"Fossil" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... was pale, and there was a curious look about her whole figure. It seemed as if shrinking from something, twisting itself rigidly, as a fossil tree might shrink in a wind ...
— Jane Field - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... Amber, the fossil resin of a pine tree, was found in Sicily, the shores of the Baltic, and other parts of Europe. It was a precious stone then as now, and an article of trade with the Phoenicians, those early merchants of the Mediterranean. The attractive power might enhance the value of the gem in ...
— The Story Of Electricity • John Munro
... how Old Hickory, who was more or less busy at the time, had tried to shunt him off. "Go on, you old fossil," he told him. "You never could play a mashie-niblick, and I'll bet twenty-five you can't now. You always top 'em. Couldn't loft over a bow-legged turtle, much less a six foot bunker. Yes, it's a bet. Twenty-five even. But you'll ...
— Torchy As A Pa • Sewell Ford
... but the weather becoming fine and bright, we started for the west coast about noon. During our progress along the bed of a creek, Blake discovered what was believed to be a glacial deposit containing fossil bones, and considerable time was spent in examining this and attempting to extract whole specimens, thereby making it too late to proceed to the west. On returning to the hut we decided to pack the swags. We reached home just in time ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... probably still at work throughout the universe. Not merely successive generations, but successive races, both of plants and animals, widely distinguished from each other, have, at different periods, tenanted the earth's surface. Those of which we possess the fossil remains belong, almost without exception, to extinct species. They were crowded out of existence, as it were, by the new forms, more perfectly organized, which came to take their places in the improving condition of things. This continuous agency of the life-producing ...
— A Theory of Creation: A Review of 'Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation' • Francis Bowen
... between San Fiorenzo and the tower of 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 ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester
... view of the advisability of not having any organic or combustible material near the generator, the solid substances just mentioned may preferably be replaced by one of those partially inorganic compositions sold for "lagging" steam-pipes and engine-cylinders, such as "Fossil meal." Indeed, the exact nature of the lagging matters comparatively little, because the active substance in retaining the heat in the acetylene generator or the steam-pipe is the air entangled in the pores ...
— Acetylene, The Principles Of Its Generation And Use • F. H. Leeds and W. J. Atkinson Butterfield
... gave this superstitious Indian about the biggest fright he had ever received. It was a book in which were pictured and described many of the great extinct monsters of the old times. These enormous hideous creatures, whose bones and fossil remains are still occasionally to be found, quite alarmed him. Yet the book was generally about the first ...
— Algonquin Indian Tales • Egerton R. Young
... 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 productions of the ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... contemporary races of elephants, the market is extensively supplied by the fossil ivory derived from the tusks of the great mammoth or fossil elephant of the geologist. The remains of this gigantic animal are abundantly distributed over the whole extent of the globe. They exist in large masses in the northern hemisphere, deeply embedded in the alluvial deposits of the ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal, No. 421, New Series, Jan. 24, 1852 • Various
... commenced at Hillstoke, and Doctress Gale hovered over the work. The various strata and their fossil deposits were an endless study, and kept her microscope employed. With this, and her treatise on "Cure by Esculents" she was so employed that she did not visit the Court for some days: then came an invitation from Lord Uxmoor to stay a week with him, and inspect ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... it rose in the back, being surmounted by two glittering knobs, like those on the head-board of an old-fashioned bedstead. Half-way down the back of this imposing structure the arms or wings sprouted out, giving to the whole the appearance of an immense Pterodactyl, or some other fossil bird of fabulous proportions, and Effectually shutting in the occupants of the sleigh from any Contemplation of the possible charms of the scenery. The seat was made very low, and it was, perhaps, on this account that the horse seemed so abnormally high. It was a ...
— Cape Cod Folks • Sarah P. McLean Greene
... whether Turner is right in giving so monotonous and severe verticality to the cliff above which the abbey stands; but I believe it must have some steep places about it, since the tradition which, in nearly all parts of the island where fossil ammonites are found, is sure to be current respecting them, takes quite an original form at Whitby, owing to the steepness of this rock. In general, the saint of the locality has simply turned all the serpents to stone; but at Whitby, ...
— The Harbours of England • John Ruskin
... blooming—blooming modestly—like a violet, not like some of these blatant tropical flowers. He had been in the house for six weeks, and had not as yet attempted to slap him on the back, or address him as "old boy," or try to make him feel a superannuated fossil. He had nothing of the exasperating young man's chatter. He was good-tempered, had not much to say for himself, was not clever by any means, thank goodness—wrote my friend. It appeared, however, that Jim was ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... has a 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 for increased exports of manufactured goods, but competition in international markets ...
— The 1996 CIA Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... geologist, from the nuts of a similar plant abounding in the tertiary 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 ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... solitary explorations of Kentucky which have given him immortality—through the valley of the Kentucky and the Licking, and along the "Belle Riviere" (Ohio) as low as the falls. He visited the Big Bone Lick and examined the wonderful fossil remains of the mammoth found there. Along the great buffalo roads, worn several feet below the surface of the ground, which led to the Blue Licks, he saw with amazement and delight thousands of huge shaggy ...
— The Conquest of the Old Southwest • Archibald Henderson
... 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 in the ribs. Dan Merion, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... expert in his line, but young Marable had charge of these particular fossil blocks, the amber being pure because it was mixed with lignite. The particular block which held the interest of the three was a huge yellow brown mass of irregular shape. Vaguely, through the outer shell of impure amber, could be seen the heart of ink. The chunk weighed many tons, and ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science July 1930 • Various
... of Mountains is that long line which fringes the Somali coast from Tajurrah to Ras Jerd Hafun (Cape Guardafui). In the portion visited by Lieutenant Speke it is composed principally of limestones, some white, others brownish, and full of fossil shells. The seaward face is a gradual slope, yet as usual more abrupt than the landward side, especially in the upper regions. Steep irregular ravines divide the several masses of hill. The range was thinly covered with Acacia scrub in the lower folds. The upper portion was thickly clad ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton
... longer have so many grand old men is that we no longer have so many old men. Instead we have numbers of octogenarian sportsmen like the late Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, who have not yet been caught by the arch-reactionary fossil-collector, Senility. This is a fair omen for the future of progress. "If only the leaders of the world's thought and emotion," writes Bourne in "Youth," "can, by caring for the physical basis, keep themselves young, why, the world will go ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... histories, by guesses and inferences; my curiosity and interest, my appetite for fact, grew by what it fed upon, I carried on my expansion of the world of fact until it took me through the mineral and fossil galleries of the Natural History Museum, through the geological drawers of the College of Science, through a year of dissection and some weeks at the astronomical telescope. So I built up my conceptions of a real world ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... past before man was created the earth was in a different form. At that time there was a gigantic animal creation and an equally gigantic vegetation in existence. It has been brought to light through the fossil beds; but in none of these fossils is found a trace of a human being. This great original creation was plunged at one time into an awful catastrophe. Death and destruction came upon it, every living thing was extinguished, while water ...
— Studies in Prophecy • Arno C. Gaebelein
... indifferently to various manifestations, some barren and without further function, others fit to carry the parent experience over into another mind, and give it a new embodiment there. Expressiveness in the former case is dead, like that of a fossil; in the latter it is living and efficacious, recreating its original. The first is idle self-manifestation, the second ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... New England. A Report on the Sandstone of the Connecticut Valley, especially its Fossil Footmarks, made to the Government of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. By Edward Hitchcock, Professor in Amherst College. Plates, etc. Boston. William White, Printer to the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... 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 ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... 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
... it has been conjectured, that the Scythians, in the northern regions of Asia, were acquainted with the polarity of the magnet, in ages antecedent to all history, and that the virtue of this fossil was intended to be meant by the flying arrow, presented to Abaris by Apollo, about the time of the Trojan war, with the help of which he could transport himself wherever he pleased. The abundance of iron ores, and perhaps of native iron, in every ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... species may come to an end; species may be exterminated, but we know of no instance of individuals coming into existence except by the process of reproduction or generation from pre-existing individuals. Further, we know from the evidence of fossil remains that the animals existing in former periods were very different from those existing now, and that many of the existing forms, such as man, mammals, birds, bony fishes, can only be traced back in the succession of stratified rocks ...
— Hormones and Heredity • J. T. Cunningham
... Teeth, bone and wood don't last long in their original state. However, buried materials decompose, leaving a film of carbon as a fossil. This results in a leaf tracery, or the outlines of some simple animal. On a gigantic scale, this process of forming carbon has resulted ...
— Let's collect rocks & shells • Shell Oil Company
... fossil remains of the animals which once roamed over the western parts of our continent were attended by adventures of great interest, which he long had the intention of collecting and publishing in book form. Unfortunately, he never did it, nor, so far as I am aware, has ...
— The Reminiscences of an Astronomer • Simon Newcomb
... said. "'Tis well. You and I, hand in hand, will search the countryside for ruined abbeys. We will snare the elusive fossil together. Above all, we will go out of bounds. We shall thus improve our minds, and have a jolly good time as well. I shouldn't wonder if one mightn't borrow a gun from some friendly native, and do a bit of rabbit-shooting here and there. From what I saw of Comrade Outwood ...
