"Animalcule" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Ocean, after you have left the land a few hundred miles, is one vast plain of mud, of some thirteen hundred miles in breadth. But here is the wonder; it was found that at a depth, averaging 1,600 fathoms—9,600 feet—in utter darkness, the sea floor is covered with countless millions of animalcule-shells, of the same families, though not of the same species, as those ...
— Scientific Essays and Lectures • Charles Kingsley
... placed beneath my instrument I believed that I discovered wonders of which the world was as yet ignorant. I remember well the thrill of delight and admiration that shot through me the first time that I discovered the common wheel animalcule (Rotifera vulgaris) expanding and contracting its flexible spokes, and seemingly rotating through the water. Alas! as I grew older, and obtained some works treating of my favorite study, I found that I was only on the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... upon my desk and officiates as showman. Now I can truly see how little and transitory is life. The earth appears almost as a drop of vinegar, on which the solar microscope of the imagination must be brought to bear in order to make out anything distinctly. That animalcule there, in the pea-jacket, is Louis Philippe, just landed on the coast of England. That other, in the gray surtout and cocked hat, is Napoleon Bonaparte Smith, assuring France that she need apprehend no interference from him in the present alarming juncture. At that spot, where you seem to see a speck ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... to say that ghosts talk: their medium of communication must be pure thought; and one should be able to see their thoughts working, just as one sees the working of the digestive organs in the clear viscera of transparent animalcule. The hard thing of it is that ghosts are chained to the same scenes that chained their bodies, and when they sleep-walk, so to speak, it must be through phases of former existence. What a nightmare for them to go over once again the lived and done, the suffered and finished! What a comfort to wake ...
— Balcony Stories • Grace E. King
... those which occur in Peronospora and Coleochaete? And, in fact, there are some green organisms, in every respect characteristically plants, such as Chlamydomonas, and the common Volvox, or so-called "Globe animalcule," which run through a cycle of forms of just the same simple character as ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... include progressive development—it only takes advantage of such variations as arise and are beneficial to each creature under its complex relations of life. And it may be asked what advantage, as far as we can see, would it be to an infusorian animalcule—to an intestinal worm, or even to an earthworm—to be highly organized. If it were no advantage, these forms would be left, by natural selection, unimproved or but little improved, and might remain for indefinite ages ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... mind-force or into the efficiency of the First Cause. . . . He assumes, also, the existence of life in the form of one or more primordial germs. . . . How all living things on earth, including the endless variety of plants and all the diversity of animals, . . . have descended from the primordial animalcule, he thinks, may be accounted for by the operation of the following natural laws, viz.: First, the law of Heredity, or that by which like begets like—the offspring are like the parent. Second, the law of Variation; that is, while the offspring are in all essential characteristics like their ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... the valley—how is that related to the beauty of the flowers? Truly enough, it is not a beauty called forth by natural selection. It is primordial; it is the beauty of great light itself. The response to its charm is felt by every living thing, even by the smallest green plant and the invisible animalcule, as it is by man himself. As I stand on the mountain-side we are all, from animalcule to man, sympathizing and uniting, as members of one great race, in our adoration of the sun. And in doing this we men are for the moment close to and in happy fellowship ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... present, appears at intervals, enlarges gradually, and then vanishes abruptly, to reappear after a brief interval; this is called the contractile vacuole (c.v.). The amoeba is constantly changing its shape, whence its older name of the Proteus animalcule, thrusting out masses of its substance in one direction, and withdrawing from another, and hence slowly creeping about. These thrust-out parts, in its outline, are called pseudopodia (ps.). By means of them it gradually creeps round and encloses its food. Little ...
— Text Book of Biology, Part 1: Vertebrata • H. G. Wells
... kingdom of Radiates, sub-kingdom Polypes. The soft body of the animal is attached to a support, the mouth opening upwards in a row of tentacles. The coral is secreted in the body of the polyp out of the carbonate of lime in the sea. Thus the coral animalcule rears its polypidom or rocky structure in warm latitudes, and constructs reefs or barriers round islands. It is limited in rage of depth from 25 to 30 fathoms. Chemically considered, coral is carbonate of ...
— The Fairy-Land of Science • Arabella B. Buckley
... not be mistaken for corals) have a tissue lined with a calcareous crust, and the modifications of its structure have induced M. Milne Edwards, my worthy master, to class them into five sections. The animalcule that the marine polypus secretes live by millions at the bottom of their cells. Their calcareous deposits become rocks, reefs, and large and small islands. Here they form a ring, surrounding a little inland lake, that communicates with the sea by means ...
— Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea • Jules Verne
... transplantation to a foreign soil. Even birds and animals pine in exile from their native haunts; their local attachments are wonderful; they migrate only to return again at the earliest opportunity. Perhaps there is not a living thing, from the hugest animal down to the minutest animalcule, whose pleasant associations are not circumscribed, or that has not some favorite retreats. This universal preference, this love of home, seems to be the element of being,—a constitutional attribute given by the all-wise Creator to bind each separate tribe or community within ...
— Thoughts on African Colonization • William Lloyd Garrison |
