"Mastodon" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Dec. 6, says "there is now on exhibition at the rooms of the State Board of Agriculture, or headquarters of the Geological Corps, a section of the femur or thigh bone of an animal of the mastodon species, the fossilized remains of which were recently discovered in Union county. These remains were found in a drift formation about three feet below the surface, and are similar to the remains of the Megatherium ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various
... Waples. "Yet here is a milder man, also of mighty girth, like the frame of a mastodon, transparent. Your name, ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend
... style of those heroic times? For nature brings not back the Mastodon, Nor we those times; and why should any man Remodel models? these twelve books of ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... Society of Glasgow, and Clan MacLean Association of Glasgow; Corresponding Member Davenport Academy of Sciences, and Western Reserve Historical Society; Author of History of Clan MacLean, Antiquity of Man, The Mound Builders, Mastodon, Mammoth and Man, Norse Discovery of America, Fingal's Cave, Introduction Study St. John's Gospel, Jewish ...
— An Historical Account of the Settlements of Scotch Highlanders in America • J. P. MacLean
... with the protruding tusk, corresponds perfectly to the formation of the lower jaw and teeth in the Manatee. Some resemblance of the Dinotherium to the Mastodon suggested a comparison with that animal as the next step in the investigation, when it was found that at the edge of the lower jaw of the latter there was a pit with a small projecting tooth, also corresponding exactly in its position to the tusk in the Dinotherium. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... tread the trees of the forest snapped, were crushed like reeds beneath the pads of a mastodon. From far below came the sound of their crashing. The thick forest checked the progress of the Shape less than tall grass would that ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt
... Behind his Memory. In the gloom he groped, And with dark hands that knew not what they knew, As one that shelters in the night, unknowing, Beneath a stranded shipwreck, with a cry He touched the enormous rain-washed belted ribs And bones like battlements of some Mastodon Embedded there ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... and fondling their little ones, while the venerable aboriginal sequoia, ancient of other days, keeps you at a distance, looking as strange in aspect and behavior among its neighbor trees as would the mastodon among the homely bears and deers. Only the Sierra juniper is at all like it, standing rigid and unconquerable on glacier pavements for thousands of years, grim and silent, with an air of antiquity about as pronounced as ...
— The Yosemite • John Muir
... French naturalist, Cuvier, was able to reconstruct the whole anatomy of an animal merely through examining the structure of a tooth or the fragment of a bone. Applying to the German historian the method which Cuvier applied to the antediluvian mastodon, we can reduce the whole complex political philosophy of Treitschke from a few fundamental principles which he follows with a single mind, and which the Prussian State has applied with an equally relentless consistency both in its internal and ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... perhaps soon, we shall send the mosquito, the house-fly and the other buzzing pirates to join in the grave's silence their big brothers—the mastodon and the rest. ...
— Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers • Arthur Brisbane
... and palms, The ferns and cones, All turned to stones Of all the unknown elder world, As in a wonderful museum, Ranged in its myriad mummy shelves. Insects and worms,— All lower forms Of fin and scale, Of gnat and whale, Fish, bird, and the monstrous mastodon, The fabulous megatherium, ...
— The Coming of the Princess and Other Poems • Kate Seymour Maclean
... wild horses and cattle than the pampas and other plains of South America, is shown by the facility with which they have there run wild and enormously multiplied, since introduced from the Old World not long ago. There was no wild American stock. Yet in the times of the mastodon and megatherium, at the dawn of the present period, wild-horses—certainly very much like the existing horse—roamed over those plains in abundance. On the principle of original and direct created adaptation of species to climate and other conditions, why were they not reproduced, ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... Alexander's power, was a pretty little baton barely two feet long. Its staff was mastodon ivory, the paleontologists had determined. One end sported a solid ball of gold hardly as big as a fist; studded with rubies, but none set quite so close as to ...
— Zero Data • Charles Saphro
... Benedictine, Calmet, in his great works on the Bible, accepted it as late as the beginning of the eighteenth century, believing the mastodon's bones exhibited by Mazurier to be those of King Teutobocus, and holding them valuable testimony to the existence of the giants mentioned in Scripture and of the early inhabitants of the earth overwhelmed by ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... Chase had a heart in him like a mastodon's. I have seen him weep when a man has been flogged at the gangway; yet, in relating the story of the Battle of Navarino, he plainly showed that he held the God of the blessed Bible to have been the British Commodore ...
