"Prehistoric" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... our knowledge grows. Earlier ways of thinking remain. Prehistoric ancestors DISCOVERED the common sense concepts. List of them. They came gradually into use. Space and time. 'Things.' Kinds. 'Cause' and 'law.' Common sense one stage in mental evolution, due to geniuses. The 'critical' stages: 1) scientific and 2) philosophic, ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... man began to study the stars is lost in the antiquity of prehistoric ages. The ancient inhabitants of the Earth regarded the heavenly bodies with veneration and awe, erected temples in their honour, and worshipped them as deities. Historical records of astronomy carry us back several thousand years. During the greater part ...
— The Astronomy of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' • Thomas Orchard
... promptly denounced the affair as a humbug. Only a feeble defense was made for it, and, a year or two later, the whole story came out. It had been designed and executed somewhere in the Northwest, transported to the place where discovered, and buried, to be afterward dug up and reported as a prehistoric wonder. ...
— The Reminiscences of an Astronomer • Simon Newcomb
... such a tragedy in the dim recesses of that prehistoric cave? Who could say? Perhaps the men had been prospecting together, and one had found the ruby and hidden in the cave, where his companion had found him and cut off his right hand with some primitive idea ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
... picture-writing of the South American Indians, nor the picture the Red Indian does on a raw elk hide; they are far and away inferior to the graphic sporting sketches left us of mammoth hunts by the prehistoric cave men. ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... o'clock; and then something happened. The whole white world became red. The oldest seas in the world went suddenly lashing into storm. An ocean of blood thundered into his head, and the noise of that primitive flood, roaring from what prehistoric gulfs, deafened him at an instant. The waves whirled his feet from under him. He went foaming up the steps, was swept violently into the ticket office, and was swirled away like a bobbing cork into the train. A guard tried to stop him, for the train was already taking its pace, but one cannot ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens
... exclaimed, "what's got into you? I can't for the life of me see what is so entertaining in that prehistoric book." "Oh, go way. Don't bother me," was the surly reply. But I wouldn't be put off that way. Quickly I snatched the book from his grasp and ...
— The Scientific American Boy - The Camp at Willow Clump Island • A. Russell Bond
... impatient curiosity impelled our steps; crackling and rattling, our feet were trampling on the remains of prehistoric animals and interesting fossils, the possession of which is a matter of rivalry and contention between the museums of great cities. A thousand Cuviers could never have reconstructed the organic remains deposited in this ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne
... writ, Full many a prehistoric soul Arrived at this unchanging goal, Through changeless Love, ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... old prehistoric myth," Ernestine proclaimed from safety, "that once he, that wretched semblance of a man-thing prone in the dirt, captained Berkeley to victory ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... madman, and used as a madman; but my opinion is the more philosophical—that, by an arrest of development, into the middle of the ladies and gentlemen of the family came a veritable savage, and one out of no darkest age of history, but from beyond all record—out of the awful prehistoric times." ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald
... the underwood, giant roots rose in fantastic convolutions above ground, as if the earth were already too full, and there wasn't room for the whole of them. There was an antediluvian magnificence, a prehistoric snakiness, a sort of primeval running-to-seedness, which filled Harold and Disco with feelings of awe, and induced a strange, almost unnatural tendency to regard Adam and Eve ...
— Black Ivory • R.M. Ballantyne
... rude but docile and progressive people. I trust that it may serve not only to illustrate some aspects of their mental condition, their inventive and imitative talents, but possibly to shed some light on the condition and diffusion of the art of the metalist in the prehistoric days of our continent, notwithstanding the fact that some elements of their craft are of recent introduction and ...
— Navajo Silversmiths • Washington Matthews
... energies of imagination to account for the destinations of millions upon millions of human beings, the countless host that has occupied the surfaces of this earth through all the historic and prehistoric ages, we can, upon this assumption, reduce the number of individuals immensely, allowing that spirits are constantly arriving, constantly departing, and that the sum total in the solar system remains perhaps nearly fixed, just as in the electrolysis of water we have hydrogen rising ...
— The Certainty of a Future Life in Mars • L. P. Gratacap
... crime by paying a certain compensation. Studying the history of other tribes in various parts of the world, we are able, with much probability, to reconstruct the antecedents of this death-penalty in our own prehistoric ages, and to trace it to the blood-feud; that is, to a tribal condition in which the next-of-kin of a murdered man was socially and religiously bound to avenge him by slaying the murderer or one of his kindred. This duty of revenge is sometimes (and perhaps was at first everywhere) regarded ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... old legend which is its basis. It is a primitive Teutonism, however, without historical alloy; such a Teutonism as we can construct by letting the imagination work back from the most forceful qualities of the historical German to those which representatives of the same race may have had in a prehistoric age. The period of Wagner's tetralogy, it must be remembered, is purely mythical. The ruggedness of the type which we obtain by such a process is the strong characteristic of Herr Niemann's treatment of Wagner's musical and literary text. ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... Cumae, at the end of the Bay of Gaeta to the north, as far as Salerno in a southerly direction, whilst, lying close to this stretch of shore, are included the three populous islands of Capri, Procida and Ischia, which in prehistoric times doubtless formed part and parcel of the Parthenopean coast itself. Our pleasant task it is to write of these classic shores and islands, where the beauties of nature contend for pre-eminence with the glorious traditions of the past that centre round them. What spot ...
— The Naples Riviera • Herbert M. Vaughan
... clearness, the earlier lives being, as one might expect, the more difficult to recover and the comparatively recent ones the easiest. Also they seem to range over a vast stretch of time, back indeed to the days of primeval, prehistoric man. In short, I think the subconscious in some ways resembles the conscious and natural memory; that which is very far off to it grows dim and blurred, that which is comparatively close remains clear and sharp, although of course this rule is not ...
