"Prehensile" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... lap; then, struck with the contrast between them, burst out laughing. But he neither withdrew his hand, nor showed the least shame of the hard, brown, tarry-seamed, strong, though rather small prehensile member, with its worn and blackened nails, but let it calmly remain outspread, side by side with the white, shapely, spotless, gracious and graceful thing, adorned, in sign of the honour it possessed in being the hand of Mrs. Sclater,—it ...
— Sir Gibbie • George MacDonald
... of Yucatan. In Central America Baird's and Dow's tapirs are native, the latter, however, more on the Pacific coast. We have included a drawing of an earthenware vessel (Pl. 28, fig. 1) that represents a tapir, about whose neck is a string of Oliva shells. The short prehensile trunk of the tapir is well made and the hoofs are likewise shown. A greatly elongated nose is found in many of the drawings of the deities, but it does not seem clear that these represent trunks of tapirs, or, as suggested by Stempell, mastodons! Two such heads are shown ...
— Animal Figures in the Maya Codices • Alfred M. Tozzer and Glover M. Allen
... under unfavourable circumstances, become an undergraduate of the Calcutta University, and that, when patent-leather shoes and English supervened, the thing was a Baboo. [This sounds very plausible; but how about the prehensile tail which the Education Department finds so much in the way of improvement, which indeed is said to preclude all access to the Bengali mind, and which can grasp everything but an idea, even an inquisitorial schoolmaster? "Hereby hangs a tail" ...
— Twenty-One Days in India; and, the Teapot Series • George Robert Aberigh-Mackay
... uncertain, and he was apt to tumble; he ran with knees bent forward and legs crooked; he was fond of hopping, and seemed particularly ape-like when doing so. The great-toe of each foot stood off at an angle from the foot, and thus gave the impression of a prehensile toe. I thought at first that this deviation had its origin in the fact that the child, on account of his uncertainty in walking, wanted to get a broader basis of support; but I afterward gave up ...
— The Mind of the Child, Part II • W. Preyer
... pride fell away now. The Duke threw a prehensile hand on the casket, and, coldly glaring at The MacQuern, pointed with his other hand towards the College gate. He, and he alone, was going to see Zuleika home. It was his last night on earth, and he was not to be trifled with. Such was the message of his eyes. ...
— Zuleika Dobson - or, An Oxford Love Story • Max Beerbohm
... enormously developed, and furnished with great nerves and muscles; but in the parasitic and protected Proteolepas, the whole anterior part of the head is reduced to the merest rudiment attached to the bases of the prehensile antennae. Now the saving of a large and complex structure, when rendered superfluous, would be a decided advantage to each successive individual of the species; for in the struggle for life to which every animal is exposed, each would have a better chance of supporting itself, by less nutriment ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... certain soft slowness moves his immense flukes from side to side upon the surface of the sea; and if he feel but a sailor's whisker, woe to that sailor, whiskers and all. .. What tenderness there is in that preliminary touch! Had this tail any prehensile power, I should straightway bethink me of Darmonodes' elephant that so frequented the flower-market, and with low salutations presented nosegays to damsels, and then caressed their zones. On more accounts than one, a pity it is that the whale does not possess this ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... make no suppositions, but adhere to facts—has a few followers still left. But what are Mr. Darwin's facts? Has he yet discovered the caudal man, except as the ever-fertile Mr. Stanley heard of one in Africa? And where is his monkey that first lost the prehensile power to climb trees? For bear in mind that it was the loss of this prehensile power that resulted in the caudal atrophy of our monkey progenitors, who became men simply because they were tailless monkeys! ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... used," commented old Hosie, "by a young fellow who taught school down in Buck Creek Township and got money to study law with. He tried law for a while." The old man's thin prehensile lips shifted his cigar to the other side of his mouth. "He's down in Buck Creek Township teaching school to get money to ...
— Counsel for the Defense • Leroy Scott
... the more difficult ones. The reader may, if he likes, begin with the first of the book, build his way through it, and graduate by building the log houses; in doing this he will be closely following the history of the human race, because ever since our arboreal ancestors with prehensile toes scampered among the branches of the pre-glacial forests and built nestlike shelters in the trees, men have made themselves shacks for a temporary refuge. But as one of the members of the Camp-Fire Club of America, as one of the founders ...
— Shelters, Shacks and Shanties • D.C. Beard
... This, then, was what was the matter with the feet of the two men, about which they had all speculated on the deck of The Aloha, the feet trained from birth to make the ascent of the steep trail, feet become long, tenuous, almost prehensile— ...
— Romance Island • Zona Gale
... of; but the moment they touch a suitable object, they instantly fix on it, forming closely compacted rings, which can be untwisted only when young. As the plant rises from one height to another, the little green shoots above send out fresh leaves, each having the same prehensile properties, which they keep in reserve till called on to apply them to their proper use; whilst at the same time, the lower rings are becoming indurated, so that, as the plant grows longer and heavier, its supports become stronger ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 454 - Volume 18, New Series, September 11, 1852 • Various
... that have what is called prehensile tails; that is, tails by which they can hang themselves to the limb of a tree, and which they use with nearly as much ease as they can their hands. The facility which this affords them for moving ...
— Minnie's Pet Monkey • Madeline Leslie
... ninety-head herd of bull phantis Carse kept on Iapetus. These creatures resembled mostly the old ostrich of Earth, but grew no feathers. The neck, however was shorter than the ostrich's; the leathery skin of a drab gray color; the powerful hind feet, on which they stood erect, prehensile and armed with short stabbing spurs; the forearms short and used for plucking the delicate shoots and young leaves on which they lived. There was a dim flicker of rudimentary intelligence inside the bullet heads; they recognized men as their ...
— Hawk Carse • Anthony Gilmore
... through it, the gleam of the white flesh beneath. From this apparent inconsistency I deduced that she was of educated tastes, but poor—probably a governess, or, more likely still, taking her hands into consideration, with their long, prehensile fingers, a teacher of music, and was going on to explain to myself her present situation as the outcome of Beauty, Poverty, and the Devil, when she sighed, glanced toward the door, shivered slightly, and reaching her shoes ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... up like a ball and drops on the ground; the foliage crackles beneath her fall, which seems as if it must be mortal; for her, this is only sport. Without altering the position of her limbs, she suddenly stops in her rapid descent, by means of her prehensile tail, that fifth hand, so powerful, with which nature has endowed the monkeys of America. Then, suspended by this organ alone, she accelerates her motions to and fro with incredible rapidity, quickly unwinds her tail from the ...
— The Solitary of Juan Fernandez, or The Real Robinson Crusoe • Joseph Xavier Saintine
... the proper position with your toes," went on Jackson, "for it's beyond a man's ability to curve his toes as he does his hands. The Colombian ape's toes are prehensile." ...
— The Mind Master • Arthur J. Burks
... the prehensile cell Of moth or maggot, or the spider's tissue, For never foot upon that threshold fell, To ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood
... were more like arms. They were twisted and gnarly, and with scarcely the semblance of the full meaty calf such as graces your leg and mine. I remember he could not walk on the flat of his foot. This was because it was a prehensile foot, more like a hand than a foot. The great toe, instead of being in line with the other toes, opposed them, like a thumb, and its opposition to the other toes was what enabled him to get a grip with his foot. This was why he could not walk on the ...
— Before Adam • Jack London
... sweeping gestures of a hand which suggested a prehensile, well-inked claw, welcomed him in an outburst of oratory, iridescent with adjectives which gushed from him like a volume of water from a fire-plug, that made Crowheart's jaw drop. While Symes may ...
— The Lady Doc • Caroline Lockhart
... generation of the businessman; and if the class typically is gifted with any peculiar hereditary traits, therefore, they should presumably be such as typically mark the successful businessman—astute, prehensile, unscrupulous. For a generation or two, perhaps to the scriptural third and fourth generation, it is possible that a diluted rapacity and cunning may continue to mark the businessman's well-born descendants; but ...
— An Inquiry Into The Nature Of Peace And The Terms Of Its Perpetuation • Thorstein Veblen
... finds the means of growing fur; when heat and cold assail it by turns it packs itself with feathers; when climates become temperate it produces hair. For the creature which keeps to the water it webs the foot; for that which takes to the trees it makes the toes prehensile; for the one which learns to stand erect and run along the ground it flattens the sole, making it steady and supporting. To resist, to survive, to win through, is the end to which the life-principle sets itself with such singleness of ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King
... predatory habits they are admirably adapted; their teeth are terrible, and produce a dreadful wound; the neck is slender, the body increasing gradually to about the middle in diameter, and then decreasing. The tail is a grasping instrument, strongly prehensile, and aided by two hooklike claws, sheathed with horn, externally visible on each side, beneath, just anterior to the base of the tail. Though externally nothing beyond these spurs appear, internally is found a series of bones, representing ...
— Forest & Frontiers • G. A. Henty
... off where it had been notched, was still in the body of the bird, and was infusing the deadly venom into its veins. In about two minutes' time the wounded bird seemed to grow giddy, and began to stagger. It then fell over, still clutching the branch with its strong, prehensile claws; but after hanging a moment, these too relaxed, and the body fell heavily to the ground. ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... habits, Anne Turner would see in the Countess's appeal a chance to turn more than one penny into the family exchequer. She was too much the opportunist to let any consideration of old acquaintance interfere with working such a potential gold-mine as now seemed to lie open to her pretty but prehensile fingers. Lady Essex was rich. She was also ardent in her desire. The game was too big for Anne to play single-handed. A real expert in cozening, a master of guile, was wanted to exploit ...
— She Stands Accused • Victor MacClure
... His ape-like ancestors had no other resource but to seek safety among the branches. When man came down to the ground and took to walking, his hand was freed for other uses. This five-fingered hand, which in most animals has become a weapon (clawed or hoofed), has in the apes alone remained a prehensile organ. Essentially pacific, ill-constructed for striking or tearing, its natural function was to seize and to take.[50] "The hand ... was superfluous as an aid to locomotion on the ground, and thus became ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland
... size and length seemed to serve as the sensory and prehensile organs. Wayne had identified one waving, restless flexible stalk as the eye. He suspected another of being the mouth, except that it apparently wasn't used for talking. The voice came from somewhere deep inside the convoluted ...
— High Dragon Bump • Don Thompson
... arms. One day the mother, while standing near a rose-bush with her infant in her arms, was astonished to observe one of its tiny toes clasp the stem of the rose. Little did she guess at the time that these prehensile toes were destined one day to serve an artist, in the execution of her work, with the same marvellous facility as hands. As the child grew up the greatest care was bestowed upon her education. She early manifested unmistakable artistic promise, and at the ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... Anglo-Semitic type so often seen in persons of mixed English and Jewish extraction. The figure was well over five feet two inches in height and broad in proportion. The graceful sloping shoulders harmonized with the slender and well-poised waist, and with a hand pliant and yet prehensile. The pallor of the features was relieved by a ...
— Literary Lapses • Stephen Leacock
... experience of men and the ways of men. For the rest, he was clad in a rich yet sober habit, unrelieved by any color save for the gleaming seals at his fob, and the snowy lace at throat and wrist; his hair—evidently a wig—curled low on either cheek, and his hands were well cared for, with long, prehensile fingers. ...
— The Amateur Gentleman • Jeffery Farnol et al
... know them, I say, through to their little prehensile souls! You don't seem to get me.... Why, I feel sorry for them, Sam! I wouldn't mind much what they did if they were only happy with it! But, good heavens!... D'you know what this age needs, my boy? A voice ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... there was shown in England and France, afterward in America, a girl of seven named "Krao," a native of Indo-China. The whole body of this child was covered with black hair. Her face was of the prognathic type, and this, with her extraordinary prehensile powers of feet and lips, gave her the title of "Darwin's missing link." In 1875 there was exhibited in Paris, under the name of "l'homme-chien" Adrien Jeftichew, a Russian peasant of fifty-five, whose ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... much satisfaction the problem of aerial flight, so far was he from the mountain whence he had sprung and above the back of the antelope towards which he had propelled himself. One could almost hear him roar. There was menace and fate in eye and tooth and claw, yea, in the very kink of the prehensile-seeming tail wherewith he apparently steered his course in mid-air. To gaze upon his impressive and determined countenance was to sympathize most fully with the sore-tried Prophet of old (known to Damocles as Dannle-in-the-lines-den) for ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... As Sir James Barrie once observed, 'The Man of Science appears to be the only man who has something to say, just now—and the only man who does not know how to say it.' But the trouble by no means ends with Science. Our poets—those gifted strangely prehensile men who, as I said in my first lecture, seem to be born with filaments by which they apprehend, and along which they conduct, the half-secrets of life to us ordinary mortals—our poets would appear to be scamping artistic labour, neglecting ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... processes of natural selection and variation cannot have been brought to a standstill; they must be at work now and may yet—should surroundings and necessity create the demand—halve the neck of the giraffe, give snow-white lamb's clothing to the tiger, and turn the rudder of the beaver into the prehensile tail of the monkey. There is no biological completion, no finitude. It is only a matter of time—sufficient time—and our bodies may become as strangely interesting to posterity as are to us the dinosaurs and mammoths of the ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... twenty little pigs of elephants. That show I also attended, and was well repaid for going. Near the entrance of the tent was a large cage, peopled with the gayest denizens of tropic life, macaws, cockatoos, paroquets—what know I?—a feathered iridescence, that sulked prehensile or perched paradisiacal in their iron house. Two youths entered; one paused admiringly. 'Come along, Jack,' remonstrated the other, hurrying him on by the arm, 'them darned things is only painted.' He wasn't going to see ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I, No. V, May, 1862 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... are subjected to the tedium of walking. If they do not fly, they will at least make long, swift, graceful hops or jumps of some ten or fifteen feet each. This would require a more hinged development of the lower limbs, like a bird's. It is also possible that the lower limbs may have the prehensile function, and do ...
— Pharaoh's Broker - Being the Very Remarkable Experiences in Another World of Isidor Werner • Ellsworth Douglass
... the least of the two evils, although I fully expected we should have a battle. After penetrating for I should think upwards of two miles, sometimes up to our knees in miry clay, and often stopped by impassable barriers of wild vines and other prehensile plants, which annoyed us greatly, and made me regret a thousand times that I had courted such dangers and inconveniences, the sound of two rifle-shots threw the whole party into indescribable commotion. Supposing we were attacked, all hands flew as quick as thought to ...
— An Englishman's Travels in America - His Observations Of Life And Manners In The Free And Slave States • John Benwell
... are provided with well-marked transverse ridges; and they continue to grow during the whole life of the animal. There are indications that the snout was prolonged, and more or less flexible; and the tongue was probably prehensile. From the characters of the molar teeth it is certain that the Megathere was purely herbivorous in its habits; and from the enormous size and weight of the body, it is equally certain that it could not have imitated its modern allies, the Sloths, in the feat of climbing, back downwards, amongst ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... only a Thing of Beauty, but a Joy for Ever, wrought by elfin fingers, fashioned of gossamer threads at once fine and prehensile. Yet so Gargantuan and Goliardic that the reader holds his breath, lest the whole beatific caboodle should vanish into thin air and leave him lamenting like a Peri ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Feb. 26, 1919 • Various
... number of little boys practising this art as a game of play, and from their skill in hitting an upright stick, they promised well for more earnest attempts. My companion, the day before, had shot two large bearded monkeys. These animals have prehensile tails, the extremity of which, even after death, can support the whole weight of the body. One of them thus remained fast to a branch, and it was necessary to cut down a large tree to procure it. This was soon effected, and down ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin
... thinks and acts more in a minute than a hundred writers can describe and explain in a year; he is a laughing, weeping, money-making, clothes-wearing, lying, reasoning, worshipping, amorous, credulous, sceptical, imitative, combative, gregarious, prehensile, two-legged animal. He does not cease to be all this and more, merely because he happens to be at one of his thousand tricks, and you catch him in the act. How do ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh
... recovered rapidly from his illness and his mental processes were as keen and prehensile as ever. Checking off one against the other, with customary shrewdness, he had a number of doctors go over him, and all agreed that he was good for twenty years yet. Twenty years! Why, Jack would be middle-aged ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... is famous for carrying its young in a pouch in front of the body. It may be known by its dirty-white woolly fur, its long, naked, prehensile tail, its hand-like paws, its white face and sharp muzzle, and the naked pink and blue ears. In size it resembles a cat. The 'possum is found from Connecticut to Florida and ...
— Boy Scouts Handbook - The First Edition, 1911 • Boy Scouts of America
... bat, Mr. Wace learned, but supported by curved ribs radiating from the body. (A sort of butterfly wing with curved ribs seems best to express their appearance.) The body was small, but fitted with two bunches of prehensile organs, like long tentacles, immediately under the mouth. Incredible as it appeared to Mr. Wace, the persuasion at last became irresistible, that it was these creatures which owned the great quasi-human buildings and the magnificent garden that made the broad ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... them. And on the whole, things, you believed, were going well. Though they were not scrupulously just, these big men were generous, and were willing to give away what they had acquired. Though grasping, they were not avaricious. They grasped things with the strong prehensile grasp of the infant, rather than with the clutch of the miser. They took them because they were there, and not because they had any well-defined idea as to whether they ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... till both eyes are on the same side of the fish, he gives ("Natural Selection," p. 188, ed. 1875) an instance of a structure "which apparently owes its origin exclusively to use or habit." He refers to the tail of some American monkeys "which has been converted into a wonderfully perfect prehensile organ, and serves as a fifth hand. A reviewer," he continues, . . . "remarks on this structure—'It is impossible to believe that in any number of ages the first slight incipient tendency to grasp, ...
— Life and Habit • Samuel Butler
... English rodents, two of them only weighing a halfpenny; they are brown in colour with white underneath, very long whiskers and prehensile tails. They were made happy by finding all things needful for their comfort in a large plant case. A thick layer of cocoa fibre was spread over the bottom of the case, dry moss and hay provided, wheat-ears, oats, and canary seed, and a small cup ...
— Wild Nature Won By Kindness • Elizabeth Brightwen
... recesses was a vast amount of book-knowledge that never could be used, and was of no use to himself or any one else;' the former wielding all his stores as he swung his sledge. What is wanted is the comprehensive hand, and not the prehensile tail. ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... the whale with a certain soft slowness moves his immense flukes from side to side upon the surface of the sea; and if he feel but a sailor's whisker, woe to that sailor, whiskers and all. What tenderness there is in that preliminary touch! Had this tail any prehensile power, I should straightway bethink me of Darmonodes' elephant that so frequented the flower-market, and with low salutations presented nosegays to damsels, and then caressed their zones. On more accounts than one, a pity it is that the whale does not possess this prehensile virtue in his ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... Flint, while his partner, forgetting now to smile, sat there by the window scrutinizing him. One saw, now, the terribly keen and prehensile intellect at work under the mask of assumed foppishness and jesting indifference—the quality, for the most part masked, which had earned Waldron the nickname of ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England
... on his way to the morning's lecture, with his plump childish face, his round innocent eyes, his absurdly non-prehensile fat hand carrying his cap, his grey trousers braced up much too high, his feet a trifle inturned, and going across the great court with a queer tripping pace that seemed cultivated even to my naive undergraduate eye. Or I see him lecturing. ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells |
