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Primitive   /prˈɪmətɪv/  /prˈɪmɪtɪv/   Listen
Primitive

noun
1.
A person who belongs to an early stage of civilization.  Synonym: primitive person.
2.
A mathematical expression from which another expression is derived.
3.
A word serving as the basis for inflected or derived forms.



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"Primitive" Quotes from Famous Books



... old ladies were not of the quaint type, nor was their home picturesque. The place and the people were merely old-fashioned, and they were almost primitive in their ways. They were kind-hearted and hospitable, but they were of the rugged New England class that has lost the charm of its ...
— Patty's Social Season • Carolyn Wells

... The primitive and popular form in which the superstition had probably lived on uninterruptedly from the time of the Romans, was the art of the witch(strege).The witch, so long as she limited herself to mere divination, might be innocent enough. were it not that the transition from prophecy ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt

... thanks to the very effective policing of the park by two troops of United States Cavalry. Two regiments could not entirely prevent poaching, but two troops were very successful, and the boys had found sections of the American Wonderland exactly as primitive as when the lonely trapper Coulter made his famous journey ...
— Frank Merriwell's Bravery • Burt L. Standish

... of the healing art in Ancient Rome is shrouded in uncertainty. The earliest practice of medicine was undoubtedly theurgic, and common to all primitive peoples. The offices of priest and of medicine-man were combined in one person, and magic was invoked to take the place of knowledge. There is much scope for the exercise of the imagination in attempting to follow the course of early man in his efforts to ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott

... is supposed to belong, in theory at least, to that primitive era; but it is not necessary to go back further than the feudal period to look for a man who never has known a will above his own. Donatello seizes Miriam's tormentor and casts him down the Tarpeian ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns

... laid down about the shores of the Adirondack continental nucleus. The slab shows the trails of animals crossing in all directions, especially those known as clemactechnites, said by Dr. J. M. Clarke to have been made by a a simple primitive type of mollusk. The slab, weighing over fifteen tons, was moved in six sections and put together ...
— New York at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, St. Louis 1904 - Report of the New York State Commission • DeLancey M. Ellis

... was a very hard undertaking, and could be accomplished only by the learned and those who were well practised. I must, therefore, make up my mind to learn these little characters; but the matter became to me more and more confused. Now, it seemed, some of the first and larger primitive letters had no value in their places, in order that their little after-born kindred might not stand there in vain. Now they indicated a gentle breathing, now a guttural more or less rough, and now served as mere equivalents. ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

... two hundred and fifty years, to represent the ecclesiastical and political schism of the Oriental sects, and to introduce their clamorous or sanguinary contests, by a modest inquiry into the doctrines of the primitive church. [1] ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon

... brother poets who mentioned him as little as possible with a disdainful smile, Perrotin had already discovered and placed him in his collection, struck by certain pictures, an original phraseology, the mechanism of his imagination, primitive yet complicated by simplicity. All this attracted him, and then the man interested him too. He sent a short complimentary note to Clerambault who came to thank him, overflowing with gratitude, and ties of friendship were formed between the ...
— Clerambault - The Story Of An Independent Spirit During The War • Rolland, Romain

... of his Sentenza, as it was originally distributed through Austrian Italy, and hanging in its black frame, a memorial of startling import to a freeman's eyes,—a landscape representing the Castle of Ferrara, the far-away scene of his youthful life,—and a primitive engraving from one of the old masters of that city, dedicated to him in one of those euphonious inscriptions peculiar to Italian artists,—these and such as these tokens of his experience and tastes gave interesting significance to his companionship. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 25, November, 1859 • Various

... star of six rays, or a plate of six angles. There is a reason for this, or rather there is a well-known property of ice in respect to the law of its crystallization which throws some light upon the subject. The law is this: that whereas every crystallizable substance has its own primitive crystalline form, that of ice is a rhomboid with angles of 60 deg. and 120 deg., and consequently all the secondary forms which this substance assumes are controlled by these angles, and derive ...
— Harper's Young People, February 10, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various

... Beside that genial plantation life which he had known he saw rising the wistful figure of the poor man doomed to conditions which he could not change—born, it may be, like Pinetop, self-poised, yet with an untaught intellect, grasping, like him, after the primitive knowledge which should be the birthright of every child. Even the spectre of slavery, which had shadowed his thoughts, as it had those of many a generous mind around him, faded abruptly before the very majesty of the problem that faced him ...
— The Battle Ground • Ellen Glasgow

... are primitive, the causes of war are no less so. It has been strikingly said of late by a Scandinavian scholar that "language was born in the courting-days of mankind: the first utterance of speech something between the nightly love-lyrics of puss upon the tiles ...
— The Creed of the Old South 1865-1915 • Basil L. Gildersleeve

... katharsis—a purification of the community from the taints and poisons of the past year, the old contagion of sin and death. And the words of Aristotle's definition of tragedy in Chapter VI might have been used in the days of Thespis in a much cruder and less metaphorical sense. According to primitive ideas, the mimic representation on the stage of 'incidents arousing pity and fear' did act as a katharsis of such 'passions' or 'sufferings' in real life. (For the word pathemata means 'sufferings' as well as 'passions'.) It is worth ...
— The Poetics • Aristotle

... means of rendering the production of the gas continuous, and of regulating it automatically without the aid of the operator. Mr. Mondollot has obtained such a result through a happy modification of the primitive system of the English engineer Bramah. He preserves the suction and force pump but, while applying it to the same uses, he likewise employs it, by the aid of a special arrangement, so as to distribute the sulphuric acid automatically over the chalk in ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 365, December 30, 1882 • Various

... private enterprise in 1986. The results, starting from an extremely low base, were striking - growth averaged 6% per year in 1988-2006 except during the short-lived drop caused by the Asian financial crisis beginning in 1997. Despite this high growth rate, Laos remains a country with a primitive infrastructure. It has no railroads, a rudimentary road system, and limited external and internal telecommunications, though the government is sponsoring major improvements in the road system with possible support from Japan. Electricity is available in only a few urban areas. Subsistence ...
— The 2007 CIA World Factbook • United States

... conceivably have gone against him, Kane's interest in the mysterious beast was uncompromisingly hostile. He was bitter on account of the dog. He felt that the great wolf had put a dishonor upon him; and for a few days he was no longer the impartial student of natural history, but the keen, primitive hunter with the blood-lust hot in his veins. Then this mood passed, or, rather, underwent a change. He decided that the Gray Master was, indeed, too individual a beast to be just snuffed out, but, at the same time, far too dangerous to ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts

... the most prolific source of poverty. Honest toil is to it the law of life. It is never weary of reiterating 'In the sweat of thy brow thou shalt eat bread'; and it condemns all swift modes of getting riches without labour. No doubt the primitive simplicity of life as set forth in this book seems far behind the many ingenuities by which in our days the law is evaded. How much of Stock Exchange speculation and 'Company promoters' gambling would survive the application ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... tragedy, as the product of a more cultivated age, these characteristics appear more strongly than in the primitive epic. The Homeric poems are still legendary narratives, though narratives unconsciously transmuted by the highest art. Tragedy, on the contrary, has no extraneous elements. It implies a conscious ...
— An Estimate of the Value and Influence of Works of Fiction in Modern Times • Thomas Hill Green

... cent. for their money. They collected pictures, too, and were supporters of such charitable institutions as might be beneficial to their sick domestics. From their father, the builder, they inherited a talent for bricks and mortar. Originally, perhaps, members of some primitive sect, they were now in the natural course of things members of the Church of England, and caused their wives and children to attend with some regularity the more fashionable churches of the Metropolis. To have doubted their Christianity would ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... unwise administration of this vast empire, Spain, in the course of time, killed the goose that laid the golden egg. The native Indians, enslaved and lashed to their work in Peruvian and Mexican silver mines, rapidly lost even their primitive civilization and died in alarming numbers. This in itself would not have weakened the monarchy greatly, but it appeared more serious when we remember that the high-handed and harassing regulations imposed by short-sighted or selfish officials had checked the growth of a healthy agricultural and ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes

... the time really came for her to go away. The doubt that she would eventually go was slight in Farwell's heart. He, keener than others, saw the closing-in of conditions. He was not blind to Jerry-Jo's primitive attempts to attract the girl's attention, but he was not deceived. When the moment came that Priscilla recognized the half-breed's real thought, Farwell knew her quick impulse would, as of old, be to fly away. She was like a wild bird, he often pondered; she would give to great lengths, ...
— The Place Beyond the Winds • Harriet T. Comstock

... had been charged with rifling Lucius' mail in the primitive New York City of 1851—came to the end of his long life in 1919. He was succeeded immediately by his son, William Henry II, who had only recently returned from military service during World War I. According to Mrs. Planty, ...
— History of the Comstock Patent Medicine Business and Dr. Morse's Indian Root Pills • Robert B. Shaw

... editor's task was not performed in the closet, but in a sort of literary pilgrimage through a land of song, story, and romance. The farmers and peasantry from whose recitation the ballads were to be set down, were a primitive race; and the country among which oral traditions, anecdotes, and legends were to be collected for notes illustrative of the ballads, was of the most romantic character. Sir Walter found the most fertile field in the pastoral vale of Liddesdale, whither he travelled ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 571 - Volume 20, No. 571—Supplementary Number • Various

... gathered from half a dozen pages of the tale called Deerslayer. He uses "verbal," for "oral"; "precision," for "facility"; "phenomena," for "marvels"; "necessary," for "predetermined"; "unsophisticated," for "primitive"; "preparation," for "expectancy"; "rebuked," for "subdued"; "dependent on," for "resulting from"; "fact," for "condition"; "fact," for "conjecture"; "precaution," for "caution"; "explain," for ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... temple of Vesta reminds us that it is time to face about, and, passing behind the temple of Julius, to look in the opposite direction, from V. Before us lies this circular shrine, a form gradually developed from the primitive round hut which once served as house to the prehistoric ancestors of the Roman stock. As it was the duty of the maiden daughters of that ancient tribe to keep alight the fire upon the domestic hearth, so through all the history of Rome it was the duty of certain ...
— Life in the Roman World of Nero and St. Paul • T. G. Tucker

... sail—we'll conclude that this fellow deliberately made away with himself. As I make it out, the dog, thus marooned, struck pretty frantically for the high ground. Lost dogs—and lost children, for that matter— always make up hill, dark or daylight. I suppose it's the primitive instinct to search for a view. . . . But anyway, here's a boat. She's unseaworthy, as she lies: but her timbers look sound enough if we can staunch her, and the first thing is to get her down to the water and see how fast she fills. We've a baler, to cope with the ...
— Foe-Farrell • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... one jot or tittle of the Law ever passes away; all laws exist to be fulfilled, but human life evolves from level to level of consciousness, and through relationship with higher understanding it escapes the primitive expressions of the lower laws and unites itself with ...
— Freedom Talks No. II • Julia Seton, M.D.

... sufficient to enable him to form a mental conception of a Something that lived after Death. No matter from what source this belief in a "ghost" originated, it must be admitted that it is found among all peoples, and is apparently an universal idea. And, running along with it in the primitive peoples, we find that there is, and always has been, an idea, more or less vague and indistinct, that somehow, someway, sometime, this "ghost" of the person returns to earthly existence and takes upon itself a new fleshly ...
— Reincarnation and the Law of Karma - A Study of the Old-New World-Doctrine of Rebirth, and Spiritual Cause and Effect • William Walker Atkinson

... increased his speed to the utmost, running through a thicket, passing the extreme northern curve of the lake, and entering a wood where only firm ground lay before him. The great obstacle was passed and he felt a mighty surge of triumph. He was for the time being primitive and wild, like the warriors who pursued him, thinking as they thought, and acting as they acted. Feeling now that he was victorious anew, he raised his voice and sent forth once more that tremendous thrilling cry, a compound of triumph, defiance and mockery. Yells of disappointment came ...
— The Eyes of the Woods - A story of the Ancient Wilderness • Joseph A. Altsheler

... animals of the Aryan race was the horse. Even in the Indian epics, the sacrifice of a horse was the highest rite of the primitive religion. Tacitus tells us that the Germans kept sacred white horses at the public expense, in the groves and woods of the gods: and that from their neighings and snortings, auguries were taken. Amongst the people of the ...
— Early Britain - Anglo-Saxon Britain • Grant Allen

... pyramid-inspectors, and such like, but for every man and woman born into the blindness of the planet—is to discover; after which discovery there is little more comfort to be had of the sort with which Helen was chiefly conversant. But she escaped for the time after a very simple and primitive fashion, although it was indeed a ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald

... Kenrick's Ascetick, at the end of which he gives an account of the lives of the primitive Christians. Their pattern she recommended to our imitation, and said, their conversation was not like this of our age: For now, says she, there is nothing but frothy, vain discourse, which is far different from ...
— The Best Ghost Stories • Various

... personal one, teacher acting upon pupil directly to secure individualized results; but it has always been socially determined, both in purpose and in method, by the group "mores" and the group needs.[17] The family has been called "the first and primitive school," but hardly with accuracy; since, although the family is the first agency to begin the educative process, what each family has demanded in loyalty and in activity from each child has been determined, since the beginning of social organization, by what the group of which that ...
— The Family and it's Members • Anna Garlin Spencer

... the course Tommy Ashe and Thompson followed. Having decided to go, they went, and neither of them took it as a serious matter that they were on the first leg of a twelve-hundred-mile jaunt in the deep of winter across a primitive land. ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair

... say. Nor need they be analyzed in detail, as the texts are before us in full. I will merely call attention to the fact that in "Zaragoza" the king sets a snare (cf. Herodotus) for the thief, instead of the more common barrel of pitch. There is something decidedly primitive about this trap which shoots arrows into its victim. Zaragoza's trick whereby he fools the rich merchant has an analogue in Knowles's Kashmir story of "The Day-Thief and the Night-Thief" ...
— Filipino Popular Tales • Dean S. Fansler

... Dubos (Hist. Critique de l'Etablissement de la Monarchie Francoise dans les Gaules, tom. i. p. 630-650) has the merit of defining the primitive kingdom of Clovis, and of ascertaining the genuine number ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 3 • Edward Gibbon

... produced,—and in his speeches and orations inspired by the feelings which evolved the Civil War and were themselves exaggerated by it to tenfold strength, we feel all the volcanic forces which buried the primitive political conditions of the United States deep under the ashes and lava of their eruption. Words are feeble in the presence of the facts of such a war. But what more could words do to suggest its meaning than they do in Mr. Beecher's oration on the raising of ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various

... general psychoneurotic or psychotic Anlage. When this is done I am sure that it will be found that there are just such primordial reactions as President Hall has been talking about lying back of all the sexual impulses. Sexual reactions have in the course of development come to be the vehicle for more primitive ones. We know by observation that the infant demonstrates anger in a much greater degree, and long before he gives evidence of things sexual, in anything approaching the adult sense of that term. The temporary formulation of psychoanalysts who attempt to explain anger or temper by sadism are ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10

... human rules; their foulness, their deformity does not depend on local constitutions, on human institutes, or religious creeds; they are crimes, and the persons who perpetrate them are monsters, who violate the primitive condition on which the earth was given to man; they are guilty by the general verdict of human-kind." Sheridan concluded his speech by an appeal to British justice, which, as it is preserved to us, is a mere sonorous roll of words, with a common-place meaning; after which he acted ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.III. - From George III. to Victoria • E. Farr and E. H. Nolan

... still burning with the desire to see what lay there in the depths of the forest. Paul, the scholar, the thinker, the future statesman, had become transformed. In such a surcharged atmosphere he, too, had turned into the primitive man, the fighter, the man who looks upon every other man not proven a friend, as his natural enemy. The bullets had ceased for the time being to whistle above his head and to strike up the earth about him. He became ...
— The Free Rangers - A Story of the Early Days Along the Mississippi • Joseph A. Altsheler

... Town" in 1915 and "The Growth of the Soil"—the title ought to be "The Earth's Increase"—in 1918 continue along the path Hamsun entered by "Children of the Time." The scene is laid in his beloved Northland, but the old primitive life is going—going even in the outlying districts, where the pioneers are already breaking ground for new permanent settlements. Business of a modern type has arrived, and much of the quiet humor displayed in these the latest and maturest of Hamsun's works springs from the spectacle ...
— Hunger • Knut Hamsun

... of his neighbours; he dressed with their primitive regard for ease; he dropped now and then into their slurring speech, and adopted one by ...
— In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... to live in the past now instead of in the future?—Rachel, who had been told to be a great deal in the fresh air, passed her time quietly, peacefully, languidly, lying out of doors. They had deemed themselves fortunate in securing in the overcrowded town a somewhat primitive little pavilion belonging to one of the big hotels, of which the charm to Rachel was that it had a shady garden. Rendel, whose time even during the period in which he had had no regular occupation had always been fully ...
— The Arbiter - A Novel • Lady F. E. E. Bell

... cannot be said, however, that the custom was first used by the Christians. It was in practice among early pagan nations also, and is regarded as a survival of the ideas of the fire-worshipers. The sun, which was the impersonation of deity to many primitive races, had his home in their mythology in the east, and out of respect for him the dead were placed facing this quarter, among certain tribes always in a sitting posture. It may also be remarked that among other races the position was reversed, the dead body being placed with its feet ...
— Burroughs' Encyclopaedia of Astounding Facts and Useful Information, 1889 • Barkham Burroughs

... wall, forming the boundary on this side of the garden of Jacques Ferrand, the notary, extended to a building situated on the street, of only one story and a garret. Two large brass plates, the sign of the notary's office, flanked the worm-eaten gate, the primitive appearance of which was no longer to be distinguished under the mud which covered it. This door led to a covered passage; on the right was the lodge of an old porter, half deaf, who was to the fraternity of tailors what Pipelet was to the boot-maker; on the left a stable, ...
— The Mysteries of Paris V2 • Eugene Sue

... discussion is enough to prove to the most undiscerning that woman's place in society was not clearly recognized, and that there were many difficulties to be overcome before she could consider herself free from her primitive state ...
— Women of the Romance Countries • John R. Effinger

... lizards and birds, a grinning human skull or two, broken pots and pieces of rag fluttering in the wind, all offered as propitiation to the presiding demon of the place, while away in the bush, behind the houses, we saw the giant leaves of the plantain groves that yielded the staple food of this primitive people. ...
— The Great White Queen - A Tale of Treasure and Treason • William Le Queux

... otherwise; but for the furtherance of his own desires he had another standard of morality. It was not a standard made to suit the present circumstances, but one that had guided him through life, the primitive ideal that what a man desires he must fight for and take as best he may. From his youth upwards he had coveted little that he had not obtained; the success was everything, the means used did not ...
— The Brown Mask • Percy J. Brebner

... entirely understand it. Here, under this Southern sun, we of the North are in danger of acquiring a sort of insouciant directness almost primitive. There comes, after a while, a certain mental as well as physical luxury in relaxation of rule and precept, permitting us a simplicity which sometimes, I think, becomes something less harmless. There is luxury in letting go of that live wire which keeps us all keyed to one conventional ...
— The Firing Line • Robert W. Chambers

... facts of our earthly existence, but Music has no external archetype, and refuses to submit her ethereal soul to our curious analysis. 'I am so, because so I am,' is the only answer she gives to the queries of materialism. Like the primitive rock, the skeleton of earth's burning heart, she looms up through the base of our existence. Addressing herself to some mystic faculty born before thought or language, she lulls the suffering baby into its first sleep, using perhaps the primeval and universal language of the race. For ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. IV. October, 1863, No. IV. - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various

... made a study of the ancient and indispensable art of bread-making, consulting such authorities as offered, going back to the primitive days and first invention of the unleavened kind, and traveling gradually down in my studies through that accidental souring of the dough which it is supposed taught the leavening process, and through the various fermentations thereafter till I came to "good, sweet, ...
— Science in the Kitchen. • Mrs. E. E. Kellogg

... excused; such hospitality to strangers was so rare, excepting in remote places where the customs of the primitive ages still existed. But hospitality so gracefully and graciously offered had to be met with graciousness and ...
— The Argosy - Vol. 51, No. 3, March, 1891 • Various

... no more. He struck her furiously—a blow which stretched her senseless on the stone floor of the cell. Having by this primitive means silenced Margery's "endless quotations," he let himself out ...
— Mistress Margery • Emily Sarah Holt

... sprang up with new force, and was carried to an extent not favored in Germany. It was in Switzerland that the greatest approximation was made to the forms, if not to the spirit, of primitive Christianity. ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord

... then past the post-office and the Hotel du Midi, to our own quarters for dinner. The Hotel de France, as it is called, is the best in Arreau, but is nevertheless not much more than a fairly large country inn. The rooms are very clean, and the food good, but the arrangements are somewhat primitive; yet for all this we were very well satisfied on the whole, though the necessity of starting at nine o'clock next morning prevented us indulging ...
— Twixt France and Spain • E. Ernest Bilbrough

... republic was commenced very differently from any other, and with what were real advantages, if she had not been too ambitious and too precipitate in seizing upon them. A republic has generally been considered the most primitive form of rule; it is, on the contrary, the very last pitch of refinement in government, and the cause of its failure up to the present has been, that no people have as yet been sufficiently enlightened to govern themselves. Republics, generally speaking, have at their commencement ...
— Diary in America, Series Two • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)

... interfere with your dinner, for Miss Payne and I have adopted primitive habits, and do not dine late; we indulge in high ...
— A Crooked Path - A Novel • Mrs. Alexander

... with zest. He was not, perhaps, aware that, through some remote ancestress on the spindle side, he "came of Harden's line," so that he and I had a common forebear with Sir Walter Scott, and were hundredth cousins of each other, if we reckon in the primitive manner by female descent. Of these Border ancestors, Louis inherited the courage; he was a fearless person, but one would not trace his genius to "The Bard of Rule," an Elliot named "Sweet Milk" who was slain in a duel by another ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... wedding was postponed indefinitely, she began to wonder whether it was quite impossible that Hawtrey should come back to her. She felt that he belonged to her, although he had never given her any very definite claim on him. She was primitive and passionate, but she was determined, and now that he had done what she had almost expected him to do, she meant to ...
— Masters of the Wheat-Lands • Harold Bindloss

... something not much under L6000. Major Scott, from all I have heard, was {p.100} a sober, sedate bachelor, of dull mind and frugal tastes, who, after his retirement from the army, divided his time between his mother's primitive fireside, and the society of a few whist-playing brother officers, that met for an evening rubber at Fortune's tavern. But, making every allowance for his retired and thrifty habits, I infer that the payments made to each of the three brothers out of their father's ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume V (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart

... exclaimed. "All those other men are used up, emotionally speaking. The count would turn a neat phrase even if he were to blow his brains out the next minute. They think they are splendidly cool, but it only means that they have exhausted all their powers of sensation. You are delightfully primitive and unspoiled, and then I suppose it is natural to like a fellow-countryman best, isn't it? Now, honest—have you found any girls over here you like as well ...
— Love, The Fiddler • Lloyd Osbourne

... I frankly admit, science was absent. In simple, primitive fashion that would have charmed a Darwinian disciple to observe, I "went for" the whole crowd. To employ the expressive idiom of the neighbourhood, I was "all over it and inside." Something clung about my feet. By kicking ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome

... hastily snatched up, or arbitrarily assumed. The principles were neither established by legitimate canons of experimental inquiry, nor the results tested by that indispensable element of a rational Deductive Method, verification by specific experience. Between the primitive method of Deduction and that which I have attempted to characterize, there is all the difference which exists between the Aristotelian physics and the Newtonian theory of ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill

... commemorated the warmest personal friendships in the profession, and, indeed, this could hardly have been otherwise, as they compelled its members into the closest habitual companionship. They rode together in the same primitive style, their saddle-bags stuffed with papers, documents, briefs, law-books, clothing, and, peradventure, some creature delectation also. They were exposed in common to the same inclemencies and impediments of travel, they lodged together at the same inns ...
— Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate and Cabinet - An Autobiography. • John Sherman

... was so thoroughly a colonist, and had so little idea of anything but primitive hospitality, that he had had no notion of writing beforehand to announce his coming, and accident had delayed the letters by which Norman and Meta had announced their decision of sending home their eldest ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge

... discovering points about poppa the existence of which I had not suspected. His appreciation of the joy of small prices had been concealed in him up to this date, and I congratulated him warmly upon its appearance. I believe it is inherent in primitive tribes and in all Englishmen, but protective tariffs and other influences are rapidly eradicating it in Americans, who should be condoled with on this point, more than they ...
— A Voyage of Consolation - (being in the nature of a sequel to the experiences of 'An - American girl in London') • Sara Jeannette Duncan

... to give a lecture in my native village, the shrewd little capital of the Upper Ward. I never lectured before; I have no turn for it; but Avunculus was urgent, and I had an odd sort of desire to say something to these strong-brained, primitive people of my youth, who were boys and girls when I left them. I could think of nothing to give them. At last I said to myself, "I'll tell them Ailie's story." I had often told it to myself; indeed, it came on me at intervals almost painfully, as if demanding to be told, as if I heard Rab whining ...
— Rab and His Friends • John Brown, M. D.

... for the hotel was rather a primitive place, and did not boast a bath-room, nor even a good tub or a large basin, and the young fellow had to sigh and make believe with a sponge before dressing hurriedly and going out to wait for the sun's rising and the first notes ...
— Old Gold - The Cruise of the "Jason" Brig • George Manville Fenn

... "That's it—primitive. That's him. He's the rough material; nobody's ever helped him to get into shape. A lot of folks pride themselves on what they call culture, forgettin' that it wasn't in them when they came into the world, that it growed on them after ...
— The Boss of the Lazy Y • Charles Alden Seltzer

... a laugh. It was all very primitive, very savage, she told herself; it was, above all, different from any of the life that she had known, and yet, in a mysterious way, it was familiar, as if the unrestrained emotion in his voice stirred some racial ...
— The Deliverance; A Romance of the Virginia Tobacco Fields • Ellen Glasgow

