"Omnivorous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... mansion. It has become a national monument. On the days when it is open we revisit it with admiration; and those chambers and garden walks re-echo to us the clear dogmas and savoury diction of the sage—omnivorous, artless, ...
— Some Turns of Thought in Modern Philosophy - Five Essays • George Santayana
... The black bears are omnivorous. They will eat fish, flesh, fowl, and vegetables. They are fond of all kinds of berries and sweet fruits. They "go crazed" after honey, climbing bee-trees and robbing the nests. They dig for roots—such ...
— The Boy Hunters • Captain Mayne Reid
... charge of a nurse and maid at all times, and she was invariably the picturesque center of a group of admirers recruited from every capital of the civilized world. Letty Gerald was a talented woman, beautiful, graceful, artistic, a writer of verse, an omnivorous reader, a student of art, and a sincere and ardent ...
— Jennie Gerhardt - A Novel • Theodore Dreiser
... with the author is limited to brief visits and loving fellowship in his church. There I discovered a self-made scholar, an omnivorous reader with a remarkable library of theological and devotional books, and one who seemed to burn the midnight oil in pursuit of God. His book is the result of long meditation and much prayer. It is not a collection of ...
— The Pursuit of God • A. W. Tozer
... while, when he went to Professor MacMullen's Academy on Twentieth Street. He was taught at home and he probably got more from his reading than from his teachers. By the time he was ten, the passion for omnivorous reading which frequently distinguishes boys who are physically handicapped, began in him. He devoured Our Young Folks, that excellent periodical on which many of the boys and girls who were his contemporaries fed. He loved tales of travel and adventure; he loved Cooper's stories, and especially ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... they separated that Quin's thoughts left the disturbing events of the day and flew to something more pleasing. For two weeks now he had had to content himself with chance interviews with Eleanor, meager diet for a person with an omnivorous appetite; but to-night there was the prospect for a long, uninterrupted evening. Since the day of Miss Enid's wedding he had found her perplexed and absent-minded; but the fact that she always had a smile for him, and ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice
... sort of glory from bringing hardily to light the obscure and vulgar vices which we know may sometimes be blended with eminent talents. He has not observed on the nature of vanity who does not know that it is omnivorous,—that it has no choice in its food,—that it is fond to talk even of its own faults and vices, as what will excite surprise and draw attention, and what will pass at worst for openness ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. IV. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... Cranach, and can be traced in England through her Rebellion and Restoration up to the very confines of the eighteenth century. Why, we have to ask, even granting that William Hogarth's "monster Caricatura" is thus omnivorous and omnipresent, does he tower aloft in some countries and under some conditions to the majesty of a new art, and in others dwindle ...
— The Eighteenth Century in English Caricature • Selwyn Brinton
... a mere intellectual exchange, but one very agreeable to Miss Rolleston; for a fine memory, and omnivorous reading from his very boyhood, with the habit of taking notes, and reviewing them, had made Mr. Hazel a walking dictionary, and a walking ...
— Foul Play • Charles Reade
... of the bear shows him to be naturally omnivorous, he rarely preys upon flesh in Ceylon, and his solitary habits whilst in search of honey and fruits, render him timid and retiring. Hence he evinces alarm on the approach of man or other animals, and, unable to make a rapid retreat, his panic rather than any vicious ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... "Then I became omnivorous, and read everything, whether I understood it or not, especially biographies. I spent all my spare time in the school library; one only valuable thing have I derived from that—a capacity for taking in the sense of a page at a glance, ...
— Memoirs of Arthur Hamilton, B. A. Of Trinity College, Cambridge • Arthur Christopher Benson
... personal habits, indulgent never beyond the dictates of perfect simplicity and sobriety. Proficient in all branches of housekeeping, her apparel was mostly of her own making. Good literature was a passion with her, and while never an omnivorous reader, she had a natural instinct for the best in language. A spirit of indomitable independence, courage and persistence in purpose characterized her from childhood. She must think her own thoughts, and mark out and follow ...
— Memories of Jane Cunningham Croly, "Jenny June" • Various
... learn how to manage fowls successfully is to observe their habits and modes of life when left to themselves. In summer, when they have a range, we find them eating grass, seeds, insects, etc. In short, they are omnivorous. In winter, when they can't get these things, they are often fed one or two kinds of grain continuously. Now, from their very nature, they need in winter all the kinds of food that they instinctively ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe
... acquisition of wealth. Then Kshatriyas also betake themselves to the practice of religious acts. In the Kali age, the Brahmanas also abstain from sacrifices and the study of the Vedas, are divested of their staff and deer-skin, and in respect of food become omnivorous. And, O son, the Brahmanas in that age also abstain from prayers and meditation while the Sudras betake themselves to these! The course of the world looketh contrary, and indeed, these are the signs that foreshadow the Universal Destruction. And, O lord ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 2 • Translated by Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... be doubted whether the largest sales of novels recorded in the last half century have surpassed those of the most trumpery trash of the "Minerva Press" period—the last decade of the eighteenth and the first of the nineteenth century. For the main novel-public is quite omnivorous, and almost absolutely uncritical of what it devours. The admirable though certainly fortunate Scot who "could never remember drinking bad whisky" might be echoed, if they had the wit, by not a few persons who never seem to read ...
— The English Novel • George Saintsbury
... existence, and we shall see her both as a colony and as a State long retaining a sort of primacy amongst them. She also retained, in the incidents of her history and in the characters of many of her great men, a colour which seems partly Elizabethan. Her Jefferson, with his omnivorous culture, his love of music and the arts, his proficiency at the same time in sports and bodily exercises, suggests something of the graceful versatility of men like Essex and Raleigh, and we shall see her in her last agony produce ...
— A History of the United States • Cecil Chesterton
... found numerous granite pebbles larger than walnuts. These may be taken for the same purpose that some birds, especially of the gallinaceous order, swallow bits of gravel. Dr Von Baer concludes, from an analysis of all the published accounts, that the walrus is omnivorous.[149] A specimen that died at St Petersburg was fed on oatmeal mixed with turnips or other vegetables; and the little fellow, who lately died in the Regent's Park, seems to have been fed by ...
— Heads and Tales • Various
... Australian Institute was a treasure to the family. I recollect a newcomer being astonished at my sister Mary having read Macaulay's History. "Why, it was only just out when I left England," said he. "Well, it did not take longer to come out than you did," was her reply. We were all omnivorous readers, and the old-fashioned accomplishment of reading aloud was cultivated by both brothers and sisters. I was the only one who could translate French at sight, thanks to Miss Phin's giving me so much of Racine and Moliere and other good French authors ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
... books in question appear to be very rare. It is doubtful if the omnivorous British Museum has swallowed a complete set; certainly at the Art Library of South Kensington Museum, where, if anywhere, we might expect to find Sir Henry Cole completely represented, many ...
— Children's Books and Their Illustrators • Gleeson White
... kind of meat or drink especially delights him. He finds ortolans to be composed of nothing but fat, and he often seems, in his thoughts on other nations, to have for his first point of view the sight of foreigners at dinner. But this is only part of the insatiable and omnivorous interest in odds and ends which is everywhere apparent. The ribbons he has seen at a wedding, the starving seamen who are becoming a danger to the nation, the drinking of wine with a toad in the glass, a lightning flash that melted fetters from the ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... constantly upon his guard. Most readers read to be informed or to be entertained; and books of information are absorbed as if all printed statements must of course be true, or even if not true must, as a record, be worth knowing. This omnivorous, careless style of reading is a grievous waste of life and energy. Were books read with critical, enquiring thought, the time misspent in reading would be wholesomely reduced, and readers would increase in mental power in due proportion to ...
— The Quarterly Review, Volume 162, No. 324, April, 1886 • Various
... school-work. She stood well with her teachers, and was an acknowledged force in her form. She came from a very refined and cultured home, where intellectual interests were cultivated both by father and mother. Her temperament was naturally artistic; she was an omnivorous reader, and could devour anything in the shape of literature that came her way. The bookcase in her dormitory was filled with beautiful volumes, mostly Christmas and birthday gifts. She rejoiced in their soft leather bindings or fine illustrations with a true book-lover's enthusiasm. ...
— For the Sake of the School • Angela Brazil
... the overpowering desire for it, the incessant and limitless search for it. To the desire for it whole literatures owe their continued existence, since, except for the universal genius-hunger of youth, the classics of almost all languages would have perished long ago. When indiscriminate and omnivorous youth has explored those vast and mostly lifeless seas, it has found that the diseased oyster which bears the pearls is the rarest object in nature. But having once formed the taste for it, youth will have ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... fishing, perhaps more than navigation, will be the future industry of the Siberian coast populations. Cetacea, fishes, molluscs, and other marine organisms are cast up in such quantities along both sides of Bering Strait that the bears and other omnivorous creatures have here become very choice as to their food. But on some parts of the coast in the Chukchi country whales are never stranded, and since the arrival of the Russians certain species threaten to disappear altogether. The ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... Sec. 61. Man is omnivorous. Children have therefore a natural desire to taste of everything. For them eating and drinking possess a kind of poetry; there is a theoretic ingredient blended with the material enjoyment. They have, on this account, a proneness to indulge, ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz
... competition with each other. The black rat (Mus rattus) is smaller than the other, but more active and a better climber; he is the rat of the barn and the granary. The brown or Norway rat (Mus decumanus) is larger but less active, a burrower rather than a climber, and though both rats are omnivorous the brown rat is more especially a scavenger; he is the rat of sewers and drains. The black rat came to Northern Europe first—both of them probably being Asiatic animals—and has no doubt been to some extent replaced by the brown rat, who has been specially favoured by the modern extension ...
— Essays in War-Time - Further Studies In The Task Of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... supplies. The simple matter of food and warmth is the first issue in the wilderness; already she had learned this lesson. Her eyes glanced about the walls. There were two or three sacks, perhaps filled with provisions, hanging from the ceiling, safely out of the reach of the omnivorous pack-rats that often wreak such havoc in unoccupied cabins. But further than this the place ...
— The Snowshoe Trail • Edison Marshall
... of 1762 he removed to "merry Islington," then a country village, though now swallowed up in omnivorous London. He went there for the benefit of country air, his health being injured by literary application and confinement, and to be near his chief employer, Mr. Newbery, who resided in the Canonbury House. In this neighborhood he used to take ...
— Oliver Goldsmith • Washington Irving
... with a card above which announced that any volume therein could be purchased for the identical sum which I carried in my pocket. As I approached it a combat ever raged betwixt the hunger of a youthful body and that of an inquiring and omnivorous mind. Five times out of six the animal won. But when the mental prevailed, then there was an entrancing five minutes' digging among out-of-date almanacs, volumes of Scotch theology, and tables of logarithms, until one found something which made it all worth while. If you will look over these ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... his advances is to him a pledge of entire success: he is so transported, that he leaps clean out of his senses forthwith, and the giddiness of his newly-fired conceit fairly puts out the eyes of his understanding. His vanity is now quite omnivorous: once possessed with the monstrous idea of having become an object of love in such a place, nothing is too gross for him to swallow. The raw and unspiced stuffings of Master Brook convey to him no hint of mistrust: he drinks them in with unfaltering confidence; and opens his breast to this ...
— Shakespeare: His Life, Art, And Characters, Volume I. • H. N. Hudson
... the aborigines, however hideous, identified with some accredited Hindu divinity; any custom, however repugnant to common sense or common decency, accepted and explained—in a word, later Hinduism has been omnivorous; it has partially absorbed and assimilated every system of belief, every form of worship, with which it has come in contact. Only to one or two things has it remained inflexibly true. It has steadily ...
— Two Old Faiths - Essays on the Religions of the Hindus and the Mohammedans • J. Murray Mitchell and William Muir
... de Buffon, whom we reckon one of our best historians, I see, says we are an omnivorous animal, and that we only seem to prefer hard substances to those which are tender or succulent. In this, however, he is mistaken; at least I can answer for myself. I know, for my part, I prefer mulligatawney and a tender young chicken, to an old pair ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 343, November 29, 1828 • Various
... sarcastically in the querulous tones of the confirmed invalid. "I've 'suffered the pangs of three several deaths,' as Shakespeare says, because you left the door part way open the last time you went to the 'cyclopedia." For twenty years Joel had been an omnivorous reader, and his speech bristled with quotations gathered from his favorite volumes, and generally tagged with the author's name. The quotations were not always apt, but they helped to confirm the village of Clematis in the conviction that Joel Dale ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith
... fatal; we must not complain, but look forward to a good result. Still, in travelling through this country, I could not but be struck with the force of a symbol. Wherever the hog comes, the rattlesnake disappears; the omnivorous traveller, safe in its stupidity, willingly and easily makes a meal of the most dangerous of reptiles, and one which the Indian looks on with a mystic awe. Even so the white settler pursues the Indian, and is ...
— At Home And Abroad - Or, Things And Thoughts In America and Europe • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... property and mercantile competition. No creative power, no nobility, no courage can battle against them. And below—in the slums and factories, what will be going on? The survival of a race of stunted toilers, with great resisting power to infection, contagion and fatigue, omnivorous as rats.... ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells
... he is said also to have been a brick and tile maker. In 1692 he failed in business; but, in no long time after, he paid every one of his creditors to the uttermost farthing. Through all his labours and misfortunes he was always a hard and careful reader,— an omnivorous reader, too, for he was in the habit of reading almost every book that came in his way. He made his first reputation by writing political pamphlets. One of his pamphlets brought him into high favour with King William; another had the effect of placing him in the ...
— A Brief History of the English Language and Literature, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John Miller Dow Meiklejohn
... originally by George Vasari, and greatly enlarged by Francis I, who succeeded to the Grand Duchy in 1574, the gallery owed most perhaps to the Cardinal, afterwards Ferdinand I, who constructed the Tribuna, and to Cardinal Leopold, an omnivorous collector, who died in 1675. But all the Medici princes added to the rarities in the various cabinets, drawing largely upon the Villa Medici at Rome for this purpose, and the last of them, John Gaston (1723-1737), was one of the ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett
... country, most people are omnivorous. The food is plentiful and people believe in generous living. They put upon their tables at each meal enough variety for a whole day and the custom is to eat some of each. Some breakfasts are heavy enough for dinners. Three heavy meals a day are common. Some can eat this ...
— Maintaining Health • R. L. Alsaker
... is as omnivorous as the Crow or Blue Jay, without their sense of humor, and whenever opportunity offers will attack and eat smaller birds, especially the defenseless young. His own meet with the like fate, a fox squirrel having been seen to emerge from a hole in a large dead tree ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photography [December, 1897], Vol 2. No 6. • Various
... Guarini, Horace, Ovid, Petrarch, Vergil, and others, and left a number of fragments including the outline of a pretentious novel of which Heinrich von Veldeke, whom he looked upon as "der Heilige des Enthusiasmus," was to be the hero. And he was, incidentally, an omnivorous reader, for, ...
— Graf von Loeben and the Legend of Lorelei • Allen Wilson Porterfield
... the room with a long tremulous sigh of contentment. Life was indeed beautiful, glorious. Around him were thousands of books. His father had been an omnivorous reader, and had amassed a large library. Nearly every inch of wall-space was covered with book-shelves. Only one space, above the mantelpiece, was uncovered, and there hung what was even dearer than the books. It was an oil painting of ...
— All for a Scrap of Paper - A Romance of the Present War • Joseph Hocking
... different ends in view, but under modern conditions such an institution would hardly solve the problem. Mr. Collins shows how the intellectual aristocracy of the past has been superseded by the present omnivorous reading-public afflicted with a perpetual craving for literary novelty. The inevitable rapidity of production results in a deluge of poor books which are foisted upon readers by a "detestable system of mutual puffery." ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... cut off from much intercourse with her fellow-creatures, she was never at a loss for occupation, and had so many resources within herself that she rarely had a dull moment. For one thing she was an omnivorous reader, and just as Mrs. Danvers never sat down without a piece of knitting in her hand, so Mrs. Murray never sat ...
— The Rebellion of Margaret • Geraldine Mockler
... became my duty to warn a girl of eleven, who was an omnivorous reader of romances, that such reading was in all probability hastening her development, and she would become a woman in bodily functions while she ought yet to be a child. Her indications of approaching womanhood ...
— What a Young Woman Ought to Know • Mary Wood-Allen
... they used them. Indeed, the reason why self-trained men so often surpass men who are trained by others in the effectiveness and success of their reading, is that they know for what they read and study, and have definite aims and wishes in all their dealings with books. The omnivorous and indiscriminate reader, who is at the same time a listless and passive reader, however ardent is his curiosity, can never be a reader of the ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... to lose sight of perfidy in magnitude and to say, when he hears all the facts: "At least these rascals hunt big game." I wish to say here that such distinction is undeserved. The "System" is omnivorous. Its insatiable maw yawns as greedily for the ten-cent pieces of the people as for the thousands of the larger investor. It is as avid and relentless in devising ant-traps as elephant-snares. There ...
— Frenzied Finance - Vol. 1: The Crime of Amalgamated • Thomas W. Lawson
... believe, even among those who lead the normal type of life, that the abstinent and chastely celibate are exceptionally healthy, energetic, immune. The wildest claims are made. But indeed it is true for all who can see the facts of life simply and plainly, that man is an omnivorous, versatile, various creature and can draw his strength from a hundred varieties of nourishment. He has physiological idiosyncrasies too that are indifferent to biological classifications and moral generalities. It is not true ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... long smoke in front of the cafe below. A homely little place it was, with two rows of small iron tables in front, and at one of these we would seat ourselves. Behind us in the window was a long glass tank of gold fish, into which from time to time a huge cat would reach an omnivorous paw. Often from within the cafe we would hear Russian folk songs played on balalaikas by a group of Russian students there. And between the songs a low hubbub rose, in French and many other tongues, for here were French ...
— The Harbor • Ernest Poole
... (Indios del monte), have a decided aversion to cultivate the land, and live almost exclusively by hunting and fishing. They are men of very robust constitution; but ill-looking, savage, vindictive, and passionately fond of fermented liquors. They are omnivorous animals in the highest degree; and therefore the other Indians, who consider them as barbarians, have a common saying, nothing is so loathsome but that an Ottomac will eat it. While the waters of the Orinoco and its tributary streams are low, the ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V2 • Alexander von Humboldt
... at last found nothing save science engrossing enough to make him oblivious of his constant ill-health, Huxley never lost his keen delight in literature and art. He was a rapid and omnivorous reader, devouring everything from a fairy tale to a blue book, and tearing the heart out of a book at express speed. With this went a love of great and beautiful poetry and of prose expression that is at once exact and artistically balanced. ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley - A Character Sketch • Leonard Huxley
... Democracy, and as the great dabbler in art, music, literature, and, above all, acting. Sir Claude was really rather magnificent in other than American eyes. There was something of the Renascence Prince about his omnivorous culture and restless publicity—, he was not only a great amateur, but an ardent one. There was in him none of that antiquarian frivolity that we convey by ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... author, "even the pupils at the village schools threw away their text-books of rhetoric, and began to study primers of history, geography, and political economy"—a striking anticipation of the movement in vogue to-day. "I have myself been," he tells us, "an omnivorous reader of books of all kinds, even, for example, of ancient medical and botanical works. I have, moreover, dipped into treatises on agriculture and on needlework, all of which I have found very profitable in aiding me to seize the great scheme of the Canon itself." But ...
— The Civilization Of China • Herbert A. Giles
... my own egotism, Know my omnivorous lines and must not write any less, And would fetch you whoever you ...
— Leaves of Grass • Walt Whitman
... STANLEY," proceeded Mr. PUNCH, "said to the banqueting Fishmongers, 'I am an omnivorous reader whenever an opportunity presents itself.' It presents itself here and now. Take, Illustrious Trio, the greatest gift that even PUNCH can bestow upon ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari Volume 98, January 4, 1890 • Various
... by-and-by, five hundred Boston rockers. On learning this fact, the Church (Brigham) graciously accepts fifty for its own purposes.—Being founded upon a rock, it does not care, in its collective capacity, to sit upon rockers, but has an immense series of warehouses, omnivorous and eupeptic, which swallow all manner of tithes, from grain and horseshoes to the less stable commodities of fresh fish and melons, assimilating them by admirable processes into coin of the realm. These warehouses ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... crafty Dupleix were frustrated, however, by a young man of twenty-seven—Robert Clive. At the age of eighteen, Clive had entered the employ of the English East India Company as a clerk at Madras. His restless and discontented spirit found relief, at times, in omnivorous reading; at other times he grew despondent. More than once he planned to take his own life. During the War of the Austrian Succession, he had resigned his civil post and entered the army. The hazards of military life were more to his liking, ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... CONSCIENCE which gives the command "Thou shalt unconditionally do something, unconditionally refrain from something", in short, "Thou shalt". This need tries to satisfy itself and to fill its form with a content, according to its strength, impatience, and eagerness, it at once seizes as an omnivorous appetite with little selection, and accepts whatever is shouted into its ear by all sorts of commanders—parents, teachers, laws, class prejudices, or public opinion. The extraordinary limitation of human development, the hesitation, protractedness, frequent retrogression, ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... and it is most likely that he had been previously made acquainted with its contents and had discussed Egyptian funeral rites and modes of sepulture with the author, for it was to Feydeau that he dedicated his novel when it was published in book form by Hachette in 1858. An omnivorous reader, Gautier had no doubt also perused the far more important works of Champollion, the decipherer of the inscriptions on the Rosetta stone, who first gave the learned world the key to the mysterious Egyptian hieroglyphic ...
— The Works of Theophile Gautier, Volume 5 - The Romance of a Mummy and Egypt • Theophile Gautier
... woodrat proves itself a nuisance about the houses where it is as omnivorous an eater as is its far-removed cousin, the house rat. The gopher is one of the mammals whose mark is more often seen than the creature itself. It lives like the mole in underground burrows, coming to the surface only to push up the dirt that ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
... ideas of the vast work which was to be done, and with rather a vague notion of the way in which I was to do it. My views of the West were chiefly derived from two books, both of which are now obsolete. When a child, with the omnivorous reading propensity of children, I had perused a thin, pale octavo, which stood on the shelves of our library, containing the record of a journey by the Rev. Thaddeus Mason Harris, of Dorchester, from Massachusetts ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... get hold of such boys at an early age and to win their interest in and attendance at the library rather than at places of low resort. To withhold a boy's card may also be considered a doubtful punishment— driving the young omnivorous reader to the patronage of the "underground travelling library" with its secret stations and patrons. Before suspension or expulsion is resorted to, the librarian should clearly distinguish between thoughtless exuberance of spirits and downright maliciousness. "If ...
— Library Work with Children • Alice I. Hazeltine
... vegetarian diet, believing that it is better for the health than eating meat. Undoubtedly food from the vegetable kingdom is a great benefit to the human system, but strict vegetarianism is not recommended by our medical men. Nature apparently intended us to be omnivorous, and, in addition, vegetarianism may run too close to the dangers of carbohydrate excess. As man progresses after middle life he can unquestionably diminish materially the amount of meat in ...
— Keeping Fit All the Way • Walter Camp
... of omnivorous readers, the position of authors has decidedly improved. We no longer see the half-starved poets bartering their sonnets for a meal; learned scholars pining in Newgate; nor is "half the pay of a scavenger" ...
— Books Fatal to Their Authors • P. H. Ditchfield
... courses in medicine and philosophy, but a fact of even more consequence than his proficiency in his regular work was his persistent study of languages and his omnivorous reading. He was associated with the other Filipinos who were working in a somewhat spectacular way, misdirected rather than led by what may be styled the Spanish liberals, for more considerate treatment of the Philippines. But while he was among them he was not of them, as his studious habits and ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... undistinguished compared with those of France. Grolier, however, and his fair imitators, as a rule, bought only the books of their own day, giving them distinction by the handsome liveries which they made them don. Our English collectors have more often been of the omnivorous type, and though Lords Lumley and Arundel in the sixteenth century cannot, even when their forces are joined, stand up against De Thou, in Sir Robert Cotton, Harley, Thomas Rawlinson, Lord Spencer, Heber, Grenville, and Sir Thomas Phillips (and the list might be doubled without much relaxation ...
— English Embroidered Bookbindings • Cyril James Humphries Davenport
... Travel begins with the part partly translated by Dr. King: Crapulia, named from Crapula, is the Land of Inebriate Excess, and its two provinces, Pamphagonia and Yvronia, mean by their names the provinces of Omnivorous Gluttony and Drunkenness. Dr. King has translated six chapters, and begun the seventh, which is upon the wars of the Pamphagonians, to which they march forth armed with spits and two-pronged forks ...
— Ideal Commonwealths • Various
... to be. He had spent five years in schools, and nine years in colleges and universities; he had given the scholars of the world full opportunity to guide him to whatever was of importance. Also, he had been an omnivorous reader upon his own impulse; and here he was, at the end of it all—practically ignorant ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair
... almost omnivorous. It eats poultry or wild fowls. It devours frogs, lizards, lame, and insects without distinction. It is fond of sweets, and is very destructive to the sugar-cane and Indian corn of the planter. When the ear of the maize is young, or, as it is termed, "in the milk," it is very sweet. Then ...
— The Hunters' Feast - Conversations Around the Camp Fire • Mayne Reid
... I was born. He was not an American, but I should never have guessed it by his speech, which was the purest Cape Cod, and I reckon myself a good taster of dialects. Nor was he less Americanized in all his thoughts and feelings, a singular proof of the ease with which our omnivorous country assimilates foreign matter, provided it be Protestant, for he was a man ere he became an American citizen. He used to walk the deck with his hands in his pockets, in seeming abstraction, but nothing escaped his eyes. How ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VIII (of X) • Various
... of their jaws," replied Cortlandt, "I should say they are omnivorous, and would doubtless prefer meat to what they are eating now. Something seems to have gone wrong with the animal ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... relationships have been published from time to time in learned periodicals like "Archaeologia," the "Archaeological Journal," the "Antiquary," etc., where, being sandwiched between others of another character, they have been lost to all but antiquarian experts of omnivorous appetite. Assuredly, the average educated Englishman will not go in quest of them, but it may be thought he will esteem the opportunity, here offered, of gaining enlightenment, if not in the full and perfect sense ...
— The Customs of Old England • F. J. Snell
... the natives consists chiefly of fish, and, in the season, turtle, with roots and fruits. These latter and shell-fish it is the business of the females to collect and prepare. They may, however, be truly said to be omnivorous, for nothing comes amiss to them, and the quantity they can consume is almost incredible. I have seen them luxuriating on the half putrid liver of a large shark cast up on the beach, the little black children scooping up the filthy oil, and ...
— The Overland Expedition of The Messrs. Jardine • Frank Jardine and Alexander Jardine
... had come upon the rotting ribs of a wreck on the beach. Its distance from the tide line, its position, and its deep imbedding of sand, showed that it was of ancient origin. An omnivorous reader of all that pertained to the history of California, Jenny had in fancy often sailed the seas in one of those mysterious treasure-ships that had skirted the coast in bygone days, and she at once settled in ...
— Colonel Starbottle's Client and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... lonely desert; most of the contributors to those yearly volumes, which took up such pretentious positions on the centre table, have shrunk into entire oblivion, or, at best, hold their place in literature by a scrap or two in some omnivorous collection. ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... it shelter and quarters commensurate with its intrinsic value and wealth of associations. So far in his newspaper work Field had little time and less inclination to learn from books. All stories of his being a close and omnivorous student of books, previous to his coming to Chicago, are not consistent with the facts. He was learning all about humanity by constant attrition with mankind. He was taking in knowledge of the human passions and emotions at first hand and getting very ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... again. If it be expended on one thing, there is none left for the other thing. And so with Vance Corliss. Scholarly lucubrations and healthy exercises during his college days had consumed all the energy his normal digestion extracted from a wholesome omnivorous diet. When he did discover a bit of surplus energy, he worked it off in the society of his mother and of the conventional minds and prim teas she surrounded herself with. Result: A very nice young man, of whom no maid's ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London
... of atheism comes from the unbelieving Bayle, whose omnivorous mind, like the anaconda, assisted its enormous deglutition with a poisonous saliva of its own, and whose negative temper makes the "Dictionnaire ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... to the end. He had a less commanding personality than his father Increase. His nervous sensibility was excessive. His natural vanity was never subdued, though it was often chastened by trial and bitter disappointment. But, like his father, he was an omnivorous reader and a facile producer of books, carrying daily such burdens of mental and spiritual excitement as would have crushed a normal man. Increase Mather published some one hundred and fifty books and pamphlets: Cotton Mather not less than four hundred. The Rev. John Norton, in his sketch ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... period Damaris was an omnivorous reader, eager for every form of literature and every description of knowledge—whether clearly comprehended or not—which the beloved printed page has to give. An eagerness, it may be noted, not infrequently productive of collisions with Theresa, and at this particular juncture ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... Patient Fancy was received with great applause. A hint from Brome, more than a hint from Moliere, much wit, vivacity, and cleverness make up this admirable comedy. Throughout the whole of her career it is amply evident that Mrs. Behn, an omnivorous reader, kept in constant touch with and profited by the French literature and theatre of her day. The debt of the English stage to France at this period is a fact often not sufficiently acknowledged, but one which it would really be difficult to over-emphasize. ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn
... for the "Century," and I determined to make a personal trial of the workings of the censorship in as strong a case as I could have found had I deliberately desired to invent a test case. I may as well remark here that "the censor" is not the hard-worked, omnivorous reader of mountains of print and manuscript which the words represent to the mind of the ordinary foreigner. The work of auditing literature, so to speak, is subdivided among such a host of men that office hours are brief, much of the foreign reading, at ...
— Russian Rambles • Isabel F. Hapgood
... to look out for these distingue foreigners, Helene! You're an heiress, you know," said Octavie, who was an omnivorous newspaper reader. ...
— The Music Master - Novelized from the Play • Charles Klein
... book together with the experience of many workers as they appear in the literature and especially the observations of Osborne and Mendel have made the rat an extremely reliable animal upon which to base comparative data. The omnivorous appetite of the animal, his ready adjustment to confinement, his relatively short life span, all contribute to his selection for experimental feeding tests. Another important reason for his selection is that being a mammal we may reasonably consider ...
— The Vitamine Manual • Walter H. Eddy
... to the aforesaid professional censor. The reviewer, sitting surrounded by them, tier on tier, may rail at the productiveness of the age, and wish that there might not be more than one new book each week. And the omnivorous reader, anxious to keep up with the literature of the day, might fairly re-echo the aspiration. Who, indeed, can hope to turn over a tithe of the new leaves which are issued daily? Nor can an unlimited consumption of them ...
— By-ways in Book-land - Short Essays on Literary Subjects • William Davenport Adams
... were probably small insectivorous or omnivorous forms, therefore with simple, short-crowned teeth, of slow-moving, ambulatory, terrestrial, or arboreal habit, and with short feet provided with claws. In seeking food and avoiding enemies in different ...
— Form and Function - A Contribution to the History of Animal Morphology • E. S. (Edward Stuart) Russell
... and others have found it, and tells us that the great part of the books named were perused before the age of fifteen. Making allowance for the fact that most of the poet's autobiographic sketches are emphatically "Dichtang und Wahrheit," we can believe that he was an omnivorous reader—"I read eating, read in bed, read when no one else reads"—and, having a memory only less retentive than Macaulay's, acquired so much general information as to be suspected of picking it up from Reviews. He himself declares that he never read a Review ...
— Byron • John Nichol
... the correction was justified, since it is a regrettable fact that the taxi-cab driver's wife made "Hermione" rhyme with "bone," and laid no stress on the second syllable. Strong in her superior knowledge, for she was an omnivorous reader of fiction—and Greek names were fashionable last ...
— One Wonderful Night - A Romance of New York • Louis Tracy
... means a new one. Scaliger says, as quoted by omnivorous old Burton: "Nequaquam, nos homines sumus sed partes hominis." The old illustration of this used to be found in pin-making. It took twenty different workmen to make a pin, beginning with drawing the wire and ending with sticking in the paper. Each expert, skilled in one small performance only, ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... of the marsupial race. They have opposable thumbs, which make their feet almost into hands; they have prehensile tails, by which they hang from branches in true monkey fashion; they lead an arboreal omnivorous existence; they feed off fruits, birds' eggs, insects, and roots; and altogether they are just active, cunning, ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... boundless extent of field; at least, the boundaries too often lie quite beyond our horizon. Selection being indispensable, we shall here glance over his First Part only in the most cursory manner. This First Part is, no doubt, distinguished by omnivorous learning, and utmost patience and fairness: at the same time, in its results and delineations, it is much more likely to interest the Compilers of some Library of General, Entertaining, Useful, or even Useless Knowledge than the ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... Froude is itself almost an insult. But there is one judgment so valuable and so emphatic that I cannot refrain from citing it. The fifteenth Earl of Derby held such a high position in the political world that his literary attainments have been comparatively neglected. He was in truth an omnivorous reader and a cool, sagacious critic, who was not led astray by enthusiasm, and never said more than he felt. Writing to Froude on the 20th of October, 1884, Lord Derby described the Life of Carlyle as the ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... realize the intellectual and moral equipment of the young man of twenty-eight, who seemed to M. Scherer to have the world at his feet. What were the chief qualities of mind and heart which Amiel brought back with him from Berlin? In the first place, an omnivorous desire to know: "Amiel," says M. Scherer, "read everything." In the second, an extraordinary power of sustained and concentrated thought, and a passionate, almost a religious, delight in the exercise of his power. Knowledge, ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Els, with a shade of reproach in her tone. "What an omnivorous appetite this Eysvogel business possesses! Ullmann Nutzel said lately: 'Wherever one wants to buy, the bird—[vogel]—has been ahead and snapped up everything in Venice and Milan. And the young one is even sharper ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... my own egotism," he wrote; "I know my omnivorous lines, and must not write any less." He was not disconcerted by any failure of art, or any propriety, ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... criminal conspiracy upon the self-styled Doctor. But in order to make assurance still more certain, we threw out vague hints to him that the portrait of Maria Vanrenen might really be elsewhere, and even suggested in his hearing that it might not improbably have got into the hands of that omnivorous collector, Sir J. H. Tomlinson. But the vendor was proof against all such attempts to decry his goods. He had the effrontery to brush away the documentary evidence, and to declare that Sir J. H. Tomlinson (one of the most learned and astute picture-buyers in England) had been smartly imposed upon ...
— An African Millionaire - Episodes in the Life of the Illustrious Colonel Clay • Grant Allen
... wholly different—nay, at the opposite pole. Gradually the girl's ardent sense—informed, perhaps, more richly than most women's with the memories of history and literature, for in her impatient way she had been at all times a quick, omnivorous reader—awoke to the peculiar conditions, the special thrill, attaching to the place and its performers. The philosopher derides it; the man of letters out of the House talks of it with a smile as a "Ship of Fools"; both, when occasion offers, ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Cockchafer—and other dishes probably unknown to her race, she accepts all and any, large and small, thin-skinned and horny-skinned, that which goes afoot and that which takes winged flight. She is omnivorous, she preys on everything, down to her own kind, should ...
— The Life of the Spider • J. Henri Fabre
... physiologists of Europe,—Cuvier, Lawrence, Blumenbach, Bell of London, Richerand, Marc, etc.,—that the structure of man resembles closely that of the monkey race; and hence objects to the conclusion to which some of these men have arrived (by jumping over, as it were), that man is an omnivorous animal. He freely allows—I use his own words—"that man does approximate more closely to the frugivorous animals than to any others, in physical organization." But then he insists that the conclusion ...
— Vegetable Diet: As Sanctioned by Medical Men, and by Experience in All Ages • William Andrus Alcott
... are dull brownish white and nearly three inches long. The chicks are sometimes domesticated, but even when born in captivity, it is said they are difficult to tame and soon wander away. The birds are omnivorous, feeding on insects, grubs, reptiles, flower buds, young shoots, ...
— Camps and Trails in China - A Narrative of Exploration, Adventure, and Sport in Little-Known China • Roy Chapman Andrews and Yvette Borup Andrews
... Sand, stone, and cocoa-nuts, stone, sand, and pandanus, make the scenery. There is no grass. Here these men, used to the cool, bright mountain rivers of Samoa, must drink with loathing the brackish water of the coral. The food upon such islands is distressing even to the omnivorous white. To the Samoan, who has that shivering delicacy and ready disgust of the child or the rustic mountaineer, it is intolerable. I remember what our present King looked like, what a phantom he was, when he returned from ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the African mosaic, reveals the same contour of countenance, of brow, nose, cheeks and chin. Furthermore it is difficult to think of any other Roman in private life who attained to such fame that six marble replicas of his portrait should have survived the omnivorous lime-kilns of the dark ages. The Barrocco museum of Rome has a very lifelike replica[9] of this type in half-relief. Though its firm, dry workmanship seems to be of a few decades later than Vergil's youth it may well be a fairly faithful copy of one of the first busts ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank
... will somehow ultimately realize; and if he aims at none in particular, he will very likely hit most of them. Thus aimlessness, so far as relations of study to life are concerned, is put at a premium, and students are directly encouraged to be omnivorous ...
— How To Study and Teaching How To Study • F. M. McMurry
... as being from boyhood a book-worm and a day-dreamer. He remained through life an omnivorous, though unsystematic, reader. He was helpless in practical affairs, and his native indolence and procrastination were increased by his indulgence in the opium habit. On his return to England, in 1800, he went ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... Greeland's spicy mountains to India's moral strand. The popular name (wolfman) is incorrect, for the creature is of the cat kind. The woman is lithe and graceful in its movement, especially the American variety (felis pugnans), is omnivorous and can be taught ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... ambition, nor altogether from principle, but from an immense craving for mental labor, which had become second nature to him. His great omnivorous, hungry intellect must have constant food,—new languages, new statistics, new historical investigations, new scientific discoveries, new systems of Scriptural exegesis. He did not for a day in the year nor an hour in the day make ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... be known as an omnivorous reader—you get no mercy shown you. A man who is ready for anything, from the fairy tale to a volume of metaphysics, is naturally one who will make nothing of a fragment of a ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... been done by water, assisted, no doubt, by the subtler action of the winds and storms in the disintegration of the monster cliffs, which, as they slowly crumbled into dust, were carried downward by the rains, and, finally, were borne off by the omnivorous river ...
— John L. Stoddard's Lectures, Vol. 10 (of 10) - Southern California; Grand Canon of the Colorado River; Yellowstone National Park • John L. Stoddard
... the speech of this kilted critic. If it were possible to retain the elasticity and adjustableness of the mind till the end of life, new authors would perhaps fix our attention as much as the old. But only a limited number of articulate-speaking men, such as the omnivorous Professor Saintsbury of Edinburgh, preserve their appetite tireless and intact. The Professor, like a literary Livingstone, can grapple with the most arid and dusty libraries, and is the envy of all scholars; but, alas! the majority ...
— Literary Tours in The Highlands and Islands of Scotland • Daniel Turner Holmes
... romantic love is the only avenue to ideal beauty. Rupert Brooke's The Great Lover might dissipate such an idea, by its picture of childlike and omnivorous taste for sensuousbeauty. ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... "one fuliginous dust-heap," and the whole human race as a mere herd of swine rushing violently down a steep place into the sea. Nor can the guidance of mankind be with safety entrusted to one who for eighty-six years insisted on remaining by his own hearth-stone a mere omnivorous reader and omnigenous writer of books. Carlyle was a true and pure "man of letters," looking at things and speaking to men, alone in his study, through the medium of printed paper. All that a "man of letters," of great genius and lofty spirit, could do by consuming and producing mere ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... road crossed is about 4600 feet above the sea, or a little higher than the Brenner Pass in the Tyrol. But there grain grows and orchards bear fruit, while here, under the parallel of 62 deg., nearly all vegetation ceases, and even the omnivorous northern sheep can find no pasturage. Before and behind you lie wastes of naked grey mountains, relieved only by the snow-patches on their summits. I have seen as desolate tracts of wilderness in the south made beautiful by the lovely hues which they took from the air; but Nature has no such tender ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... the tribes of Veddahs. They are the most degraded, or rather least civilised of all the people of Ceylon. They are divided into Rock Veddahs, Village Veddahs, and Coast Veddahs. This man belongs to the first, who are the most barbarous of all. They are omnivorous, eating carrion or anything that comes in their way— roots, or fish, or wild honey, or any animals they can catch; but their favourite food is monkeys and lizards. They live either in caves and nooks in ...
— My First Voyage to Southern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... the city school in Vicksburg but one year, after which I was employed as a cake-baker's assistant and bread-wagon driver. A short time before this I was a house-boy in the city. I was, at the time of my employment in the bakery, an omnivorous reader of the newspapers, and, in fact, of all kinds of literature; but my hours of labor at both places were so long and incessant that I found it almost impossible to do any reading during ...
— Tuskegee & Its People: Their Ideals and Achievements • Various
... the scientists call an omnivorous, or "all-devouring," animal, able to eat and live upon practically every kind of food that any animal on earth can deal with,—animal and vegetable, soft and hard, wet and dry; fruits, nuts, crabs, roots, seaweeds, insects, anything that we can get ...
— A Handbook of Health • Woods Hutchinson
... the thought of the learned reader, who knows that young women could not be strulbrugs; since the true strulbrug was one who, from base fear of dying, had lingered on into an old age, omnivorous of every genial or vital impulse. The strulbrug of Swift (and Swift, being his horrid creator, ought to understand his own horrid creation) was a wreck, a shell, that had been burned hollow, and cancered by the fierce furnace of life. His clockwork ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... Cafe Anglais is infested with English; and at Very's, which is otherwise a meritorious establishment, one's digestion is disturbed by the sight of omnivorous provincials, who drink champagne with the roti, and eat ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... Jones had been a voracious and an omnivorous reader. He read with amazing rapidity. The first book he enjoyed whole-heartedly was Mabel Dearmer's "Noah's Ark Geography," one of the best children's books written in the past twenty years. He read and re-read this book as a little boy and used ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... in 1916. The peanut is rich in the richest of foods, some 50 per cent. of oil and 30 per cent. of protein. The latter can be worked up into meat substitutes that will make the vegetarian cease to envy his omnivorous neighbor. Thanks largely to the chemist who has opened these new fields of usefulness, the peanut-raiser got $1.25 a bushel in 1917 instead of the 30 cents that he got four ...
— Creative Chemistry - Descriptive of Recent Achievements in the Chemical Industries • Edwin E. Slosson
... have stated, the Sotadic Zone begins to broaden out, embracing all China, Turkistan and Japan. The Chinese, as far as we know them in the great cities, are omnivorous and omnifutuentes: they are the chosen people of debauchery, and their systematic bestiality with ducks, goats, and other animals is equalled only by their pederasty. Kaempfer and Orlof Toree (Voyage en Chine) notice the public houses for boys and youths in China ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... body lay along the ground, and that its skin was of a corrugated white, dappling into blackness along the backbone. But of its feet we saw nothing. I think also that we saw then the profile at least of the almost brainless head, with its fat-encumbered neck, its slobbering omnivorous mouth, its little nostrils, and tight shut eyes. (For the mooncalf invariably shuts its eyes in the presence of the sun.) We had a glimpse of a vast red pit as it opened its mouth to bleat and bellow again; we had a breath from the pit, and then the monster heeled over like a ship, dragged ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... Assembly, was impelled to publish a mad confession of his mad faults, and to attempt a new sort of glory from bringing hardily to light the obscure and vulgar vices which we know may sometimes be blended with eminent talents. He has not observed on the nature of vanity who does not know that it is omnivorous; that it has no choice in its food; that it is fond to talk even of its own faults and vices, as what will excite surprise and draw attention, and what will pass at worst for openness ...
— Selections from the Speeches and Writings of Edmund Burke. • Edmund Burke
... Afthen slowly, "were men such as you are. They descended from a primeval omnivorous mammal very closely related to your race. Evidently the tendency of evolution on any planet is approximately the same ...
— Invaders from the Infinite • John Wood Campbell
... yellow, and constricted at the base, and is altogether so exactly like a small common wasp of the genus Odynerus, that Mr. Bates informs us he was afraid to take it out of his net with his fingers for fear of being stung. Had Mr. Bates's taste for insects been less omnivorous than it was, the beetle's disguise might have saved it from his pin, as it had no doubt often done from the beak of hungry birds. A larger insect, Sphecomorpha chalybea, is exactly like one of the large metallic blue wasps, and like them has the abdomen connected ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - The Naturalist as Interpreter and Seer • Various
... but of a more distinct individuality, is Carlyle, who was born in Dumfries-shire, Scotland, in 1795. He was the eldest son of a farmer. After a partial education at home, he entered the University of Edinburgh, where he was noted for his attainments in mathematics, and for his omnivorous reading. After leaving the university he became a teacher in a private family, and began to study for the ministry, a plan which he ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... are decidedly omnivorous. Their appetite is immense; quantity and (for most of them come from France), not quality, is what they chiefly desire. When not dining at their own expense, they eat all they can, and pocket the rest. Indeed, a celebrated ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... reinforced my provant by a pannikin of tea, some fried fish, and a slice off the edge of a damper which rivalled the nether millstone in more than one respect; thus assuring myself that I had attained Carlyle's definition of a man: "An omnivorous biped that wears ——." Meanwhile, in response to my host's invitation to tell him what I was lagged for, I explained that I was travelling; my horses were on the other side of the river; I had come across to see a friend, had been ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... robin has life in the fullest measure, or best stands the Darwinian test of the fittest to survive. His versatility, adaptiveness, and fecundity are remarkable. While not an omnivorous feeder, he yet has a very wide range among fruits and insects. From cherries to currants and strawberries he ranges freely, while he is the only thrush that makes angle-worms one of his dietetic staples and looks upon a fat grub as a rare tidbit. Then his nesting-habits are the most ...
— Under the Maples • John Burroughs
... wanted, it seemed to him, was a pretext, and to such a mind a pretext was readily forthcoming. Had not the English dogs fortified their settlement without his permission? Had they not afforded shelter to some victim flying from his omnivorous rapacity? These were pretexts good enough to serve the insane brain of Surajah Dowlah. He attacked Fort William with an overwhelming force; the English traders, unwarlike, timorous, and deserted by their leaders, made little or no resistance; the madman had Fort William ...
— A History of the Four Georges, Volume II (of 4) • Justin McCarthy
... the country districts whose manners and whoso minds were still uncontaminated, in whom the ancient habits of life still survived, who still believed in the gods, who were contented to follow the wholesome round of honest labor. The numbers of such citizens were fast dwindling away before the omnivorous appetite of the rich for territorial aggrandizement. To rescue the land from the monopolists, to renovate the old independent yeomanry, to prevent the free population of Italy, out of which the legions had been ...
— Caesar: A Sketch • James Anthony Froude
... edification or amusement they may be able to derive from the discussion of my individual affairs, or the analysis of my peculiar tastes. You forget, my dear Constance, that to devour and in turn be devoured is an inexorable law of this world; and if my eccentricities furnish a ragout for omnivorous society, I should be philanthropically glad ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... widely expanded, purple-blue bells rising about two feet above the ground, has little of the exquisite grace of its cousin. It blooms from July to September. This is the species whose roots are eaten by the omnivorous ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... formed of earth, kneaded up with a kind of gum which the insect secretes. In the subterranean passages of a termite's nest there are arches which seem to be composed of morsels of wood stuck together by some sticky matter. These insects are omnivorous, and, like ants, take care to lay up abundant stores ...
— Adventures of a Young Naturalist • Lucien Biart |
