"Vertebrate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... prelude to this vast chapter of natural history in the simultaneous appearance of the four great types of the animal kingdom: Radiates, Mollusks, Articulates, and Vertebrates. Then comes the orderly development of the class by which the vertebrate plan was first expressed, namely, the fishes. Underlying all its divisions and subdivisions, is the average expression of the type in the past and present; the Placoids and Ganoids, with their combination of reptilian and fishlike features, characterizing the earlier geological epochs, while in ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... any rate abstain from opposing them." His prescience has in less than a generation been justified by the discovery of intermediate fossil forms of animals too numerous to be here recounted. The break between vertebrate and invertebrate animals, between flowering and non-flowering plants, between animal and plant, is now bridged over by discoveries in the life histories of animals and plants which exist to-day. Embryo animals and plants are now known to go through stages ...
— Life of Charles Darwin • G. T. (George Thomas) Bettany
... are not worthy of special mention, but its dorsal eyes, sometimes several dozen in number, are truly remarkable. These eyes, although they are very simple in structure, in type are the same as those of vertebrates, having corneae, lenses, retinae, and "blind spots." (In the vertebrate eye, the spot where the optic nerve pierces the external layer of the retina is not sensitive to light impressions; hence, it ...
— The Dawn of Reason - or, Mental Traits in the Lower Animals • James Weir
... Natural-Selection acts by slight variations.—These must be useful at once.—Difficulties as to the giraffe; as to mimicry; as to the heads of flat-fishes; as to the origin and constancy of the vertebrate, limbs; as to whalebone; as to the young kangaroo; as to sea-urchins; as to certain processes of {viii} metamorphosis; as to the mammary gland; as to certain ape characters; as to the rattlesnake and cobra; as to the process of formation ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... succeeded in certain forms—even in a vertebrate like the frog—in inducing development in unimpregnated ova. The evidence for all these things is still slender; but we will content ourselves with noting that point and passing on to the consideration of the phenomena ...
— Science and Morals and Other Essays • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle
... vertebrate—for that is as definitely as we can yet describe it—forces a great pressure of air into its head and neck, which, by the action of valves, it must allow to rush into its very rudimentary lower extremities, distending them with ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... absurd to waste time analyzing, every word I came across—noun, genitive, singular, feminine—when its meaning was quite plain. I thought I might just as well describe my pet in order to know it—order, vertebrate; division, quadruped; class, mammalia; genus, felinus; species, cat; individual, Tabby. But as I got deeper into the subject, I became more interested, and the beauty of the language delighted me. ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... jelly-like condition in which the microscope cannot detect the latent structure, not as they are in the adult, but as they are in the foetus in which they first appear, with a structure similar to that of the lowest class of vertebrate animals, the fishes. ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, April 1887 - Volume 1, Number 3 • Various
... whatever—when the whole organism consists of transparent, structureless, semi-fluid living bioplasm—when it would not be possible to distinguish the growing moving matter which was to evolve the oak from that which was the germ of a vertebrate animal. Nor can any difference be discerned between the bioplasm matter of the lowest, simplest, epithelial scale of man's organism and that from which the nerve cells of his brain are to be evolved. Neither by studying bioplasm under the microscope nor by any kind of physical ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... want of it, the preachers are becoming emasculated apologists for lack of it, and the world, looking on, is laughing at a limp, genuflecting thing calling itself modern Christianity and for want of vertebrate strength, ...
— Christ, Christianity and the Bible • I. M. Haldeman
... The silent vertebrate in brown Contracts and concentrates, withdraws; Rachel nee Rabinovitch Tears at the grapes ...