... to-morrow—and the "dwellers in the wilderness setting up the towers and the palaces thereof." [9] Thus, while in Greece this mysterious people are often represented as the aboriginal race, receiving from Phoenician and Egyptian settlers the primitive blessings of social life, in Italy we behold them the improvers in agriculture [10] and first ...
— Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... all chance of expedition. The route was not along one continuous trust, but here over a bit of turnpike and there over a bit of turnpike, with ever and anon long interregnums of township roads, repaired in the usual primitive style with mud and soft field-stones, that turned up like flitches of bacon. A man would travel from London to Exeter by rail in as short a time, and with far greater ease, than he would drive from Lord Scamperdale's to Jawleyford Court. His lordship being aware of this fact, and thinking, ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees

... all restraint. Hers was such beauty as lies in rich blood beneath dark coloring, in dusky hair and eyes, in the soft, warm contours of youth. Already she was slenderly full, an elemental daughter of Eve, primitive as one of her fur-clad ancestors. No forest fawn could have been more ...
— A Man Four-Square • William MacLeod Raine

... upon him almost savagely; it looked as if her primitive mother-passion were at bay for her young. "Where's help to come from? ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller

... larger experience of them, dear, you will find that there is usually a reason, or at least a primitive instinct of some sort, at the root of their actions. But, seriously, we must really concentrate our attention upon the poet, for my other engagement will call me away at four, which only leaves me ten minutes ...
— A Duet • A. Conan Doyle

... Primitive incandescence, attendant, in his fantastic view, on planetary origin by cometary impacts with the sun, combined, he concluded, with vast bulk to bring about this result. Jupiter has not yet had time to cool. Kant thought similarly in 1785;[1040] but the ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke

... more resisting than Wagner's music. Only folk aristocratically sure of themselves can be as gay and light at will. If there is anything in modern music to be compared with the sheer, blunt, powerful volumes of primitive art it is the work of Moussorgsky. And as the years pass, the man's stature and mind become more immense, more prodigious. One has but to hearken to the accent of the greater part of modern music ...
— Musical Portraits - Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers • Paul Rosenfeld

... her mamma! I appeal to you, my Kobolds, is such a baby worthy to be Queen of our realm, of a people more ancient than the mountains, older indeed than mankind; for we were the first inhabitants of the earth, we are Primitive Man!" ...
— Fairy Tales from the German Forests • Margaret Arndt

... decisions which have preceded it. The character of the feeling, therefore, as distinct from its intensity, is already determined for it by a previous process. And its intensity is undoubtedly greater amongst primitive and uneducated men than it is in civilized life. Amongst ourselves, not only are the feelings of approbation and disapprobation themselves largely modified by the account we take of mixed motives, qualifying circumstances, and the like, but the expression of, them is still further ...
— Progressive Morality - An Essay in Ethics • Thomas Fowler

... requests to Manila for protection and religious instruction. The richness and fertility of their country is described; and an interesting account is given of the gold-mines in the adjacent mountains, and the primitive mining operations conducted by the natives. These are Igorrotes, of whose appearance and customs some mention is made. As they are pagans, and lukewarm even in idolatry, it will be easy to make Christians of them. There is great reason to believe that the ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XIV., 1606-1609 • Various

... rear are two pine bed-frames, with spreads of sackcloth and plaid canopies; nearer are sets of shelves lined with trenchers and earthen crockery in formal array, while a wood-fire smoulders on the wide hearth in front between the window-openings, fortified with a primitive crane and kettle of strange designs and unrecorded antiquity, and with various pots and pans. Everything seems clean. Our hostess, pleased at entertaining distinguished and appreciative visitors, draws out a wooden bench for us, and attempts to rouse ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix

... Puerco, he would have seen the true Mecca breed, with which the Moslems conquered Spain. He would have also perceived how much the advantages of a beautiful clime and perpetual pasture has improved these noble animals, making them superior to the primitive stock, both in size, speed, and bottom. With one of them I made a journey of five thousand miles, and on arriving in Missouri, I sold him for eight hundred dollars. He was an entire horse, as white as snow, and standing seventeen and a half hands high. One thousand pounds ...
— Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet • Captain Marryat

... the word clay for shortness. In both, the enemy is really limestone; but in the first, disordered, and mixed with true clay; while, here, it is nearly pure, and crystallizes into its own primitive form, the oblique six-sided one, which you know: and out of these it makes regiments; and then squares of the regiments, and so charges the rock crystal, ...
— The Ethics of the Dust • John Ruskin

... priestcraft — less of what we now call popery — in those earlier days than there came to be later on; and the springs of truth, though somewhat tainted, were not poisoned, as it were, at the very source, as they afterwards became. Something of the purity of primitive times lingered in the minds of men, and here and there were always found pure spirits upon whom the errors of man obtained no hold — spirits that seemed to rise superior to their surroundings, and hold communion direct with heaven ...
— In the Days of Chivalry • Evelyn Everett-Green

... Vedic hymns we find Indra, the Sun, born of Dahana (Daphne), the Dawn, whom he afterwards, in the evening twilight, marries. To the Indian mind the story was here complete; but the Greeks had forgotten and outgrown the primitive signification of the myth. To them Oidipous and Iokaste were human, or at least anthropomorphic beings; and a marriage between them was a fearful crime which called for bitter expiation. Thus the latter part of the story arose ...
— Myths and Myth-Makers - Old Tales and Superstitions Interpreted by Comparative Mythology • John Fiske

... mother was already up, and seated among her maids, spinning at her wheel, as the fashion was in those primitive times, when great ladies did not disdain housewifery: and the king her father was preparing to go abroad at that early hour to council ...
— THE ADVENTURES OF ULYSSES • CHARLES LAMB

... replied. "In a primitive culture, things like this would be assigned supernatural explanations, and imbedded in the locally accepted religion. But this culture, while nominally religious, is highly rationalistic in practice. Typical lag-effect, characteristic ...
— Police Operation • H. Beam Piper

... drying were confined to aiding or hastening nature in the seasoning process by exposing the material to the direct heat from fires built in pits, over which the lumber was piled in a way to expose it to the heat rays of the fires below. This, of course, was a primitive, hazardous, and very unsatisfactory method, to say the least, but it marked the first step in the evolution of the present-day dry kiln, and in that particular only is ...
— Seasoning of Wood • Joseph B. Wagner

... loose to chase away she knew not what, which was troubling her with emotion she could neither entirely control nor explain later as the result of what seemed to her mere foolishness. If he was himself disturbed by his storm of primitive passion, he did not show ...
— Westways • S. Weir Mitchell

... a primitive heartiness. Whisky was served round in a shell, according to the ancient Highland custom. Dr Johnson would not partake of it; but, being desirous to do honour to the modes 'of other times', drank some ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell

... and learned man, who, although he was denied the Sacrament, did not suffer himself to be driven out of the Church of England till 1747. At last he established a small congregation in his own house in accordance with his own notion of primitive Christianity. He lived ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele

... cross of four equal arms "occurs innumerable times on the whorls of the three upper pre-historic cities of Hissarlik," and that if, as Burnouf and others suggest, the {image "svastika2.gif"} and {image "svastika1.gif"} represented primitive fire machines, this other cross "might also claim the honour of representing the two pieces of wood for producing the holy fire ...
— The Non-Christian Cross - An Enquiry Into the Origin and History of the Symbol Eventually Adopted as That of Our Religion • John Denham Parsons

... she laughed bowed her forehead on the back of her hand in the way Florindo thought so pretty when they were both young. "Yes," she said, "awful, awful! Why should people want to flock together when they feed? Do you suppose it's a survival of the primitive hospitality when those who had something to eat hurried to share it with those ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells

... Indian and European, will demur to the high place here assigned to the Advaita philosophy. I am far from claiming that the doctrine of Sankara is either primitive or unchallenged. Other forms of the Vedanta existed before him and became very strong after him. But so far as a synthesis of opinions which are divergent in details can be just, he gives a just synthesis and elaboration of the Upanishads. ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot

... capacity. It was, in short, an effort to represent the universal ground of all differences distinct or opposite, but in relation to which all 'antithesis' as well as all 'antitheta', existed only potentially. This was the container and withholder, (such is the primitive sense of the Hebrew word rendered darkness (Gen. 1. 2.)) out of which light, that is, the 'lux lucifica', as distinguished from 'lumen seu lux phaenomenalis', was produced;—say, rather, that which, producing itself into light as the one pole or antagonist power, remained ...
— Literary Remains, Vol. 2 • Coleridge

... to go to sleep. There was ample room for Phil and Larry to make up their primitive beds on the seats of the launch. Arrangements looking to this had been made in the beginning. True, it was always a chance as to whether one of them in turning over while he slept, might not roll off the elevated couch, ...
— Chums in Dixie - or The Strange Cruise of a Motorboat • St. George Rathborne

... him, for a moment grasped the tail of the horse. Every one of these pioneer leaders, from Clark and Boon to Sevier and Robertson, was required constantly to expose his life; each lost sons or brothers at the hands of the Indians, and each thinned the ranks of the enemy with his own rifle. In such a primitive state of society the man who led others was expected to show strength of body no less than strength of mind and heart; he depended upon his physical prowess almost as much as upon craft, courage, and headwork. The founder and head of each little community needed not only a shrewd brain and ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume Two - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1777-1783 • Theodore Roosevelt

... sight among the Highlanders; and some of the incidents are so well authenticated that I scarcely see how they can be denied. Of course, there is no accounting for it, but it is possible that among what we may call primitive people there are certain intuitions or instincts, call them what you like, that have been lost ...
— Rujub, the Juggler • G. A. Henty

... primitive hour of half-past five, Flora took her work, and went across the green to take ...
— Flora Lyndsay - or, Passages in an Eventful Life • Susan Moodie

... Longworth, gave him a dollar, which the latter good-humouredly put into his pocket, and it was not till he was asked to go into the house that the stranger discovered him to be the owner.[10] He is, however, delightfully vivacious, and full of agricultural hobbies. His wife is a very pleasing, primitive-looking person. We tasted at their house some of the ham for which this city, called by the wits Porkopolis, is so remarkable. The maple sugar is used in curing it, and improves the flavour ...
— First Impressions of the New World - On Two Travellers from the Old in the Autumn of 1858 • Isabella Strange Trotter

... was what marriage would mean to me, a contest with another woman for my husband's love! A fierce anger took possession of me. One moment I regretted my marriage to Dicky, the next I was fiercely primitive as any savage woman in my desire to crush my rival. I could have strangled Lillian Gale in that moment. Then common sense came back to me. What was it that woman had said? I had all the best cards in my ...
— Revelations of a Wife - The Story of a Honeymoon • Adele Garrison

... that physitheism is earlier and older than psychotheism. Perhaps there may be left a "doubting Thomas" who believes that the highest stage of psychotheism—that is, monotheism—was the original basis for the philosophy of the world, and that all other forms are degeneracies from that primitive and perfect state. If there be such a man left, to him what I have to say about ...
— Sketch of the Mythology of the North American Indians • John Wesley Powell

... on all hands that the primitive way of breaking eggs, before we eat them, was upon the larger end; but his present majesty's grandfather, while he was a boy, going to eat an egg, and breaking it according to the ancient practice, happened to cut one of his fingers; whereupon, ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 5 • Charles Sylvester

... coldness towards me on the part of Her Majesty for having gone so far as I had done. It was not until after the birth of the Duc de Normandie, her third child, in March, 1785, that her friendship resumed its primitive warmth. ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre

... is not necessary to study the twilight history of religion in primitive races nor to trace its origins in the cradle-stage of human life. Anthropologists are rendering a valuable service in their attempts to explore the baffling region of primitive man's mind, and they have hit upon some very suggestive clues, though so far only tentative ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones

... a few miserable stunted gums. They bear, in fact, a striking similarity, both in respect to their soil and productions, to the barren wastes on the coast of Port Jackson. They are very rocky, but they want granite, the distinguishing characteristic of primitive mountains. Sandstone thickly studded with quartz and a little freestone, are the only varieties which they offer; a circumstance the more singular, as the moment you descend into the low country beyond them, granite is the only sort ...
— Statistical, Historical and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales and its Dependent Settlements in Van Diemen's Land • William Charles Wentworth

... fashion in dress which is always unbecoming, especially when the arms are thin. The hair of the elder woman was doubled back in front, from about the middle of the forehead, and the rest of the head was covered by a dowd cap, the most primitive of all female headdresses, being a plain shell, or skull-cap, as it were, for the head, pointed behind, and without any fringe or border whatsoever. This turning up of the hair was peculiar only to married ...
— The Evil Eye; Or, The Black Spector - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton

... every one is free to use his own: to wit, What constitutes identity, or difference in two things, in the common acceptation of sameness? All languages may be called the same, as being all made up of the same primitive sounds, expressed by the letters of the different alphabets. But, in this sense, all things on earth are the same, as consisting of matter. This gives up the useful distribution into genera and species, which we form, arbitrarily ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson

... the primitive churches in their disposition to work for others. They are imbued with a spirit of labor. They go from house to house, reading and preaching the word. This is the theme in the shop, the field, ...
— History Of The Missions Of The American Board Of Commissioners For Foreign Missions To The Oriental Churches, Volume II. • Rufus Anderson

... impressively brings out the impelling motive of such titanic lives. On one of his expeditions Alexander penetrates into the land of Scythian barbarians. These child-like people are so contented with their simple, primitive existence that they beseech Alexander to give them immortality. He answers that this is not in his power. Surprised, they ask why, then, if he is only a mortal, he is making such a stir in the world. Thereupon ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke

... unity, higher division of functions. But the functions themselves, like those of your priests and judges and soldiers, may be as barbaric and cruel, or as irrational and unintelligent, as any that exist among the most primitive peoples. Advance in civilisation doesn't necessarily involve either advance in real knowledge of one's relations to the universe, or advance in moral goodness and personal culture. Some highly civilised nations ...
— The British Barbarians • Grant Allen

... that he had not often walked the Road in previous states of life, as for instance that Eastern woman had done who accosted me before the arrival of the Hare. So to speak his crude nature had scarcely outgrown the primitive human condition in which necessity as well as taste make it customary and pleasant to men to kill; that condition through which almost every boy passes on his way to manhood, I suppose by the working of some secret ...
— The Mahatma and the Hare • H. Rider Haggard

... it was in 1805; but the primitive simplicity and "lowliness" of the chapel was changed by the addition a few years ago of an apse, by the removal of some of the old rafters, and by the ...
— The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Vol. III • William Wordsworth

... a few days out they encountered a great storm which lasted so long that, by the time its fury abated, the Knight had determined to give up the hunt of the dragon. They were at last blown on shore, for navigation was primitive in those days. Worn out with his travels and anxiety, the fourth suitor gave himself up to rest. He had caught a very heavy cold, and had to go to bed with ...
— Japanese Fairy Tales • Yei Theodora Ozaki

... an assembly gathered for such a purpose, and oftentimes is not really necessary. It is also to be noticed that the Church's true worship is the Holy Communion; all other services are but adjuncts to the one service appointed by our Lord Himself. In the Primitive Church an ordinary Christian would not have considered that he had kept the Lord's Day as a day of worship if he had not attended a celebration of the Holy Communion. When, therefore, our people grasp these Scriptural ideas, then no longer can it be said that worship ...
— The American Church Dictionary and Cyclopedia • William James Miller

... Iliads of preposterous mischeife From your intemperate breach of faith to me Fetch their loathed essence; thinke but on the love, The holy love I bore you, that we two —Had you bin constant—might have taught the wor[ld] Affections primitive purenes; when, from Your abrogation of it, Bonvills death, Your daughter['s] losse have luc[k]lessly insu'd. The streame that, like a Crocodile, did weepe Ore them whom with an over ravenous kisse Its moyst lips stifled, will record your fault In watery characters ...
— A Collection of Old English Plays, Vol. II • Various

... neglected the principal sources of information, which were to be found only in the north of Europe, and in the west of Ireland and Scotland. In another particular they all failed of success; they never discovered some of the principal modes in which the primitive radical words were combined to form the more modern compounds. On this subject, therefore, almost everything remains to be done.... I can assure the American public that the errors in Johnson's Dictionary are ten times as numerous as they suppose; and that the confidence now reposed ...
— Noah Webster - American Men of Letters • Horace E. Scudder

... Indian. The brilliant and strikingly designed Navajo blankets may be used for both rugs and couch covers, or hung up as wall-ornaments. Moqui basketware serves equally well for useful purposes, such as scrap-baskets, and for ornamentation. The pottery of the Pueblo Indians, being naive and primitive in design, is much more intimate and therefore appropriate than the ...
— Practical Suggestions for Mother and Housewife • Marion Mills Miller

... of pudding-stone mountains, is a general fact, so far as it is founded upon observations that are made in Africa, Germany, and Britain. We may now reason upon this general fact, in order to see how far it countenances the idea of primitive mountains, on the one hand, or on the other supports the present theory, which admits of nothing primitive in the visible or examinable parts of ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 1 (of 4) • James Hutton

... a people who require a very large quantity of land, since they possess great numbers of cattle which must have grazing room. Also their cultivation being of the most primitive order, and consisting as it does of picking out the very richest patches of land, and cropping them till they are exhausted, all ordinary land being rejected as too much trouble to work, the possession, or the right of usor, of several hundred ...
— Cetywayo and his White Neighbours - Remarks on Recent Events in Zululand, Natal, and the Transvaal • H. Rider Haggard

... same desire which in those days of my youth, in 1846, took me to Nohant, —the desire to see the country and the places of which the books that so charmed us were full. Those old provinces of the centre of France, primitive and slumbering,—Berry, La Marche, Bourbonnais; those sites and streams in them, of name once so indifferent to us, but to which George Sand gave such a music for our ear,—La Chatre, Ste. Severe, the Vallee Noire, the Indre, the Creuse; how many a reader of ...
— Selections from the Prose Works of Matthew Arnold • Matthew Arnold

... plan. This plan, which was first adopted by St Bruno and his twelve companions at the original institution at Chartreux, near Grenoble, was maintained in all the Carthusian establishments throughout Europe, even after the ascetic severity of the order had been to some extent relaxed, and the primitive simplicity of their buildings had been exchanged for the magnificence of decoration which characterizes such foundations as the Certosas of Pavia and Florence. According to the rule of St Bruno, all the members of a Carthusian brotherhood ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... Carpeted with moss and heather, their coast-lines showed a series of ravines and clefts and little sandy bays, with a growth of splendid pine-woods that came down to the water's edge and led the eye through unknown depths of shadow and mystery into the very heart of primitive forest. ...
— Three More John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood

... a broken heart in your hands! A broken heart, gentlemen! Creation's masterpiece, flawed cracked, SHIVERED TO BITS! See how the blood flows from it—mark where its strings are cut and cut—its delicate fibres violated—its primitive aroma evaporated to all the winds of heaven. Make that heart your own, gentlemen, and say at how many pounds you value the demoniac damage. And oh, may your verdict still entitle you to the blissful confidence of that divine, purpureal sex, the fairest floral specimens of which ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, December 4, 1841 • Various

... her to feel offended at this cheery, vigorous young fellow with the winning smile and the firm-set jaw. She liked the warmth in his honest brown eyes. She liked the play of muscular grace beneath his well-fitting clothes. The sinuous ease of his lean, wide-shouldered body stirred faintly some primitive instinct in her maiden heart. Sheba did not know, as her resilient muscles carried her forward joyfully, that she was answering the call of ...
— The Yukon Trail - A Tale of the North • William MacLeod Raine

... mimes and mummers, and, I fear, think of dramatic authors as liars and pandars, whose main business is the voluptuous soothing of the tired city speculator when what he calls the serious business of the day is over. Passion, the life of drama, means nothing to them but primitive sexual excitement: such phrases as "impassioned poetry" or "passionate love of truth" have fallen quite out of their vocabulary and been replaced by "passional crime" and the like. They assume, as far as I can ...
— Bernard Shaw's Preface to Major Barbara • George Bernard Shaw

... below. Generally speaking, the true Klemantan designs are quite simple, and it is noteworthy that although the Kenyah tribes most nearly akin to Kayans have borrowed the Kayan tatu patterns, the majority of Kenyah and Klemantan tribes employ quite simple designs, whilst the primitive Kenyahs of the Batang Kayan river hardly tatu at all. A remarkable exception to the general simplicity of the Klemantan patterns is furnished by the Ukits, Bakatan, and Biadjau, who tatu very extensively in the most complex designs; the Long Utan, an extinct tribe, ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall

... would be right for me to say, did the time serve, and were this the occasion—let me add,—you are a Union party. Your origin has been referred to as having occurred eight years ago. In one sense it is true. But you are far older than that. I see before me not only primitive Republicans and primitive Abolitionists, but I see also primitive Democrats and primitive Whigs. * * * As a Union party I will follow you to the ends of the earth, and to the gates of death. But as an Abolition party—as a Republican party—as a Whig party—as ...
— History of the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson, • Edumud G. Ross

... a general law in psycho-physics, known as FECHNER's law, which says that changes of the apparent impression of light are proportional not to the changes of the intensity but to these changes divided by the primitive intensity. A similar law is valid for all sensations. A conversation is inaudible in the vicinity of a waterfall. An increase of a load in the hand from nine to ten hectograms makes no great difference in the feeling, whereas an increase ...
— Lectures on Stellar Statistics • Carl Vilhelm Ludvig Charlier

... whatever naturalists call them. The trout seemed as if they could not have too much of these abominable wretches, and the flies were blown across the loch, not singly, but in populous groups. I had never seen anything like them in any hook-book, nor could I deceive the trout by the primitive dodge of tying a red thread round the shank of a dark fly. So I waded out, and fell to munching a frugal sandwich and watching Nature, not without ...
— Angling Sketches • Andrew Lang

... latter part of August, has given a picturesque character of its own to the life of the village and environs. In the primitive days of the industry, when the harvesting of the crop did not require any additional help from outside of the immediate region, the task of hop-picking was lightened by the enjoyment of social pleasures and romantic excitements ...
— The Story of Cooperstown • Ralph Birdsall

... his face turned toward that region where lived the unspeakable noises of the swirling missiles. There was the faintest shadow of a smile on his lips as he looked at Collins. He gave a sigh, a little primitive breath ...
— The Little Regiment - And Other Episodes of the American Civil War • Stephen Crane

... than a cause, of their backward institutions. Their social activities are such as to restrict their objects of attention and interest, and hence to limit the stimuli to mental development. Even as regards the objects that come within the scope of attention, primitive social customs tend to arrest observation and imagination upon qualities which do not fructify in the mind. Lack of control of natural forces means that a scant number of natural objects enter into associated ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey

... lamplight, hastily avoided him. That Inez—at this time—should have been taken from her home, abducted, frightened or harassed, was the sin unpardonable. For it he meant to exact a capital punishment. The law, just then, meant to him nothing; only the primitive instinct of an ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman

... point to be remembered in the history of the English language, is that it was not the primitive and original tongue of any of the British Islands, nor yet of any portion of them. Indeed, of the whole of Great Britain it is not the language at the present moment. Welsh is spoken in Wales, Manks in the Isle ...
— A Handbook of the English Language • Robert Gordon Latham

... to man. There is, however, one other—that which forms the subject of the present article—Pantomime, and which may be considered as the natural form of the visible language—literature being taken as the artificial. This is the most primitive as well as most comprehensive, of all. It is the earliest, as it is the most intuitive—the smiles and frowns of the mother being the first signs understood by the infant. Indeed, if we consider for a moment that all existence is but a Pantomime, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 1, July 17, 1841 • Various

... of chronological convenience. What is called modern history is in reality the formation of a new cycle of culture, connected in several stages of its development with the perishing or perished civilization of the Mediterranean states, as this was connected with the primitive civilization of the Indo-Germanic stock, but destined, like the earlier cycle, to traverse an orbit of its own. It too is destined to experience in full measure the vicissitudes of national weal and woe, the periods ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen

... study of the almost primitive picture Carolyn June forgot the flight of time and the speed at which they ...
— The Ramblin' Kid • Earl Wayland Bowman

... it something wild and defiant. When the Matron turned her over she did not yawn or cry, but uttered a kind of snarl. I suppose that here is an instance of atavism, that the child throw back for thousands or tens of thousands of years, to when her progenitors were savages, and that their primitive instincts have reasserted themselves in her, although she was born in the twentieth century. She had been ten months in the Home and was doing well. Indeed, the Matron told me that they had taken her out and given her opportunities of running away, but that ...
— Regeneration • H. Rider Haggard

... the imagination has been the want of illustrative examples. In a State where there is no fever of speculation, no inflamed desire for sudden wealth, where the poor are all simple-minded and contented, and the rich are all honest and generous, where society is in a condition of primitive purity and politics is the occupation of only the capable and the patriotic, there are necessarily no materials for such a history as we have constructed out of ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... the beginnings of property among animals, of its communistic stages among primitive races, and of its later individualistic developments, together with a brief sketch of its probable ...
— Volcanoes: Past and Present • Edward Hull

... occupation," said Flint. "It's an avocation, and it isn't silly. Any one of us would enjoy it, if he weren't so self-conscious. And it's more picturesque than golf and takes more skill. And what courtesy! These men form what is really a club—a club in its primitive and true sense. And I was invited to be one ...
— Chimney-Pot Papers • Charles S. Brooks

... of march. Again a bucket is filled with tea-cups, or I shoulder the fire-shovel. The two weeks drag themselves away, and the cry is still, "Unfinished!" To prevent petrifying into a fossil remain, or relapsing into primitive barbarism, or degenerating into a dormouse, I rouse my energies and determine to put my own shoulder to the wheel and see if something cannot be accomplished. I rise early in the morning and walk to Dan, to hire ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various



Words linked to "Primitive" :   Heidelberg man, fine arts, troglodyte, somebody, barbarian, Basket Maker, cave man, feral man, cave dweller, mound builder, untrained, Piltdown hoax, Aryan, primitive person, autochthon, expression, noncivilised, individual, wild man, soul, savage, anthropology, beaux arts, missing link, primitive art, primitiveness, caveman, mortal, Piltdown man, Indo-European, early, Homo heidelbergensis, formula, ape-man, person, noncivilized, someone, word, rude



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