— The Mahatma and the Hare • H. Rider Haggard
... rats, who recovers the charm for him. But the first part is entirely different: the charm is an apple obtained from a hind, and the hero's wife is not stolen along with the charm. No Spanish version has been recorded. It is not impossible that the story in the Philippines is prehistoric. "Juan Manalaksan," which the narrator took down exactly as it was told to him, clearly dates back to a time when the tribe had its own native datu government, possibly to a time even before the Pampangans migrated to the Philippines. ...
— Filipino Popular Tales • Dean S. Fansler
... the old men of Bontoc say that in the past the Igorot people once extended to the seacoast in the Provinces of Ilokos Norte and Ilokos Sur. This, of course, is a tradition of the prehistoric time before the Ilokano invaded northern Luzon; but, as has been stated, the Bontoc people claim never to have been driven by that invasion, neither have they any knowledge of such a movement. It is not improbable, however, that traditions of the invasion ...
— The Bontoc Igorot • Albert Ernest Jenks
... notice on the tenth ode of the first decade of the Sacrificial Odes of Ku. To him the kings of Ku traced their lineage. Of Kiang Yan, his mother, our knowledge is very scanty. It is said that she was a daughter of the House of Thi, which traced its lineage up to Shan-nung in prehistoric times. From the first stanza of this piece it appears that she was married, and had been so for some time without having any child. But who her husband was it is impossible to say with certainty. As the Ku surname ...
— The Shih King • James Legge
... fortified it with an array of arguments philological, historical, topographical, and traditional. He claims to have established that the fairies of the Celtic and Teutonic races are neither more nor less than the prehistoric tribes whom they conquered and drove back, and whose lands they now possess. He identifies these mysterious beings with the Picts of Scotland, the Feinne of the Scottish Highlands and of Ireland, and the Finns and Lapps of Scandinavia. And he suggests that the Eskimo, the Ainos, and ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... landmark. The erosion of the ages had played strange tricks with the sandstone. The rocks rose like huge red toadstools or like prehistoric animals of vast size. One of them was known as the Three Bears, another ...
— Man Size • William MacLeod Raine
... it was dry land, a tribe of what you call prehistoric men lived here. They was pagans—sun worshippers, an' such. They built the stones in a circle as a kinder temple, same's them chaps you told me of that built Stonehenge. What? Ain't that a cute idea ...
— Kiddie the Scout • Robert Leighton
... he had been a man of ambition, a man of promise. He'd even found his Dream. An Easterner had helped him to that foolishness; an -ologist from a university who expected to find prehistoric bones and ...
— Winner Take All • Larry Evans
... design finds that historical study of his subject carries him through the entire history of art, from the crude expressions of prehistoric man down the long and varied centuries to the styles and fancies of the present day. He will find his theme closely interwoven with the story of the development of races, the rise and fall of nations, the whole thrilling drama of ancient ...
— Applied Design for Printers - Typographic Technical Series for Apprentices #43 • Harry Lawrence Gage
... Anyway, from the sound up yonder you will presently see some of the primitive habits of the genus bos, and the spectacle may be the more interesting because the beast will if possible head away up that valley into fastnesses where only a prehistoric man with a tail could ...
— Alton of Somasco • Harold Bindloss
... I don't call anyone a professional beauty, and you mustn't either. There's no such thing. I can't think how in America you get hold of these prehistoric phrases! The expression must have been dead long before either of us was born!... Still, she is ...
— The Limit • Ada Leverson
... that work a chapter on 'History and Fable' was inserted because of its bearing on the author's general views 'regarding the elementary commixture of fable and fact in ages that may be called prehistoric.' In this chapter the author made a rapid survey of the 'kinship between history and fable,' tracing it through the times of myth and romance to the period of the historic novel. 'At their birth,' he says, 'history and fable were twin sisters;' and again, 'There is always ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... to give the feminine view of the finish of drinking; publishers would fall over one another in their eagerness to secure the 'Memoirs of the Last Publican'; the Salvation Army would put the last drunkard in the British Museum as a prehistoric specimen; on the death of this National Hero, the Dean of Westminster would politely offer the Abbey for a memorial service, with no tickets ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... be re-erected yonder; mounding themselves, perhaps, above a living and struggling human being, to move forward, anon, leaving where he was a little heap of withered bones. A fearful place is this broad abyss, where once murmured the waters of a prehistoric sea. Let us return to the cool and fragrant security of the ...
— The Golden Fleece • Julian Hawthorne
... surely witnessed something crudely and essentially primitive. Something that had survived somehow the advance of humanity had emerged terrifically, betraying a scale of life still monstrous and immature. He envisaged it rather as a glimpse into prehistoric ages, when superstitions, gigantic and uncouth, still oppressed the hearts of men; when the forces of nature were still untamed, the Powers that may have haunted a primeval universe not yet withdrawn. To this day he thinks of what he termed years later in a sermon "savage ...
— The Wendigo • Algernon Blackwood
... cordial recollections of the boatmen of the Tarn, the aubergistes and voituriers of the Causses, the peasant owners of the Cite du Diable. I need hardly add that I give a mere record of travel. The geology of the strange district visited, its rich and varied flora, its wealth of prehistoric remains, are only touched upon. For further information the reader is referred to other writers. On the subject of agriculture I have occasionally dwelt at more length, being somewhat of a farmeress, as Arthur Young ...
— The Roof of France • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... of the oval with the upright being of symbolic significance. The crux ansata is found in the hand of most of the Egyptian deities. It is found in the Assyrian temples and throughout the temples of India as well. Prehistoric monuments of Ireland have the same design. Priests are portrayed in adoration of the crux ansata before phallic monuments. This symbol, from which our modern cross is doubtless derived, originated with the religions of antiquity. Much additional evidence ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... are very slightly changed From the semi-apes who ranged India's prehistoric clay; Whoso drew the longest bow, Ran his brother down, you know, As ...
— Departmental Ditties and Barrack Room Ballads • Rudyard Kipling
... wolds rising rapidly into desolate regions where sheep can scarcely find pasture. In this region Toller concealed himself. About two miles beyond the old quarry, on a slaty hillside, he found a deep pit, which had probably been used as a water-hole in prehistoric times; and here he built himself a hut. He made the walls out of the stones of a ruined sheep-fold; he roofed them with a sheet of corrugated iron, stolen from the outbuildings of a neighbouring farm, and covered the iron with sods; he built a fire-place with a flue, but no chimney; he caused water ...
— Mad Shepherds - and Other Human Studies • L. P. Jacks
... paganism, while renouncing the forms which they had of necessity abjured, were disposed to attribute to Christian symbols some of the virtues which they had believed to inhere in heathen emblems and tokens.[8:1] The amulets and charms used by prehistoric man were silent appeals for protection against the powers of evil, the hostile ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... be, these sacrifices, as I see them, are destined to create a great and powerful Greece, which will bring about not an extension of the state by conquest, but a natural return to those limits within which Hellenism has been active even from prehistoric times. ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... Leet that was in the party? I remember dancing a cotillon with a very good looking youth of that name in the prehistoric ages. He was a senior at Yale, very rich and very good looking. I wore his fraternity pin over my heart for a ...
— Lady of the Decoration • Frances Little
... entire family if need should come. When finished the entrance was gained by raising a large flat stone which was a part of the hearth. But the winter came without any alarm to the Hardings, and drew its slow length across the green hills and valleys like some albino monster of prehistoric times. The firs were snow-crowned and the white mantle lay deep in the hollows. Bryce and Enoch added generously to the family larder by the fruit of their hunting-trips, for there was plenty of time for such sport now. They had learned to weave snow-shoes in Indian fashion, too, and ...
— With Ethan Allen at Ticonderoga • W. Bert Foster
... Already its silver rays fell upon the ruins of Karnak; upon the thickets of lotus columns; upon solitary gateways that now give entrance to no courts; upon the sacred lake, with its reeds, where the black water-fowl were asleep; upon sloping walls, shored up by enormous stanchions, like ribs of some prehistoric leviathan; upon small chambers; upon fallen blocks of masonry, fragments of architrave and pavement, of capital and cornice; and upon the people of Karnak—those fascinating people who still cling to their habitation ...
— The Spell of Egypt • Robert Hichens
... prided himself on never having involved any of his papers in a libel suit, though he was usually the man who wrote the "danger-stuff." He had complaints, yes; libel suits, no. Dick Ryan, known in prehistoric newspaper circles in Louisville as "Cold Steel," because his mild blue eyes hardened and glinted when his copy was cut—the typical police court reporter who could be depended upon for a sobbing "blonde-girl story" when news was off—always ...
— The Dead Men's Song - Being the Story of a Poem and a Reminiscent Sketch of its - Author Young Ewing Allison • Champion Ingraham Hitchcock
... lower lands make of Saltillo a summer resort. It is humorously said that people never die here; they grow old, dry up, and disappear. The place is certainly very healthy. It is over three hundred years old, and looks as though it had existed in prehistoric times. It has, like all Mexican cities, its alameda, its bull ring, and its plaza, the latter particularly well-cared for, beautiful in flowers and charming shade trees, together with well-trimmed shrubbery. ...
— Aztec Land • Maturin M. Ballou
... Thanksgiving turkey, a Christmas goose or ducks or chickens with home-grown, home-prepared herbs, either fresh or dried, will ever after be willing to buy the paper packages or tin cans of semi-inodorous, prehistoric dust which masquerades equally well as "fresh" sage, summer savory, thyme or something else, the only apparent difference ...
— Culinary Herbs: Their Cultivation Harvesting Curing and Uses • M. G. Kains
... reconstruct, work, and fight such an important element in the new social machinery as a railway system. Such a business, in the next European war, will be hastily entrusted to some haphazard incapables drafted from one or other of the two prehistoric arms.... I do not see how this condition of affairs can be anything but transitory. There may be several wars between European powers, prepared and organized to accept the old conventions, bloody, vast, distressful encounters that may still leave the art of war essentially ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... peasants, when they make any pretence of sprucing up, probably find themselves quite as much enslaved by fashion as our very fastidious selves; a wide difference betaken ourselves and them, however, being, that while they cling tenaciously to some prehistoric style of garment, and regard innovations with abhorrence, fashion demands of us to be ...
— Around the World on a Bicycle Volume II. - From Teheran To Yokohama • Thomas Stevens
... of a man quite as much as wings are the mark of an angel. Wheels are the things that are as old as mankind and yet are strictly peculiar to man, that are prehistoric ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... look. One has been accustomed to see him with his neck bowed to the yoke he hates, and breaks whenever the opportunity offers; or else in the padi fields. In the former case he looks out of place,—an anachronism belonging to a prehistoric period, drawing a cart which seems also to date back to the days before the Deluge. In the fields the buffalo has usually a complete suit of grey mud, and during the quiet evening hour, goggles at you through the clouds of flies, ...
— In Court and Kampong - Being Tales and Sketches of Native Life in the Malay Peninsula • Hugh Clifford
... times and climes men had worn figured silks and satins and brocades, had worn long gowns and lace-trimmed sleeves, jeweled bonnets and curls, but now the male had surrendered to the female his prehistoric right to the fanciful plumage. These war days were grown so austere that it began to seem wrong even for women to dress with much more than a masculine sobriety. But the occasion of this ball had removed the ban ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... horribly mauled by the sea and the breakers. Nor did we ever get a snake, a lizard, a frog, or a fresh-water fish, whose eggs I at first fondly supposed might occasionally be transported to us on bits of floating trees or matted turf, torn by floods from those prehistoric Lusitanian or African forests. No such luck was ours. Not a single terrestrial vertebrate of any sort appeared upon our shores before the advent of man with his domestic animals, who played havoc at once with my ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... a novelty in the oriental dances of to-day; the indolent male spectator being satisfied with a slow, voluptuous movement congenial to his disposition. When, on the contrary, the performance of our prehistoric friends was governed and determined by ideas of grace, there were not infrequently from six to eight musical instruments, the harp, guitar, double-pipe, lyre, and tambourine of the period being most popular, and these commonly accompanied ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... figures on the ground, the sky, the earth all seemed to be dancing madly about him. It was not yet light and Tim strained his eyes to pierce the darkness. Then he made a discovery. A dark mass, like some prehistoric monster, was gradually approaching. Tim spoke to a man next to him who was softly swearing and bandaging a shattered hand. He peered through the light and half-light of dawn, and then started to laugh ...
— War and the Weird • Forbes Phillips
... semi-mythical Cave Man (who is perhaps only a pseudo-scientific creation) on his return from a prehistoric hunt find his leafy spouse all in tears over her staglocythic house-cleaning, or the conduct of the youngest cave child? Did she complain of her back, did she have a headache every time they disagreed, did she fuss and fret until he lost his patience ...
— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson
... mountain that we first conceived the idea of making the ascent of Ararat. Here and there, on some of the most prominent peaks, we could distinguish little mounds of earth, the ruined watch-towers of the prehistoric Hittites. ...
— Across Asia on a Bicycle • Thomas Gaskell Allen and William Lewis Sachtleben
... between parents and children, between brothers and sisters, nay, even between children-in-law and parents-in-law, had been recognized and sanctified by names. That there are, and always will be, doubts and slight differences of opinion on these prehistoric thoughts and words, is easily understood. We were pleased for a long time to see in vidua, widow, the Sanskrit vidua, i. e. without a man or a husband. We now derive vi-dhava, widow, from vidh, to be separated, to be without (cf. vido ...
— My Autobiography - A Fragment • F. Max Mueller
... others. A fashion in New York is immediately reproduced in every other city on the continent. Conservatism, day by day, becomes more and more retiring; presently it will exist only in Webster, side by side with the word prehistoric. ...
— Half a Rogue • Harold MacGrath
... dinosaur was a prehistoric reptile," adding modestly, "I once had the pleasure of helping ...
— 'Me-Smith' • Caroline Lockhart
... the nation and the world. But against what bitter and furious opposition on the part of the ancient ignorance the new light had to struggle cannot easily be conceived by those who have only heard of the "Hard-Shell Baptist" as a curious fossil of a prehistoric period.[255:1] ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... furnaces are the squalid huts and ramshackle cottages of the operatives; there too, a little removed from the river are the caves in which the Huns and Scandinavians dwell, even as their prehistoric ancestors dwelt before the light ...
— The Transgressors - Story of a Great Sin • Francis A. Adams
... she said, suddenly putting on a farcically rapt and yearning expression and speaking in a hollow, hungry voice. "Are we in the prehistoric Eighties?" ...
— The Woman With The Fan • Robert Hichens
... brought from Compiegne were being unpacked we tried to rest our weary limbs in some prehistoric chairs, whose carvings pierced our bones to the marrow. I suppose this is what they call payer de sa personne. I consoled myself, while drinking my tea and eating my cake, with the thought that my personne was paying its ...
— In the Courts of Memory 1858-1875. • L. de Hegermann-Lindencrone
... perform. As for the pterodactyl quoted in the last article, I have only to remark that this discussion arose purely from a consideration of what was the best type of flying apparatus nature had given man to study, and I claim that this prehistoric bird of geology does not come within this class. For if it is not fully established that this species had become extinct long before the appearance of man on the globe, it is at least certain that the man of that early day had ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XV., No. 388, June 9, 1883 • Various
... Brittany is probably female—is usually represented as a skeleton. M. Anatole le Braz has elaborated a study of the whole question in his book on the legend of death in Brittany,[38] and it is probable that the Ankou is a survival of the death-goddess of the prehistoric dolmen-builders of Brittany. MacCulloch[39] considers the Ankou to be a reminiscence of the Celtic god of death, who watches over all things beyond the grave and carries off the dead to his kingdom, but greatly influenced by medieval ideas of 'Death ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... cause for the passing eclipse of interest in wisdom of the world. Extraordinary advances have been made in ordered knowledge of the various stages of the long prehistoric dawn of human civilisation. The man of the flint implement and the fire-drill, who could only count up to five, and who was content to live in a hut like a beehive, has drawn interest away from the man of the market and the parlour. The literary ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... Gossamer that only people who had known each other a long time, as he and she had, could depend upon their attitude toward each other. The attitude between Miss Gossamer and him had seemed very reliable in those prehistoric days when congeniality of taste, a flower face and the probability of getting through life without much worry on your mind and a good cigar in your mouth had seemed sufficient to him. Things like that seemed pitifully insufficient ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young
... the rapture of contemplation. Even the primitive had to give place to the movement of our tiny, civilised drama. Jervaise and I were of the race that has been steadily creating a fiction of the earth since the first appearance of inductive science in the days of prehistoric man; and we could not live for long outside the artificial realism of the thing we were making. We were not the creatures of a process, but little gods ...
— The Jervaise Comedy • J. D. Beresford
... headlands with red wheat still as in the days of Justice Shallow. The shining Mere, a tributary of the Avon, came dancing down out of these hills: strange pastoral cliffs of chalk covered with fine sward, and worked by the hands of prehistoric man into bastions and ramparts that imitated in verdure ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... and eye from the Niebelungen Lied to the wholesale captivity of the French army, in the autumn of 1870, and when not thus conceived, incomplete. To those who lived in and through the period comprised between the war of the Danish Duchies and the re-conquest of Alsace-Lorraine, no item of even prehistoric times can remain absent; the spirit of German unity is everywhere, pervades everything, and those alone who thoroughly master this are capable of painting it ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 21, August, 1891 • Various
... Running through prehistoric ages—coming down from them into the daybreak of our records, founding theology, suffusing literature, and so brought onward—(a sort of verteber and marrow to all the antique races and lands, Egypt, India, Greece, Rome, the Chinese, the Jews, &c., and giving ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... 109. Prehistoric Man at the Headwaters of the Mississippi River (with plates), and an addendum relating to the early visits of Mr. Julius Chambers and the Rev. J. A. Gilfillan to Itasca Lake, by Hon. ...
— The History of Minnesota and Tales of the Frontier • Charles E. Flandrau
... skin covering. In any case they would have had no use for eyes, because the water-holes were situated in the most profound darkness. In other caves I discovered quantities of extraordinary animal-bones, probably of prehistoric origin. ...
— The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont - as told by Himself • Louis de Rougemont
... poles, ropes, and rings. Even this make-shift was short-lived, for in 1868 the class of '70 erected a "gymnasium in embryo" described by a graduate of '75 as "two uprights with a cross-beam and ropes dangling from eye-bolts—the remains of some prehistoric effort towards muscular development," which was to be found "back of the Museum";—otherwise the old North Wing. Mark Norris, '79, thus pictures the comparatively primitive state of athletics in ...
— The University of Michigan • Wilfred Shaw
... of Hecataeus to add to his history spurious chapters, in which he was made to deal more eulogistically with their beliefs and history, and they circulated oracles and poems in the names of fabled seers of prehistoric times—Orpheus and the Sibyl—which conveyed some of the religious and moral teachings of Judaism. Nor were they slow to adapt their own chronicles for the Greek world or to take their part in the literary movement ...
— Josephus • Norman Bentwich
... side. The floor was littered with every imaginable shape and size of broken glass and china. Fragments of pictures, looking as if they had been chewed by some prehistoric animal, lay amid heaps of shattered statuettes and vases. As Sally moved slowly into the room after her involuntary pause, china crackled beneath her feet. She surveyed the stripped walls with a wondering eye, and turned ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... this curious fact another proof of the ancient kinship between the first men of my own race and the prehistoric grandfathers of Malicious Gossip and Haabunai. My savage friends, with their clear features, their large straight eyes and olive skins, showed still the traces of their Caucasian blood. Their forefathers ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... of warp weighted looms amongst the prehistoric Lake Dwellers of Switzerland was first surmised by Pauer (Keller's Lake Dwellings) from the discovery of the weights, and was made practically certain by ...
— Ancient Egyptian and Greek Looms • H. Ling Roth
... of our worthy ancestors. Prehistoric man lived thickly on the moor, and as no one in particular has lived there since, we find all his little arrangements exactly as he left them. These are his wigwams with the roofs off. You can even see his hearth and his couch if you have ...
— Hound of the Baskervilles • Authur Conan Doyle
... enthusiastically, taking Arabella's arm as they struck rapidly inward and up a knoll. "Did you ever see anything look so like a lady in that impossible old dress? Tell us about her, Mr. Derringham. Does she live with those prehistoric ladies all alone in that haunted house? Could anything be so mysterious and romantic? Please tell us ...
— Halcyone • Elinor Glyn
... for gray castle-towers rising behind the foliage. The place looked inaccessible and romantic, and was undeniably picturesque. New York was far enough away to be mistaken for—say—Alexandria; while the broad river certainly took its rise in as prehistoric an age as the Nile itself. Perhaps in the early morning of the world some chieftain built his stronghold there, and fought notable battles and gave mighty feasts; and later married, and begat stalwart sons, or a daughter beautiful as earth and ...
— Idolatry - A Romance • Julian Hawthorne
... causing the child to use only the infinitive. But no one would maintain that "for this reason" we ought to restrict the child artificially to such primitive language, to enable him to pass through his prehistoric period easily. ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... communications. It appeared to me that intelligent people accepted this sort of story as true on evidence on which they wouldn't risk five dollars if it were a question of money. Even scientists swallow tales of prehistoric bones on testimony they would reject if it involved the title to a piece of ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... little probability that the Siouan habitat, as thus outlined, ran far into the prehistoric age. As already noted, the Siouan Indians of the plains were undoubtedly descended from the Siouan tribes of the east (indeed the Mandan had a tradition to that effect); and reason has been given for supposing that the ancestors ...
— The Siouan Indians • W. J. McGee
... from itself, be compared with our own time, which enjoys alike Hellenic and Roman art, now better understood, Byzantine, mediaeval, Arabic, and Renaissance art, the art of the Cinque Cento, baroque art, and the art of the seventeenth century. Egyptian, Babylonian, Etruscan, and even prehistoric art, are more profoundly studied every day. Certainly, the difference between the savage and civilized man does not lie in the human faculties. The savage has speech, intellect, religion, and morality, in common with civilized man, and he is a complete ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... remarkable how completely this Celtic leaven—the true history of which is lost in the depths of prehistoric darkness—succeeded in impressing not only its language but its culture and spirit upon the various peoples with whom it came into contact. To impose a special type of civilization upon another race must always prove a task of almost superhuman proportions. To compel the use of an ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... further points out, that in prehistoric times the Malay and Indonesian stock spread westwards to Madagascar and eastwards to the Philippines and Formosa, Micronesia and Polynesia. "This astonishing expansion of the Malaysian people throughout the Oceanic ...
— British Borneo - Sketches of Brunai, Sarawak, Labuan, and North Borneo • W. H. Treacher
... whose hospitable walls we were to lodge? The date was but five years old, but in that time the world had changed for Silverado; like Palmyra in the desert, it had outlived its people and its purpose; we camped, like Layard, amid ruins, and these names spoke to us of prehistoric time. A boot-jack, a pair of boots, a dog-hutch, and these bills of Mr. Chapman's were the only speaking relics that we disinterred from all that vast Silverado rubbish-heap; but what would I not have given to unearth a letter, a pocket-book, a diary, only ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... in a larger proportion of cases. The great majority of people, modern and ancient, civilised and uncivilised, use the right hand by preference. Even graphic representations on the sun-baked clay records of Assyria, and the drawings on rocks, tusks, and horns of animals of the flint-weapon men of prehistoric times show that man was then right-handed. There is a difference of opinion whether anthropoid apes use the right hand in preference to the left. Professor Cunningham, who made a special study of this subject, asserts that they use either hand indifferently; ...
— The Brain and the Voice in Speech and Song • F. W. Mott
... first place, but languished at home when my betters admired Miss Cushman—terribly out of the picture and the frame we should to-day pronounce her, I fear—as the Nancy of Oliver Twist: as far away this must have been as the lifetime of the prehistoric "Park," to which it was just within my knowledge that my elders went for opera, to come back on us sounding those rich old Italian names, Bosio and Badiali, Ronconi and Steffanone, I am not sure I have them quite right; signs, of a rueful ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... with perhaps its companions in crime imprisoned in a suspensory bandage,—what is this prepuce? Whence, why, where, and whither? At times, Nature, as if impatient of the slow march of gradual evolution, and exasperated at this persistent and useless as well as dangerous relic of a far-distant prehistoric age, takes things in her own hands and induces a sloughing to take place, which rids it of its annoyance. In the far-off land of Ur, among the mountainous regions of Kurdistan, something over six thousand years ago, the fathers of the Hebrew race, inspired ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... from out of a black shed—the only sign of man's handiwork for many miles—it came—something grey at first, moving slowly as though being pushed down a slight incline, then afloat in the air, gathering speed—something between a torpedo with wings and a great prehistoric insect. Now and then it described strange circles, but mostly it came towards them as swift and as true as an arrow shot from a bow. The two men looked at one another—the shorter, to whose cheeks the Cumberland winds had ...
— Peter Ruff and the Double Four • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... go out in the nice flint boat along with the other children,—it was the annual school-treat next day,—and he came and flung himself down near me on the morning of the treat, and he kicked his little prehistoric legs about and said he wished he was dead. And of ...
— Five Children and It • E. Nesbit
... is made: there remains the decoration. This is the work of patient after-touches which perfect the curves and leave on the soft loam a series of stippled impressions similar to those which the potter of prehistoric days distributed over his big-bellied jars with the ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... of mankind. The story of Yellowstone's making multiplies many times the thrill occasioned by its world-famed spectacle. Even the simplest and smallest rock details often tell thrilling incidents of prehistoric tunes out of which the enlightened imagination reconstructs the romances and the tragedies ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard
... should be stated here that the copper, so often mentioned in The Kalevala, when taken literally, was probably bronze, or "hardened copper," the amount and quality of the alloy used being not now known. The prehistoric races of Europe ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.
... which would have been highly unnecessary if I had been permitted to carry out my intention fully, and restore man to his prehistoric simplicity," interrupted Tsin-Su-Hoang. "For that reason, when the voice of the assemblage expresses itself, it must be understood that it represents in no ...
— The Wallet of Kai Lung • Ernest Bramah
... campaigns of the war. Would it not not be an interesting task to make a thorough search of all the old buildings and dug-outs, just as the archeologists have been doing in Egypt and all the ancient habitations of mankind? The prehistoric caves of Spain or the cliff dwellings of the Colorado could not be more interesting than a compilation of these records, including the drawings and sketches, some of which are real works of art. Regimental crests and badges are ...
— The Emma Gees • Herbert Wes McBride
... there—hard, round, polished, and of various colours, like sea-worn pebbles on the beach; and some, called lady-birds in the vernacular, were bound like the books that Chaucer loved in black and red. And the small gilded fly, not less an insect light-headed, a votary of vain delights, than in the prehistoric days when a white-headed old king, discrowned and crazed, railed against sweet Nature's liberty. And ever waiting to welcome this inconstant lover (with falces) there sits the solitary geometric spider, an image and embodiment of patience, not on ...
— Birds in Town and Village • W. H. Hudson
... an ax and a trowel, by thumb measure, having probably never known anything so prosaic as a spirit-level and a square. We began on the large room—that is to say, the old kitchen, which was to be the new living-room, and in a very little while had the prehistoric pantry and sink ripped out and the big hole patched in the plaster, for our boss carpenter was a gifted man, qualified for ...
— Dwellers in Arcady - The Story of an Abandoned Farm • Albert Bigelow Paine
... nimbly across the fallen timber of the morass and began feeding voraciously upon the body of the dead dinosaur, only to be driven away by another animal, which all three men recognized instantly as that king of all prehistoric creatures, the saber-toothed tiger. This newcomer, a tawny beast towering fifteen feet high at the shoulder, had a mouth disproportionate even to his great size—a mouth armed with four great tiger-teeth more than three feet ...
— The Skylark of Space • Edward Elmer Smith and Lee Hawkins Garby
... the extinction of species has been preceded by a great increase in their size, for example, the case of the great reptilia of prehistoric time. That possibly represented pituitary stabilization, and so an abeyance of the ability to vary, necessary for fresh adaptation to a changing environment. Indeed, endocrine instability appears the fundamental condition of the tendency to ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... the remote past we received the pea, growing it at first in the prehistoric vegetable garden which already supplied the bean. It was found a better article of diet than the broad bean, which to-day, after such good service, is comparatively neglected. The weevil was of the same ...
— A Book of Exposition • Homer Heath Nugent
... in various parts of the country traces of the prehistoric races who inhabited our island and left their footprints behind them, which startle us as much as ever the print of Friday's feet did the indomitable Robinson Crusoe. During the last fifty years we have been collecting ...
— Vanishing England • P. H. Ditchfield
... crushingly hold prehistoric beasts, or still existent marsh gas, accountable for dragons and serpents and other fauna of legendary history; but in certain country districts there are some animals that no amount of Board School information, nor countless Science Siftings from ...
— Stories of the Border Marches • John Lang and Jean Lang
... incidents and the view of the characters of the actors is essentially different; and when the story is treated from the antiquarian point of view, that which regards both versions as resting upon a common prehistoric model, the question arises, which of the two more nearly represents the "true" version? There is, I would submit, in such cases, no true version. The old Druidic story, if it could be found, would in all probability contain only a ...
— Heroic Romances of Ireland Volumes 1 and 2 Combined • A. H. Leahy
... of medicine will show three fairly well defined periods. The beginning of the first is hidden in the uncertain days of prehistoric ages and the period continues down to early Christian times—perhaps the end of the second century when Galen died. The second period extends from this time to the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries, and the third period embraces ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten
... with a picture of the country as nature made it. There is an account of early plant life, prehistoric animals, paleoliths, and prehistoric man. The early inhabitants are then given more detailed treatment. Attention is directed to the Bushman, the Hottentot, and the Bantu as each figured in South Africa. ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, 1920 • Various
... worthy of him, who not only wrote in sober seriousness pamphlets with titles, which Master Francis could hardly have bettered in jest, but who composed a pedigree of the Urquhart family nominatim up to Noah and Adam, and then improvised chimney pieces in Cromarty Castle, commemorating the prehistoric ancestors whom he had excogitated? Where are the great Bishops from Andrewes and Cosin onwards, and the lesser Theologians who wrangled, and the Latitudinarians who meditated, and the historians with Whitelocke at their head, and the countless writers of countless classes ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... in those lands since Clovis was signed with the cross. To the naked pride of the new men nations simply were not. The struggling populations of two vast provinces were simply carried away like slaves into captivity, as after the sacking of some prehistoric town. France was fined for having pretended to be a nation; and the fine was planned to ruin her forever. Under the pressure of such impossible injustice France cried out to the Christian nations, one after another, and by name. Her last cry ended ...
— The Crimes of England • G.K. Chesterton
... so they ought to be. Some of the omens are favourable. Militarism has dug its own grave. The great powers increased their armaments till the burden became insupportable, and have now rushed into bankruptcy in the hope of shaking it off. In prehistoric times the lords of creation were certain gigantic lizards, protected by massive armour-plates which could only be carried by a creature thirty to sixty feet long. Then they died, when neither earth, air, nor water ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... old cromlech," explained the Doctor. "Somewhere about here, if we were to dig down, we should find a withered bundle of bones crouching over the dust of a prehistoric luncheon-basket. Interesting neighbourhood!" ...
— Malvina of Brittany • Jerome K. Jerome
... formerly attached to a Lazar-house. It now belongs to the adjoining farm close by, a pleasant place, with flower-garden and orchard. High up in the woods dominating the broad valley in which Remiremont is placed are some curious prehistoric stones. But more inviting than the steep climb under a burning sun—for the weather has changed on a sudden—is the drive to the Valle d'Hrival, a drive so cool, so soothing, so delicious, that we fancy we can never feel heated, languid, ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards
... of the various Sumerian and Babylonian versions of the Deluge that have come down to us shows us that they are incomplete. And as none of them tells so connected and full a narrative of the prehistoric shipbuilder as Berosus, a priest of Bl, the great god of Babylon, it seems that the Mesopotamian scribes were content to copy the Legend in an abbreviated form. Berosus, it is true, is not a very ancient authority, ...
— The Babylonian Story of the Deluge - as Told by Assyrian Tablets from Nineveh • E. A. Wallis Budge
... on the east bank of the river, contains several small villages and a large stretch of common. Woodbury Castle is a well-known earthwork on the top of a high hill; it is probably prehistoric in origin, although afterwards occupied by the Romans. The church of St. Swithin at Woodbury has a chancel in the Decorated and a tower in the Perpendicular styles. The beautiful screen has been modernized and consequently spoiled, but some ...
— Exeter • Sidney Heath
... showed a slight arch in profile; her mouth was a little too full, and her chin slightly retreated. She came in late, and stopped at the door of the office, and bent upon Cornelia a look at once prehistoric and fin de siecle, which lighted up with astonishment, interest and sympathy, successively; then she went trailing herself on up stairs with her strange Sphinx-face over her shoulder, and turned upon Cornelia as long as ...
— The Coast of Bohemia • William Dean Howells
... and even prehistoric times till the construction of our great railways in the second quarter of the present century [the nineteenth], there had been absolutely no change in the methods of human ...
— Our Day - In the Light of Prophecy • W. A. Spicer
... annals, chronicle, record, account; biography, autobiography. Associated Words: historic, historicity, historian, historiology, historiography, Clio, prehistoric. ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... in early savage times we know only what we can learn from fragmentary prehistoric remains, from the structure of early languages, from records of travelers and students among savages of more recent times; or what can be inferred from human nature in general. Most of this data is difficult to interpret, but it is probable that woman's position was not much ...
— Woman in Modern Society • Earl Barnes
... creeping paralysis of nerve-exhaustion; above all, we must be able even now from a few bare facts, to re-create a man and make him live and love again for the reader, just as the biologist from a few scattered bones can reconstruct some prehistoric ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... dishes in a pestilential water that stained the stones on its edges black. Here was the frame of a new boat about which some carpenters were pounding, and from a distance the skeleton of unpainted timber looked like the remains of some prehistoric saurian. Across the drain, some rope-walkers, hanks of hemp about their waists, were backing away from the lathe, letting the yellow strands revolve between their deft fingers. And then the Cabanal, so called from the miserable ...
— Mayflower (Flor de mayo) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... reptiles I had ever seen upon Barsoom, but I knew from their similarity to the fossilized remains of supposedly extinct species I had seen in the museums of Helium that they comprised many of the known prehistoric reptilian genera, ...
— Warlord of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... camp was eighty miles south of Urga, after we had passed a succession of low hills and reached what, in prehistoric times, was probably a great lake basin. When our tents were pitched beside the well they seemed pitifully small in the vastness of the plain. The land rolled in placid waves to the far horizon on every hand. It was like a calm sea which is disturbed only by the lazy progress of ...
— Across Mongolian Plains - A Naturalist's Account of China's 'Great Northwest' • Roy Chapman Andrews
... not far—to the village of Civitella, now called Bellegra, a prehistoric fastness with some traces of "cyclopean" defences. Those ancients must have had cisterns; inconceivable that springs should ever have issued from this limestone crag. You can see the women of to-day fetching water from ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... closest to the unstudied tale-spinning of talk, should be the late discovery that it is. Of all the main forms into which the literary impulse moulds the stuff of imagination, the novel is the last to be devised. The drama dates from prehistoric times, so does the epic, the ballad and the lyric. The novel, as we know it, dates practically speaking from 1740. What is the reason it is so late ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... Only when the feelings erupt in some surprising way is the process manifest. The best of these sources are autobiographies, and of these only few are full of the details of this stage. Just as in the mythic prehistoric stage of many nations there is a body of legendary matter, which often reappears in somewhat different form, so there is a floating plankton-like mass of tradition and storiology that seems to attach to eminence wherever it emerges and is repeated over and over again, concerning the youth ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... dawned in Egypt and Assyria, and its works lie buried in the tombs of prehistoric Pharaohs and Ninevite kings. The second day the sun rose on the shores of many-isled Greece, and shed its rays over Etruria and Rome, and ere it set, temples and palaces were flooded with beauty. The gods had taken human form, and were come to dwell ...
— Fra Bartolommeo • Leader Scott (Re-Edited By Horace Shipp And Flora Kendrick)
... on Newton's great law of universal gravitation led to the conclusion that the inclination of the earth's equator to the plane of her orbit (the obliquity of the ecliptic) has been diminishing slowly since prehistoric times; and this fact has been confirmed by Egyptian and Chinese observations on the length of the shadow of a vertical pillar, made thousands of years before the Christian ...
— History of Astronomy • George Forbes
... snailed the herd, like a many-jointed, prehistoric reptile wandering over the limitless spaces of some primeval world. A cloud of red dust hung over them in a dense haze, trailed after them a weary length, then all was featureless monotony as before. What were a thousand steers, a handful ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... with visible objects; the allegorical laudation and deification of eminent men leads to a completed polytheism. That this and not (mono-) theism was the original form of religion, Hume assumes to be a fact for historical times, and a well-founded conjecture for prehistoric ages. Those who hold that humanity began with a perfect religion find it difficult to explain the obscuration of the truth, endow immature ages with a developed use of the reason which they can scarcely have possessed, make error grow worse with increasing culture, and contradict the historical ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... barefooted Cocopah, a tribe noted for its men of gigantic build, and with great feet out of all proportion to their size. If that footprint was to be fossilized, future generations would marvel at the evidence of some gigantic prehistoric animal, an alligator with a human-shaped foot. These Indians have lived in these mud bottoms so long, crossing the streams on rafts made of bundles of tules, and only going to the higher land when their homes are inundated by the ...
— Through the Grand Canyon from Wyoming to Mexico • E. L. Kolb
... civilisation. But in the whole room there are but three things living: myself, my dog, and the fire in my grate. And of these lives the third is very much the most intensely vivid. My dog is descended, doubtless, from prehistoric wolves; but you could hardly decipher his pedigree on his mild, domesticated face. My dog is as tame as his master (in whose veins flows the blood of the old cavemen). But time has not tamed fire. Fire is as wild a thing as when Prometheus snatched it ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm
... some rat which had been roasted in his burrow. It is impossible to describe the look of terrific awe on the faces of these quaint savages. Let us imagine our own feelings on being, without warning, confronted by a caravan of strange prehistoric monsters; imagine an Easter holiday tripper surrounded by the fearful beasts at the Crystal Palace suddenly brought to life! What piercing shrieks they gave forth, as, leaving their hunting implements, they raced away, to drop, all ...
— Spinifex and Sand - Five Years' Pioneering and Exploration in Western Australia • David W Carnegie
... when Egypt and Assyria were names of renown, through the days when Nineveh and Babylon were mighty and populous cities in the zenith of their glory. Back earlier still to those more ancient nations of which we know hardly anything, and still earlier to the prehistoric man, of whom we know less; back, finally, to the days when man first trod on this planet, untold ages ago. Here is indeed a portentous retrospect from most points of view, but it is only the commencement of that which our ...
— Time and Tide - A Romance of the Moon • Robert S. (Robert Stawell) Ball |