— White Jacket - or, the World on a Man-of-War • Herman Melville
... wonders of nature and art very well to each other, by suggesting that these great masses of stone were transported by means of the mastodon, whose remains are occasionally disinterred ...
— The Story of Extinct Civilizations of the West • Robert E. Anderson
... light at first that shone On giant fern and mastodon, On half-formed plant and beast of prey, And man as rude and wild ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... forgotten. Well, I'd like to know where those people got that mule out here, in 1805! I'd have been no more surprised to see a mastodon really walking around out here. Of course, you know that President Jefferson wrote Lewis not to be surprised if he did see the mastodon still living in this unknown country. You see, all of them knew about the mastodon bones found ...
— The Young Alaskans on the Missouri • Emerson Hough
... say now. What if,—mind, I only suggest it,—what if the direful creatures, whose report lingers in these tales, should have an origin far older still? What if they were the remnants of a vanishing period of the earth's history long antecedent to the birth of mastodon and iguanodon; a stage, namely, when the world, as we call it, had not yet become quite visible, was not yet so far finished as to part from the invisible world that was its mother, and which, on its part, had not then become quite invisible—was only almost such; and when, as a credible ...
— The Portent & Other Stories • George MacDonald
... of mastodons, elephants, and other animals. From Suetonius we learn that Augustus Caesar pleased himself by adorning his palaces with so-called giants' bones of incredible size, preferring these to pictures or images. From their enormous size we must believe they were mastodon bones, as no contemporary animals show such measurements. Bartholinus describes a large tooth for many years exhibited as the canine of a giant which proved to be nothing but a tooth of a spermaceti whale (Cetus dentatus), quite a common fish. ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... yield three thousand pounds per acre.[32] Single Alvarado seeds were sold at fifty cents each, or a bushel might be had at $160. In the succeeding years Vick's Hundred Seed, Brown's, Pitt's, Prolific, Sugar Loaf, Guatemala, Cluster, Hogan's, Banana, Pomegranate, Dean, Multibolus, Mammoth, Mastodon and many others competed for attention and sale. Some proved worth while either in increasing the yield, or in producing larger bolls and thereby speeding the harvest, or in reducing the proportionate weight of the seed and increasing ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... grinding him to powder, sprinkled it upon the earth, and this produced many worms. The worms were then collected and scattered again. They matured into infants and these were then collected and scattered and became full-grown Dakotas. The bones of the mastodon, the Dakotas think, are the bones of Unktehees, and they preserve the with the greatest care in the medicine bag." Neill's Hist. Minn., p. 55. The Unktehees and the Thunder-birds are perpetually it war. ...
— Legends of the Northwest • Hanford Lennox Gordon
... sun of human history was yet silvering the dawn of the world—before Job's sheep lay sick in the land of Uz— before a lion had lain down to dream in the jungle where Babylon was to arise and to become a name,—this old, old, old high road may have been a footpath of the awful mastodon, who had torn his terrible way through the tangled, twisted, gnarled and rooted fastnesses of the wilderness as lightly as a wild young Cyclone out of the South tears his ...
— The Choir Invisible • James Lane Allen
... defence and attack, huge clubs and pointed spears, rose from the rock, like the phantoms before the doomed Macbeth. They lived in hollows, woods, and mud huts—perhaps in caves of the neighbouring rocks. Behind them stood an earlier band. No man was there. Huge elephantine forms, the mastodon, the hippopotamus, the tapir, antelopes of monstrous size, the megatherium, and the myledon—all, for the moment, in juxtaposition. Further back, and overlapped by these, were perched huge-billed birds and swinish creatures ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... decoctions for imparting strength. Then after a few score yards of invitation to debauch there came, with characteristic admirable English common sense, a cure for indigestion, so large that it would have given ease to a mastodon who had by inadvertence swallowed an elephant. And then there were the calls to pleasure. Astonishing, the quantity of palaces that offered you exactly the same entertainment twice over on the same night! Astonishing, the reliance on number in this matter of amusement! Authenticated statements ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett
... description of the horse very nearly, but all that I saw were destitute of the horns, and none had the characteristic forked tail. This member, on the contrary, is a tassel of straight wiry hair, reaching nearly to the ground—a surprising sight. Lower still I came upon the mastodon, the lion, the tiger, hippopotamus and alligator, all differing very little from those infesting Central Europe, as described in my ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce • Ambrose Bierce
... gathered up the crockery, marched off in disgrace, and came back with a molasses-hogshead, or a wash-tub, or some such overgrown mastodon, to turn ...
— Gala-days • Gail Hamilton
... the roughness of a Russian barin all the coarseness of a Dutch sailor." Such in brief suggestion was Peter I. of Russia, half-savage, half-sovereign, the strangest jumble of contradictions who has ever worn the Imperial purple—"a huge mastodon, whose moral perceptions were ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... until the recent period, and their bones deposited contemporaneously with those of modern species and man. Another is that the geologists may be vastly mistaken as to the date of the extinction of species, and that in fact the mastodon, mammoth, and other species found in juxtaposition with human remains and works of art, have probably survived until a very recent period. Without entering into detail on these points, we would venture the prediction that when weighed in the balance they will be found utterly ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... 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, Preh. Times, ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... by the hand of Omnipotence, and the sweet spring came bursting upward from the fragrant earth, and light and flowers came together to welcome the birthday of the glad and glorious gift. Here, many a century back, the giant mastodon trod the earth into deep hollows, as he moved upon his sounding path. Then came another time. In the hollow of the three hills, the Indian raised his bark wigwam, and the smoke of his council fire curled up ...
— The Three Brides, Love in a Cottage, and Other Tales • Francis A. Durivage
... silver-fox stoles at Goliath and Mastodon's," said Suzanne, with a sigh; "if I could only inveigle Bertram into their building and take him for a ...
— Beasts and Super-Beasts • Saki
... basis of all morality can be expressed by the words Left—or Right. 'Shall I take the path to the right, when my child is being threatened with death by a pterodactyl, or shall I take the path to the left when a mastodon is threatening to put a ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... Where float the mighty ichthyosaurus, the megalosaurus, in company with the gigantic plesiosaurus! Upon whose sloping shores disport the enormous mastodon, ...
— The Lost City • Joseph E. Badger, Jr.
... not cast you, sublime ashes, to the winds of heaven! I will keep you reverently, as one preserves the cloak of a great man, or the bones of a mastodon. Behold, I close you again in your covers, where the eye of no mortal shall henceforth ...
— A Black Adonis • Linn Boyd Porter
... in the British Museum, looking at the monstrous skeletons of the mastodon, megatherium and iguanodon, and conclude that all the great animals thirty feet long and eleven ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage
... thirty million years the bird arrived, and the kangaroo, and by and by the mastodon, and the giant sloth, and the Irish elk, and the old Silurian ass, and some people thought that man was about due. But that was a mistake, for the next thing they knew there came a great ice-sheet, and those creatures all escaped across the Bering Strait and wandered ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... base of the cliffs for a considerable distance. The ground was rolling and tree-dotted and covered with grazing animals, alone, in pairs and in herds—a motley aggregation of the modern and extinct herbivore of the world. A huge woolly mastodon stood swaying to and fro in the shade of a giant fern—a mighty bull with enormous upcurving tusks. Near him grazed an aurochs bull with a cow and a calf, close beside a lone rhinoceros asleep in a dust-hole. Deer, antelope, bison, horses, ...
— The People that Time Forgot • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... carriage in the place. It may be doubted if there is a dog. There certainly is not a cow. The people use goats' milk. The horse is as unknown as the pterodactyl, icthyosaurus, dodo, iguanodon, mastodon, great awk. How do they go about? Where are the conveniences for moving to ...
— The Dodge Club - or, Italy in 1859 • James De Mille
... furnished much new evidence of the same character. In the Miocene beds of Pikermi he has discovered the group of the Simocyonidae intermediate between bears and wolves; the genus Hyaenictis which connects the hyaenas with the civets; the Ancylotherium, which is allied both to the extinct mastodon and to the living pangolin or scaly ant-eater; and the Helladotherium, which connects the now isolated giraffe ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace
... unique order of hoofed mammals, of which the elephant is the sole survivor, began, so far as known, in the Eocene, in Egypt, with a piglike ancestor the size of a small horse, with cheek teeth like the Mastodon's, but wanting both trunk and tusks. A proboscidian came next with four short tusks, and in the Miocene there followed a Mastodon (Fig. 346) armed with two pairs of long, straight tusks on ...
— The Elements of Geology • William Harmon Norton
... It was a saying of some great French religious teacher. But surely this is false. God can do without man. God could do without the ichthyosauri and the mastodon. These monsters failed creatively to develop, so God, the creative mystery, dispensed with them. In the same way the mystery could dispense with man, should he too fail creatively to change and develop. The eternal ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... that place; it's one of the great curiosities of the country and for the sake of learning I'm bound to see it. Think of all the gigantic skeletons of the mastodon, the mammoth and other monsters lying there on the ground ...
— The Young Trailers - A Story of Early Kentucky • Joseph A. Altsheler
... alone one hundred. Barnum listened, and gazed in silence at the horse-armor, large enough for an elephant, and a pot called "Guy's porridge-pot," which could have held seventy gallons, but when the old man produced the ribs of a mastodon which he declared had belonged to a huge dun cow, which had done much injury to many persons before being slain by the dauntless Guy, he drew a long breath, and feelingly congratulated the old porter on his ability to concentrate more lies than anyone had ever before heard in ...
— A Unique Story of a Marvellous Career. Life of Hon. Phineas T. • Joel Benton
... pensively Miss Emily wrapped the old mastodon up in a white cloth. "I believe I'll take him home with me. People are always asking to buy him, and it's hard ...
— The Tin Soldier • Temple Bailey
... Cereus, with deeply channelled stems and the appearance of immense candelabra. Totally devoid of leaves, and often skeleton-like in appearance, these plants have a strange look about them, which is suggestive of some fossilised forms of vegetation belonging to the past ages of the mastodon, the elk, and the dodo, rather than to the living things ...
— Cactus Culture For Amateurs • W. Watson
... ventilation. Then into this ark he put a certain number of all the animals in the world. Naturalists have ascertained that at that time there were at least eleven hundred thousand insects necessary to go into the ark, about forty thousand mammalia, sixteen hundred reptiles, to say nothing of the mastodon, the elephant and the animalcule, of which thousands live upon a single leaf and which cannot be seen by the naked eye. Noah had no microscope, and yet he had pick them out by pairs. You have no idea the trouble that man had. Some say that the flood was not ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll
... out of London, but when he takes a holiday spends it in hanging about Tweedy's, and observing that unlovely place of business from the outside. The dust, if not the iron, of Tweedy's has entered into his soul; and Tweedy's young men know him as "the Mastodon." He is a thin, bald septuagenarian, with sloping shoulders, and a habit of regarding the pavement when he walks, so that he seems to steer his way by instinct rather than sight. In general he keeps silence while eating his chop; and on this occasion ...
— Stories By English Authors: London • Various
... archaeologists. By 1888 Dr. Abbott had obtained not less than 60 implements from various recorded depths in the gravel, while many others were found at depths not recorded or in the talus of the banks.[8] Three human skulls and other bones, along with the tusk of a mastodon, have been discovered in the same gravel. Careful studies have been made of the conditions under which the gravel-banks were deposited and their probable age; and it is generally agreed that they date from the later ...
— The Discovery of America Vol. 1 (of 2) - with some account of Ancient America and the Spanish Conquest • John Fiske
... who had dug up the tooth of the mastodon was Louis Bloche. Details were wanting. As to his history, it was comprised in one of the volumes of the Lisieux Academy, and he could not lend his own copy, as he was afraid of spoiling the collection. With regard to ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert
... discoverers of America. Mr. Kipling, however, has taken the wind out of its sails with his sketch, "The Finest Story in the World." There are all the marvels and portents of the Eyrbyggja Saga to draw upon, there are Skraelings to fight, and why should not Karlsefni's son kill the last mastodon, and, as Quetzalcoatl, be the white-bearded god of the Aztecs? After that a romance on the intrigues to make Charles Edward King of Poland sounds commonplace. But much might be made of that, too, if the right man took it in hand. Believe me, there are ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... consoled himself with the reflection that this human mastodon probably knew what it ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston
... snow, oranged by the sun, or else of a deep, cold blue, a piling up of mounds of ice, fantastically structured into towers, fleches, aiguilles, aretes, and gigantic heaps, under which one could well believe that the lost megatherium or mastodon lay sleeping. All the tints of the rainbow played there and met in the bed of vast glaciers rolling down their immovable cascades, crossed by other little frozen torrents, the surfaces of which the sun's warmth liquefied, making them smoother and more glittering. ...
— Tartarin On The Alps • Alphonse Daudet
... transformations, of remoulding and steeping in new dyes. Matter-of-fact objects, clear-cut during the day, assume fantastic shapes; a bush may appear a crouching mountain cat; a rock may masquerade as a mastodon. This is an hour of uncertainties. And doubtings and questionings and uncertainties were other shadow shapes thronging the demesnes of two men's souls. Silence and dim dusk without, dim ...
— The Desert Valley • Jackson Gregory
... engines, trucks which run on rails along the galleries, subterranean tramways, frames to support the shaft, pipes—in short, all that constituted the machinery of a mine had been brought up from its depths. The exhausted mine was like the body of a huge fantastically-shaped mastodon, from which all the organs of life have been taken, and only the ...
— The Underground City • Jules Verne
... superhuman. The impotent little flames of the candles, placed in a row, in groups of fifty, on tripods of wood from one end of the route to the other, show on the right and left of the immense avenue rectangular sepulchral caverns, containing each a black coffin, but a coffin as if for a mastodon. And all these coffins, so sombre and so alike, are square shaped too, severely simple like so many boxes; but made out of a single block of rare granite that gleams like marble. They are entirely without ornament. It is necessary to look closely to distinguish on the smooth walls the hieroglyphic ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... ago, the miners came across a large mass of tallow weighing about one hundred and fifty pounds, and in proximity were the bones and tusks of a huge animal. Many bones and tusks of the mammoth and mastodon, not to mention the remains of other animals, have been found in the ancient river-bed. Probably some of these elephantine animals were sporting in the water and dashing it over themselves when the ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson
... as well as extinct, species were common to pre-glacial and post-glacial times. In like manner there is reason to suppose that in North America much of the ancient mammalian fauna, together with nearly all the invertebrata, lived through the ages of intense cold. That in the United States the Mastodon giganteus was very abundant after the drift period, is evident from the fact that entire skeletons of this animal are met with in bogs and lacustrine deposits occupying hollows in the glacial drift. They sometimes occur in the bottom even of small ponds recently ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell
... by its vacant chair. Or rather, like a ghost it haunts a word, rattling a warning lest we disarrange a syllable. Its absence, however, in the flesh, despite the lapse of time—for it went off long ago when the mastodon still wandered on the pleasant upland—its continued absence vexes the learned. They scan ancient texts for an improper syllable and mark the time upon their brown old fingers, if possibly a jolting measure may offer them a clue. Although it must appear that the digamma—if it yet rambles alive ...
— Chimney-Pot Papers • Charles S. Brooks
... epoch also saw the pine and the palm-tree gradually displace the giant tree ferns. In the later days of the Mesolithic epoch, mammals for the first time came into existence, but the fossil remains of the mammoth and mastodon, which were their earliest representatives, are chiefly found in the subsequent strata of ...
— The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria • W. Scott-Elliot
... our fire-proof building where we keep our inflammable beasts. That big, sleeping creature that looks like a mastodon lizard is the dragon that your friend St. George, of London, got the best of, and sent here with his compliments. I'll give the beast a prod and let ...
— Olympian Nights • John Kendrick Bangs
... 4th of July, 1776. The Federal Convention also sat in it, in 1787. It is now occupied by the supreme and district courts below, and by Peale's Museum above. This museum, among other articles, contains an immense fossil skeleton of the great Mastodon, or American Mammoth, which, some years ago, ...
— Travels in North America, From Modern Writers • William Bingley
... dead! If any ever really lived!" cried Cap, in a fury. "Heaven knows I am inclined to believe them to have been a fabulous race like that of the mastodon or the centaur! I certainly never saw a creature that deserved the name of man! The very first of your race was the meanest fellow that ever was heard of—ate the stolen apple and when found out laid one half of the blame on his wife and the ...
— Capitola the Madcap • Emma D. E. N. Southworth |
