"Vertebrate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... an eye identical in structure with that of the eye of vertebrates. [Footnote: The common edible scallop (Pecten maximus) has several eyes of brilliant blue and of very complex structure.] It is obvious, however, that the eye of this mollusc and the eye of the vertebrate must have developed quite independently, ages after each had been separated from the parent stock. Again, we find that in all organic evolution, infinite complexity of structure accompanies the utmost simplicity of function. The variation of an organ so highly complex as the eye must involve ...
— Bergson and His Philosophy • J. Alexander Gunn
... impossible, nor is the theory that the moon is hollow, that the "Selenites" live below the surface, or that evolution has produced on our satellite an intelligent form which, anatomically, is more nearly allied to the insect than to the vertebrate type as we know it. The exposition of lunar social conditions cannot be taken very seriously. Specialisation is the key-note; the production by education and training, of minds, and, as far as possible, bodies, adapted to a particular end, and incapable ...
— H. G. Wells • J. D. Beresford
... was with the Philadelphia Institute expedition in the Bad Lands under Professor Cope, hunting mastodon bones, and I overheard him say, his own self, that any plantigrade circumflex vertebrate bacterium that hadn't wings and was uncertain was a reptile. Well, then, has this dog any wings? No. Is he a plantigrade circumflex vertebrate bacterium? Maybe so, maybe not; but without ever having seen him, and judging only by his illegal and spectacular parentage, I will ...
— A Horse's Tale • Mark Twain
... other activity, the force employed has first to overcome the weight of the body. A man can easily bound a height of two feet, and he weighs as much as a hundred thousand grasshoppers, while a hundred thousand grasshoppers could leap no higher than one—say a foot. This shows that the vertebrate has the advantage. A man represents the volume of fifteen millions of ants, yet can easily move more than three hundred feet a minute, a comparison which gives him forty times more power, bulk for bulk, than the ant possesses. Yet were all the conditions compared, something like equality would ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 430, March 29, 1884 • Various
... exploration of the Rocky Mountain region, and found that there, in the strata of the ancient lake beds, records of the age of mammals had been made and preserved with a fulness surpassing that of any other known region on earth. The profusion of vertebrate remains brought to light was almost unbelievable. Prof. Marsh, who was first in the field, found three hundred new tertiary species between 1870 and 1876, besides unearthing the remains of two hundred birds with teeth, six hundred ...
— American Men of Mind • Burton E. Stevenson
... may be found among mollusks, crustaceans or the lower invertebrates. Slang is not common to vertebrate fishes or to whales, seals, reptiles or anthropoid apes - in a word, slang-speaking is nowhere prevalent among lower animals. It may, then, be definitely and clearly asserted that Slang is the natural, logical expression ...
— The Love Sonnets of a Car Conductor • Wallace Irwin
... genesis of life take man out of the definitional formula embracing the "beasts of the earth." From the lowest vertebrate, in Mr. Darwin's plexus, to the highest quadrumane (his nearest allied type to man), covering almost an infinite variety of distinct living forms, the distance to be traversed, in order to reach man, is hardly more than one-third the length ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... the Outfit and Methods of the Bird Photographer. By FRANK M. CHAPMAN, Assistant Curator of Vertebrate Zoology in the American Museum of Natural History; Author of "Handbook of Birds of Eastern North America" and "Bird-Life." Illustrated with over 100 Photographs from Nature by ...
— The Farringdons • Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler
... of the development of any other vertebrate animal, Lizard, Snake, Frog, or Fish, tells the same story. There is always, to begin with, an egg having the same essential structure as that of the Dog:—the yelk of that egg always undergoes division, or 'segmentation' as it is often called: ...
— On the Relations of Man to the Lower Animals • Thomas H. Huxley
... dreary astonishment that there are heights and depths of experience of which I once had not the faintest conception. This is a kind of battle that one must fight out alone. I must go away and accustom myself to a new condition of life. But do not worry about me. I shall come back a vertebrate;" and he tried to summon a reassuring smile, as he ...
— His Sombre Rivals • E. P. Roe
... Man can no longer be regarded as a creature apart by himself. We cannot erect an order on purpose to contain him, as Cuvier tried to do; we cannot even make a separate family for him. Man is not only a vertebrate, a mammal, and a primate, but he belongs, as a genus, to the catarrhine family of apes. And just as lions, leopards, and lynxes—different genera of the cat-family—are descended from a common stock of carnivora, back to which we may also trace the pedigrees of dogs, hyaenas, bears, ...
— The Destiny of Man - Viewed in the Light of His Origin • John Fiske
... fiscal barrier is the barrier of poltroonery. The one character that distinguishes man from the other higher vertebrate, indeed, is his excessive timorousness, his easy yielding to alarms, his incapacity for adventure without a crowd behind him. In his normal incarnation he is no more capable of initiating an extra-legal affair—at all events, above the mawkish harmlessness ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... pugnacity of the Norseman is, so far as the climate is concerned, an accident. Evolutionists should not forget that we all have five fingers not because four or six would not do just as well, but merely because the first vertebrate above the fishes happened to have that number. He owed his prodigious success in founding a line of descent to some entirely other quality,—we know {239} not which,—but the inessential five fingers were taken in tow and preserved to the present day. So of most social ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James |