— Mike • P. G. Wodehouse
... life upon the globe. According to the first of these hypotheses, living beings, such as now exist, have existed from all eternity upon this earth. We tested that hypothesis by the circumstantial evidence, as I called it, which is furnished by the fossil remains contained in the earth's crust, and we found that it was obviously untenable. I then proceeded to consider the second hypothesis, which I termed the Miltonic hypothesis, not because it is of any particular consequence to me whether John ...
— American Addresses, with a Lecture on the Study of Biology • Tomas Henry Huxley
... This is a long and not unimportant street on the hill of Montmartre in the XVIII^e arrondissement, and in the zone of the old stone or gypsum quarries which existed before Paris extended so far out in that direction, and from which were taken the fossil remains of the early ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... 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 of the mines in the principalities ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... haven't the intelligence to recognize a new point of view—a new force in the world; the force of women's brains—until it shall hit you in the face. That's why I'm holding out against Charles, fighting him, to save him, to keep him from growing into a narrow-minded, hard-headed, ignorant old fossil!" The application of this explicit description was not far to seek. It was evident that Delancy took it to himself, for he, in his turn at last, colored rosily. But he did not choose to accept a personal reference, and contented himself with a ...
— Making People Happy • Thompson Buchanan
... Glazed pipes and earthenware used in smelting iron, show that iron was smelted in the remotest ages in Africa. These earthenware vessels, and fragments of others of a finer texture, were found in the delta of the Zambesi and in other parts in close association with fossil bones, which, on being touched by the tongue, showed as complete an absence of animal matter as the most ancient fossils known in Europe. They were the bones of animals, as hippopotami, water hogs, antelopes, crocodiles, identical with those now living in the country. These were the primitive ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume II (of 2), 1869-1873 • David Livingstone
... taste and judgment. On the opposite side of the room was a fine cabinet of minerals and shells. In one corner stood a number of curious relics of the aboriginal Caribs, such as bows and arrows, etc., together with interesting fossil remains. On the tops of the book-cases and mineral stand, were birds of rare species, procured from the South American Continent. The centre table was ornamented with shells, specimens of petrifactions, and elegantly bound books. The remainder of the furniture ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... Melbourne to Wood Bay, and examine the neighbourhood geologically and geographically. The sledge team found some remarkable ice structures and new and interesting glaciers. They had, a crop of small adventures, and found sandstone rock containing fossil wood and many other excellent fossils, garnets, etc., besides which Campbell did good work surveying. A new glacier was named after Priestley and another ...
— South with Scott • Edward R. G. R. Evans
... slipped away, between the conversation with Aunt Judy, and the visit to Tawny Rachel; and when, soon after, a friend called to take No. 3 off on a fossil hunt, and he had to snatch a hasty morsel before his departure, he declared he was like the poor governess in the song, who ...
— Aunt Judy's Tales • Mrs Alfred Gatty
... permanent place in the botanic system has been given by Dr. Lindley. Much importance has been added to the work, by the researches and discoveries which Professor Owen has made, with regard to the fossil remains; and the few particulars gleaned relative to existing animals have enabled Mr. Ogilby to introduce several interesting novelties to the attention of zoologists. To these gentlemen, and also to Professor Faraday, Mr. MacLeay, and other scientific friends, the warmest acknowledgments ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 1 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell
... which has always excited 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 period ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... are you?" he cried; and he looked about the place, up and down, but to all appearances, he was in a cul de sac, whose walls were dotted with the fossil stems of pentacrinites, over which stalagmitic petrifaction had gradually formed, looking as if dirty water had run over the walls in places, and hardened in the course ...
— The Black Tor - A Tale of the Reign of James the First • George Manville Fenn
... 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 a compressing force ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... species, the gibbon (HYLOBATES MULLERI) is closely allied to species found in the mainland and in Sumatra, while the MAIAS or orang-utan (SIMIA SALYRUS) is found also in Sumatra and, though not now surviving on the continent, must be regarded as related to anthropoids whose fossil remains have been ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... the lecturer is pictured as an old fossil to whom he has to listen attentively for an hour without understanding a word of his learned discourse. The funereal blackboard, the austere diagrams, the severe pointer and the chilly glass of water, a professor something like one of the prehistoric creatures he ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... any sense would take to Miss Mariner. If I told you how near I came to spilling the sauce-boat accidentally over that old fossil's head, you'd be surprised, Ellen. She just sat there brooding like an old eagle. If you ask my opinion, Miss Mariner's a long sight too ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... obtainable that are necessary to show the connection of others: as, for example, the hypothesis that all species of animals have arisen from earlier ones by some process of gradual change, can be only imperfectly verified by collecting the fossil remains of extinct species, because immense depths and expanses of fossiliferous strata have been destroyed. Or, again, the general state of culture may be such as to prevent men from tracing the consequences of an hypothesis; ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... he knew. And 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
... Raymond Hall and Dr. Robert W. Wilson for their permission to examine this material and for critical comments and advice on the manuscript. The drawings were made by Miss Lucy Remple. The specimens are a part of the collection of fossil vertebrates formerly belonging to the California Institute of Technology, but now the property of the Los Angeles County Museum. The specimens had been lent by the late Professor Chester Stock to Professor Hall and Dr. Wilson for study and report. All measurements ...
— Pleistocene Pocket Gophers From San Josecito Cave, Nuevo Leon, Mexico • Robert J. Russell
... its most acute activity in the struggle against Asia, then in the north-west, in England and in France. And indeed, in one form or another, throughout all the old limits of the Empire. It died, its fossil was preserved in one or two small and obscure communities, its ancient rules and form were captured by the English squires and merchants, and it was maintained, a curious but vigorous survival, in this country. ...
— On Something • H. Belloc
... Big Bone Lick, was famous because there were scattered about it in incredible quantity the gigantic remains of the extinct mastodon; the McAfees made a tent by stretching their blankets over the huge fossil ribs, and used the disjointed vertebrae as stools on which to sit. Game of many kinds thronged the spaces round the licks; herds of buffalo, elk, and deer, as well as bears and wolves, were all in sight at once. The ground round about some of them was trodden down so that ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume One - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1769-1776 • Theodore Roosevelt
... has enriched this work with a very comprehensive treatise on the axolotl of the lake of Mexico, and on the genera of the Protei. That naturalist has also recognized two new species of mastodons and an elephant among the fossil bones of quadrupeds which we brought from North and South America. For the description of the insects collected by M. Bonpland we are indebted to M. Latreille, whose labours have so much contributed to the progress of entomology in our ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... multitudes of organic remains, the fossilised exuviae of animals and plants which lived and died 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 ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... the mode of formation of these caves, I may add that I noticed, imbedded in a boulder of rock in the upper caves, two pieces of coral and several fossil ...
— British Borneo - Sketches of Brunai, Sarawak, Labuan, and North Borneo • W. H. Treacher
... no comment; I was absorbed in the implications of the remark—like Agassiz when some one gave him a fossil bone, and his mind set to work ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... this sort, together with new power sources to replace the fossil fuels on which factory, home, and vehicle now depend, might also all but eliminate the growing smog and ...
— The Practical Values of Space Exploration • Committee on Science and Astronautics
... we learn that to these spicula we must turn for an 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 ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... with respect to their class as fishes, and the order to which they belong—that of the cartilaginous or gristly fishes. In all the orders of ancient animals there is an ascending gradation of character from first to last. Further, there is a succession from low to high types in fossil plants, from the earliest strata in which they are found to the highest. Several of the most important living species have left no record of themselves in any formation beyond what are, comparatively speaking, modern. Such are the ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... knowledge is a foolish fear and trembling lest the tendencies of science should result in the overthrow of the Bible. They seem, somehow, to be fully persuaded that the inspired word of God has no inherent power to stand alone,—that it has fallen among thieves and robbers,—is being pelted with fossil coprolites, suffocated with fire-mist and primitive gases, or beaten over the head with the shank-bones of Silurian monsters, and is bawling aloud for assistance. Therefore, not stopping to dress, they dash out into the public notice without ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... be traced the imaginary ruins of medieval cities with forts and dungeons, pepper-box turrets, and machicolated towers. And in truth these Bad Lands are an immense ossuary where lie bleaching in the sun myriads of fragments of pachyderms, chelonians, and even, some would have us believe, fossil men, overwhelmed by unknown cataclysms ages ...
— Rubur the Conqueror • Jules Verne
... conversation at last.' But alas and alack a day! Prosey the second chimes in, and works away, and hems and haws, and hawks up some old scraps of schoolboy Latin and Greek, which are all Hebrew to you, honest man, until at length he finishes off by some solemn twaddle about fossil turnips and vitrified brickbats; and thus concludes Fozy No. 2. Oh, shade of Edie Ochiltree! that we should stand in the taunt of such umnerciful spendthrifts of our time on earth! Besides, the devil of it is, that whatever may be said of the flippant palaverers, the heavy ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... Byron, an interesting addition to zoology was made in a small floating shellfish, which has since proved to constitute a new genus,* throwing light, I am informed, upon many fossil univalves in the older formations; and a rare bird of the noddy kind (Anous leucocapillus) perched on the rigging towards evening, and was added to the collection; for even the beauty and innocence of a tired wanderer like it was insufficient ...
— Narrative Of The Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Commanded By The Late Captain Owen Stanley, R.N., F.R.S. Etc. During The Years 1846-1850. Including Discoveries And Surveys In New Guinea, The Louisiade • John MacGillivray
... 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 ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... many species and genera of plants and animals are found in a fossil state which are not found in the flora or fauna of our present earth; but the human characters that were fixed and stamped as by photograph in the Scriptures are not so far removed from the men and women who now live on ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... sympathetic moods under whose influence one gazes with a certain poignant tenderness at the worn face of the moon; that little "fossil world'' (the child of our mother earth, too) bears such terrible scars of its brief convulsive life that a sense of pity is awakened by the sight. The moon is the wonder-land of the telescope. Those towering mountains, ...
— Curiosities of the Sky • Garrett Serviss
... this group—we already have tropical land-crabs—and as far as we know there is no reason why in the future these creatures should not increase in size and terrestrial capacity. In the past we have the evidence of the fossil Paradoxides that creatures of this kind may at least attain a length of six feet, and, considering their intense pugnacity, a crab of such dimensions would be as formidable a creature as one could well imagine. And their amphibious capacity would give ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... Sooloo Islands believe that this has been the case. Mr. Cuming, who has lately investigated, with so much success, the natural history of the PHILIPPINES, found near Cabagan, in Luzon, about fifty feet above the level of the R. Cagayan, and seventy miles from its mouth, a large bed of fossil shells: these, he informs me, are of the same species with those now existing on the shores of the neighbouring islands. From the accounts given us by Captain Basil Hall and Captain Beechey (Captain B. Hall, "Voyage to ...
— Coral Reefs • Charles Darwin
... Religions, laws, sciences, arts, theories, and histories, instead of passing Ariel-like into the elements when their task is done, are made perpetual prisoners in the alcoves of dreary libraries. They have a fossil immortality, surviving themselves in covers, as poems have survived minstrels. The memory of man is made omni-capacious; its burden increases with every generation; not even the ignorance and stolidity of the past are allowed the final grace of being forgotten; and omniscience ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... first form of 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 ages ago. ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton
... whether, that weakness unknown, he could not have occupied Constantinople on the swagger. His master was prepared promptly to reinforce him; Constantinople was perhaps nearer its fall in 1828 than in 1878, and certainly Diebitch was much smarter than were the Grand Duke Nicholas, his fossil Nepokoitschitsky, and ...
— Camps, Quarters, and Casual Places • Archibald Forbes
... 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 ...
— The Water-Babies - A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby • Charles Kingsley
... only differs from its kindred, in a certain shady, grave, old-fogy, fossil aspect, just touched with a pensive solemnity, as if it thought to itself, "I'm getting old, but I'm highly respectable; that's a comfort." It has, moreover, a dejected, injured air, as if it brooded solemnly on the wrong done to ...
— Little Classics, Volume 8 (of 18) - Mystery • Various
... this? The sacred beetle, bound upon the breast Of the blind heathen! Snatch the curious prize, Give it a place among thy treasured spoils, Fossil and relic,—corals, encrinites, The fly in amber and the fish in stone, The twisted circlet of Etruscan gold, Medal, intaglio, poniard, poison-ring,— Place for the Memphian beetle ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... the Baltic, or rather the bottom of the basin in which it lies, is rich in amber, which the agitated waters cast upon the shores in large quantities annually,—a process which has been going on for three or four centuries. We all know that amber is a hardened fossil resin produced by an extinct species of pine; so that it is evident that where these waters now ebb and flow there were once flourishing forests of amber-producing pines. These were doubtless gradually submerged by the encroachment of the sea, or suddenly engulfed by some grand ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou
... with the popular theory as to the existence of fossil remains of marine animals at a height above the level of the sea. The "deluge" accounted for what ...
— The Works of Lord Byron - Poetry, Volume V. • Lord Byron
... 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
... by looking within upon the soul or without upon the world. A truth written upon the human heart to-day in its full play of emotions or passions, cannot be at any real variance even with a truth written upon a fossil whose poor life was gone millions of years ago. And this being so, it would also seem a truth irrefragable; that the search for each of these kind of truths must be followed out in its own lines, by its own methods, to its own results, without ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various
... emigrants, are, 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
... we are annoyed by the vulgar curiosity of the populace, who gape in our faces as if we were South Sea Islanders or specimens of fossil life." ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... through which, guiding us with groping finger-tips beneath the shadowy vault, ribbed strongly as an immense bat's wing of stone, Theodore or his sister would light up for us with a candle the tomb of Sigebert's little daughter, in which a deep hole, like the bed of a fossil, had been bored, or so it was said, "by a crystal lamp which, on the night when the Frankish princess was murdered, had left, of its own accord, the golden chains by which it was suspended where the apse is to-day and with neither the crystal ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... devilish initiation. He was its spoiled and pampered favourite. Ivory? I should think so. Heaps of it, stacks of it. The old mud shanty was bursting with it. You would think there was not a single tusk left either above or below the ground in the whole country. 'Mostly fossil,' the manager had remarked, disparagingly. It was no more fossil than I am; but they call it fossil when it is dug up. It appears these niggers do bury the tusks sometimes—but evidently they couldn't bury this parcel ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... 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 ...
— At the Deathbed of Darwinism - A Series of Papers • Eberhard Dennert
... study of those relics by which the geologist tries to regain the history of the past races and families of the fauna and flora of the ancient world. Surely, as a mere matter of scientific pursuit, the ancient or fossil states of man should—for man himself—have attractions as great, at least, as the ancient or fossil states of plants and animals; and the old Celt, or Pict, or Saxon, be as interesting a study as ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... myself saying over and over. I must have said other things before, but I don't remember them. "You can't! it is impossible. You! marry an old fossil like me! Oh, Frances, are ...
— Kent Knowles: Quahaug • Joseph C. Lincoln
... are unduly influenced by the counsels, the representations, the menaces, of certain fossil politicians hailing from ...
— The Life of Abraham Lincoln • Henry Ketcham
... has lately been found in America part of the fossil vertebrae of a serpent which must have measured, it is said, a hundred and forty feet! I cannot say I believe it, but if any human creatures inhabited the earth at the time when such "small gear" are supposed to have disported themselves on its surface, if the merest legend containing ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... and as easily overcome by keen-witted human foes like "Jack the Giant-killer." It may be that traditions of pre- historic peoples have sometimes given birth to legends of giants. Another source of stories concerning them has been the discovery of huge fossil bones, such as those of the mammoth or mastodon, which were formerly supposed to be bones of gigantic men. The ogres, who sometimes figure in folk tales, are giants with a taste for human flesh. They recall the ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... different and (me judice) equally erroneous solutions. I solicit also, Messrs. Editors, your own acceptance of the copy herewith inclosed. I need only premise further, that the stone itself is a goodly block of metamorphick sandstone, and that the Runes resemble very nearly the ornithichnites or fossil bird-tracks of Dr. Hitchcock, but with less regularity or apparent design than is displayed by those remarkable geological monuments. These are rather the non bene junctarum discordia semina rerum. Resolved to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... should mention just here, that out of Miss Flora's Two hundred and fifty or sixty adorers, I had just been selected as he who should throw all The rest in the shade, by the gracious bestowal On myself, after twenty or thirty rejections, Of those fossil remains which she called her "affections," And that rather decayed but well-known work of art Which Miss Flora persisted in styling her "heart." So we were engaged. Our troth had been plighted, Not by moonbeam or starbeam, by fountain or grove, But in a front parlor, most ...
— Little Masterpieces of American Wit and Humor - Volume I • Various
... 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 from the past ...
— The Felon's Track • Michael Doheny
... all seriousness, that the way that lank, pin-headed young man revived the soul of that old, worn-out harpischord, digging into its ribs, kicking at its knees with both feet, hand-massaging every one of the keys up, down, and crossways, until the ancient fossil fairly rattled itself loose with the joy of being alive once more, was altogether the most astounding miracle he has ever had to record. And Pestler with his violin was ...
— Felix O'Day • F. Hopkinson Smith
... these cones are scattered over the isthmus and shores of Waitemata and Manukau. The tuff cones and craters rise from a floor of Tertiary sandstone and shale, the horizontal strata of which are laid open in the precipitous bluffs of Waitemata and Manukau harbours; they sometimes contain fossil shells of the genera Pecten, Nucula, Cardium, Turbo, and Neritae. As the volcanic tuff-beds are intermingled with the Upper Tertiary strata, it is inferred that the first outbursts of volcanic forces occurred when the region was ...
— Volcanoes: Past and Present • Edward Hull
... girls with whom Lou associated within the college walls were up-to-the-minute—if not a little ahead of it—she found her aunt, like many of those barnacles clinging to the outer reefs of learning in college towns, was really a fossil. If one desires to meet the ultraconservative in thought and social life let me commend him to this stratum of humanity within stone's throw of a college. These barnacles like Aunt Euphemia are wedded to a manner of thought, gained from their own school experiences, that went out of fashion ...
— Cap'n Abe, Storekeeper • James A. Cooper
... 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 for ...
— A New Hochelagan Burying-ground Discovered at Westmount on the - Western Spur of Mount Royal, Montreal, July-September, 1898 • W. D. Lighthall
... paleoanthropological, paleoanthropic[obs3], paleolithic, ; primordial, primordinate[obs3]; aboriginal &c. (beginning) 66; diluvian[obs3], antediluvian; protohistoric[obs3]; prehistoric; antebellum, colonial, precolumbian; patriarchal, preadamite[obs3]; paleocrystic[obs3]; fossil, paleozoolical, paleozoic, preglacial[obs3], antemundane[obs3]; archaic, classic, medieval, Pre-Raphaelite, ancestral, black-letter. immemorial, traditional, prescriptive, customary, whereof the memory of man runneth not to the contrary; inveterate, rooted. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... and 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, and ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... 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 ...
— Roumania Past and Present • James Samuelson
... days! Even if you're not going off to the wilds, maybe you might give me some kind of a job here so that my wife can't drag me off to that house party. I feel it in my very bones that old Hiram Leatherby will be there and he ALWAYS singles me out to talk about his fossil collection!" ...
— Tom Swift and His Giant Telescope • Victor Appleton
... of fossil saurians, or animals of the lizard tribe, have, as our scientific readers are aware, been found at Lyme, in Dorsetshire; but the world would to this day have remained ignorant of the treasures England possessed, but for the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 382, July 25, 1829 • Various
... foundation wall boulders from the stream were used, and many were found bearing bold imprints of fossil ferns, birds, and snakes. Mrs. Stevenson was delighted to have these reminders of a past age for her wall, but, alas, during her absence the stones were all cemented in place with the nice smooth sides outward and ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez
... church, with a long flight of steps leading up to it from the harbor along which the people go, and when there is a funeral the coffin has to be slung in order to be carried up the steps. Whitby is famous for its jet, which is worked into numerous ornaments: this is a variety of fossil wood, capable of being cut and taking a high polish. It is also celebrated for its production of iron-ore, which indeed is a product of all this part of Yorkshire; while at night, along the valley of the Tees, not far north of Whitby, the blaze of the myriads ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... pages 170-71. "The cretaceous birds of America all appear to be aquatic, and comprise some eight or a dozen genera, and many species. Professor Marsh and others have found in Kansas a large number of most interesting fossil birds, one of them, a gigantic loon-like creature, six feet in length from beak to toe, taken from the yellow chalk of the Smoky Hill River region and from calcareous shale near Fort ...
— Bird Stories • Edith M. Patch
... land was still in its natural condition of stones, fossil shells, and green shrubs with fragrant herbs. There might be seen occasionally starting up before the intruding wanderer, partridges, hares, quails, the wild pigeon, the ...
— Byeways in Palestine • James Finn
... necessarily attain the rank of species. They may whilst in this incipient state become extinct, or they may endure as varieties for very long periods, as has been shown to be the case by Mr. Wollaston with the varieties of certain fossil land-shells in Madeira. If a variety were to flourish so as to exceed in numbers the parent species, it would then rank as the species, and the species as the variety; or it might come to supplant and exterminate the parent species; or both might co-exist, and ...
— On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection • Charles Darwin
... 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 empyreumatic smell, very dark colour, and is recommended ...
— The Handbook of Soap Manufacture • W. H. Simmons
... party which claims him. That he was a man of extraordinary endowments and deep spiritual nature was not questioned, nor that he was a most acute reasoner, who could unfold a proposition into its consequences as patiently, as convincingly, as a palaeontologist extorts its confession from a fossil fragment. But it was maintained that so many dehumanizing ideas were mixed up with his conceptions of man, and so many diabolizing attributes embodied in his imagination of the Deity, that his system of beliefs ...
— Pages From an Old Volume of Life - A Collection Of Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... 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 ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... proceeded down the river, its current became weaker, and its channel somewhat deeper. Our attention was called to a remarkable change in the geology of the country, as well as to an apparent alteration in the natural productions. The cliffs of sand and clay ceased, and were succeeded by a fossil formation of the most singular description. At first, it did not exceed a foot in height above the water, but it gradually rose, like an inclined plane, and resembled in colour, and in appearance, ...
— Two Expeditions into the Interior of Southern Australia, Complete • Charles Sturt
... resolved to hitch his wagon, if not to a star, to the mighty sun. With this purpose in view, he had bought the 20,000 acres of coal land. Half of this area was located in Jefferson, Harrison, and Belmont counties on the Ohio River, and thus title was secured to vast quantities of fossil power in the upper coal measures, which ignites quickly and burns with a hot fire. The other 10,000 acres were valuable because nearer to Harrisville. This coal came ...
— The Harris-Ingram Experiment • Charles E. Bolton
... draw a distinction between Phrenology and Physiognomy, because I don't believe I ever went into any community to lecture in my life, that I did not hear some old fossil say that he believed in the science of Physiognomy, but he didn't take much stock in Phrenology. Now I beseech you, as friends of mine (and after I have lectured to an audience for twenty minutes I always feel that I have so many friends in it that I am personally interested ...
— How to Become Rich - A Treatise on Phrenology, Choice of Professions and Matrimony • William Windsor
... natural.[109] This little touch of art throws a gleam of inner light on the struggle towards originality and truth which characterized the Greek principles of beauty and fitness in literature and art, in direct contrast to that which was always turning back to those fossil forms which were only respectable on account of their age and their mystery, but of which the tradition and intention were ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... race upon the two continents. Their type was the same and universal, and only these mounds to witness of a former race. Ethnology has discovered no other. All the remains of man indicate the same type, and there remains not a fossil to record the existence of those who reared these earth-books, which speak so eloquently of ...
— The Memories of Fifty Years • William H. Sparks
... grateful if any correspondents who can will send me specimens of minerals or fossil formations in exchange for the beautiful quartz crystals that we find imbedded in the rock at this place. I am also anxious to get some pretty shells, especially from the Southern and Western coasts. I will return any excess of postage ...
— Harper's Young People, September 21, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... gravely, making a negative gesture which was not a little droll, and proved to an observer that in his youth the sailor had been witty and loving and beloved. Perhaps his fossil life at Guerande hid many memories. When he stood, solemnly planted on his two heron-legs in the sunshine on the mall, gazing at the sea or watching the gambols of his little dog, perhaps he was living again in some terrestrial paradise of a past ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... "They look like the fossil bird-tracks in the Connecticut Valley sandstone," said Putnam, following the direction ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 26, October, 1880 • Various
... 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 ...
— A Gunner Aboard the "Yankee" • Russell Doubleday
... 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 and their fine trunks. But such is the mischief ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... 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 were annually ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 344, August 5, 1882 • Various
... a maiden aunt of Sir James, Miss Patricia, a stern and awful specimen of the female sex in its fossil state; her ward, Miss Henderson, who, having long passed her pupilage, remained at Collingham-Westmore in the capacity of gouvernante and companion to the young heiress; the heiress aforesaid, and myself. A priest—did I say that ...
— A Stable for Nightmares - or Weird Tales • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... so interesting as Geology, even to common and ignorant people, especially when you have a bank or the side of a cutting, studded with fossil fish and things and oysters that were stale when Adam was fresh to illustrate by. (Remark made by Steelman, professional wanderer, to ...
— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson
... "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 never ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... 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 ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz
... "Count Alfieri, sir," he said, "has doubtless explained to you the necessity that obliges me to be so private in receiving my friends; and now perhaps you will join these gentlemen in examining some rare fossil fish newly sent me ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... productions of nature than of man, and have the lastingness of such, delighting our age with the same startle of newness and beauty that pleased our youth. Is it his thought? It has the shifting inward lustre of diamond. Is it his feeling? It is as delicate as the impressions of fossil ferns. He seems to have caught and fixed forever in immutable grace the most evanescent and intangible of our intuitions, the very ripple-marks on the remotest shores of being. But this intensity of mood which insures high quality is by its very nature ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... Rebellion. The story of "Washington During the War" has yet to be written in all its vividness of enterprise, devotion, and infamy. It has been, in periods of peace, a dull, dolorous town, of mammoth hotels, paltry dwellings, empty lots, prodigiously wide avenues, a fossil population, and a series of gigantic public buildings, which seemed dropped by accident into a fifth-rate backwoods settlement. During the sessions Washington was overrun with "Smartness": Smart pages, smart messengers, smart cabmen, smart publicans, smart ...
— Campaigns of a Non-Combatant, - and His Romaunt Abroad During the War • George Alfred Townsend
... Renny. How long will he remember? Sometimes I think he has a fossil inside of him instead of a heart. But there! I must not abuse him to ...
— Girls of the Forest • L. T. Meade |
