"Starfish" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and loaded ourselves with things that we thought curious, and put some stranded starfish carefully back into the water—I hardly know enough of the race at this moment to be quite certain whether they had reason to feel obliged to us for doing so, or the reverse—and then made our way home to Mr. Peggotty's dwelling. ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... home on the steamer Andrea held tightly to the dried starfish he had found on the sand, while Maria was the happiest child in Venice, with a brooch made from the pearl shell of the Lido, which Luisa called "fior di mare," or flower of ...
— Chico: the Story of a Homing Pigeon • Lucy M. Blanchard
... bottoms some coral shrubs, of the kind which, according to James Ross, live in the Antarctic seas to the depth of more than 1,000 yards. Then there were little kingfishers and starfish studding the soil. But where life abounded most was in the air. There thousands of birds fluttered and flew of all kinds, deafening us with their cries; others crowded the rock, looking at us as we passed by without fear, and pressing familiarly close by our feet. There were penguins, ...
— Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea • Jules Verne
... rule, fertilised. The eggs of a sea-urchin can be fertilised by sperm of their own species, or, though in smaller numbers, by the sperm of other species of sea-urchins, but not by the sperm of other groups of echinoderms, e.g. starfish, brittle-stars, holothurians or crinoids, and still less by the sperm of more distant groups of animals. The consensus of opinion seemed to be that the spermatozoon must enter the egg through a narrow opening or canal, the so-called micropyle, and that the micropyle allowed only the spermatozoa ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... shoulder heaved and he sent an iron fist smash into Magnus's bland Mongolian visage, laying him on the lawn as flat as a starfish. Two or three of the police instantly put their hands on Royce; but to the rest it seemed as if all reason had broken up and the universe were turning into ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... from the Caribbean Sea—every superb variety of coral, and in short, every species of these unusual polyparies that congregate to form entire islands that will one day turn into continents. Among the echinoderms, notable for being covered with spines: starfish, feather stars, sea lilies, free-swimming crinoids, brittle stars, sea urchins, sea cucumbers, etc., represented a complete collection of the ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... children out in the bay, where the water, now green, now blue, was always clear as crystal. On the rocks and sand at the bottom starfish and crabs crawled slowly along or clung to some stone. The purple sea-urchins, queer round-shelled creatures covered with thorny spines, crowded together, and the ugly toad-fish hid in the green and brown ...
— Stories of California • Ella M. Sexton
... mushrooms, tipsy toadstools; narrow fjords, sparklingly clear, wind among and intersect the stubborn masses. Fish, bright as butterflies and far more alert, flash in and out of mazes more bewildering than that in which Rosamond's bower was secluded. Starfish stud the sandy flats, a foot in diameter, red with burnished black bosses, and in all shades of red to pink and cream and thence to derogatory grey. Here is a jade-coloured conglomeration of life ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... encrinites. These, when growing, were fixed to the bed of the ocean, and extended upward in the shape of pliant stems composed of limestone joints or plates; the stem of each encrinite then expanded at the top in the shape of a gorgeous and graceful starfish, possessed of numberless and lengthy arms. These encrinites grew in such profusion that after death, when the plates of which their stems consisted, became loosened and scattered over the bed of the sea, they ...
— The Story of a Piece of Coal - What It Is, Whence It Comes, and Whither It Goes • Edward A. Martin
... shells, Trochi, uncovered molluscs, and some bivalves are attached. Innumerable crustacea frequent every part of the plant. On shaking the great entangled roots, a pile of small fish, shells, cuttlefish, crabs of all orders, sea-eggs, starfish, beautiful Holothuriae, Planariae, and crawling nereidous animals of a multitude of forms, all fall out together. Often as I recurred to a branch of the kelp, I never failed to discover animals of new and curious structures. ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin
... (the male) and Darkness (the female) are born the coral insect, the starfish, sea urchin, and the shellfish. Next seaweed and grasses are born. Meanwhile land has arisen, and in the next era fishes of the sea and plants of the forest appear. Next are born the generations of ...
— The Hawaiian Romance Of Laieikawai • Anonymous
... Colin spending the entire day peering through the water glass for perfect specimens, which, when sighted, the diver would descend to get. He secured an especially fine example of a long-spined black and white striped sea-urchin, with spines nearly seven inches in length, a number of pale-blue starfish (an unusual color in that genus), and one superb sea-fan of a glowing purple color nearly five feet across. Of sea-anemones he found a large variety, and those he brought to the aquarium, where Mr. Collier was working steadily; ...
— The Boy With the U. S. Fisheries • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... difficult nowadays to say where the suburbs of London come to an end, and where the country begins. The railways, instead of enabling Londoners to live in the country, have turned the country into a city. London will soon assume the shape of a great starfish. The old town, extending from Poplar to Hammersmith, will be the nucleus, and the various railway lines ...
— The Three Clerks • Anthony Trollope
... of the fishing for cod about the river mouths in June. There are two shoals, one of 14 and the other of 16 feet, both of which break in rough weather, but depths elsewhere on the ground about are from 13 to 20 fathoms. The bottom, both on the shoals and about them, is rocky and has many starfish upon it, except on the north-western part, where the bottom is of sand. Marks: The eastern end of Elmwood Rock on the little high woods of Small Point: the Outer ...
— Fishing Grounds of the Gulf of Maine • Walter H. Rich
... The starfish, or "five fingers," will, after washing, dry well, or can be plunged in any one of the hardening solutions mentioned in Chapter IV. The various sea urchins (Echinii), if emptied of their contents, make pretty objects, either with or without their spines. ...
— Practical Taxidermy • Montagu Browne
... councilman or insurrecto general; there were the horny feet of the old women, slim and bony, or a pair of great toes quizzically turned in; and there were flat feet, speckled, brown, or yellow, like a starfish cast up on the sand. They seemed to watch the game with interest, and to note every move the dealer made, smiling or frowning as they won or lost. There was a tramway at Salay, drawn by a bull, and driven by a fellow whose chief object seemed to be to linger with the senorita ...
— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert
... of all descriptions are found in immense numbers. The five-rayed varieties of starfish are universally condemned as insatiable foes of the oyster family, and the oyster cultivators destroy all they can find. To dismember the body of the starfish by pulling off the finger-like rays does not kill the animal, for not only does each fish ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson |
