bone Lick, was famous because there were scattered about it in incredible quantity the gigantic remains of the extinct mastodon; the McAfees made a tent by stretching their blankets over the huge fossil ribs, and used the disjointed vertebrae as stools on which to sit. Game of many kinds thronged the spaces round the licks; herds of buffalo, elk, and deer, as well as bears and wolves, were all in sight at once. The ground ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume One - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1769-1776 • Theodore Roosevelt
... have taken place in the climate. At first the temperature of the earth was much warmer than now, and uniform in all parallels of latitude, as is shown by the fossil remains. Now we have a great diversity of climate, whether we contrast the polar with the torrid regions, or the different seasons of the temperate zone with ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... which ever and anon crossed his cheek, as the verses of the ballad rested on some allusion to the knightly House of Brandon and its old renown. It was an early prejudice, breaking out despite of himself,—a flash of character, stricken from the hard fossil in which it was imbedded. One would have supposed that the silliest of all prides (for the pride of money, though meaner, is less senseless), family pride, was the last weakness which at that time the callous and astute lawyer would have confessed, ...
— Paul Clifford, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... species is probably not half done; yet, when from a wider outlook the vast antiquity of the genus is considered, and its ancient richness in species and individuals; comparing our Sierra Giant and Sequoia sempervirens of the Coast Range, the only other living species of Sequoia, with the twelve fossil species already discovered and described by Heer and Lesquereux, some of which seem to have flourished over vast areas in the Arctic regions and in Europe and our own territories, during tertiary and cretaceous times,—then indeed it becomes plain that our two surviving ...
— The Mountains of California • John Muir
... draw a distinction between Phrenology and Physiognomy, because I don't believe I ever went into any community to lecture in my life, that I did not hear some old fossil say that he believed in the science of Physiognomy, but he didn't take much stock in Phrenology. Now I beseech you, as friends of mine (and after I have lectured to an audience for twenty minutes I always feel that I have so many friends in it that I am personally interested ...
— How to Become Rich - A Treatise on Phrenology, Choice of Professions and Matrimony • William Windsor
... the suns were "fictions of mythological astronomy, modified either by obscure reminiscences of some great revolution suffered by our planet, or by physical hypotheses, suggested by the sight of marine petrifactions and fossil remains,"[216-1] while the Abbe Brasseur, in his late works on ancient Mexico, interprets them as exaggerated references to historical events. As no solution can be accepted not equally applicable to the same ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... the blue bay held many fossil shells. Children sometimes strayed here and there with hammers, pounding out fossils from fallen pieces of the cliffs. On the extent of sands that bordered the cliffs and stretched up the coast between them and the breakers, old stumps that had been months before brought in ...
— Out of the Triangle • Mary E. Bamford
... Mr. Arnold's contemplations of Lady Emily, and all his attentions to her. These were delicate in the extreme, evidently bringing out the best life that yet remained in a heart that was almost a fossil. Hugh made some fresh efforts to do his duty by Harry, and so far succeeded, that at least the boy made some progress — evident enough to the moderate expectations of his father. But what helped Harry as ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... Australia has a prosperous Western-style capitalist economy, with a per capita GDP at the level of the four dominant West European economies. Rich in natural resources, Australia is a major exporter of agricultural products, minerals, metals, and fossil fuels. Commodities account for 57% of the value of total exports, so that a downturn in world commodity prices can have a big impact on the economy. The government is pushing for increased exports of manufactured goods, but competition in international markets continues to be severe. While ...
— The 2000 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... their young alive, or are "ovo-viviparous." These are the characters belonging to all members of the reptile-class. The class is subdivided into orders somewhat thus: 1. The Testudinate (tortoises and turtles). 2. Enaliosaurian (all fossil, the Ichthyosaurus and his like). 3. Loricate (crocodiles and alligators). 4. Saurian (lizards). 5. Ophidian (serpents); and the last order, Batrachian (frogs, toads, &c.); which is, by some, parted from the reptiles, and ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... but profound revolutionary sentiment which indicated a belief that the world seemed to be out of joint, and a vehement protest against the selfish and stolid conservatism which fancied that the old order could be preserved in all its fossil institutions and corresponding dogmas. ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... My theory would give zest to recent & Fossil Comparative Anatomy: it would lead to study of instincts, heredity, & mind heredity, whole metaphysics, it would lead to closest examination of hybridity & generation, causes of change in order to know what we have come from & to what ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... staff, truncheon, or badge of military honour for field-marshals. A term in heraldry. Also, batoons of St. Paul, the fossil spines of echini, found ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth
... 1952 an old broken down fossil, broken in health, but not in spirit, of little consequence to anybody or anything, I am still on ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 43rd Annual Meeting - Rockport, Indiana, August 25, 26 and 27, 1952 • Various
... they come? Have they been blown on to the lake, or left behind by man? or are they fossil trees, integral parts of the vegetable stratum below which is continually rolling upward? or are they of both kinds? I do not know. Only this is certain, as Messrs. Wall and Sawkins have pointed out, that not only 'the purer varieties ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... Sache, thing, cause, and originally meaning a contention at law, has been replaced by cause, except in phrases beginning with the preposition for. See also bead (p. 74). Unkempt, uncombed, and uncouth, unknown, are fossil remains of obsolete ...
— The Romance of Words (4th ed.) • Ernest Weekley
... often a fossil shell, or sometimes only a queer shaped piece of flint, is called by the Blackfeet I-n[)i]s'k[)i]m, the buffalo stone. This stone has great power, and gives its owner good luck in bringing the buffalo close, so ...
— Blackfeet Indian Stories • George Bird Grinnell
... of the most valuable of gums, and is furnished by many countries in the districts of Africa explored by Mr. H. M. Stanley, the discoverer of Livingstone. Copal is found in a fossil state in very large quantities. The natives collect the gum by searching in the sandy soil, mostly in the hilly districts, the country being almost barren, with no large tree except the Adansonia, and occasionally a few ...
— French Polishing and Enamelling - A Practical Work of Instruction • Richard Bitmead
... a prosperous Western-style capitalist economy, with a per capita GDP comparable to levels in industrialized West European countries. Rich in natural resources, Australia is a major exporter of agricultural products, minerals, metals, and fossil fuels. Of the top 25 exports, 21 are primary products, so that, as happened during 1983-84, a downturn in world commodity prices can have a big impact on the economy. The government is pushing for increased exports of manufactured goods, but competition in ...
— The 1992 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... William F. Warren, in his book already cited, pages 297 and 298, says: "The Arctic rocks tell of a lost Atlantis more wonderful than Plato's. The fossil ivory beds of Siberia excel everything of the kind in the world. From the days of Pliny, at least, they have constantly been undergoing exploitation, and still they are the chief headquarters of supply. The remains of mammoths are so abundant that, ...
— The Smoky God • Willis George Emerson
... to their ancestors! That is an irrational interference with the liberty of the players which hardly anybody nowadays ventures to defend in principle, and which is only upheld in some half-hearted way (save in the case of that fossil anachronism, the Duke of Argyll) by supposed arguments of convenience. It won't last long now; there is talk in the committee of "mending or ending it." It shows the long-suffering nature of the poor blind players at this compulsory ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen
... alone on the main hatch, in the rain, privately remembered our Fatherland. There was on board an American sea-captain, of Norwegian birth, as I afterwards found, who would gladly have joined us. The other passengers were three Norwegians, three fossil Englishmen, two snobbish do., and some jolly, good-natured, free-and-easy youths, bound to Norway, with dogs, guns, rods, fishing tackle, ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... Infidel lived. He did not know that it was all finished and over hundreds of years ago, a page of history upon which many pages were turned, and which lay as unalterable as the fate of some warm swift creature of early Eocene days over whose fossil today the ...
— Don Rodriguez - Chronicles of Shadow Valley • Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, Baron, Dunsany
... pale, and there was a curious look about her whole figure. It seemed as if shrinking from something, twisting itself rigidly, as a fossil tree might shrink in a wind that ...
— Jane Field - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... peasant, Of character pleasant, Once lived in a hut with his wife. He was cheerful and docile, But such an old fossil You wouldn't meet twice in your life. His notions were all without reason or rhyme, Such dullness in any one else were a crime, But the folly pig-headed To which he was wedded Was so deep imbedded, it touched ...
— Grimm Tales Made Gay • Guy Wetmore Carryl
... established specific distinctions are surrendered, as is illustrated in the case of the mammoth, which is acknowledged by some of the very best authorities to be really indistinguishable from the modern Asiatic elephant. Several fossil bears were long listed in scientific books; but they are all acknowledged now to be identical with the modern grizzly, and as we have already intimated all the modern ones ought to be put together. These ...
— Q. E. D., or New Light on the Doctrine of Creation • George McCready Price
... of creation were interpreted as periods of twenty-four hours each and the universality of the Noachian deluge was accepted by everybody, it would have been something like a miracle if he had at once fathomed the true meaning of the shark's teeth, elephant's bones, and other fossil remains which came under his notice. His idea was that all these things were mere concretions "generated by fermentation in the spots where they were found," as he very quaintly and even absurdly put it. The accusation, however, is not that Fallopius made a mistake—as ...
— Science and Morals and Other Essays • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle
... thin old man, clad in duck, turning yellow with age. When he threw the helmet back it exposed a wrinkled brow and a baldish head, except for a few wisps of hair at the temples. He appeared to be of great age—a fossil, an animated mummy, a relic from an ancient graveyard; and the stoop of his lean shoulders accentuated these impressions. It was plain that the tropics were fast making an ...
— The Devil's Admiral • Frederick Ferdinand Moore
... the shadowy vault, ribbed strongly as an immense bat's wing of stone, Theodore or his sister would light up for us with a candle the tomb of Sigebert's little daughter, in which a deep hole, like the bed of a fossil, had been bored, or so it was said, "by a crystal lamp which, on the night when the Frankish princess was murdered, had left, of its own accord, the golden chains by which it was suspended where the apse ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... ear, and retreating to a convenient place he observed its final course: from the poles amid the trees it leaped across the moat, over the girdling wall, and thence by a tremendous stretch towards the keep where, to judge by sound, it vanished through an arrow-slit into the interior. This fossil of feudalism, then, was the journey's-end of the wire, and not ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... not esteemed very good; but I am informed that this is the case with all coal found near the surface of the earth, and, as the veins are observed to run in an inclined direction until the pits have some depth, the fossil must be of an indifferent quality. The little island of Pisang, near the foot of Mount Pugong, was supposed to be chiefly a bed of rock crystal, but upon examination of specimens taken from thence they proved ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... ruined themselves in the sinking of mines in search of coal. They might have saved their money had they known that a certain fossil which they dug up in abundance belongs to a geological stratum below which no coal is ever found. They went on digging cheerfully and wasting their money. An acquaintance with that fossil and its meaning would have ...
— Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers • Arthur Brisbane
... enjoyed a very high reputation in Eastern countries as a drug. Its supposed medicinal virtues, like those of the fossil teeth of China and the belemnites ("thunderbolts") of this country, seem to have been suggested by the peculiarity of its mode of occurrence. A knowledge of the substance was introduced into Western ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 595, May 28, 1887 • Various
... the most definite and unquestionable of all the results of paleontology, must be mentioned the immense extension and impulse given to botany, zoology, and comparative anatomy, by the investigation of fossil remains. Indeed, the mass of biological facts has been so greatly increased, and the range of biological speculation has been so vastly widened, by the researches of the geologist and paleontologist, that it is to be feared there are naturalists ...
— Geological Contemporaneity and Persistent Types of Life • Thomas H. Huxley
... (no letter.)—1. and 2. Garnetiferous quartz rock. 3 and 4. Micaceous quartz rock. 5. Granite. 6. Basalt with traces of chalcopyrite.—L. C. G.—They are fossil sharks' teeth, common in marl beds.—J. E. C.—1. Iron sulphide and lead sulphide. 2. Quartzite, with traces of galena and molybdic sulphide. 3 and 4. Dolomite. 5. Fossiliferous argillaceous limestone, containing traces of lead sulphide. 6. Lead sulphide in argillite.—C. ...
— Scientific American, Volume XLIII., No. 25, December 18, 1880 • Various
... extinct, the being ceases to live; or it is no longer an animal. It falls and reverts altogether to the element of matter. The processes of decomposition and incorporation are longer, or shorter, according to circumstances; and these fossil remains of which your writers say so much, are merely cases that have met with accidental obstacles to their final decomposition. As respects our two species, a very cursory examination of their qualities ought to convince any candid mind of the truth of our philosophy. Thus, ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... of the Mississippi. He now proceeded to make those remarkable solitary explorations of Kentucky which have given him immortality—through the valley of the Kentucky and the Licking, and along the "Belle Riviere" (Ohio) as low as the falls. He visited the Big Bone Lick and examined the wonderful fossil remains of the mammoth found there. Along the great buffalo roads, worn several feet below the surface of the ground, which led to the Blue Licks, he saw with amazement and delight thousands of huge shaggy buffalo gamboling, bellowing, and making the earth rumble beneath the trampling of ...
— The Conquest of the Old Southwest • Archibald Henderson
... civilization, there have been found numerous relics of uncivilized races, which, at periods far remote, must have inhabited the same ground. Many of these antiquities are met with in connection with remains of fossil elephants, hyenas, bears, etc.,—with animals which no longer live in the regions referred to, and some of which have become wholly extinct. Dwelling-places of these far-distant peoples—such as caves and rock-shelters, and the remains of the lake-habitations that were built on ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... Stimulated either by this compliment, or by her burning indignation, that illustrious woman then added, 'Let him meet it if he can!' And, with a rigid movement of her stony reticule (an appendage of great size and of a fossil appearance), indicated that Clennam was the unfortunate person at whom ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... discovery of huge fossil animals, as Mrs. Jameson says, on the high authority of Professor Owen, may have modified our ancestors' notions of dragons: but in the old serpent worship we believe the real explanation of these stories is to be ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... Hergott Springs, Mr. Waterhouse learnt that Mr. Burtt, whose station* is only a few miles distant, in opening these springs discovered some fossil bones, casts of which were forwarded to Professor Owen, who pronounced them to be the remains of a gigantic extinct marsupial, named Diprotodon Australis. (* Hergott Springs were only discovered and named ...
— Explorations in Australia, The Journals of John McDouall Stuart • John McDouall Stuart
... obtained from Senegambia and the steppe regions of North Africa (Kordofan, &c.); gum copal, a valuable resin produced by trees of the leguminous order, the best, known as Zanzibar or Mozambique copal, coming from the East African Trachylobium hornemannianum, and also found in a fossil state under the soil; kola nuts, produced chiefly in the coast-lands of Upper Guinea by a tree of the order Sterculiaceae (Kola acuminata); archil or orchilla, a dye-yielding lichen (Rocella tinctoria and triciformis) growing on trees and ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... natural history, the fossil department is, to me, the most interesting; there is room for speculation and reflection, till the mind is lost in its own wanderings, which I consider one of the greatest delights of existence. We are indebted ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... discovery of a new lichen, but she did better than that, she made one of the finest collections in the United States for a local city museum, so that the fruits of her labor were thus accessible to future lichenists; and she gave much needed help to geologists in investigating fossil lichens. ...
— Girls and Women • Harriet E. Paine (AKA E. Chester}
... island till about 11 A.M., but the weather becoming fine and bright, we started for the west coast about noon. During our progress along the bed of a creek, Blake discovered what was believed to be a glacial deposit containing fossil bones, and considerable time was spent in examining this and attempting to extract whole specimens, thereby making it too late to proceed to the west. On returning to the hut we decided to pack the swags. We reached home just in time for tea, finding that nothing unusual had ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... decided rightly; my judgment inclined the other way. I should be sorry if your letter to Lord Derby led him to make any more extended proposal. It could not possibly succeed, as matters now stand; and the abortive attempt would be injurious to him. The reconstruction of the fossil remains of the old Peel party is a hopeless task. No human power can now reanimate it with the breath of life; it is decomposed into atoms and will be remembered only as a ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... appreciable because it was comprehensible to the minds that sprang from it; there were mysteries in it, but mysteries that enticed rather than baffled, for they unfolded new glories with every discovery that man could make; even inanimate objects, the fossil, the electric current, the far-off stars, these were dust thrown off by the Spirit of the World—fragrant with His Presence and eloquent of His Nature. For example, the announcement made by Klein, the astronomer, twenty years ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... old fossil" referred to by Miss Sally was one of those occurrences—auxiliaries or encumbrances, as may be—whom one is liable to meet with in almost any family, who are so forcibly taken for granted by all its members that the infection of their acceptance catches on, and ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... and the end of life. The good man Mussard, a real philosopher in practice, lived without care, in a very pleasant house which he himself had built in a very pretty garden, laid out with his own hands. In digging the terraces of this garden he found fossil shells, and in such great quantities that his lively imagination saw nothing but shells in nature. He really thought the universe was composed of shells and the remains of shells, and that the whole earth was only the sand of these in different stratae. His attention ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... interesting as the means by which Nature carries light into her shadows, and shade into her lights, an art of which we shall have more to say hereafter, in speaking of composition. Fig. 5. is a rough sketch of a fossil sea-urchin, in which the projections of the shell are of black flint, coming through a chalky surface. These projections form dark spots in the light; and their sides, rising out of the shadow, form smaller whitish spots in the dark. You may take such ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... should think so. Heaps of it, stacks of it. The old mud shanty was bursting with it. You would think there was not a single tusk left either above or below the ground in the whole country. 'Mostly fossil,' the manager had remarked, disparagingly. It was no more fossil than I am; but they call it fossil when it is dug up. It appears these niggers do bury the tusks sometimes—but evidently they couldn't bury this parcel deep enough to save the gifted Mr. Kurtz from his fate. We filled the steamboat ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... Gaze on the heart Of its fetidity, This wreck of me, And sing. O God, what death, in eyes so bound, They see Life's beauty in her draining wound! Lay thou the blind thing down With saurian tusk and bone, With dust of sworded maw And peril's fossil claw, Lest sexton Earth even Man inter, nor trover Of after-law untomb ...
— Path Flower and Other Verses • Olive T. Dargan
... states. Their family has come down practically unchanged from the steaming days of the Carboniferous period, when ferns grew one hundred feet high, and thronged with other rank tropical growths in matted masses to form the coal measures. The fossil remains of cycads in the rocks of that period prove that they once flourished in the tropic swamps where now are the ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... on the side of this ridge, as we ascended, which at once induced us to name it, Fossil Head. Our view was decisive of the fact, that all further progress eastward was at an end, but to the south sandbanks and patches of dark-coloured water bounding our view left still great hope. The high land terminated abruptly to the southward, ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 2 • John Lort Stokes
... Through a long period of development, the present day one-toed horse descended from this many-toed primitive horse. There is certainty of the line of descent of the horse because all the connecting links have been discovered in fossil form, between the primitive horse and the present day horse. Plants in like manner show all ...
— Negro Folk Rhymes - Wise and Otherwise: With a Study • Thomas W. Talley
... and 2 (magnified two hundred times) represent two sections, made in rectangular planes, of fragments of Lancashire cannel coal. In a certain measure, they remind one of Figs. 4 and 5, Pl 11, of Witham's "Internal Structure of Fossil Vegetables," and which were drawn from specimens of cannel coal derived likewise from Lancashire, but which are not so highly magnified. There is an interesting fact to note in this coincidence, and that is that this structure, which is so difficult to explain in its details, is not accidental, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 481, March 21, 1885 • Various
... that the primitive home of man was on one of the continents. As man is the highest and last development of organic nature, it is advocated, with considerable force of argument, that his first home was in a region suitable to the life of the anthropoid apes. As none of these, either living or fossil, are found in Australia or America, these continents are practically excluded from the probable list of places for the ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... "fossil poetry," but "fossil music" would have described it even better; for as Darwin says, man sang before ...
— Critical & Historical Essays - Lectures delivered at Columbia University • Edward MacDowell
... monastic-like existence, simple and studious: "We have not even the distraction of neighbors and friends around. In this country everybody stays at home, to look after his oxen and his land. One would become a fossil in ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... friendly to the human race. Religions, laws, sciences, arts, theories, and histories, instead of passing Ariel-like into the elements when their task is done, are made perpetual prisoners in the alcoves of dreary libraries. They have a fossil immortality, surviving themselves in covers, as poems have survived minstrels. The memory of man is made omni-capacious; its burden increases with every generation; not even the ignorance and stolidity of the past are allowed the final grace ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... ears red, their lips pale, looking toward the entrance of the palace with flaming eyes, as if they wanted to see from there a certain pretentious house with a Greek facade and a gold inscription. "The fossil! It is a shame that the fortunes of the younger men, who really amount to something, are entrusted to an old fogey who has run out, a 'four-flusher' who will never leave anything worth while behind him!" ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... by fossil remains is by all odds the strongest evidence that we have in favor of organic evolution. Paleontology holds the incomparable position of being able to point directly to the evidence showing that the animals and ...
— A Critique of the Theory of Evolution • Thomas Hunt Morgan
... myself saying over and over. I must have said other things before, but I don't remember them. "You can't! it is impossible. You! marry an old fossil like me! Oh, Frances, are you ...
— Kent Knowles: Quahaug • Joseph C. Lincoln
... displacements of the red soil, resembling more the chaos of some primary elemental upheaval than the work of man; while, half-way down, a long flume straddled its narrow body and disproportionate legs over the chasm, like an enormous fossil of some forgotten antediluvian. At every step smaller ditches crossed the road, hiding in their sallow depths unlovely streams that crept away to a clandestine union with the great yellow torrent below, and here and there were the ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... curvature than those of the Elephas Indicus. Some have been found which describe a circle, but the curve being oblique, they thus clear the head, and point outward, downward, and backward. The numerous fossil tusks of the mammoth which have been discovered and recorded may be ranged under two averages of size, the larger ones at nine feet and a half, the smaller at five feet and a half in length. The writer has elsewhere assigned reasons for the probability ...
— The Tree-Dwellers • Katharine Elizabeth Dopp
... those isles call the bird 'Rukh.'" Yule has an interesting note (vol. II, p. 348) showing how old and widespread the fable of the Rukh was, and is of opinion that the reason that the legend was localized in the direction of Madagascar was perhaps that some remains of the great fossil Aepyornis and its colossal eggs were found in that island. Professor Sayce states that the Rukh figures much—not only in Chinese folk-lore—but also in the old, Babylonian literature. The bird is of course familiar to ...
— The Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela • Benjamin of Tudela
... hospitality from Senhor Lubata. The town has more than a thousand inhabitants; the district has 28,063, with only 315 slaves. It stands on a mound of calcareous tufa, containing great numbers of fossil shells, the most recent of which resemble those found in the marly tufa close to the coast. The fort stands on the south side of the town, on a high perpendicular bank overhanging the Coanza. This river is here a noble stream, about a hundred and fifty yards wide, admitting ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... country. It was he, indeed, who gave the earliest authentic account of "geysers," those springs of warm water which occasionally reach to such great heights, and he also supplied curious details of the existence of fossil wood, which prove that at an early geological period, Iceland, now entirely devoid of ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... production by source: fossil fuel: 100% hydro: 0% nuclear: 0% other: 0% note: Greenland is shifting its electricity production from fossil fuel to ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States
... This fossil record has given us our best knowledge of the course by which the present living world has been brought into its existing condition. But its accuracy is largely confined to the recent periods. Of the very early history fossils tell us little or nothing. All the early rocks, which we may believe ...
— The Story of the Living Machine • H. W. Conn
... his scientific exploits. There he worked and lectured, and obtained the office of assistant to the aged professor of comparative anatomy. In the year of his appointment, he made a mark in the study which he rendered so famous, by a memoir on the Megalonyx, a fossil animal known by a few of its bones, and which, contrary to received opinion, he boldly proved to have been a gigantic sloth. This was the first of those able comparisons of the fossil with the present world which revolutionized geology, extended comparative anatomy, and absolutely ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... left this museum, they went to another and saw a wonderful collection of fossil animals, skeletons, birds, minerals, precious stones, and other natural specimens, but as they were not learned men, they could only walk about and stare, enjoy the little knowledge of natural history they ...
— Hans Brinker - or The Silver Skates • Mary Mapes Dodge
... assign Tamias to the tribe Marmotini. I assign Eutamias to the tribe Callosciurini, but do so only tentatively because I have not, at first hand, studied the bacula of most of the Callosciurini. The fossil record is too incomplete to reveal the time when the two tribes diverged. The subgenera Eutamias and Neotamias are closely related. Indications are that the divergence of the two subgenera occurred, geologically, but a short time ago, ...
— Genera and Subgenera of Chipmunks • John A. White
... say, do not mistake words for deeds, and after the dreary inflated nonsense one is compelled to listen to from their better educated townsmen, it is refreshing to talk with them. From the Belleville pothouse I went to the Faubourg St. Germain. In this solemn abode of a fossil aristocracy I have a relative—a countess. She is, I believe, my cousin about sixteen times removed, but as she is the only person of rank with whom my family can claim the most distant relationship, we stick to the cousinship and send her every year cheap presents, which she reciprocates with ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... masses of flint which abound in various chalk formations. "The mere assertion," says Rhymer Jones, "that flints were sponges, would no doubt startle the reader who was unacquainted with the history of these fossil relics of a former ocean;" and yet a little reflection "will satisfy the most skeptical." For long ages the sponge is imbedded in the chalk, through which water is continually percolating. A well-known law of chemistry explains why similar matter should become aggregated; and thus the ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... discouraged; but we assured him that the man was far ahead of many specimens we had met. We never see an opossum in Virginia—a fossil animal in most other places—but it seems the sign of the moral stratification around. There are many varieties of opossum in Virginia,—political and religious: Saturn, who devours his offspring, has not come ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... subject of Fossil Whales, I present my credentials as a geologist, by stating that in my miscellaneous time I have been a stone-mason, and also a great digger of ditches, canals and wells, wine-vaults, cellars, and cisterns of all sorts. Likewise, by way of preliminary, I desire to remind the reader, that while ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... experimentation. All discoverers have made predictions; Harvey predicted the existence of the capillaries, Halley predicted the return of his comet, Adams predicted the place of the planet Neptune, the missing link in the evolutionary series of the fossil horses had been predicted long before it was actually found by Professor Marsh. Pasteur predicted that the sheep inoculated with the weak anthrax virus would be alive in the anthrax-infected field, while those not so protected would all be dead. A prediction verified is a conclusion ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... fissile results of the frost; the wavering line of ripple-marks of Seas that shall ebb no more; growth of lichen; an army of ants in full march; a passion-flower trailing from a crevice, its purple blooms lying upon the gray stone near where it is stamped with the fossil imprint of a sea-weed, faded long ago and forgotten. Or is it, alas! for the eyes that ...
— The Riddle Of The Rocks - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... into these deep places? To explain the mystery, Forbes called to mind the fact that, in the epoch which immediately preceded the present, the climate was much colder (whence the name of "glacial epoch" applied to it); and that the shells which are found fossil, or sub-fossil, in deposits of that age are precisely such as are now to be met with only in the Scandinavian, or still more Arctic, regions. Undoubtedly, during the glacial epoch, the general population of our seas had, universally, the northern aspect which is now ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... the right of these men to set limits to that selenographic science which had till now been making itself so very busy in reconstructing the lunar world. They could now say, authoritatively, like Cuvier lecturing over a fossil skeleton: "Once the Moon was this, a habitable world, and inhabitable long before our Earth! And now the Moon is that, an uninhabitable world, and uninhabitable ages ...
— All Around the Moon • Jules Verne
... by the company resided in bachelor retirement. My host described a mammal's tooth that weighed nearly fourteen pounds, which had been taken from a phosphate mine; it had been sent to a public room at Beaufort, South Carolina. A fossil shark's tooth, weighing four and a half pounds, was also found, and a learned ichthyologist has asserted that the owner of this remarkable relic of the past must have been one ...
— Voyage of The Paper Canoe • N. H. Bishop
... state of civilisation in any given country by tracing back the course of centuries, or else at a given epoch find out in different parts of the earth all the stages of human evolution. The savage men of to-day are not further advanced in their evolution than our own ancestors who have now gone to fossil. However it may be, Man, at first frugivorous, as his dentition shows as well as his zoological affinities, in consequence of a famine of fruit or from whatever other cause, gradually began to nourish himself with the flesh of other animals. To search ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay
... is very tenacious, and near the surface is generally of a brown colour, probably owing to the decomposition of the iron pyrites which it contains. It abounds in selenite or sulphate of lime, and in nodules which often contain organic remains. Fossil wood with Teredo antenautae is also met with, and pyritous casts of univalve and bivalve shells. Lower down the stratum becomes more compact and is of a bluish or blackish colour, and its fossil contents are in a fine state of preservation. During the ...
— Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society - Vol. 3 - Zoology • Various
... the earth. But the reptiles that crawled upon the half-finished surface of our infant planet, have left memorials of their passage, enduring and indelible. No history has recorded their creation or destruction; their very bones are found no more among the fossil relics of a former world. Centuries and thousands of years may have rolled away between the time in which those footsteps were impressed by tortoises upon the sands of their native Scotland, and the hour when they ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 459 - Volume 18, New Series, October 16, 1852 • Various
... absolute certainty when bred in the direct line, although they were originally acquired peculiarities which have merely been fixed by long habit in successive generations. The earliest horse had five toes, and even the most recent fossil horse had three toes, of which the two lateral ones are still represented in the modern animal by the two splint bones. Yet if our horse develops an extra toe it is pronounced a monstrosity. A more genuine monstrosity is the solid-hoofed ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture
... INFUSORIAL ANIMALCULES, Living and Fossil, containing Descriptions of every species, British and Foreign, the methods of procuring and viewing them, &c., illustrated by numerous Engravings. By ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 235, April 29, 1854 • Various
... fishes, and insects, scattered with lavish prodigality over land and sea;—but what is the living wealth of that Fauna as compared to the winged words which fill the air with unceasing music! What are the scanty relics of fossil plants and animals, compared to the storehouse of what we call the dead languages! How then can we explain it that for centuries and centuries, while collecting beasts, and birds, and fishes, and insects, while ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... part of the bridle is prolonged by a single strap; this strap is used as a whip, and hence the whip of the Hussar attached to the reins; hence, also, as I imagine, the Austrian driving rein described page 54. When fossil remains of the extinct postboy shall be discovered, it will be seen that he used the short rein, and with great propriety; since his horse may be said to have been always "au trot," and needed only one degree ...
— Hints on Horsemanship, to a Nephew and Niece - or, Common Sense and Common Errors in Common Riding • George Greenwood |