— Poems • T. S. [Thomas Stearns] Eliot
... mean: Let me call your attention to those vertebrate animals which are most familiar to you, such as mammals, birds, and reptiles. At the present day, these groups of animals are perfectly well-defined from one another. We know of no animal now living which, in any sense, is intermediate between the mammal and the bird, or between the bird ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley
... the examination, and his landlady pointed out that she really could not supply so much lamp oil at the price. He walked to and fro from the College with little slips of mnemonics in his hand, lists of crayfish appendages, rabbits' skull-bones, and vertebrate nerves, for example, and became a positive nuisance to foot ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... Professor Haeckel, of Jena, is the Coryphaeus. I know of no more solid and important contributions to biology in the past seven years than Haeckel's work on the "Radiolaria," and the researches of his distinguished colleague Gegenbaur, in vertebrate anatomy; while in Haeckel's "Generelle Morphologie" there is all the force, suggestiveness, and, what I may term the systematising power, of Oken, without his extravagance. The "Generelle Morphologie" is, in fact, an attempt to put the Doctrine of Evolution, so far as it applies to ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... some of the more widely separated forms there ought to be thousands of intermediate varieties; as for instance between the bear and the whale; and a still greater number between the mollusk with its external shell, and the vertebrate with its internal skeleton. And we ought to find these intermediate forms closely connected with their parents and their children. For intermediate forms in another continent could not be the connecting links between the ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... to classify planets and inhabitants, so as to chart a space-trend if there is any. I'd say the most important ones would be geology, stratigraphy, paleontology, oceanography, xenology, anthropology, ethnology, vertebrate biology, botany, and at least ...
— The Galaxy Primes • Edward Elmer Smith
... marks of the vertebrates is to know a truth which possesses generality, in contradistinction to the particularism of Whitman's poetic consciousness. Even so to know well the groups and marks of human character, vertebrate and invertebrate, is to know that of which the average man, in his hand to hand struggle with life, is ignorant. Such a wisdom Shakespeare possessed to a unique degree, and it enabled him to reconstruct human life. He did not ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... relatively very small size on earth." The largest terrestrial insects, living or extinct, do not, as a matter of fact, measure six inches in length; "but here, against the lesser gravitation of the moon, a creature certainly as much an insect as vertebrate seems to have been able to attain to human ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... rooms, the vertebrated animals are grouped in the wall cases or on the top of the cases. It is hardly necessary to guide the visitor systematically through the intricacies of a collection, every beast, bird, fish, and shell of which is native to his own land. In the wall cases devoted to British vertebrate animals he will notice, first the Carnivorous Beasts, which include the foxes; stoats; cats; &c.:—the Glirine Beasts, including rabbits; squirrels; hares; rats; and mice:—the Hoofed Beasts, as the fallow deer; the stag; and the roebuck:—and the Insectivorous ...
— How to See the British Museum in Four Visits • W. Blanchard Jerrold
... the dead moth is so, because they continue to exist and shine when the artist's hands and brain are dust:—and man has the long day of life before him in which to do again things like these, and better than these, if there is any truth in evolution. But the forms of life in the two higher vertebrate classes are Nature's most perfect work; and the life of even a single species is of incalculably greater value to mankind, for what it teaches and would continue to teach, than all the chiselled marbles and ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson
... be seen with the naked eye to the largest mammals, and, yet, not one is in transition from one species to another; every one is perfect. It is strange that slight similarities could make him ignore gigantic differences. The remains of nearly one hundred species of vertebrate life have been found in the rocks, of which more than one-half are found living to-day, and none of the survivors show material change. The word hypothesis is a synonym used by scientists for the word guess; it is more dignified ...
— In His Image • William Jennings Bryan
... so far as the white ants, we find that the queen lays eggs at an enormous rate during the whole of her active life, according to some estimates at the rate of 80,000 a day. Even in the more primitive members of the great vertebrate group, to which we ourselves belong, reproduction is sometimes still on almost as vast a scale as among lower organisms. Thus, among herrings, nearly 70,000 eggs have been found in a single female; but the herring, nevertheless, does not tend to increase in the seas, for ...
— Essays in War-Time - Further Studies In The Task Of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... fishes are Vertebrates, and that there are five principal classes of them. If I should tell you as much about them as I have about the Building of a Bird, you would see that they are all built on what we call the Vertebrate plan of structure. Here is a chart of the Classes of Vertebrates—you can study it this afternoon, till ...
— Citizen Bird • Mabel Osgood Wright and Elliott Coues
... of (2) paleontology, which is developed along with geology. In this we have both the vertebrate and invertebrate paleontology, which are divisions of the science which treats of ancient forms of animal and vegetable life. There are many other divisions of paleontology, some {61} devoting themselves entirely to animal life and others to vegetable, as, for instance, ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... serious thing to exterminate a species of any of the vertebrate animals. There are probably millions of people who do not realize that civilized (!) man is the most persistently and wickedly wasteful of all the predatory animals. The lions, the tigers, the bears, the eagles and hawks, serpents, and the fish-eating fishes, all live by ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday |
