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Primitive   Listen
adjective
Primitive  adj.  
1.
Of or pertaining to the beginning or origin, or to early times; original; primordial; primeval; first; as, primitive innocence; the primitive church. "Our primitive great sire."
2.
Of or pertaining to a former time; old-fashioned; characterized by simplicity; as, a primitive style of dress.
3.
Original; primary; radical; not derived; as, primitive verb in grammar.
Primitive axes of coordinate (Geom.), that system of axes to which the points of a magnitude are first referred, with reference to a second set or system, to which they are afterward referred.
Primitive chord (Mus.), that chord, the lowest note of which is of the same literal denomination as the fundamental base of the harmony; opposed to derivative.
Primitive circle (Spherical Projection), the circle cut from the sphere to be projected, by the primitive plane.
Primitive colors (Paint.), primary colors. See under Color.
Primitive Fathers (Eccl.), the acknowledged Christian writers who flourished before the Council of Nice, A. D. 325.
Primitive groove (Anat.), a depression or groove in the epiblast of the primitive streak. It is not connected with the medullary groove, which appears later and in front of it.
Primitive plane (Spherical Projection), the plane upon which the projections are made, generally coinciding with some principal circle of the sphere, as the equator or a meridian.
Primitive rocks (Geol.), primary rocks. See under Primary.
Primitive sheath. (Anat.) See Neurilemma.
Primitive streak or Primitive trace (Anat.), an opaque and thickened band where the mesoblast first appears in the vertebrate blastoderm.
Synonyms: First; original; radical; pristine; ancient; primeval; antiquated; old-fashioned.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Primitive" Quotes from Famous Books



... they could without attracting notice, the comrades threw aside all distinction of rank, and were again the Archie Gordon and Davie Barclay of old school-days—as real to them still as those of the hardest battles they had fought together. In more primitive Scotland, such relations are, or were more possible than in countries where more divergent habits of life occasion wider social separations; and then these were sober-minded men, who neither made much of the shows ...
— Heather and Snow • George MacDonald

... in every house two sticks were kept for producing fire by rubbing. These were replaced by the flint-stone and a piece of steel. Of course, Bryant and May's matches have now replaced those primitive arrangements almost everywhere, and in the hands of children have become a source of great danger to both ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown

... lines of its closing apostrophe to the ship of state were reached, with tears in his eyes the president said, "It is a great gift to be able to stir men like that." In his poem, "Hiawatha," Longfellow chose the metre of the Finnish epic "Kalevala," which is peculiarly suited to the tales of primitive people. The worthiest and most picturesque traditions of the American Indian are woven into a connected story whose charm is greatly heightened by the novel melody ...
— Elson Grammer School Literature, Book Four. • William H. Elson and Christine Keck

... only once among Digby's receipts. The modern housewife may be aghast at the thought of more than a hundred ways of making mead and metheglin. Mead recalls to her perhaps her first history-book, wherein she learnt of it as a drink of the primitive Anglo-Saxons. If she doubt the usefulness of the collection in her own kitchen, let her take the little volume to her boudoir, and read it there as gossiping notes of the beau monde in the days when James I and the Charleses ruled the land. She will find herself in lofty ...
— The Closet of Sir Kenelm Digby Knight Opened • Kenelm Digby

... that there never was a copy upon vellum; for the Cardinal, who was a great patron of Sweynheym and Pannartz, the printers, would doubtless have possessed it in that condition. At the beginning, however, it is slightly stained, and at the end slightly wormed. Yet is this copy, in its primitive binding, finer than any which can well be imagined. The curious are aware that this is supposed to have been the first book printed at Rome; and that the blanks, left for the introduction of Greek characters, prove that the printers were not in possession of the ...
— A Bibliographical, Antiquarian and Picturesque Tour in France and Germany, Volume Three • Thomas Frognall Dibdin

... artillery tactics were no longer practical. The infantry, armed with its own comparatively long-range firearm, was usually able to keep artillery beyond case-shot range, and cannon had to stand off at such long distances that their primitive ammunition was relatively ineffective. The result was that when attacking infantry moved in, the defending infantry and artillery were still fresh and unshaken, ready to pour a devastating point-blank fire into ...
— Artillery Through the Ages - A Short Illustrated History of Cannon, Emphasizing Types Used in America • Albert Manucy

... blazed with primitive emotion whenever he roused from his calm, became suddenly gentle and he patted her hand as he hurried off to order ...
— Rimrock Jones • Dane Coolidge

... by horse through the passes down into the forests and jungles, out upon the endless, sparsely settled pampas, and eventually into the remote village that witnessed the passing every second day of a primitive and far from dependable railway train, was presented with agreeable simplicity and conciseness. He passed briefly over what might have been expanded into grave experiences, and at last came, so to speak, to the gates of the city, unharmed, ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon

... were great. His wounds continued bleeding and froze upon the dressings, which were of the most primitive character. And yet not once through those hours of anguish did he utter a word of complaint. Many a strong man would have cried out in his agony, but one might have sat within arm's length of the mountaineer without knowing ...
— The Life of Kit Carson • Edward S. Ellis

... But you know, in eclipses, when they are on the recovering hand, all the creatures upon the face of the earth cannot put a stop to that course, until the sun or the moon have recovered their glory. And thus it shall be now, the Lord is returned to visit the earth, and his people with his primitive lustre; he will not go back, nor slack his hand, until he has recovered what Antichrist has darkened of his. 'The anger of the Lord shall not return, until he have executed, and till he have performed the thoughts of his heart: in the latter days ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan

... of our journey lay through thick underbrush, and beneath the spreading branches of interlacing trees. It was a gloomy, primitive spot, where no evidence of man was apparent. Suddenly I emerged upon the bank of the creek, with the rude log wharf directly before me. I could hear in that silence the sound of those following, as they continued to crunch a passage through the thicket, but I stopped ...
— The Devil's Own - A Romance of the Black Hawk War • Randall Parrish

... had nothing like this since Mahomet and, accepted literally, it claims for the Kaiser the divine attributes attributed to the Caesars. Even the Caesars, in baser and more primitive times, found posing as a divine superman somewhat difficult and disconcerting. Shakespeare subtly suggests this when he makes his Caesar talk like a god and act with ...
— The Evidence in the Case • James M. Beck

... scarcely difficult to the imagination to realise the first embodiment of what is now Edinburgh in the far distance of the early ages. Neither Pict nor Scot has left any record of what was going on so far south in the days when the king's daughters, primitive princesses with their rude surroundings, were placed for safety in the castrum puellarum, the maiden castle, a title in after days proudly (but perhaps not very justly) adapted to the supposed invulnerability ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant

... all the lake country being ceded, the French relinquishing the magnificent territory that had cost them so much in precious lives already, took on new life. True, the French protested, and many of them went to the West and made new settlements. The most primitive methods were still in vogue. Canoes and row boats were the methods of transportation for the fur trade; there had been no printing press in all New France; the people had followed the Indian expedients in most matters of household supplies. For years there were abortive plots and struggles ...
— A Little Girl in Old Detroit • Amanda Minnie Douglas

... forty miles from the nearest post-office, and half a dozen miles from any neighbors save Indians, wolves, and wildcats; that we were wholly unlearned in the ways of the woods as well as in the most primitive methods of farming; that we lacked not only every comfort, but even the bare necessities of life; and that we must begin, single-handed and untaught, a struggle for existence in which some of the severest forces of nature would be arrayed against ...
— The Story of a Pioneer - With The Collaboration Of Elizabeth Jordan • Anna Howard Shaw

... Compiegne he received a visit from Father Berton, formerly principal of the military school of Brienne. He was then rector of the school of arts at Compiegne, a situation in which he had been placed by Bonaparte. I learned the particulars of this visit through Josephine. Father Berton, whose primitive simplicity of manner was unchanged since the time when he held us under the authority of his ferule, came to invite Bonaparte and Josephine to breakfast with him, which invitation was accepted. Father Berton had at that time ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne

... these principles have never been so thought out and applied as to give consistency and harmony to our daily relations. America starts with a political organization based on a declaration of the primitive freedom and equality of all men. Every human being, according to this principle, stands on the same natural level with every other, and has the same chance to rise according to the degree of power or capacity given by the Creator. All our civil institutions ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 84, October, 1864 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... conception of the nature of things. Now, it is not to be thought, save by "a priori" reasoners, that such a folk as the Northmen—a mighty folk, far advanced in the arts of life, imaginative, literary—should have had no further creed than the totemistic myths of their primitive state; a state they have wholly left ere they enter history. Judging from universal analogy, the religion of which record remains to us was just what might be looked for at the particular stage of advancement the Northmen had reached. Of course something may have been ...
— The Story of the Volsungs, (Volsunga Saga) - With Excerpts from the Poetic Edda • Anonymous

... originate from his forehead," and she pulled it up to show us. But Elihu himself sulked on in the dumps: his dignity was offended. "If you wanted to know," he said, "you might as well have asked me. Assault and battery is not the right way to test whether a citizen's hair is primitive or acquired." ...
— An African Millionaire - Episodes in the Life of the Illustrious Colonel Clay • Grant Allen

... abettors, and with the vain pursuit of Ambiorix. The remainder contains an elaborate contrast of the manners and customs of the Gauls and Germans, which forms an important source for the history of the primitive institutions of these nations. The seventh book is the thrilling tale of the formidable rising of all the Gauls against their conquerors, under the leadership of Vercingetorix, an Arvernian chief. This ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various

... civilisation and of fierce and sanguinary habits."* Their distinctness as a race has been denied with much apparent reason by Mr. Earl, and they are considered by Prichard to be merely various tribes of the Malayo-Polynesian race retaining their uncivilised and primitive state. Be this as it may, of these Harfours D'Urville states, that they reminded him of the ordinary type of the Australians, New Caledonians, and the black race of Oceania, from their sooty colour, coarse but not woolly hair, thick beards, and habit of scarifying the body. I mention these Harfours ...
— Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Vol. 2 (of 2) • John MacGillivray

... Porte l'ont compris ainsi que nous le faisons encore. Ce sens-la n'a ete interrompu qu'en derniers temps, a la suite d'instigations que votre Majeste connait aussi bien que moi. Le retablir dans son reception primitive et la justifier par un engagement plus solennel, tel est le but de mes efforts, tel il sera, Madame, quand meme le sang devrait couler encore contre mon v[oe]u le plus ardent; parce que c'est une question vitale pour la Russie, et mes efforts ...
— The Letters of Queen Victoria, Vol 2 (of 3), 1844-1853 • Queen Victoria

... change than written language, because of the ridicule with which the Indian visits any attempt at innovation on the point. One peculiarity of the American tongues is their singular power of extending the primitive signification of words by the addition of new syllables to the original term. Taking the verb for his starting point, the Indian is enabled, by prefixing, inserting, and adding syllables, to form at last some word which will ...
— The Life of the Venerable Mother Mary of the Incarnation • "A Religious of the Ursuline Community"

... to me that with my inexperience it would be foolish to go into action with this mitrailleuse, so I ordered it to the rear and told the facchino to provide something a little more primitive to start with, something less elaborate, some gentle old-fashioned flint-lock, smooth-bore, double-barreled thing, calculated to cripple at two hundred yards and kill at forty—an arrangement suitable for a beginner who could be satisfied with moderate results on the ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... storm and stress of this religious war, its triumphs, its defeats, its many agitations, Julius's diaries told with a deep, if chastened, enthusiasm. His was a singularly pure nature, unmoved by the primitive desires which usually inflame young blood. Ideas heated him; while the lust of the eye and the pride of life left him almost scornfully cold. He strove earnestly, of course, to bring the flesh into subjection to the spirit; which was, calmly considered, a slight waste ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet

... have had the most powerful influences over general taste in all ages and countries. One of the simplest and most interesting elementary examples of the treatment of flat metal by cutting is the common branched iron bar, Fig. 8, used to close small apertures in countries possessing any good primitive style of ironwork, formed by alternate cuts on its sides, and the bending down of the severed portions. The ordinary domestic window balcony of Verona is formed by mere ribbons of iron, bent into curves as studiously refined as those of a Greek vase, and decorated ...
— Aratra Pentelici, Seven Lectures on the Elements of Sculpture - Given before the University of Oxford in Michaelmas Term, 1870 • John Ruskin

... men of piety and real christianity: The truth of this observation will appear with peculiar lustre, when we consider what a paultry figure, those antient heathenish states of Greece and Rome made in the primitive ages. You elsewhere shrewdly remark, that it has always been astonishing to the world, how any important trusts came to be committed to Doctor Young; the best account that can be given for it, YOU BELIEVE is, that he has appeared ready to lead in such bold and exceptional measures, ...
— The Writings of Samuel Adams, volume II (1770 - 1773) - collected and edited by Harry Alonso Cushing • Samuel Adams

... spitted and placed on forked sticks to roast. We each of us had our various duties to attend to, some made up the beds with blankets and buffalo robes; one man roasted the coffee berries in a frying-pan and prepared them for boiling in a primitive fashion by wrapping them in a piece of buffalo or deer-skin and pounding them with the back ...
— With Axe and Rifle • W.H.G. Kingston

... were agriculture and many forms of manufacture conjoined, but the division of labour and differentiation of processes within the several industries was not very far advanced. The primitive tillage of the common-fields which still prevailed in the early eighteenth century, though the rapid enclosure of commons was effecting a considerable, and from the wealth-producing point of view, a very salutary change, did not favour the specialisation ...
— The Evolution of Modern Capitalism - A Study of Machine Production • John Atkinson Hobson

... affluent of the Loire) which drains the north-west. There are three regions—the Gatine, occupying the north and centre of the department, the Plaine in the south and the Marais,—distinguished by their geological character and their general physical appearance. The Gatine, formed of primitive rocks (granite and schists), is the continuation of the "Bocage" of Vendee and Maine-et-Loire. Its surface is irregular and covered with hedges and clumps of wood or forests. The systematic application of lime has much improved the soil, which is naturally poor. The Plaine, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various

... the main derived from the Hebrew nation and the Law of Moses. The Primitive Religion of the City of Rome. An historical Investigation, ...
— The Formation of Christendom, Volume VI - The Holy See and the Wandering of the Nations, from St. Leo I to St. Gregory I • Thomas W. (Thomas William) Allies

... They're setting up something to signal for help with. They've landed on a world of rather primitive savages and they want somebody to come and ...
— Long Ago, Far Away • William Fitzgerald Jenkins AKA Murray Leinster

... which I received part of my early education, and, as a schoolboy, passed the happiest days of my life!—Well might their tones vibrate to my inmost soul, and kindle uncommon sympathies!" I now recollected that the winding of the river must have brought me nearer to that simple and primitive village than the profusion of wood had permitted me to perceive, and my memory had been unconsciously acted upon by the tones which served as keys to all the associations connected with these bells, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, - Issue 269, August 18, 1827 • Various

... early part of the nineteenth century education was conducted in a primitive fashion at Ardmuirland. In a small community, consisting almost entirely of Catholics, and those mostly in poor circumstances, a trained teacher was rarely to be found. In many country districts like ours the task of instructing the young devolved upon one or other of the better ...
— Up in Ardmuirland • Michael Barrett

... following the route by the north of Scotland. A week's sail brought the ships 'with a merrie wind' to the Orkneys. Here a day or so was spent in obtaining water. The inhabitants of these remote islands were found living in stone huts in a condition almost as primitive as that of American savages. 'The good man, wife, children, and other members of the family,' wrote Master Settle, one of Frobisher's company, 'eat and sleep on one side of the house and the cattle on the other, very beastly ...
— Adventurers of the Far North - A Chronicle of the Frozen Seas • Stephen Leacock

... Arthur Hill, the founder of the house of Downshire, in which they show the chamber occupied by William III. while his army was encamped at Blaris Moor. This was once a royal fort, and among the most interesting memorials of the past are the primitive gates, long laid aside from duty, the timber gradually mouldering away from the huge nails, which once added to their massive strength. Hillsborough was incorporated by Charles II., and sent two members to parliament. The Hills rose rapidly in rank and influence. ...
— The Land-War In Ireland (1870) - A History For The Times • James Godkin

... as if with an almost hopeless effort to turn thought into such primitive speech, 'that's where we stand, then.' He got up suddenly like a man awakened in the midst of unforeseen danger, 'Where is your sister?' he cried, looking into the shadow. And as if in actual answer to ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare

... latter, which, indeed, did not look its best, but its very worst at this time. Mr. Ballantyne's station Harriett confessed to be rather prettily situated; but things in the house were much rougher than she had expected, and the house itself was of a very irregular and primitive style of architecture—the slab hut enlarged so as to be tolerably commodious; yet, still, the very house that the squatter had built, partly with his own hands, in the early days of the colony. He had not been ...
— Mr. Hogarth's Will • Catherine Helen Spence

... [FN65] All primitive peoples translate the songs of birds with human language; but, as I have noticed, the versions differ widely. The pigeon cries, "Allah! Allah!" the dove "Karim, Tawwa" (Bountiful, Pardoner!) the Kata or sand-grouse "Man sakat salam" (who is silent is safe) yet always betrays ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton

... called by the common name of Gaetuli, were almost exempt from European influences in historic, and probably in prehistoric, times. A few intermingled with the Aethiopians of the Sahara,[858] but, taken as a whole, they are believed to represent the primitive race of brown Saharic dwellers ...
— A History of Rome, Vol 1 - During the late Republic and early Principate • A H.J. Greenidge

... this honorable body stare to find a noble Lord conceding a measure, and in the next breath, by a solemn Protest, disowning it! A Protest there is a reason given for non-compliance, not a subterfuge for an equivocal occasional compliance. It was reasonable in the primitive Christians to avert from their persons, by whatever lawful means, the compulsory eating of meats which had been offered unto idols. I dare say the Roman Prefects and Exarchates had plenty of petitioning in their days. But what would ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, No. 72, October, 1863 • Various

... 1657. This is a highly diverting work. The Second Edition (1657) has various cuts amongst which is a frontispiece, that occurs again at page 29 of the little volume, depicting Gonsales being drawn up to the lunar world in a machine, not unlike a primitive parachute, to which are harnessed his 'gansas ... 25 in number, a covey that carried ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. III • Aphra Behn

... general assessment: primitive system; telephone density one of the lowest in the world; fixed-line connections stand at well less than 1 per 100 persons; mobile-cellular usage is increasing but remains at a meager 3 per 100 persons domestic: sparse system of open-wire, radiotelephone ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... had disinterred the deputy sheriff's badge, and began to polish it by the primitive but effectual method of spitting on it and then rubbing vigorously on his sleeve. "You're outside of Crater County, but by thunder you're both guilty of resisting an officer, and county lines don't count!" He had pinned the badge at random on his coat while he was ...
— Cow-Country • B. M. Bower

... to escape the grilling that this merciless woman was evidently going to put me to; my first primitive instinct to strike my adversary with some bitterly worded accusation and then turn and fly. But I stood my ground. Without a quiver of obvious embarrassment, or more than a second's hesitation, I replied, ...
— The Fifth Wheel - A Novel • Olive Higgins Prouty

... two primitive men in a savage age might have met, bare handed, they came together. Locked in each other's arms, their limbs entwined, with set faces, tugging muscles, straining sinews, and taut nerves they struggled. One moment they crushed against the rocky wall of the cliff—the next, and they swayed toward ...
— The Eyes of the World • Harold Bell Wright

... struck in the literature, not of England alone, but of Germany and France—romanticism, the chief element in which was a love of the wild. Poets turned from the lameness of modern existence to savage nature and the heroic simplicity of life among primitive tribes. In France, Rousseau introduced the idea of the natural man, following his instincts in disregard of social conventions. In Germany Bodmer published, in 1753, the first edition of the old German epic, the Nibelungen Lied. Works of a similar tendency in England ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers

... increasingly unwieldy character of the Landesgemeinde as population has grown, the rest have gone over to the representative system. All of those in which the institution survives are small in area and are situated in the more sparsely populated mountain districts where conditions of living are primitive and where there is ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg

... one, on account of his fault, be deprived of a favor bestowed on him the privation of that favor is a punishment of that fault. Now as we stated in the First Part (Q. 95, A. 1; Q. 97, A. 1), God bestowed this favor on man, in his primitive state, that as long as his mind was subject to God, the lower powers of his soul would be subject to his rational mind, and his body to his soul. But inasmuch as through sin man's mind withdrew from subjection to God, the result was that neither ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas

... to the Rosicrucian, but one altogether different from those he had already witnessed. Instead of being in an Oriental amphitheatre, he was standing in a rural lane; instead of tumult he found tranquillity; instead of regal pageantries an almost primitive simplicity. He inhaled the sweet smells of clover and newly-turned mould with a zest hitherto unexperienced. The gurgling of a brook by the wayside saluted his ears, as it struggled through the rushes and tinkled over the pebbles, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various

... the first time, beheld their phenomena and effects—when mere hundreds of invaders easily subjugated millions of natives chiefly by this appalling influence—than was manifested by these Iximayans on this occasion. Indeed, it appears that these primitive and isolated people, holding no intercourse whatever with the rest of mankind, were as ignorant as their ancestors even of the existence of this kind of weapons; and although their modern hieroglyphical annals were found to contain vague allusions ...
— Memoir of an Eventful Expedition in Central America • Pedro Velasquez

... let him feel at a disadvantage with Nate, although his friend was five years older. Now he began to appreciate that Nate was indeed a man grown, and had become sophisticated in the ways of his primitive world by his association with the other men at ...
— Down the Ravine • Charles Egbert Craddock (real name: Murfree, Mary Noailles)

... primitive ages of the gospel were adapted to the simple comprehension of the multitude; metaphysical subtilties were not even employed by the Fathers, of whom several are eloquent. The Homilies explained, by an ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli

... Nonconformist religious communities, the Wesleyan, Congregational, Primitive Methodist, Baptist, and New Church or Swedenborgian, each now having substantially built chapels, resident ministers, with Sunday, and, in one case, Day Schools. Through the courtesy of the Rev. John Percy, late Head Minister of the Wesleyan Society, we are enabled to give a fairly full ...
— A History of Horncastle - from the earliest period to the present time • James Conway Walter

... may take a little walk into "Old" Cairo, and turning a corner you may catch glimpses of what Mark Twain calls "Oriental simplicity," namely, picturesquely-composed groups of "dear delightful" Arabs whose clothing is no more than primitive custom makes strictly necessary. These kind of "tableaux vivants" or "art studies" give quite a thrill of novelty to Cairene-English Society,—a touch of savagery,—a soupcon of peculiarity which is entirely lacking ...
— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli

... fine, put it under my wood. In order to light my fire, I tore up a piece of a cotton handkerchief, which I laid over the pan of my gun, newly primed. Having fired the cotton in this manner, I enclosed it in the cedar-bark, keeping up the flame—not by using that primitive bellows, my mouth—but, by waving the bark to and fro, after the method used by the Indians. Thus, I soon had a large cheerful fire, which I much needed, for I ...
— Twenty-Seven Years in Canada West - The Experience of an Early Settler (Volume I) • Samuel Strickland

... strikingly designed Navajo blankets may be used for both rugs and couch covers, or hung up as wall-ornaments. Moqui basketware serves equally well for useful purposes, such as scrap-baskets, and for ornamentation. The pottery of the Pueblo Indians, being naive and primitive in design, is much more intimate and therefore appropriate than the Japanese bric-a-brac ...
— Practical Suggestions for Mother and Housewife • Marion Mills Miller

... tends to move along certain lines that constitute the law of human nature. Just as the infant tends first to wriggle, then creep, then walk, then run and dance, so human nature tends to move upward from savagery through primitive settled life to the complex forms of larger settled units. In this progress, material or economic forces play a large part; but ideas, originally born out of circumstances, but sometimes borrowed from other ...
— Woman in Modern Society • Earl Barnes

... healthy reversion to the primitive type of Father Abraham, and he has so much aristocratic moss on him that he reminds me of that old gray crag that hangs over Silver Creek out on Providence Road. Artistically he is perfectly beautiful in an Old-Testament fashion. He lives in an ancient, rambling house across the road ...
— The Tinder-Box • Maria Thompson Daviess

... the flame of gas was seen in the streets, or the sounds of the railroad were heard in the land; so long before, that, had any prophet then living foretold such magical doings, he would have been deemed a fit inhabitant of Bedlam. In those primitive times, the Widow Lawton was considered a rich woman, though her income would not go far toward clothing a city-fashionable in these days. She owned a convenient house on the sea-shore, some twelve or fifteen miles from Cape Ann; she cultivated ten acres of sandy soil, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various

... boy did not stir. He sat with his elbows on his knees, his chin resting on the back of his clasped fingers, while his eyes followed the slow approach of the primitive little Quantuck train. Cicely waited for a moment. Then she came back to his side once more and dropped down on ...
— Phebe, Her Profession - A Sequel to Teddy: Her Book • Anna Chapin Ray

... went the air grew keener and more biting, the aspect of the country wilder and more desolate, the quebradas more appalling in their fathomless depth. The precipices became more lofty and difficult to scale, the mountain torrents more impetuous and dangerous to cross, the primitive suspension bridges more dilapidated and precarious, the patches of timber and vegetation more tenuous, the flocks of huanaco and vicuna larger and more frequent, the way more savage and forbidding, the storms more frequent and terrible, until at length ...
— Harry Escombe - A Tale of Adventure in Peru • Harry Collingwood

... encouraging private enterprise in 1986. The results, starting from an extremely low base, were striking - growth averaged 6% in 1988-2004 except during the short-lived drop caused by the Asian financial crisis beginning in 1997. Despite this high growth rate, Laos remains a country with a primitive infrastructure; it has no railroads, a rudimentary road system, and limited external and internal telecommunications. The government has sponsored major improvements in the road system. Electricity is available in ...
— The 2005 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency

... and will do all I can to spread the light on the true state of affairs in this unhappy country. If the people of England and Scotland saw Nationalists as I have seen them they would not force Home Rule on the Loyalists of Ulster so as to leave them at the mercy of such a party." A Primitive Methodist Minister, the Rev. J. Angliss, who came to Ireland a faithful follower of Mr. Gladstone, changed his mind when acquainted with the facts, and confessed himself a convert to Unionism. He said that he had used his influence ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)

... stress, torn in advance of the actual undertaking by primitive emotions pulling in opposite directions, men bear themselves after curious but common fashions. To a psychologist twenty men chosen at random from the members of the battalion, waiting there in the edge of the birch thicket for their striking hour to come, would have offered twenty contrasting ...
— From Place to Place • Irvin S. Cobb

... cryptogamous ancestors. But progression is nearly always accompanied by retrogression in the principal lines of evolution, [15] as well as in the collateral branches of the genealogical tree. Sometimes it prevails, and the monocotyledons are obviously a reduced branch of the primitive dicotyledons. In orchids and aroids, in grasses and sedges, reduction plays a most important part, leaving its traces on the flowers as well as on the embryo of the seed. Many instances could be given to prove that progression and retrogression are the two main principles of evolution at ...
— Species and Varieties, Their Origin by Mutation • Hugo DeVries

... universal admiration of its unity by the better, the poetic age of Greece, almost conclusive testimony to its original composition. It was not till the age of the grammarians that its primitive integrity was called in question; nor is it injustice to assert, that the minute and analytical spirit of a grammarian is not the best qualification for the profound feeling, the comprehensive conception of an harmonious whole. The most exquisite anatomist may be no judge of the symmetry of ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer

... went into the log hut and there saw how the hermit had been living in his primitive way. In a corner he had a box filled with ammunition for his gun and also a large collection of hooks and lines. He had a plate, a cup, and a kettle and pan, and that was all. He ate from a block of wood and slept on a heap of cedar boughs. His clothing ...
— Young Hunters of the Lake • Ralph Bonehill

... their taste appears to me to give the anthropologist a hint of certain traits of the mode of life of the people of the Stone Age which have been completely overlooked. To judge from the Chukches our primitive ancestors by no means so much resembled beasts of prey as they are commonly imagined to have done, and it may, perhaps, have been the case that "bellum omnium inter omnes" was first brought in with the higher culture of ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold

... of the Earth. Primitive conception of the earth as flat In Chaldea and Egypt In Persia Among the Hebrews Evolution, among the Greeks, of the idea of its sphericity Opposition of the early Church Evolution of a sacred theory, drawn from ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White

... this subject, the story is certainly primitive; its savage character vouches for its antiquity. Voelsunga then reproduces the substance of the prose Death of Sinfjoetli mentioned above, the object of which, as a part of the cycle, seems to be to remove Sinfjoetli and leave the field clear for Sigurd. It preserves a touch which may be original ...
— The Edda, Vol. 2 - The Heroic Mythology of the North, Popular Studies in Mythology, - Romance, and Folklore, No. 13 • Winifred Faraday

... down their necks, some with a wheatsheaf for design, some with a swan. The road itself, if you follow it, dips into a valley where the horses must splash through the water of a brook spread out some fifteen or twenty yards wide; for, after the primitive Surrey fashion, there is no bridge for waggons. A narrow wooden structure bears foot-passengers; you cannot but linger half across and look down into its clear stream. Up the current where it issues from the fields and falls ...
— Nature Near London • Richard Jefferies

... that all races, and primitive peoples especially, exhibit the wish somehow to inscribe their racial autograph before they depart. It is our redman who permits us to witness the signing of his autograph with the beautiful gesture of his body in the form of the symbolic dance which he and his forefathers ...
— Adventures in the Arts - Informal Chapters on Painters, Vaudeville, and Poets • Marsden Hartley

... also observe, for it is to be gained from the chronicles of this province, that the time at which it may be said that the primitive Christian church first fell into error, appears to have been about one thousand years after the death of our Saviour. And as I thought of all this, and a great deal more, and smoked my cigar, I felt a great deal of respect for the good old city of Liege; and then I wandered back ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)

... been indurated into stone of considerable hardness. But besides those, I observed many rocks in these hills, especially in deep vallies, where they were disposed in vertical strata, running easterly and westerly, and consisting of limestone, hornstone, and aggregates, usually called primitive. These parts abound in incrustations, formed by the deposition of calcareous matter; but I have not been able to hear of the exuviæ of marine animals, except such as are washed down by the Gandaki, and are ...
— An Account of The Kingdom of Nepal • Fancis Buchanan Hamilton

... is a third requisite of production, capital (see page 58). Since the limitation to only two requisites applies solely to a primitive condition of existence, so soon as the element of time enters into production, then a store of capital becomes necessary; that is, so soon as production requires such a term that during the operation the laborer can not at the same time provide himself with subsistence, ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill

... Executive Council, managed to acquire quantities of land which, had they been brought together in one spot, would have made a township of average size. Thus was monopoly perpetuated and increased from year to year, and thus were large tracts of the Provincial territory maintained in a state of primitive wilderness. ...
— The Story of the Upper Canada Rebellion, Volume 1 • John Charles Dent

... Dr. Carey in his study, and we were both pleased and struck with his primitive, and we may say, apostolical appearance. He is short of stature, his hair white, his countenance equally bland and benevolent in feature and expression. Two Hindoo men were sitting by, engaged in painting some small subjects in natural history, of which the doctor, a man of pure taste ...
— The Life of William Carey • George Smith

... his equipage. Attached to the tricycle by a stout rope was a kind of wicker perambulator on four wheels, which he called his "sleeping-car," because he stored away in it all the bits of rag he picked up on his journeys, and also his very primitive bedding and the little piece of waterproof canvas under which he often slept in the open air. Behind the sleeping-car was a third vehicle, the restaurant-car, consisting of an old soap box mounted on four solid wooden wheels, which were fastened to the axles by huge conical bolts; in this he kept ...
— Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre

... human mind, and the study of ourselves, of our true selves, India occupies a place second to no other country. Whatever sphere of the human mind you may select for your special study, whether it be language, or religion, or mythology, or philosophy, whether it be laws or customs, primitive art or primitive science, everywhere, you have to go to India, whether you like it or not, because some of the most valuable and most instructive materials in the history of man are treasured up in India, and ...
— The New Avatar and The Destiny of the Soul - The Findings of Natural Science Reduced to Practical Studies - in Psychology • Jirah D. Buck

... A convenient sketch of the primitive African regime is J.A. Tillinghast's The Negro in Africa and America, part I. A fuller survey is Jerome Dowd's The Negro Races, which contains a bibliography of the sources. Among the writings of travelers and sojourners particularly notable are Mary Kingsley's ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips

... primitive country robbery is a crime unknown. She, therefore, has no fears for her pound of tea, and pint of gin, and sixteen shillings in silver which she is bringing home in her pocket. But there is something that would have frighted another ...
— J.S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 5 • J.S. Le Fanu

... admitted, that this method is not free from defect. It is true, we direct towards the horizon of the sea, a vast number of rays, which would have been lost upon the ground, in space, or landward; we also destroy the primitive divergence of those rays which fall within the range of the seaman; but the cylinder of reflected light is of no greater size than that of the mirror; the zone which it illuminates has precisely the same dimensions, at ...
— Smeaton and Lighthouses - A Popular Biography, with an Historical Introduction and Sequel • John Smeaton

... Plymouth to it is vexed daily by innumerable wheels; of a summer holiday the wayside watcher may count the motors by the thousand; yet you have but to step a rod or two off its tarred, tire-beaten surface to find wild woodland as primitive as it was three hundred years ago. The spring seeking motorist finds his first mayflowers there as the grade leads up Manomet heights and may expect them by the roadside anywhere, after that. The old trail to Sandwich saunters along here, but those who built for modern traffic took ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard

... long-lost forms for which I had sought so eagerly shaped themselves ever more and more clearly into realities that lived again. There rose up soon before my mind a whole world of figures, which revealed themselves as so strangely plastic and primitive, that, when I saw them clearly before me and heard their voices in my heart, I could not account for the almost tangible familiarity and assurance of their demeanour. The effect they produced upon the inner state of my soul I can only describe as ...
— My Life, Volume I • Richard Wagner

... customs, or else it has changed within the past decade, for, as a rule, the gentle courtesy and kindness of the people are especially appealing. Augustus often sojourned in Naples, and it was an especially poetic haunt of Virgil, whose tomb is here. Although the poverty and the primitive life of the great masses of the people have been widely discussed, it is yet true that Naples has a very charming social life, and that the University is a centre of learning and culture. One of the ...
— Italy, the Magic Land • Lilian Whiting

... imagination has been the want of illustrative examples. In a State where there is no fever of speculation, no inflamed desire for sudden wealth, where the poor are all simple-minded and contented, and the rich are all honest and generous, where society is in a condition of primitive purity and politics is the occupation of only the capable and the patriotic, there are necessarily no materials for such a history as we have constructed out ...
— The Gilded Age, Complete • Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner

... practice; but that practice is most dangerous to the language. When a democratic people doubles the meaning of a word in this way, they sometimes render the signification which it retains as ambiguous as that which it acquires. An author begins by a slight deflection of a known expression from its primitive meaning, and he adapts it, thus modified, as well as he can to his subject. A second writer twists the sense of the expression in another way; a third takes possession of it for another purpose; and as there is no common ...
— Democracy In America, Volume 2 (of 2) • Alexis de Tocqueville

... and she became us frolicsome as she had before been melancholy. George Sand describes her character as continually alternating between "contemplative solitude and complete giddiness in conditions of primitive innocence." It is hardly to be wondered at that one who exhibited such glaring and unaccountable contrasts of character was considered by some people whimsical (bizarre) and by her husband an idiot. She herself admits the possibility that he may not have been ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks

... and a human soul on earth yearning for the possession of that God. "Socialism, Communism!" men bellow to Tolstoy, and think to confound him with the hateful name. "Would you have us give up," they say, "the fruit of civilization and progress, and return to the primitive life of the days of yore?" But read Emerson's "Miscellanies," Carlyle's "Past and Present," Ruskin's "Fors Clavigera," and see for yourselves whether Tolstoy preaches aught different from these. And if this be ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin

... there, glimmered a light from a passing vessel, and listening to the swish of the water lapping the foot of the sea-wall. A fisherman preparing his bait hailed him "Good-night!" from the glooms of a small, primitive jetty. He returned the salute civilly, but, as he was not in the mood for human intercourse, he sang out and wished the man a good haul and then moved on. Up, up the incline he went, the rugged cliff-front towering ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill

... the exhibitions of the theatre, and many of the accustomary diversions of the times. The early Quakers, who followed him in all these points, were considered by some as turning the world upside down; but they contended in reply, that they were only restoring it to its pure and primitive state; and that they had more weighty arguments for acting up to their principles in these respects, than others had for condemning them ...
— A Portraiture of Quakerism, Volume I (of 3) • Thomas Clarkson

... to be traveling in the wake of the friendly old Englishman and his party. Through their interpreter, arrangements were made to have him carried to one of the tents of a primitive sort of a hospital, kept by some native missionaries. The Englishman's young assistant went with him. He was a quiet fellow whom Mr. Bowles had jokingly dubbed David the silent, because it was so hard to make him talk. But Doctor Huntingdon, a reserved, silent ...
— Georgina of the Rainbows • Annie Fellows Johnston

... mountaineer rose and led the way into the cabin. Clayton was embarrassed at first. On one bed lay a rather comely young woman with a child by her side; on a chest close by sat another with her lover, courting in the most open and primitive manner. In the corner an old grandam dozed with her pipe, her withered face just touched by the rim of the firelight. Near a rectangular hole in the wall which served the purpose of a window, stood a girl whose face, silhouetted ...
— A Mountain Europa • John Fox Jr.

... English alphabet into Indian languages. He believes it, with me, to be of political, educational, and religious importance; but he seems to be opposed by all the English scholars. Edwin Norris says that even Sanscrit imported its alphabet from a foreign tongue. The number of primitive alphabets is so few, the diversity of languages so great, that nearly all tongues must have adopted foreign alphabets. I cannot therefore understand the almost a priori objections raised by the learned.... Do you attend to Indian affairs? ...
— Memoir and Letters of Francis W. Newman • Giberne Sieveking

... in his "Races of Man," says that "perhaps the Brazilian Botocudos, of all the inhabitants of the world, are most nearly in the primitive state, and yet," he adds, "possibly we may be altogether mistaken in this regard, as their ...
— The New Avatar and The Destiny of the Soul - The Findings of Natural Science Reduced to Practical Studies - in Psychology • Jirah D. Buck

... thorough," said Hillyard, although he remembered, with some doubts as to the truth of his comment, moments now and again when more primitive impulses had ...
— The Summons • A.E.W. Mason

... officers leaped ashore with the end of a rope in his hand, and quickly secured the vessel. As he did so a faint light was seen proceeding toward them, and they heard the steps of a half dozen men advancing on the sounding planks. It was the watch, and the light shone from a primitive lantern with sides of horn ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye

... Week in and week out, he had never been away from the sound of groaning thousands. Not since he had assumed his disguise to Laodice in the wilderness had he been close to the immemorial repose of nature. All his primitive manhood rushed back to him, now infuriated with a fear that his love was the spoil ...
— The City of Delight - A Love Drama of the Siege and Fall of Jerusalem • Elizabeth Miller

... was possibly not Jewish. It is said by believers in an ancient secret tradition common to other races besides the Jews, that a part of this tradition related to a past Golden Age when man was free from care and evil non-existent, to the subsequent fall of Man and the loss of this primitive felicity, and finally to a revelation received from Heaven foretelling the reparation of this loss and the coming of a Redeemer who should save the world and restore the Golden Age. ...
— Secret Societies And Subversive Movements • Nesta H. Webster

... it with his name. Discarding the crude notions of cometary impact and volcanic eruption, Laplace filled up the gaps in the hypothesis with the aid of well-known laws of gravitation and motion. He assumed that the primitive mass of cosmic matter which was destined to form our solar system was revolving on its axis even at a time when it was still nebular in character, and filled all space to a distance far beyond the ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams

... whole time to the gardening in question. There reigned among the younger friends of this couple a legend, almost too venerable for historical criticism, that the marriage itself, the happiest of its class, dated from the far twilight of the age, a primitive period when such things—such things as American girls accepted as "good enough"—had not begun to be;—so that the pleasant pair had been, as to the risk taken on either side, bold and original, honourably marked, ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James

... well he might, for not fifty yards off the blacksmith was plying his work energetically, while a lad sat literally between a pair of native bellows, one of which he blew with his left hand, the other with his right and, beyond these, groups of men and women wrought at their primitive looms or tilled their vegetable gardens ...
— Black Ivory • R.M. Ballantyne

... the richest citizen of supposed wealth. The people seemed surprised to meet well-dressed private soldiers who could converse on any subject, and who seemed capable of doing any kind of business. Fires broke out in many places in the city, and Union soldiers went to work with the primitive fire apparatus at hand and put out the fires. Locomotives had been thrown from the track of the railroad in an attempt to destroy them, and private soldiers were detailed to put the locomotives together ...
— How Private George W. Peck Put Down The Rebellion - or, The Funny Experiences of a Raw Recruit - 1887 • George W. Peck

... to show the primitive taste of the villagers; one more to the point than that just recorded, which may have been accidental. Opposite the room where he lay sick was the residence of one of the rich men of the place. His house was of brick, commodious ...
— Our campaign around Gettysburg • John Lockwood

... book in Paris in the winter of 1917-18—in the midst of bombs, and raids, and death. Everyone was keyed up to a strange pitch, and only primitive instincts seemed to ...
— The Price of Things • Elinor Glyn

... even in his weaknesses, has a certain heroic air about him. It was necessary to break through the bonds of unworthy love. Unable to trust any longer to his often baffled resolution and self-command, Alfieri devised a primitive and theatrical remedy too much in harmony with his whole nature to be otherwise than efficacious. The lady occupied a house in the great rococo square of San Carlo, opposite to the one which he rented; she could not go in or out of her door without being ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)

... neighbour of most importance to England, was also at peace under a so-called "citizen-king." The "Tractarian" movement at Oxford was startling the world with a proposed return to the practices of the primitive Church, while it laid the foundation of the High Church and Ritualistic parties in the modern Church of England. The names of Newman and Pusey especially were in many mouths, spoken in various terms of reprobation and alarm, or approval ...
— Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen V.1. • Sarah Tytler

... the effects of their misery, and repairing their losses. Peace and prosperity, under the gentle rule of a fatherly lord paramount, re-dawned upon the tribes; their household lares, after so harsh a translation to distant climates, found again a happy reinstatement in what had in fact been their primitive abodes; they found themselves settled in quiet sylvan scenes, rich in all the luxuries of life, and endowed with the perfect loveliness of Arcadian beauty. But from the hills of this favored land and even from the level grounds as they approach ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey

... story, never offend against good taste. "Plays that antagonize the finer element in an audience," says Mr. Louis Reeves Harrison, "had better never be shown at all. There is nothing funny in what is cruel, though vulgar brutality in a play may get a laugh from a few who have not yet emerged from primitive egoism." ...
— Writing the Photoplay • J. Berg Esenwein and Arthur Leeds

... culminates in a given climax, which usually consists in a victory of skill, speed or strength. In a strictly scientific sense, games do not always involve the element of sport or play, being used in many forms among primitive peoples for serious divinatory purposes. It is perhaps needless to say that all of the games in the present collection are for the purpose of sport ...
— Games for the Playground, Home, School and Gymnasium • Jessie H. Bancroft

... here as in every other stancia a wooden calendar of native construction was suspended over the doorway. Some superstition is probably attached to the possession of these, for although I frequently tried to purchase one at a fancy price the owners would never sell this primitive timekeeper which was generally warped and worm-eaten with age. I never saw a ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt

... head as a trophy and also as a means of gaining control over the animals by sympathetic magic. All the skulls were broken, probably for the sake of removing the brains, which are usually considered a delicacy among primitive peoples. ...
— The Later Cave-Men • Katharine Elizabeth Dopp

... commence his account, in most parts, below the apostolic times; and it was only by the strength of the dark coloring with which he brought out the failings and the follies of the succeeding ages, that a shadow of doubt and suspicion was thrown back upon the primitive ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon

... of acquiescence, while the cavalier beats the back of her neck with his antennae. The embrace is brief, and they abruptly separate; after a little refreshment the two parties are ready for other adventures, and yet others, so long as there are males available. After the feast, a brief and primitive wooing; after the wooing, the feast; in such delights the life of the ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre

... "electric fire," as it was now called, were chiefly investigated by Dufay. To refine on the primitive experiment let us replace the shreds by a pithball hung from a support by a silk thread, as in figure 2. If we rub the glass rod vigorously with a silk handkerchief and hold it near, the ball will fly toward the rod. ...
— The Story Of Electricity • John Munro

... figure with the primitive weapon was too savage a picture for the remaining pair to contemplate at close quarters. Unas had made no movement to help in the assault. He had felt the weight of the sculptor's hand and had evidently published the savagery ...
— The Yoke - A Romance of the Days when the Lord Redeemed the Children - of Israel from the Bondage of Egypt • Elizabeth Miller

... segment by segment, until he reached what he knew to be the hotel's third floor. Here he rested for a moment or two against the wall, feeling inwardly grateful that a Mediterranean climate still made possible Monaco's primitive outside plumbing—to the initiated, he inwardly remarked, such things had always their unlooked-for advantages. He also felt both relieved and grateful to see that the two windows between him and his destination had been left shuttered against the heat ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer

... one side. A plain table stood in the middle; two hammocks were slung against the walls, which were hung with guns and fishing-rods. A bookcase in one corner, and Mrs. Merryweather's workstand in another, completed the furniture of the primitive parlour. On one side a door opened into the tiny kitchen, and hither the girls now betook themselves, after reminding Will and Kitty that it was their turn to set the supper table. The fire was soon burning brightly in the stove, the ...
— Hildegarde's Neighbors • Laura E. Richards

... idea of buying off the deity with gold and gifts, though they are still quite ready to buy him off with the paper money of praise and professions of repentance. Accordingly, you will find that though a religion may last unchanged for many centuries in primitive communities where the conditions of life leave no room for poverty and riches, and the process of propitiating the supernatural powers is as well within the means of the least of the members as within those of the headman, yet when commercial ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw

... reject the claims of morality, and refuse the lessons of Christianity and the Bible. Where then would all our boasted progress be? Where would our religion be? Where would modern civilization be? All would revert to primitive barbarism, through the failure of this one generation, and the race would be obliged to start anew the long climb toward the mountain top of ...
— How to Teach Religion - Principles and Methods • George Herbert Betts

... to the Old Catholics of Europe and America, whose names always will be linked with Selwyn, Wilberforce, and Wordsworth, Whittingham, Kerfoot, and Brown, in defence of the faith. It is with deep sorrow that we remember that the Church of Rome has separated herself from the teaching of the primitive Church by additions to the faith once delivered to the saints, and by claiming for its Bishop prerogatives which belong only to the Divine Head of the Church While we honor the devotion and zeal of her missionary heroes, and rejoice at the good works of multitudes of her children, ...
— Five Sermons • H.B. Whipple

... a novel by Sir W. Scott (1821). In this novel we are introduced to the wild sea scenery of the Shetlands; the primitive manners of the old udaller, Magnus Troil, and his fair daughters Minna and Brenda; lovely pictures, drawn with nice discrimination, and ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer

... and Groton, ages ago, seven years ago—and of an autumn day in France twelve months before when he had lain in tall grass, his platoon flattened down close around him, waiting to tap the shoulders of a Lewis gunner. He saw the two pictures together with somewhat the same primitive exaltation—two games he had played, differing in quality of acerbity, linked in a way that differed them from Rosalind or the subject of labyrinths which were, after all, the business ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald

... unquestionably, the favourite game among the ancient Hindus, was that of chess; a knowledge of which in those primitive times formed one of the requisite accomplishments of a hero, just as skill in chess was considered among us in the palmy days ...
— Chess History and Reminiscences • H. E. Bird

... such things might mean. "The Christian—in speculative belief—fails under the challenge of life as often as other men. Surely it depends on something infinitely more primitive and fundamental than Christianity?—something out of which Christianity itself springs? But this something—does it really exist—or am I only cheating myself by fancying it? Is it, as all the sages have said, the pursuit of some eternal good, the identification ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... at Edmonton is clear in the winter and also in the summer except during the May and July floods. This distance from the Rocky Mountains (which I suppose to be of primitive formation) is upwards of one hundred and thirty miles. The neighbouring plains are alluvial, the soil is calcareous and contains numerous travelled fragments of limestone. At a considerable distance below Edmonton the river, ...
— The Journey to the Polar Sea • John Franklin

... primitive Slavonic culture have been dug up on the islands in the Baltic Sea and even as far west as Hanover; remains of an identical culture have been found as far east as the Volga, so the Slavs have been widely spread out over Europe in earliest days. The expansion of Slavs so far to westward may ...
— From a Terrace in Prague • Lieut.-Col. B. Granville Baker

... none went discontented away. There the priest was all things to all men. He showed just so much rigour as might not drive those who knelt at his spiritual tribunal to the Dominican or the Franciscan church. If he had to deal with a mind truly devout, he spoke in the saintly tones of the primitive fathers, but with that very large part of mankind who have religion enough to make them uneasy when they do wrong, and not religion enough to keep them from doing wrong, he followed a very different system. Since he ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... so. It was a perversion of the ancient institution of matrimony. All the evils of that idolatrous age could not be remedied in a moment; nothing was made perfect until the appearance of that wonderful counselor—Christ. He restored the primitive integrity of the marriage institution by revoking polygamy and divorce. Polygamy was never friendly to the physical and mental character of its population. It is demonstrated beyond the possibility of a doubt that it is debasing and brutalizing. The Turks and Asiatics are polygamists, ...
— The Christian Foundation, March, 1880

... divisions of his former life to face world problems and the wide extension of the Kingdom of God. Four lecturers have followed each other to present a great world view to the men in these thirty huts: Butcher of New Guinea showed the effect of the impact of the Gospel upon primitive native races; Farquhar of India showed the power of Christianity over the great ethnic religions of India; Lord Wm. Gascoyne Cecil came next on the transformation of China, and was followed by Dennis of Madagascar and ...
— With Our Soldiers in France • Sherwood Eddy

... order thousands of men to go to their death or bring his country to ruin. It was his strength that he never forgot that he was working, not for himself, but for others. Behind the far-sighted plotter and the keen intriguer there always remained the primitive honesty of his younger years. He may at times have complained of the difficulties which arose from the reluctance of the King to follow his advice, but he himself felt that it was a source of strength to him that he had to explain, justify, ...
— Bismarck and the Foundation of the German Empire • James Wycliffe Headlam

... Swiss boundaries, but within these lines the comforts of travel far surpass those in the neighboring mountainous countries. In Savoy, Lombardy, and the Austrian Tyrol, the traveler must be prepared to put up with comparatively antiquated methods and primitive accommodations. ...
— Direct Legislation by the Citizenship through the Initiative and Referendum • James W. Sullivan

... rude, rough, primitive lot we Russians are!" commented Ossip, seating himself atop of the icebreaker, and screwing up his eyes to measure its fall. "To speak plainly, we Russians are sheer barbarians. Once upon a time, I ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky

... on both sides. Boys are improved; but some in our own day have asked, "Mamma, I say, what did God make the world of?" and several, who did not venture on speech, have had an idea of some one gray primitive thing, felt a difficulty as to how the red came, and wondered that marble could ever have been the same as moonshine. This is in truth the picture of life. We begin with the infinite and eternal, which ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various

... BROTHER, God having called you to the office of a deacon by the choice of the brethren and your own acceptance, and that call being now to be consummated according to the primitive pattern, 6 Acts 6, by prayer and ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham

... the Declaration of War threw us into a primitive abyss of hatred and the lust for blood. Others declare that we behaved very well. I do not know. I only know the thoughts that flowed through the mind of a friend of mine when he heard the news. My friend—I shall make no endeavour to excuse him—is ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke

... use of the gospels, the Acts, and Pauline epistles enable us to trace the general outline of the early stages of the synthesis between primitive Jewish Christianity and the spirit of Graeco-Oriental mysteries. It takes us in succession into Jerusalem, Antioch, and Corinth, not because these were the only churches which grew up in this period, but because it is in the main their tradition which is preserved in the documents ...
— Landmarks in the History of Early Christianity • Kirsopp Lake

... hurrahs burst forth from the yacht as the boat rowed off. In ten minutes the shore was reached, and a quarter of an hour afterward the Irishman's farm. All was ready. Lady Helena was enchanted with her installation. The huge chariot, with its primitive wheels and massive planks, pleased her particularly. The six bullocks, yoked in pairs, had a patriarchal air about them which took her fancy. Ayrton, goad in hand, stood waiting the orders of ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne

... accomplished only by the learned and those who were well practised. I must, therefore, make up my mind to learn these little characters; but the matter became to me more and more confused. Now, it seemed, some of the first and larger primitive letters had no value in their places, in order that their little after-born kindred might not stand there in vain. Now they indicated a gentle breathing, now a guttural more or less rough, and now served as mere equivalents. But finally, when one ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

... ruffled the old man's pride, but later he became quite friendly and explained that he hunted the vipers for their fat, to make unguents especially for rheumatism, and also collected simples, knowing he virtues of such as had medicinal value. On one of his excursions this primitive sportsman told him the marvellous tale of the King of the Vipers. The old fellow was wakened from his sleep one sultry day by a dreadful viper moving towards him—"all yellow and gold . . . bearing ...
— Souvenir of the George Borrow Celebration - Norwich, July 5th, 1913 • James Hooper

... place—happy they! I find the task increasingly difficult. One outgrows the youthful age of hero-worship; next, our really keen edges are so soon worn off by mundane trivialities and vexations that one is glad to take refuge in simpler pleasures once more—to return to primitive emotionalism. There are so many Emperors of past days! And like the old custodian, I have not so much ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas

... incurable. I am convinced that it is permanently curable. And its eminent importance as a nuisance to mankind at large deserves, I think, that it should receive particular attention. Anyhow, I am strongly against the visitation of Providence theory, as being unscientific, primitive, and conducive to unashamed laissez-aller. A man can be master in his own house. If he cannot be master by simple force of will, he can be master by ruse and wile. I would employ cleverness to maintain the throne of reason when it is likely ...
— The Human Machine • E. Arnold Bennett

... satisfaction in his small eyes as he glanced over his simple preparations, he jumped to the ground and replaced the bits in his horses' mouths. In two minutes he was again rushing over the trail, but this time through a world of crag and forest as primitive and rugged as ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum

... connection, there is a striking contrast between the American Indians and the primitive Polynesians. The chief economic plants encountered by early explorers on the islands of the Pacific Ocean were identical with well known Asiatic species. Coconuts, breadfruit, taro, sugar cane, yams and bananas, the most ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Fourteenth Annual Meeting • Various

... of cocoons in the warm sunshine. Women were frequently seen outside the houses spinning the silk and winding the thread. Though silk raising is so large and important an industry in Japan, the winding of the material is still performed in the most laborious and primitive manner. Grain was being winnowed, as we drove along, by the simple process of passing it from hand to hand, this being done by the women, who also separated the rice from the stalks, drawing it by the handful through fixed ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou

... future teams. Even your failure would be of infinite use to us." He lifted and dropped a shoulder. "I have no desire to undermine your belief in yourselves but—how are we to know?—perhaps there will be a score of failures before we find the ideal method of quickly bringing these primitive colonies ...
— Adaptation • Dallas McCord Reynolds

... in the facility with which the artist, in any realm of art, manipulates his implements and his materials. His especial enthusiasm is for marble, which he has come to regard as an original, primitive substance, containing in itself all other substances. It may be made to seem as light and clear as air, as brilliant as diamonds. Sometimes as his chisel strikes, it seems to be metal. Again it seems to be actual flesh and blood. At moments when the sculptor works ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning

... has been urged that the patriarchs held slaves, and therefore, slavery is right. Do you really believe that patriarchal servitude was like American slavery? Can you believe it? If so, read the history of these primitive fathers of the church and be undeceived. Look at Abraham, though so great a man, going to the herd himself and fetching a calf from thence and serving it up with his own hands, for the entertainment of his guests. Look at Sarah, that princess as her name signifies, baking cakes upon the ...
— An Appeal to the Christian Women of the South • Angelina Emily Grimke

... side of the road were fields of maize, suffering greatly from the drought. The soil was a fine deep, dark loam, and for the first time in Nicaragua I found they ploughed their land, and made permanent fences. The plough was a primitive implement, not unlike some of those still in use in parts of Spain. It was entirely of wood, excepting that the point was shod with an iron plate. Many of the fences were hedges, amongst which grew ...
— The Naturalist in Nicaragua • Thomas Belt

... teeth, and even two similarly formed bodies are attached by some point common to both, as the navels, breastbones, backs, etc. (Pl. XIX, figs. 1, 2, 3.) This shows that both have been derived from the same primitive layer of the embryo, which possessed the plastic power of building up a given structure or set of organs. An inclosed ovum, on the other hand, has no such identity or similarity of structure to the part with which it is connected, showing an evident primary ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture

... great redwood log with a rounded foot let into a socket swung by wire rope guys above the pool. Another wire rope with a pair of iron claws at the end of it ran over a block at the head of the log to the winch below, and the primitive derrick and its fittings had cost Nasmyth a great deal of money, as well as ...
— The Greater Power • Harold Bindloss

... for which he generally used the rail road, he would never allow the drivers to stop for him to get on or off the car, feeling, as he used smilingly to observe, 'very jealous on that point.' Few ever passed him in the street without asking who he was; for not only did his primitive dress, his broad-brimmed hat, and his antique shoe buckles attract attention, but the beauty and benevolence of his face was sure to fix the eye of ordinary discernment. He was a living temperance lecture, and those who desire to preserve good ...
— The Underground Railroad • William Still

... of human misery and so forth, I believe more than ever that the whole aim of the world is in the direction of Joy. And as dancing is one of the most primitive expressions of joy, give me ...
— Letters to Helen - Impressions of an Artist on the Western Front • Keith Henderson

... holds together all the various parts of the vast Empire has been gradually created by successive generations, but we may say roughly that it was first designed and constructed by Peter the Great. Before his time the country was governed in a rude, primitive fashion. The Grand Princes of Moscow, in subduing their rivals and annexing the surrounding principalities, merely cleared the ground for a great homogeneous State. Wily, practical politicians, rather than statesmen of the doctrinaire ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace

... Lexington was the very heart of the great Blue Grass region of Kentucky. The amazing richness of the soil had lured the first settlers from the safety of their transmontane homes to the hardships of Indian fighting and primitive living. Here they had built an ideal city adorned with beautiful Colonial homes; established the first great seat of learning west of the Alleghanies; built the first insane asylum; started the first newspaper; established the first public library, and surrounded by culture, ...
— A Pioneer Railway of the West • Maude Ward Lafferty

... be reaped as the fruit of observation and intellect, combined with the spirit of the age, in which are reflected all the varied phases of thought. He who can trace, through by-gone times, the stream of our knowledge to its primitive source, will learn from history how, for thousands of years, man has labored, amid the ever-recurring changes of form, to recognize the invariability of natural laws, and has thus, by the force of mind, gradually subdued a great portion of the physical world to his dominion. ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt

... of a horse that shivers with terror, or of a dog that howls at something a man's eyes cannot see, and men who live primitive lives where instinct does the work of reason are fully conscious of many things that we cannot perceive at all. As life becomes more orderly, more deliberate, the supernatural world sinks farther away. Although ...
— Gods and Fighting Men • Lady I. A. Gregory

... overlooked. Nor was ecclesiastical merit confined to the established church. Many instances of extraordinary genius, unaffected piety, and universal moderation, appeared among the dissenting ministers of Great Britain and Ireland; among these we particularize the elegant, the primitive Foster; the learned, ingenious, and ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett

... with which to construct their small shelters. These frail frames were covered with ki leaves or with sugar-cane leaves, the best ones with pili grass. I, myself, was sheltered during several weeks under the single pandanus-tree which is preserved up to the present in the churchyard. Under such primitive roofs were living without distinction of age or sex, old or new cases, all more or less strangers one to another, those unfortunate outcasts of society. They passed their time with playing cards, hula (native dances), drinking fermented ki-root ...
— Heroes Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie

... a barndoor Fowl and the Dog who protects the farm-yard. Nevertheless the student of development finds, not only that the chick commences its existence as an egg, primarily identical, in all essential respects, with that of the Dog, but that the yelk of this egg undergoes division—that the primitive groove arises, and that the contiguous parts of the germ are fashioned, by precisely similar methods, into a young chick, which, at one stage of its existence, is so like the nascent Dog, that ordinary inspection would hardly ...
— On the Relations of Man to the Lower Animals • Thomas H. Huxley

... than Fabre d'Eglantine's nomenclature of the months for the Revolutionary Calendar. Although slightly tinged with pedantism and preciosity, its freshness, its grace, its inspiration and sincerity, give it a flavour almost of primitive art. It remains one of the few notable ...
— The French Revolution - A Short History • R. M. Johnston

... spending a night in the great, busy, bewildering city of Lyon, already the centre of silk industry; but more interesting to the travellers as the shrine of the martyrdoms. All went to pray at the Cathedral except Arthur. The time was not come for heeding church architecture or primitive history; and he only wandered about the narrow crooked streets, gazing at the toy piles of market produce, and looking at the stalls of merchandise, but as one unable to purchase. His mother had indeed contrived ...
— A Modern Telemachus • Charlotte M. Yonge



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