"Fossil" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... these folk—the Cubans or Siboneyes—have vanished, save in the instance of the temple remains near Cobre, and an occasional caney or mound of the dead, a truncated cone of earth and broken stones. Some fossil skeletons found in caves, and of an alleged age of fifty thousand years, denote an ancient race of large, strong people. There are other skeletons of Siboneyes, Chinese, and negroes in the caves,—victims of herding, slavery, fever, cruelty, and suicide. ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner
... overview: Kazakhstan, the largest of the former Soviet republics in territory, excluding Russia, possesses enormous fossil fuel reserves as well as plentiful supplies of other minerals and metals. It also is a large agricultural - livestock and grain - producer. Kazakhstan's industrial sector rests on the extraction and processing of these natural resources and also on a growing ...
— The 2004 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... French plays, French lectures. We read French, speak French, sing French, and look French; and, if you are so barbarously ignorant as not to understand that language, why, you might just as well retire for an old fossil or petrifaction. You're obsolete, that's all; as much behind the times as RIP VAN WINKLE himself, after his memorable sleep. English is out of date here—a relic of the Dark Ages. Fashionable ladies return from Paris, bringing with them accomplished bonnes, and every one is prohibited ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 8, May 21, 1870 • Various
... I devoted my whole time to arranging my huge pile of notes, to observing, and to experimenting in relation to the transmutation of species. During the voyage of the Beagle I had been deeply impressed by discovering in the pampean formation great fossil animals covered with armor like that on the existing armadillos; secondly, by the manner in which closely allied animals replace one another in proceeding southward over the continent; and thirdly, by the South American character of most of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... know primeval birds had teeth, three fingers with claws on each hand, and a long lizard-like tail provided with nearly twenty pairs of well-formed true feathers. But unfortunately neither this lizard-tailed bird, nor yet the fossil birds found in America, throw any light on the origin of feathers. Ornithologists and others who have devoted much time to the study of birds have as a rule assumed that feathers were made out of scales, that ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... course, as in process of time the mud becomes hardened and solidified, the shells of these animals are preserved and firmly imbedded in the limestone or sandstone which is being thus formed. You may see in the galleries of the Museum up stairs specimens of limestones in which such fossil remains of existing animals are imbedded. There are some specimens in which turtles' eggs have been imbedded in calcareous sand, and before the sun had hatched the young turtles, they became covered over with calcareous mud, and thus have been ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... mollusks were living in Wales, certain similar crustaceans and mollusks were living in Australia. Yet the improbability of this assumption may be readily shown from Sir R. Murchison's own facts. If, as he points out, the fossil crustaceans of the uppermost Silurian rocks in Lanarkshire are, "with one doubtful exception," all "distinct from any of the forms known on the same horizon in England;" how can it be fairly presumed that the forms existing on the other side of the Earth during the Silurian period, were nearly allied ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... slipping into quiet—these were among the horrors that assailed the ears of the voyagers in the Pendragon. Such a discord of laments has not tingled to the indifferent stars since the ice-wave swept into their last retreats, and crushed among the rocks that bear their fossil forms, the fauna of the preglacial period, the Ichthyosaurus, the Brontosaurus, the Guyas Cutis (or Ring-tailed Roarer), the Mastodon, and ...
— The Disentanglers • Andrew Lang
... species, we say; for the live specimens which still go about under that character are too evidently to be classed as spurious in Natural History: the Gospel of Richard Arkwright once promulgated, no Monk of the old sort is any longer possible in this world. But fancy a deep-buried Mastodon, some fossil Megatherion, Ichthyosaurus, were to begin to speak from amid its rock-swathings, never so indistinctly! The most extinct fossil species of Men or Monks can do, and does, this miracle,—thanks to the Letters of the Alphabet, ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... I had enjoyed the privilege of personal acquaintance with Dr. Buckland, and in 1834, when engaged in the investigation of fossil fishes, I had travelled with him through parts of England and Scotland, and had derived invaluable assistance from his friendly advice and direction. To him I was indebted for an introduction to all the geologists and palaeontologists of Great Britain, with none of whom, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... My theory would give zest to recent & Fossil Comparative Anatomy: it would lead to study of instincts, heredity, & mind heredity, whole metaphysics, it would lead to closest examination of hybridity & generation, causes of change in order to know what we have come from & to what we tend, ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... owns twenty-four coins from Carteia, whereas Florez (Medallas, Madrid, 1773) shows a total of only thirty-three. Amongst his antiquities there is a charming statuette of Minerva, a bronze miniature admirably finished. He has collected the rock fauna, especially the molluscs, fossil and modern. He is preparing an album of the Flora Calpensis. His birds' nests were lately sold to an Englishman. All these objects, of immense local interest, were offered by him at the lowest possible rate to the Military ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... delight in idly listening to the prattle of his Moorish and Syrian slave-boys as they played knuckle-bones on the beach, his enjoyment of the cool breeze which swept through his villa even in summer or of the cool plash of water from the fountain in the peristyle, his curiosity about the big fossil bones dug up in the island which he sent to Rome to be placed in the galleries of his house on the Palatine, his fun in quizzing the pedants who followed him by Greek verses of his own making. But in the midst of his idleness the indefatigable ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... one of his day, the iridescent Irishman, whose remembered repartees are a feast, sharp and ringing, at divers tables descending from the upper to the fat citizen's, where, instead of coming in the sequence of talk, they are exposed by blasting, like fossil teeth of old Deluge sharks in monotonous walls of our chalk-quarries. Nor are these the less welcome for the violence of their introduction among a people glad to be set burning rather briskly awhile by the most unexpected of digs ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... for believing that the appearance of fossil horses with a diminishing number of toes is caused by the creation at separate periods of a four-, a three-, a two-, and a one-toed horse are, he says, "personal, philosophical, historical," and he opposes them with the utmost ...
— Reflections and Comments 1865-1895 • Edwin Lawrence Godkin
... deeds, and after the dreary inflated nonsense one is compelled to listen to from their better educated townsmen, it is refreshing to talk with them. From the Belleville pothouse I went to the Faubourg St. Germain. In this solemn abode of a fossil aristocracy I have a relative—a countess. She is, I believe, my cousin about sixteen times removed, but as she is the only person of rank with whom my family can claim the most distant relationship, we stick to the cousinship and send her every year cheap presents, which she reciprocates ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere
... feathers on an arrow's shaft. The name expresses exactly what they are like—diminutive kangaroos—but, of course, they are rodents and not marsupials. During the glacial period of the early Pleistocene, about one hundred thousand years ago, we know from fossil remains that there were great invasions into Europe of most of these types of tiny mammals, which we were catching during this delightful summer on ...
— Across Mongolian Plains - A Naturalist's Account of China's 'Great Northwest' • Roy Chapman Andrews
... spoken of the deposits of salt, petroleum, and lignite, and in association with the second is found the substance known as ozokerit or fossil wax. This is a brownish-yellow translucent crystalline hydrocarbon, which softens with the warmth of the hand, and burns with a bright light. It has never been industrially applied, excepting in small quantities by the peasantry, who themselves fabricate rude candles ...
— Roumania Past and Present • James Samuelson
... Farinole, the tertiary deposits are seen in successive layers forming beds which in some places are in the aggregate from 400 to 500 feet thick, and the calcareous beds contain great quantities of fossil remains of marine animals of low organisation, such as sea-urchins, pectens, and other shells; forming a compact mass, of which the greater part of the formation consists. The singular phenomenon of the presence of rounded boulders of euritic porphyry, ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... rhinoceros. Though in Europe bone caves contain the remains of animals very different from those now existing in the same regions, yet in the caves of Brazil extinct species of nearly all the territorial quadrupeds now inhabiting this region occur. The Australian caverns contain fossil bones of a large extinct kangaroo. In New Zealand the wingless apteryx is still found in the wilds, and the caves of that country show us that it was preceded by other wingless birds of gigantic stature; among them the moa, which, when ...
— The Mines and its Wonders • W.H.G. Kingston
... to trot out the members of his marital stud for discussion of their points with his more humble fellow-polygamist of the hammer; but when I happened to touch upon the earliest Mrs. Heber, whom I naturally thought he would by this time regard as a forgotten fossil in the Lower Silurian strata of his connubial life, and referred to the interview I had enjoyed with her on the afternoon before entering the city, his whole manner changed to a proper husbandly dignity, and, without ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... but we assured him that the man was far ahead of many specimens we had met. We never see an opossum in Virginia—a fossil animal in most other places—but it seems the sign of the moral stratification around. There are many varieties of opossum in Virginia,—political and religious: Saturn, who devours his offspring, has not ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... stone quarry, which a few clumps of trees spotted with dark green. Of the ancient city one could see the sunburnt tower of the Capitol, the black cypresses of the Palatine, and the ruins of the palace of Septimius Severus, suggesting the white osseous carcase of some fossil monster, left there by a flood. In front, was enthroned the modern city with the long, renovated buildings of the Quirinal, whose yellow walls stood forth with wondrous crudity amidst the vigorous crests of the garden trees. And to right ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... read this narrative doubt not its veracity. There be much in Nature that we wot not of, and many strange countries to explore. The monsters who roamed the earth in ancient times, as their fossil bones attest, are still to be seen in those regions hitherto unvisited by white men, and in the fathomless depths of uncharted ...
— Adventures in Southern Seas - A Tale of the Sixteenth Century • George Forbes
... prepared by treating with sulphuric acid, and afterwards with ammonia, the hydrocarbon oil containing sulphur obtained by the dry distillation of the fossil remains of fish and sea-animals, which form a bituminous mineral deposit in Germany. This product has been admixed with soap for many years, the quantity generally used being about 5 per cent.; the resultant soap is possessed of a characteristic ...
— The Handbook of Soap Manufacture • W. H. Simmons
... SENSIBLE, as the phrase is,—others prophetic. Some forms of disease, even, may prophesy forms of health. The geologist has discovered that the figures of serpents, griffins, flying dragons, and other fanciful embellishments of heraldry, have their prototypes in the forms of fossil species which were extinct before man was created, and hence "indicate a faint and shadowy knowledge of a previous state of organic existence." The Hindus dreamed that the earth rested on an elephant, and the elephant on a tortoise, and the tortoise on ...
— Walking • Henry David Thoreau
... source This entry states the percentage share of electricity generated from each energy source. These are fossil fuel, hydro, nuclear, and ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... legitimate prediction as there is for experimentation. All discoverers have made predictions; Harvey predicted the existence of the capillaries, Halley predicted the return of his comet, Adams predicted the place of the planet Neptune, the missing link in the evolutionary series of the fossil horses had been predicted long before it was actually found by Professor Marsh. Pasteur predicted that the sheep inoculated with the weak anthrax virus would be alive in the anthrax-infected field, while those not so protected would ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... palaeozoic rocks, stratified conglomerates and quartzites. They rejoiced with Miss Lever, however, when she secured a fairly intact belemnite. It was the only good find they had, though some of the girls got broken bits of fossil shells. ...
— The Luckiest Girl in the School • Angela Brazil
... a prosperous Western-style capitalist economy, with a per capita GNP comparable to levels in industrialized West European countries. Rich in natural resources, Australia is a major exporter of agricultural products, minerals, metals, and fossil fuels. Of the top 25 exports, 21 are primary products, so that, as happened during 1983-84, a downturn in world commodity prices can have a big impact on the economy. The government is pushing for increased exports of manufactured ...
— The 1991 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... of a bean out of a pill-box. "So far as I am a judge this human bone is the analogue of the one which you hold in your hand. That will give you some idea of the size of the creature. You will observe from the cartilage that this is no fossil specimen, but recent. What do you ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... embodying them with an instantaneous thought, and therefore we often find sculptures from his hand left at the critical point of their struggle to get out of the marble. The statue of St. Matthew looks like the antediluvian fossil of a human being of an epoch when humanity was mightier and more majestic than now, long ago imprisoned in stone, ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... of his native friends in Japan, and he used to write in the Japanese character even if they understood English. That was what he chiefly used the Chinese ink for. But he also used to copy the inscriptions from these things." Here Stephen lifted from the mantelpiece what looked like a fossil Bath bun, but was actually a clay tablet covered with ...
— The Mystery of 31 New Inn • R. Austin Freeman
... pronounced "Ambar;" wherein I would derive "Ambrosia." Ambergris was long supposed to be a fossil, a vegetable which grew upon the sea-bottom or rose in springs; or a "substance produced in the water like naphtha or bitumen"(!): now it is known to be the egesta of a whale. It is found in lumps weighing several pounds upon the Zanzibar Coast and is sold at a high price, being held a potent ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... extinct, as now seems very probable, Lowell's masterly portrait of him will remain, and future generations can reconstruct him from it, as Agassiz reconstructed an extinct species of mammal from fossil bones. ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... river's edge was a little shore formed of round fragments of rock washed into this shape by the constant action of water, and giving the place the appearance of being strewn with thousands of fossil cannon balls. Evidently when the water of the underground river is high there is no beach at all, or very little, between the border of the stream and the precipitous cliffs; but now there was a space of seven or eight yards. And here, on this beach, we determined to land, in order to ...
— Allan Quatermain • by H. Rider Haggard
... community; for among all the tribes of the Vril-ya there is considerable commercial interchange. I may here observe, that their money currency does not consist of the precious metals, which are too common among them for that purpose. The smaller coins in ordinary use are manufactured from a peculiar fossil shell, the comparatively scarce remnant of some very early deluge, or other convulsion of nature, by which a species has become extinct. It is minute, and flat as an oyster, and takes a jewel-like polish. This coinage circulates among all the tribes of the Vril-ya. Their larger transactions ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... and if we had a natural history, also fossil, setting forth to us the customs and habits of these animals; if the savages that are said to be the nearest neighbors to monkeys were all fossils; we should find ourselves in presence of a progressive and continued development of beings, and, for an inattentive mind, all would ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... "That fossil, so proud of its petty reforms half a century ago that it has stood still ever since to admire them! It is a synagogue for snobs—who ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... done, 'that you have decided rightly; my judgment inclined the other way. I should be sorry if your letter to Lord Derby led him to make any more extended proposal. It could not possibly succeed, as matters now stand; and the abortive attempt would be injurious to him. The reconstruction of the fossil remains of the old Peel party is a hopeless task. No human power can now reanimate it with the breath of life; it is decomposed into atoms and will be remembered only as a happy accident, ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... the fossils of Solenhofen to be sold in Bavaria; the best in existence, containing many specimens unique for perfectness, and one, unique as an example of a species (a whole kingdom of unknown living creatures being announced by that fossil). This collection, of which the mere market worth, among private buyers, would probably have been some thousand or twelve hundred pounds, was offered to the English nation for seven hundred; but we would not give seven hundred, ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... looked for a department of Fish, with your lordship's name at the head of it; but I did not find it. It would be a fine department. It would divide itself naturally into three classes—living fish, fossil fish, ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... profit by the instructions of the celebrated Werner; and, when there, he devoted himself, with the characteristic ardour of his disposition, to make himself master of geology and botany, and prosecuted in an especial manner the study of the fossil remains of plants in the rocks around that place. In 1792, he published at Berlin a learned treatise, entitled Specimen Florae, Friebergensis Subterraniae; which procured for him such celebrity, that he was soon after appointed director-general ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... The fossil remains previously referred to are of course only a few of the most important, but it is remarked as a curious and notable fact that among the fossils of the lower orders of life in the Bad Lands, the ...
— Cave Regions of the Ozarks and Black Hills • Luella Agnes Owen
... and comprehensive survey of the thoughts of the past and passing age. I commend it to the coming generation as a useful means of acquiring some notion of the main puzzles and controversies of the strenuous time through which their fathers have lived. Fossil remains of these occasionally fierce discussions they will find embedded in literature; and although we are emerging from that conflict, it can only be to find fresh opportunities for discovery, fresh fields of interest, in the newer age. Towards a wise reception of these discoveries, ...
— God and the World - A Survey of Thought • Arthur W. Robinson
... differences in the structure of the baculum. I assign Tamias to the tribe Marmotini. I assign Eutamias to the tribe Callosciurini, but do so only tentatively because I have not, at first hand, studied the bacula of most of the Callosciurini. The fossil record is too incomplete to reveal the time when the two tribes diverged. The subgenera Eutamias and Neotamias are closely related. Indications are that the divergence of the two subgenera occurred, geologically, but a short ...
— Genera and Subgenera of Chipmunks • John A. White
... steam power into that new region, connected with a highway across the isthmus of Panama, no one can calculate. The experiment along the shores of Chili and Peru has already commenced; and the cheap rate at which fossil fuel can be had has proved a great facility. Under circumstances so peculiarly propitious, to what an extent, then, may not steam navigation be carried on the smooth expanse of the Southern ocean? If there are two sections of the globe more pre-eminently suited ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... considerable interest among the various visitors. Mr. Grubemup, encouraged by this highly satisfactory result, proceeded to scratch up with his thumb-nail a portion of the soil, and his geological enterprise was speedily rewarded by a fossil of the most interesting character. Upon close inspection it proved to be a highly crystallised rat's-tail, from which the geologist inferred that there were rats on the Kensington-road at a much earlier ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, October 2, 1841 • Various
... frost; the wavering line of ripple-marks of Seas that shall ebb no more; growth of lichen; an army of ants in full march; a passion-flower trailing from a crevice, its purple blooms lying upon the gray stone near where it is stamped with the fossil imprint of a sea-weed, faded long ago and forgotten. Or is it, alas! for the eyes ...
— The Riddle Of The Rocks - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... the distortion leads to the inference that the rock which contains these shells has been subjected to enormous pressure in a direction at right angles to the planes of cleavage. The shells are all flattened and spread out in these planes. Compare this fossil trilobite of normal proportions with these others which have suffered distortion. Some have lain across, some along, and some oblique to the cleavage of the slate in which they are found; but in all cases the distortion is such, as required for its production ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... 138 degrees, and that will cover all of our needs for hot countries. But in getting paraffins that melt at 136, 137 or 138 degrees we have a rather definite crystalline element. Mr. Bixby has suggested the use of the earth wax which is mined in Australia. It is really a fossil paraffin and is not so granular. I found that it is not to be had in this country at the present time, however, although various dealers told me that they had it, and I obtained from a firm in New York City a misbranded specimen called ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Fourteenth Annual Meeting • Various
... case in relation to everything in France. An aristocratic Englishman may live years in Paris without really knowing anything about it. In the first place, he goes there with letters of introduction to the Faubourg St. Germain, where he finds only the fossil remains of the old noblesse, intermixed with a slight proportion of the actual intelligence of the country, and here he moves round in the stagnant circles of historical France, and it is a wonder if he gets so much ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... the birth of geology, and fossil paleontology, concurring with vast strides ahead in the science of comparative anatomy, it is a well-established fact, that oftentimes the most scientific museum admitted as genuine fragments of the human osteology what in fact belonged to the gigantic brutes of our earth in her ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... want anything of that," declared John. "If you stand for sense and experience and try to learn them, they think you're a fossil and out of sight of reality; and if you attempt to be young and interest yourself in their wretched little affairs and pay the boy with the boys and the girl with the girls, they think you're ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... in all probability, tokens of descent from this appallingly ancient people. The type appears occasionally in the Basque provinces, and on the Atlantic coast of Morocco, but nowhere else. Few civilised races inhabit the land where the fossil relics of their own lineal ancestors mark the furthest point of human occupancy; yet it would seem to be so with the true Irish. In what other way can this anomalous variety of the human race be accounted for? Ay, ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... with people in the mass, David, and no one living can do it better. I am like most women, I think: I deal with the individual. That is all the difference. When do the Annerses go out to the fossil-beds?" ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde
... and warm, but full of enthusiasm and interest for the things they had seen. The amount of "curios" and souvenirs brought aboard would fill a museum. Pieces of projectiles and Mauser cartridge shells, fragments of an unusual red wood, and pieces of fossil rock, of which the cliff was composed, were stowed away in bags ...
— A Gunner Aboard the "Yankee" • Russell Doubleday
... fortikigi. Fortify fortigi. Fortitude kuragxeco. Fortnight du semajnoj. Fortress fortikajxo. Fortune ricxeco. Forward! antauxen! Forward (in advance) antauxe. Forward ekspedi, sendi. Fossil elfosatajxo. Foster nutri. Foster child sucxinfano. Foul malpura. Foulard silktuko. Found fondi. Foundation fondo, fondajxo. Founder (ship) sxipperei. Foundry fandejo. Fountain fontano. Four kvar. Fowl (domestic) kortbirdo. Fox vulpo. Fraction ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... discovery of huge fossil animals, as Mrs. Jameson says, on the high authority of Professor Owen, may have modified our ancestors' notions of dragons: but in the old serpent worship we believe the real explanation of these stories is to be found. There is no doubt that human victims, and even young maidens, were offered ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... resembling arrow heads, hammers and celts. Several bones which are not human have however been since found with these three skeletons, one possibly of a dog, another of a squirrel. They may be those of the funeral feast Sir William Dawson mentions in his work "Fossil Men," as usually to be looked ...
— A New Hochelagan Burying-ground Discovered at Westmount on the - Western Spur of Mount Royal, Montreal, July-September, 1898 • W. D. Lighthall
... recovered the manuscript, a work of considerable interest to students of British paleontology would have been lost. I must show you a letter I have just received from Sir Thomas Potter, of the British Museum, agreeing with my conclusions about the fossil remains of Ichthyosaurus, Plesiosaurus, and Mosasaurs, discovered last year at Roslyn Hole. It is very gratifying to me; very gratifying. But what can I do for you, ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees
... visiting mosques and mausoleums. In every land he made collections of its greatest curiosities in art, literature, science, natural history, and politics. A sphinx, an obelisk, a winged bull from Nineveh, stuffed porcupines, live monkeys, fossil remains, a pinchbeck president of the United States, and many rare specimens even more curious, did he collect, and after years of wandering, by land and by sea, carry with him to his native village. ...
— The Magician's Show Box and Other Stories • Lydia Maria Child
... a time seemed satisfactory, assumed several successive creations and destructions of the world to have taken place in the interval between the first and second verses of Genesis. To these all the fossil remains were ascribed, while the present state of things was supposed to be the result of the operations recorded in the remainder of the chapter. But as geological knowledge advanced, it soon became ...
— The Story of Creation as told by Theology and by Science • T. S. Ackland
... of Atlantis occurred 9000 years before that date, to wit, about 9600 years before the Christian era. This looks like an extraordinarily long period of time, but it must be remembered that geologists claim that the remains of man found in the caves of Europe date back 500,000 years; and the fossil Calaveras skull was found deep under the base of Table Mountain, California, the whole mountain having been formed since the man to whom it belonged lived ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... marked as the publication proceeded. In speech, article, song and essay, the spell of Davis's extraordinary genius and embracing love was felt. Historic memories, forgotten stories, fragments of tradition, the cromlech on the mountain and the fossil in the bog supplied him substance and spirit wherewith to mould and animate nationality. Native art, valour, virtue and glory seemed to grow under his pen. All that had a tendency to elevate and ennoble, he rescued ...
— The Felon's Track • Michael Doheny
... organs, leading us on to two distinct series of species, which at length differ so much from each other as to form distinct genera or families. These are the parallel series or representative groups of naturalists, and they often occur in different countries, or are found fossil in different formations. They are said to have an analogy to each other when they are so far removed from their common antitype as to differ in many important points of structure, while they still preserve a family resemblance. ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace
... as the most definite and unquestionable of all the results of palaeontology, must be mentioned the immense extension and impulse given to botany, zoology, and comparative anatomy, by the investigation of fossil remains. Indeed, the mass of biological facts has been so greatly increased, and the range of biological speculation has been so vastly widened, by the researches of the geologist and palaeontologist, that it is to be feared there are naturalists ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... .. < chapter civ 30 THE FOSSIL WHALE > From his mighty bulk the whale affords a most congenial theme whereon to enlarge, amplify, and generally expatiate. Would you, you could not compress him. By good rights he .. should only be treated of in imperial folio. Not to tell over ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... zoology. "It was," he writes, "while living at Barton that I obtained my first information that there was such a science as geology.... My brother, like most land-surveyors, was something of a geologist, and he showed me the fossil oysters of the genus Gryphaea and the Belemnites ... and several other fossils which were abundant in the chalk and gravel around Barton.... It was here, too, that during my solitary rambles I first began to feel the influence of nature ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant
... current issues: air pollution resulting in acid rain in both the US and Canada; the US is the largest single emitter of carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels; water pollution from runoff of pesticides and fertilizers; very limited natural fresh water resources in much of the western part of the country require ...
— The 1997 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... Jack, whimsically. "I haven't the advantage of being a girl with a brother and a baker's dozen of beaux in bell buttons and gray. I'm only an old fossil of a 'cit,' with a scamp of a nephew and that limited conception of the delights of West Point which one can derive from running up there every time that versatile youngster gets into a new scrape. You'll admit my opportunities have ...
— Starlight Ranch - and Other Stories of Army Life on the Frontier • Charles King
... have a cramp in my left leg which will make me kick down the cliff in another minute, if I don't move it. Let me help you up.... That's the way. Now you sit safely there, while I get unwedged.... By Jove! I believe I've grown into the cliff, like a fossil ichthyosaurus. Did you ever see an ichthyosaurus? Doesn't it seem years since you said: 'And who is Davy Jones?' Don't you want some breakfast? I suppose it's ...
— The Mistress of Shenstone • Florence L. Barclay
... any one in my life, not even you, or Esther, or the man who said that my fossil bird was a crocodile. Why do you want me to ...
— Esther • Henry Adams
... lives. He was the friend and correspondent of Professor Owen, and supplied the Prince of Science with curious data of the strange, and then but scantily known, Australian fauna, from the platypus, at the head of modern wonders, back to the earliest marsupialdom of the fossil world. ...
— Personal Recollections of Early Melbourne & Victoria • William Westgarth
... however, was not the case. Quatrefages, speaking of this wonderful genealogical tree which Haeckel has drawn up with such scientific accuracy of description, observes: "The first thing to remark is that not one of the creatures exhibited in this pedigree has ever been seen, either living or in fossil. Their existence is based entirely upon theory." (Les Emules de Darwin, ii. p. 76). "Man's pedigree as drawn up by Haeckel," says the distinguished savant, Du Bois-Reymond, "is worth about as much as is that of Homer's heroes for ...
— At the Deathbed of Darwinism - A Series of Papers • Eberhard Dennert
... did not come to Walton oftener than once in ten years, it followed that apparel among the young people wore very much the expression of individual taste, while among the elders it was wont to assume the cast now irreverently designated by "fossil remains." And, really, it did not much matter. Whatever our country-grandmothers were admired and esteemed for, be ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., February, 1863, No. LXIV. • Various
... guide insisting that the big ice-mountain at the head of the bay could not be reached before dark, that the landing there was dangerous even in daylight, and that this was the only safe harbor on the way to it. While camp was being made. I strolled along the shore to examine the rocks and the fossil timber that abounds here. All the rocks are freshly glaciated, even below the sea-level, nor have the waves as yet worn off the surface polish, much less the heavy scratches and grooves ...
— Travels in Alaska • John Muir
... assembled at Montgomery to form a Southern confederacy, one hundred and thirty-three commissioners, representing twenty-one States, of which fourteen were non-slave-holding, met at Washington and continued in session, sitting with closed doors, until the 27th. It was a body of great dignity—a "fossil convention," the Tribune called it—whose proceedings, because of the desire in the public mind to avoid civil war, attracted wide attention. David Dudley Field represented New York on the committee on resolutions, which ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... worked salt-pits in England, and salt-works are frequently mentioned in Domesday Book. Rock or fossil salt, says Herbert, was never worked in England till 1670, when it was discovered in Cheshire. The enormous use of salt fish in the Catholic households of the Middle Ages brought ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury
... boys," said Jack Barnes suddenly, "I've done nothing and am not afraid to be arrested. I'm going to give myself up." Of course there was a storm of protest and a flow of tears, but the culprit was firm. "Tell the old fossil that if he'll guarantee safety to me ...
— The Daughter of Anderson Crow • George Barr McCutcheon
... prosperous Western-style capitalist economy, with a per capita GDP comparable to levels in highly industrialized West European countries. Rich in natural resources, Australia is a major exporter of agricultural products, minerals, metals, and fossil fuels. Commodities account for more than 80% of the value of total exports, so that, as in 1983-84, a downturn in world commodity prices can have a big impact on the economy. The government is pushing ...
— The 1996 CIA Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... obtained currency because for the moment it symbolized the world to the first speaker and to the hearer. The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture. Language is fossil poetry. As the limestone of the continent consists of infinite masses of the shells of animalcules, so language is made up of images or tropes, which now, in their secondary use, have long ceased to remind us of their poetic origin. But the poet names the thing because he sees it, or comes ...
— Essays, Second Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... desolation over the earth. But the reptiles that crawled upon the half-finished surface of our infant planet, have left memorials of their passage, enduring and indelible. No history has recorded their creation or destruction; their very bones are found no more among the fossil relics of a former world. Centuries and thousands of years may have rolled away between the time in which those footsteps were impressed by tortoises upon the sands of their native Scotland, and the hour when they were again laid bare and exposed ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 459 - Volume 18, New Series, October 16, 1852 • Various
... when from a wider outlook the vast antiquity of the genus is considered, and its ancient richness in species and individuals; comparing our Sierra Giant and Sequoia sempervirens of the Coast Range, the only other living species of Sequoia, with the twelve fossil species already discovered and described by Heer and Lesquereux, some of which seem to have flourished over vast areas in the Arctic regions and in Europe and our own territories, during tertiary and cretaceous times,—then indeed it becomes plain ...
— The Mountains of California • John Muir
... interesting note (vol. II, p. 348) showing how old and widespread the fable of the Rukh was, and is of opinion that the reason that the legend was localized in the direction of Madagascar was perhaps that some remains of the great fossil Aepyornis and its colossal eggs were found in that island. Professor Sayce states that the Rukh figures much—not only in Chinese folk-lore—but also in the old, Babylonian literature. The bird is of course familiar to readers of ...
— The Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela • Benjamin of Tudela
... appeared for more than a mile, to which distance Mr. Ross and myself walked inland, following the banks of the stream. Among the fragments we picked up one piece of limestone, on which was the impression of a fossil-shell. We saw here a great number of young black guillemots, and a flock of ducks, which we supposed to be ...
— Three Voyages for the Discovery of a Northwest Passage from the • Sir William Edward Parry
... with sticks and poles, in quest of the mallard. That "swopping" bird, still justly respected, was thought, for many ages, to linger in the college of which he is the protector. But now all hope of recovering him alive is lost, and it is reserved for the excavator of the future to marvel over the fossil bones of the ...
— Oxford • Andrew Lang
... Sweetheart!" That done and removed and there sounded down the way, "One cantaloupe, Honey!" Back the waiter came in a moment. "The old party says it's too ripe." There were only two left to choose from. "Knock his slats in if he don't like that, the old fossil." In another moment the waiter was back again with the second half. "He says he don't want no cantaloupe, anyhow. Says he meant an order of ...
— Working With the Working Woman • Cornelia Stratton Parker
... general alarm visibly diminished. Poor Mr. Glastonbury had never looked into a newspaper in his life, save the County Chronicle, to which he occasionally contributed a communication, giving an account of the digging up of some old coins, signed Antiquarius; or of the exhumation of some fossil remains, to which he more ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... while the mud of which the rocks are formed was yet soft ooze, and could receive and bury them. It would be a great error to suppose that these organic remains were fragmentary relics. Our museums exhibit fossil shells of immeasurable antiquity, as perfect as the day they were formed, whole skeletons without a limb disturbed—nay, the changed flesh, the developing embryos, and even the very footsteps of primieval organisms. Thus the naturalist finds in the ...
— The Darwinian Hypothesis • Thomas H. Huxley
... American writer professes to have discovered in Missouri the fossil remains of a bogged mastodon, which had been killed precisely in this way by human contemporaries. (See Lubbock, ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... geology to which he had devoted a large share of his attention. But even in his works we look in vain for a satisfactory treatise on the mountain-rocks of Palestine, on the geognostic formation of that interesting part of Western Asia, or on the fossil treasures which its strata are understood to envelop. We are therefore reduced to the necessity of collecting from various authors, belonging to different countries and successive ages, the scattered notices which appear ...
— Palestine or the Holy Land - From the Earliest Period to the Present Time • Michael Russell
... another immensely interesting fossil word. It lies just at the foot of the Wrekin, and the hill which takes that name in English must have been pronounced by the old Celtic inhabitants much like Uricon: for of course the awkward initial letter has only become silent ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... time, ponders its own ideals, not of literature and art only—not of men only, but of women. The idea of the women of America, (extricated from this daze, this fossil and unhealthy air which hangs about the word lady,) develop'd, raised to become the robust equals, workers, and, it may be, even practical and political deciders with the men—greater than man, ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... and more plausible objection is that raised by Darwin when he said that there were no fossil remains of instincts. And, if there were, O master, what would they teach us? Not very much more than what we learn from the instincts of to-day. Does not the geologist make the erstwhile carcases live anew in our minds in the light of the world as we see it? With nothing but analogy to guide ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre
... explanation of the isolated masses of flint which abound in various chalk formations. "The mere assertion," says Rhymer Jones, "that flints were sponges, would no doubt startle the reader who was unacquainted with the history of these fossil relics of a former ocean;" and yet a little reflection "will satisfy the most skeptical." For long ages the sponge is imbedded in the chalk, through which water is continually percolating. A well-known law of chemistry explains why similar matter should become aggregated; ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... speech—as, indeed, it is his last—whereby he was able to say what else he could not have uttered. Such is the fact, and even the language in which we state it is "a dictionary of faded metaphors," the fossil poetry of ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton
... the modern copal varnishes consists principally of linseed oil with some turpentine. Their base is Copal, a fossil, resinous substance of vegetable origin. The gums of which they are made have been chemically altered by long exposure in the earth. Other gums, as mastic, dammar, sandarac, and even resin are sometimes mixed with copal ...
— Handwork in Wood • William Noyes
... it was a grindlestone, another he said "Nay; It's nought but an' owd fossil cheese, that somebody's ...
— R. Caldecott's First Collection of Pictures and Songs • Various
... he held towards the old lawyer rather the same sort of patronizing attitude that he had had towards the old man. It would be a rotten dinner probably followed by a deadly dull evening with a snuffy old fossil who would tell him long-winded, rambling anecdotes of what New York had been like when there were wild goats in ...
— By Advice of Counsel • Arthur Train
... is analogous to that of an evolutionist who can only point to a few more or less useless peculiarities in the anatomy of man without being able to show resemblances between them and the corresponding portions of fossil or actually existing anthropoids. He calls them "vestiges[197]" and insists that homo is descended from a generalised anthropoid. The mere assertion of the vestigial character of such bones or organs ...
— Kinship Organisations and Group Marriage in Australia • Northcote W. Thomas
... at the peril of being banished from political communion with those who hold the reins and prescribe the policy to be pursued. Slavishness to party and obsequiousness to the popular whims go hand in hand. Political independence only occurs in a fossil state; and men's opinions grow out of the acts they have been constrained to do or sanction. Flattery, either of individual or people, corrupts both the receiver and the giver; and adulation is not of more service to the people than to kings. A Cæsar, securely ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... grove they wandered side by side, The tender Iguanodon and Ichthyosaurian bride And through the enubilious air, the carboniferous breeze, Awoke, with their amphibious sighs, the silence in the trees. "To think," they cried, botaurus-toned, "when ages intervene, Our osseous fossil forms will ...
— Dot and the Kangaroo • Ethel C. Pedley
... statement that had been made, and he tried to substitute for the long hard words little short simple words, that a boy could understand. During those early years, he learned that the rich, racy, homey words are steeped and perfumed with beautiful associations. He knew that words are fossil poetry. What would one not give for the old cloak that Paul had from Troas, a piece of the marble by Phidias, the old threshold worn by the feet of Socrates, an old missal illuminated by Bellini, an old note-book in which Shakespeare wrote the first outline of Hamlet! And the old, sweet, home words ...
— The Battle of Principles - A Study of the Heroism and Eloquence of the Anti-Slavery Conflict • Newell Dwight Hillis
... patches of a northern population get into these deep places? To explain the mystery, Forbes called to mind the fact that, in the epoch which immediately preceded the present, the climate was much colder (whence the name of "glacial epoch" applied to it); and that the shells which are found fossil, or sub-fossil, in deposits of that age are precisely such as are now to be met with only in the Scandinavian, or still more Arctic, regions. Undoubtedly, during the glacial epoch, the general population of our seas had, universally, ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... Non—sense! You'd find ways enough to amuse yourself without the help of an old fossil like me, I guess," blustered the clockmaker. Nevertheless it was plain to be seen the words pleased him, for he was a kind man who enjoyed doing a service for another. Moreover, Christopher had worn a path to his lonely heart and ...
— Christopher and the Clockmakers • Sara Ware Bassett
... rumoured at this time the discovery of the first known (?) fossil monkey, but its tail was missing. "Depend upon it, Daniel O'Conell's got hold of it!" said 'Adam' briskly.[15] Yule was very happy with Mr. Hamilton and his kind wife, but on his tutor's removal to Cambridge other arrangements became ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... she inquires of an Irish acquaintance whether she retained recollection enough of her own country to be entertained with "that strange caricature, Castle Rack Rent." Contemporary judgments such as these (not more extravagant than Horace Walpole's) are to the historian of literature what fossil ...
— Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale) (2nd ed.) (2 vols.) • Mrs. Hester Lynch Piozzi
... smiled to himself to see Daisy's face at this statement, though outwardly he kept perfectly grave. Daisy's own simple orbs were so full and intent. She looked from him to the fossil. ...
— Melbourne House, Volume 1 • Susan Warner
... interrupted. "Does that old fossil look like the sort to take such a creature about for nothing? Colonel, he doesn't know himself—where those securities are! He's brought that woman here ...
— The Avenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... certainty when bred in the direct line, although they were originally acquired peculiarities which have merely been fixed by long habit in successive generations. The earliest horse had five toes, and even the most recent fossil horse had three toes, of which the two lateral ones are still represented in the modern animal by the two splint bones. Yet if our horse develops an extra toe it is pronounced a monstrosity. A more genuine monstrosity is the solid-hoofed pig, in which two toes have ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture
... long ages of the Tertiary period monkeys must have been very abundant and very varied, yet it is but rarely that their fossil remains are found. This, however, is not difficult to explain. The deposits in which mammalian remains most abound are those formed in lakes or in caverns. In the former the bodies of large numbers of terrestrial animals ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 344, August 5, 1882 • Various
... Living and Fossil, containing Descriptions of every Species, British and foreign; the methods of procuring and viewing them, &c., illustrated by numerous Engravings. BY ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 216, December 17, 1853 • Various
... formations at the mouth of the Thames, and having floated about there in as great profusion as here, till buried deep in the silt and mud that now forms the island of Sheppey.* [Bowerbank "On the Fossil Fruits and Seeds of the Isle of Sheppey," and Lyell's "Elements of Geology," 3rd ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... tame ram, which are turned outward, the points being directed away from the body, constitute one of the strongest proofs that the blood of the argalis and its extinct European ancestors—which are known only by the fossil remains—flows in the veins of ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1178, June 25, 1898 • Various
... begins to thaw, new mines or deposits of fossil ivory—a perfect treasure of mammoths' tusks—are discovered in the marsh-lands of Eastern Siberia. There are no mammoths now—unless we call elephants by that name; yet their remains have been found upon both continents. In the year 1799, the perfect skeleton ...
— Reading Made Easy for Foreigners - Third Reader • John L. Huelshof
... day, however, Mr. F. and Caleb, learning the result of the fossil-search, offered to apply their more efficient skill and strength to a new attempt in the same direction; and, with high hopes for the result, Mysie, still accompanied by Clarissa, proceeded to another portion of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 23, September, 1859 • Various
... Waldeck "has seen fit to place three or four elephants. What end did he propose to himself in giving this fictitious representation? Presumably to give a prehistoric origin to these ruins, since it is an ascertained fact that elephants in a fossil state only have been found on the American continent. It is needless to add that neither Catherwood, who drew these inscriptions most minutely, nor myself who brought impressions of them away, nor living man, ever saw these elephants ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... monotonous song, the bearers started at a swinging trot. For half an hour or so I lay still, reflecting on the very remarkable experiences that we were going through, and wondering if any of my eminently respectable fossil friends down at Cambridge would believe me if I were to be miraculously set at the familiar dinner-table for the purpose of relating them. I do not want to convey any disrespectful notion or slight when I call those good and learned ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... resembling more the chaos of some primary elemental upheaval than the work of man; while, half-way down, a long flume straddled its narrow body and disproportionate legs over the chasm, like an enormous fossil of some forgotten antediluvian. At every step smaller ditches crossed the road, hiding in their sallow depths unlovely streams that crept away to a clandestine union with the great yellow torrent below, and here and there were the ruins of some ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... blue bay held many fossil shells. Children sometimes strayed here and there with hammers, pounding out fossils from fallen pieces of the cliffs. On the extent of sands that bordered the cliffs and stretched up the coast between them and the breakers, old stumps that had been months before ...
— Out of the Triangle • Mary E. Bamford
... exception of one article—"A Majestic Literary Fossil"—[Harper's Magazine, February, 1890. Included in the "Complete Works."]—Clemens was writing nothing of importance at this time. This article grew out of a curious old medical work containing absurd prescriptions which, with Theodore Crane, he had often laughed ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... calcareous beds. The formation of the limestone seems to have proceeded from the fissures which traverse it in all directions. The cavities are every where covered with rhomboidal crystals of magnesian bitter spar, and the whole formation, without any trace of strtification, or of the fossil remains which it once contained, consists only of a granular aggregation of crystals of dolomite. Talc laminae lie scattered here and there in the newly-formed rock, traversed by masses of serpentine. In the valley of the Fassa, ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... on the Great Desert. But in addition to African geography, all these explorations have added to our knowledge of African geology. A vast portion of the interior is supposed to have been an inland sea, of which Ngami and other lakes are the remains; fossil bones of most peculiar character have been found, but only of terrestrial and fresh-water animals. A name is already given to a creature of a remote secondary period; Professor Owen, from the examination of a few relics, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 452 - Volume 18, New Series, August 28, 1852 • Various
... know, has become a citizen of the United States, has had the Cuvierian prize awarded to him for his great work on fossil fishes—an honour approved by every lover of science. This distinguished writer says, in his latest publications on fossil zoology, that the number of fossil fishes distributed over the globe is more than 25,000 species; of mammifera, over 3000; reptiles, over 4000; shells, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 439 - Volume 17, New Series, May 29, 1852 • Various
... reputation of being above all things a controversialist. Naturally enough, the public knew little and cared less for the unspectacular researches among the Invertebrates, which had won such high scientific fame. They were only stirred when the results of study in geology, in fossil forms and simian anatomy, clashed with long-established popular conceptions. There was also a gladiatorial delight in watching controversy not simply abstract, but fanned by personal conviction, which marked the champions ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley - A Character Sketch • Leonard Huxley
... young man, an' not become a fossil like some of the fellers in big cities, but I git a heap of rubbin' with me rollin', an' that keeps ...
— Glen of the High North • H. A. Cody
... learned men, too, hold, till within the last twenty-five years, that a flying dragon was an impossible monster? And do we not now know that there are hundreds of them found fossil up and down the world? People call them Pterodactyles: but that is only because they are ashamed to call them flying dragons, after denying so long that flying dragons ...
— The Water-Babies - A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby • Charles Kingsley
... and self-restraining simplicity. I say with grace and decorum throughout, because all things which might beget ugliness in the life of others, or ugliness in our own attitude towards others, would be eliminated, thrown away like the fossil which Thoreau threw away because it collected dust. Moreover, such a life as this is such as all may reasonably hope to have; may, in some more prosperous age, obtain because it involves no hoarding of advantage for self or excluding ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... of you to call me a fossil when I am only approaching that stage. Oh! I am glad to see you. I /am/ glad!" and she gave me both ...
— The Ancient Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... an exact contrast. A learned Pharisee, conscious of a power that would one day place the highest dignities at his disposal, he was a man of great and manifold possessions. A curious and interesting inventory of his goods has been preserved like a fossil in the Scriptures (Phil. iii. 5, 6). These things he highly valued and fondly loved; but another and opposing love came against them, and the strong man succumbed to the stronger. "What things were gain to me, these I counted loss for ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... again. You must have been reading a tremendous lot lately. Of course you would, with that learned old fossil about. No my dear, I've come simply to ...
— The Princess Priscilla's Fortnight • Elizabeth von Arnim
... sea free from shoals, was Ustica,—an abrupt and volcanic island that the Phoenicians had colonized and which had served as a refuge for Saracen pilots. Its population was scant and poor. There was nothing to see on it, apart from certain fossil shells interesting to ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... to keep all these laws perfectly. Disease is one of the penalties of one of the forms of such failure. It is prefigured in the perturbations of the planets, in the disintegration of the elemental masses; it has left its traces in the fossil organisms of extinct creations. [Professor Agassiz has kindly handed me the following note: "There are abnormal structures in animals of all ages anterior to the creation of mankind. Malformed specimens of Crinoids are known from the Triassic and Jurassic deposits. Malformed ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... playing the slave part," he said—"a slave to conventions and fossil-methods of instruction. One can really learn more from studying the actual formation of rocks than from those worthy Dons whom nothing will move out of their customary ruts of routine. Even at that early time I felt that, given ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... caused to perform voyages in opposition to wind and tide, and a power placed in human hands which seems almost unlimited. To these novel and still extending improvements may be added others, whish, though of a secondary kind, yet materially affect the comforts of life, the collecting from fossil materials the elements of combustion, and applying them so as to illuminate, by a single operation, houses, streets, and even cities. If you look to the results of chemical arts you will find new substances of the most extraordinary nature applied to various ...
— Consolations in Travel - or, the Last Days of a Philosopher • Humphrey Davy
... shown them the adjoining cabinet of geological specimens. It is in vain that you assure him of your indifference to these scientific seccature; he is deaf and you are not suffered to escape a single fossil. He asked us a hundred questions, and understood nothing in reply, insomuch that when he came to his last inquiry, "Have the Protestants the same God as the Catholics?" we were rather glad that he should be obliged to settle the fact ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells
... a hundred miles south of Bisbee, we came upon a deposit of fossils. It was scarcely more than a mile in extent, but many bones were said to have been taken away from it as curiosities. I had already observed isolated fossil bones along the creeks on several occasions during our travels, but we could find nothing here ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz
... antediluvian affairs I ever beheld, the old fellow now coming towards us is the queerest; he looks like a fossil edition of Methuselah, dug up and modernised some hundred years ago at the very least. Holloa! he's going mad I believe; I hope he does ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley |
