"Antediluvian" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and her companion. He liked the girl for herself, as well as for the fact that, in this remote corner of the world, she represented the sole bit of feminine companionship which is the rightful heritage of every son of Eve. True, there was Miss Arthur; but Miss Arthur was antediluvian. Under these conditions, it was galling to Weldon to see Ethel absorbed by a comrade who, he frankly admitted to himself, was far the more personable man of the two. And the girl's blue eyes had laughed up into the eyes of the stranger just exactly as, ...
— On the Firing Line • Anna Chapin Ray and Hamilton Brock Fuller
... I would point out to ye that Fortune is a fickle, tricksy jade, and the luck o' the game might fall to your patriarch in the antediluvian headgear to-morrow." ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... difficulty on account of the scarcity of reindeer and the dangerous condition of the mountain passes. The task of conveying the mammoth, even as far as this point, had been an almost super-human one, but no trouble or expense had been spared in the preservation of this antediluvian monster, which is undoubtedly the most perfect specimen of its kind ever brought to light. The animal was found frozen into a huge block of ice, as it had evidently fallen from a cliff overhead, ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... as the vegetable kingdom was slowly developed from the mineral, and as in like manner the animal supervened upon the vegetable, so now in these last few ages an entirely new kingdom has sprung up, of which we as yet have only seen what will one day be considered the antediluvian prototypes of the race. ...
— Samuel Butler's Canterbury Pieces • Samuel Butler
... wandered out to the entrance. Rain had begun to fall, that would make it harder to find a taxi. It would happen, now of all times! Ten minutes passed, then up the street chug-chugged a somewhat battered motor-vehicle with the apache hanging on the step. Yes, it was a taxi, an antediluvian one, but she must not be critical. If a chariot offered one a lift out of hell, one would not stop to inquire its horse-power. The apache helped her in and closed the door. She turned grateful eyes on him through the open ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... honours of the mountain. The rather heavy gentleman is carried by fifteen men; each of the ladies by half-a-dozen. We who walk, make the best use of our staves; and so the whole party begin to labour upward over the snow,—as if they were toiling to the summit of an antediluvian Twelfth-cake. ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... them; except on either side five eight-inch shell guns, a small tribute to progress. The rest threw solid shot for the most part. Imposing as they certainly looked, and heavier though they were than most of those with which the world's famous sea-fights have been fought, they were already antediluvian. A few years later I saw a long range of them enjoying their last repose on the skids in a navy-yard; and a bystander, with equal truth and irreverence, called them pop-guns. One almost felt that the word should ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan
... you really wish it.' So he accompanied Mr Tigg to the retreat in question; on arriving at which place that gentleman took from his hat what seemed to be the fossil remains of an antediluvian pocket-handkerchief, and wiped his ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... force in our day from its discordance with modern sentiment. We look upon religions as members of the same family, and are more interested in their resemblances than their antagonisms. Moloch and Dagon themselves appear no longer as incarnate fiends, but as the spiritual counterparts of antediluvian monsters; and Milton's treatment of the Olympian deities jars upon us who remember his obligations to them. If the most Hebrew of modern poets, he still owed more to Greece than to Palestine. How living a thing Greek mythology was to him from his earliest years appears from his college ...
— Life of John Milton • Richard Garnett
... transcending our conceptions, even as our own transcended the ideas of the previous orders of existence. Undoubtedly, had the ichthyosaurus, ploughing through the deep and making it boil like a pot, or one of those mammoth creatures of the antediluvian age who browsed half a dozen trees for breakfast, crunched a couple of oxen for luncheon and a whole flock of sheep for his dinner, been consulted on a similar problem, he would have replied, without hesitation, "I exhaust the uses of the world. What animal can there be superior ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... young fellow," he said, "everybody knows that he (pointing to me) is an antediluvian; but you've gone a bit off ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, December 23, 1914 • Various
... place as we drove through gates from Highland Falls into the Government Reservation. We meant to arrive, shed the dust at our hotel, and then saunter forth for dress parade, but instead of that we had to see the great sight of the day sitting in our motors. The poor Hippopotamus did look antediluvian among all the smart cars and carriages assembled! But the rest of us weren't so bad, even after a day's run, and, anyhow, we had no time to think of ourselves, there was too much ...
— The Lightning Conductor Discovers America • C. N. (Charles Norris) Williamson and A. M. (Alice Muriel)
... anything, seems to have been an antediluvian conception; for we find primitive men thinking that almost everything is significant and can exert influence of some sort. The search for the more definite influences seems to have started in the question: "Who, or what, is to blame?"—for any illness, namely, or disaster, ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... from a notice of one of my own discourses, which, from its superior tone and appearance of vast experience, I concluded to have been written by a man at least three hundred years of age, though I recollected no existing instance of such antediluvian longevity. Nevertheless, I afterwards discovered the author to be a young gentleman preparing for the ministry under the direction of one of my brethren in a neighbouring town, and whom I had once instinctively corrected in a Latin ...
— The Biglow Papers • James Russell Lowell
... animal juices become wholly frozen up, the substance is almost proof against decay. Thus, about seventy years ago, a huge animal was found imbedded in the ice in Siberia: from a comparison of its skeleton with those of existing species, Cuvier inferred that this animal must have been antediluvian; and yet, so completely had the cold prevented putrefaction, that dogs willingly ate of the still existing flesh. At St Petersburg, when winter is approaching, the fish in the markets become almost like blocks of ice, so completely are they frozen; and in this state they will remain sound ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 460 - Volume 18, New Series, October 23, 1852 • Various
... than take my chances in an antediluvian rattle-trap like that," said the tall wayfarer, bending quite close to her ear. "It will fall to pieces ...
— Green Fancy • George Barr McCutcheon
... eminent naturalists have actually believed, that, like the sloths, to which they are intimately related, they subsisted by climbing back downwards on trees, and feeding on the leaves. It was a bold, not to say preposterous, idea to conceive even antediluvian trees, with branches strong enough to bear animals as large as elephants. Professor Owen, with far more probability, believes that, instead of climbing on the trees, they pulled the branches down to them, and tore up the smaller ones by the roots, and so fed on the leaves. The colossal ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... the coal mines, but in Stirlingshire, and ultimately throughout the kingdom. The strangeness of the story was exaggerated; the affair could not have made more commotion had they found the girl enclosed in the solid rock, like one of those antediluvian creatures who have occasionally been released by a stroke of the pickax from their stony prison. Nell became a fashionable wonder without knowing it. Superstitious folks made her story a new subject for legendary marvels, and were inclined to think, ...
— The Underground City • Jules Verne
... herbage on the eastern, give those plains a peculiar appearance. The soil is composed of sand and red or yellow clay, and this is covered by a layer of earth, in which the vegetation takes root. The geologist would find rich treasures in the tertiary strata here, for it is full of antediluvian remains—enormous bones, which the Indians attribute to some gigantic race that lived in a ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... modes of construction and design throughout their arts, which have shown but few moments of change in growth—scarcely a sign of evolution. And we may fairly surmise that this Accadian culture (if such it be) is reflected from antediluvian tradition. ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... dear friend," he said, "yet what you say possesses, shall we call it, a somewhat antediluvian flavour. Intrigue is no longer a clumsy game of knife and string and bowl. It becomes to-day a game of finesse. I can assure you that I have no desire to give a stage whistle and have you throttled at my feet. On the contrary, I beg you ...
— The Yellow Crayon • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... during the period we are speaking of, the Quakers believe, from what they conceive to be the sense of the holy scriptures on this subject. For in the first place, they consider it as a position, deducible from the expressions of Moses[33], that the spirit of God had striven with those of the antediluvian world. They believe, therefore, that it was this spirit (and because the means were adequate, and none more satisfactory to them can be assigned) which informed Cain, before any written law existed, ...
— A Portraiture of Quakerism, Volume II (of 3) • Thomas Clarkson
... to promise one vase of pre-eminent size and beauty. Oh, indubitably! if your la'ship prefers it, you can have the EGYPTIAN HIEROGLYPHIC PAPER, with the IBIS BORDER to match! The only objection is, one sees it everywhere—quite antediluvian—gone to the hotels even; but, to be sure, if your la'ship has a fancy—At all events, I humbly recommend, what her Grace of Torcaster longs to patronise, my MOON CURTAINS, with candlelight draperies. A demisaison elegance ...
— The Absentee • Maria Edgeworth
... across the table, the fingertips of one hand resting on the immaculate cloth. "A creature with an antediluvian lower jaw, hairy like a mastodon, and formed like a pre-historic ape, has laid this table. Are you awake, Lena? Am I? I would pinch myself, only I know that nothing would do away with this dream. Three covers. ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... a little adventure. As he cantered up to London with two servants and a post-boy, all riding on horses ordered in relays beforehand, he came up with an antediluvian coach, stuck fast by the road-side. Looking into the window, with the humane design of quizzing the elders who should be there, he saw a young lady of surpassing beauty. This altered the case; Sir Charles instantly drew ...
— Peg Woffington • Charles Reade
... indefatigable humorist is our actor? What a continuous stream of wheezes, unintelligible for the most part, of antediluvian puns, of pure nonsense at which he laughs so heartily that it is difficult not to laugh with him. He wanted to learn a few words of Chinese, and Pan-Chao having told him that "tching-tching" means thanks, he has been tching-tchinging at every ...
— The Adventures of a Special Correspondent • Jules Verne
... above and shading off to a dirty whitish-grey beneath, with a long tail broad and flat at its extremity, and with four seal-like flippers instead of legs and feet, the monsters looked more like nightmare creatures, evolved by reading a book on antediluvian animals after a—. Of course, that was it, Escombe decided, as his thoughts took some such turn as above. He now distinctly remembered having read some years ago a most interesting illustrated magazine article upon extinct animals, and one ...
— Harry Escombe - A Tale of Adventure in Peru • Harry Collingwood
... the same regions, and must have come from elsewhere." Geoffrey Saint Hilaire opposed to Cuvier's inductive treatment of the question the following expression of belief: "I have no doubt that existing animals are directly descended from the animals of the antediluvian world," but added, "it is my belief that the season has not yet arrived for a really ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... disdain which the painted old duchesse of the Restoration cast upon the youthful belles of the Chausse d'Antin, or the handsome widows of Napoleon's army of heroes, defies description. Although often responded to by a sarcastic sneer at the antediluvian charms of the emigree, yet the look of contempt and disgust often sank deep into the victim's heart, leaving there germs which showed themselves fifteen years later in the revolution of 1830. In those days, this privileged class was surrounded by a charmed circle, which no one could by any means ...
— Reminiscences of Captain Gronow • Rees Howell Gronow
... as it regards the separating of metals from foreign matters in the ore, smelting and refining them, is of the highest antiquity; it is even supposed to have been understood and practised in the antediluvian world. ...
— A Catechism of Familiar Things; Their History, and the Events Which Led to Their Discovery • Benziger Brothers
... gypsies stole our antediluvian horse and cow. The barking of the faithful dog awakened father and brothers who rushed to the rescue, leaving mother half dead with fear; but at length the marauders were overtaken, shots were exchanged, heads were broken, and after a fierce ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss
... which I am writing I lived in an old-fashioned hotel on the Boulevard, which an enterprising Belgian had lately bought and was endeavouring to modernise; an old-fashioned hotel, that still clung to its ancient character in the presence of half a dozen old people, who, for antediluvian reasons, continue to dine on certain well-specified days at the table d'hôte. Fifteen years have passed away, and these old people, no doubt, have joined their ancestors; but I can see them still sitting in that salle ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... were preparing for their first landing, there detached itself from the background of trees along the shore the most singular aquatic structure I think I have ever seen. It looked like the skeleton of some antediluvian wigwam which a prehistoric roc had subsequently chosen for a nest. Four poles planted in the water inclined to one another at such an angle that they crossed three-quarters of the way up. The projecting quarters ...
— Noto, An Unexplored Corner of Japan • Percival Lowell
... Big Ships.—In the history of mankind several vessels of extraordinary magnitude have been constructed, all distinctively styled great, and all unfortunately disastrous, with the honorable exception of Noah's Ark. Setting aside this antediluvian craft, concerning the authenticity of whose dimensions authorities differ, and which, if Biblical measures are correct, was inferior in size to the vessel of most importance to modern shipowners, the great galley, constructed by the great engineer Archimedes for the great King Hiero II., of ...
— Burroughs' Encyclopaedia of Astounding Facts and Useful Information, 1889 • Barkham Burroughs
... of the two years Miss Ray suddenly announced to her dear friend, Miss D'Armande, that she was going to spend the summer at an antediluvian village on the north shore of Long Island, and that the stage would see her ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry
... are plenty of people who knew all about it; but such stories get packed away like old letters. They interest me. I like to know the manners of my time—contemporary gossip, not antediluvian. These Dryasdust fellows get a reputation by raking up some small scandal about Semiramis or Nitocris, and then we have a thousand and one poems written upon it by all the warblers big and little. But I don't care a straw about the faux pas of the mummies. You do, though. You are one of the ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot
... said Goggins, "in the first place, it is quite beautiful to see the mind in adversity bearing up against the little antediluvian afflictions that will happen occasionally, and then how fine it is to remark the spark of generosity that kindles in the noble heart and rushes to the assistance of the destitute! I do assure you, sir, it is a ...
— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover
... how antediluvian you are! No doubt he did like her,—after his fashion; though what he saw in her, I never could tell. I think Miss Morris would make a very nice wife for a country clergyman who didn't care how poor things were. But ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... thanks. He made an interesting extract from the report, by which it appeared how very much stress had been laid formerly on the mode of tooling, by the fathers, both Greek and Latin. In confirmation of this pleasing fact, he made a very striking statement in reference to the earliest work of antediluvian art. Father Mersenne, that learned Roman Catholic, in page one thousand four hundred and thirty-one[1] of his operose Commentary on Genesis, mentions, on the authority of several rabbis, that the quarrel of Cain with Abel was about a young woman; that, ...
— Miscellaneous Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... entering the offices of Tutt & Tutt and hanging his antediluvian stovepipe on the hat-tree in the corner, "I see by the morning paper that Payson Clifford has departed ...
— By Advice of Counsel • Arthur Train
... declines from the foot of the shaft to the end of the main heading. The very lowest level of all is there, where I propose to put in a ventilating shaft, with a fan; all the water flows to that point, flooding it. Under the antediluvian methods in use in this mine, all this water must be pumped into leaky cars and hauled by mules to the bottom of the the sloping shaft, whence it is drawn up by the engine, spilling half of it before it reaches the surface. Now, when I sink that ventilating ...
— A Captain in the Ranks - A Romance of Affairs • George Cary Eggleston
... called Burnt Sienna, and was now much interested to learn that it was made of the yellow clay on which the city of Siena stands; and when I discovered for myself that this clay, having formed the bed of some antediluvian ocean, was full of fossil shells, I thought that Siena was a place where I would do well to spend one of my lifetimes. The odd, parti-colored architecture of the town did not so much appeal to me, and certainly the streets and ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... antique halls, we wandered through saloons of antediluvian animals, some set up in skeletons, others imprisoned in solid stone; also specimens of still extant animals, birds, reptiles, shells, minerals,— the whole circle of human knowledge and guess-work,—till I wished that the whole Past might be ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... in 1838 Lamartine published his "La chute d'un age."[8] This is one of his poorest productions, though exhibiting vast powers of imagination and productive genius. The scene is laid in a chaotic antediluvian world, inhabited by Titans, and is, perhaps, descriptive of the author's mind, full of majestic imagery, but as yet undefined, vague, and without an object worthy of its efforts. Lamartine's time had not yet come, though he required but a few years to complete the fiftieth ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 1 July 1848 • Various
... tell that the barge was moving. The ferrymen plied the oars with a slow measured stroke; Brains hung over the tiller with his stomach pressed against it and swung from side to side. In the dim light they looked like men sitting on some antediluvian animal with long limbs, swimming out to a cold ...
— The House with the Mezzanine and Other Stories • Anton Tchekoff
... valley of the Rhone. The wind blew from the south across the mountains; it was an African wind, a wind which scattered the clouds for a moment, and then suddenly fell. The broken clouds hung in fantastic forms upon the wood-covered hills by the rapid Rhone. They assumed the shapes of antediluvian animals, of eagles hovering in the air, of frogs leaping over a marsh, and then sunk down upon the rushing stream and appeared to sail upon it, although floating in the air. An uprooted fir-tree was being carried away by the current, and marking out its path by eddying circles ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen
... for wounded lay along this ridge, which rises like the vertebrae of some great antediluvian reptile—dropping sheer down on the Gulf of Saros side, and, in varying slopes, to the plains and the ...
— At Suvla Bay • John Hargrave
... answer his arguments. He detracted, it is true, from the significance of his success by admitting that no one in Rome took him au serieux, and the residents in the Vatican made sport of him as being "an antediluvian." It is a pity-that they did not pay more heed to what he said. A complete change took place about 1840. The older members whose training dated from before the Revolution were dead, and the younger ones nearly all rallied to the doctrine of ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... up to obloquy, picturing his ideas as prehistoric, even antediluvian; but Bismarck stood the prick of honor; as King's Man he insisted in numberless arguments, far and wide, that behind the Divine-right idea was not only a sentimental but a practical side. At any rate, the King's Man was everlastingly against any movement ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel
... antediluvian world was the fondness shown by the sons of God for the daughters of men. That fondness has continued ever since. The deluge itself could not wash out the amatory feelings with which the pious males regard those fair creatures who ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... say, when it transforms those sins into legal crimes. How would you like to be haled before a Court of law for some ridiculous trifle, which became a crime only because it used to be a sin, and became a sin only because some dyspeptic old antediluvian was envious of his neighbour's pleasure? Our statute-book reeks of discarded theories of conduct; the serpent's trail of the theologian, of the reactionary, is ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... of the strata that nourish gold; and at length the moon, now in all her pomp of light, mid-heaven amongst her subject stars, gleamed through the fissures of the cave, on whose floor lay the relics of antediluvian races, and rested in one flood of silvery splendour upon the hollows of the extinct volcano, with tufts of dank herbage, and wide spaces of paler sward, covering the gold below,—Gold, the dumb symbol of organized Matter's great mystery, storing in itself, ...
— A Strange Story, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the street for him. He was dressed in a fine flowing, olive-green frock (made like a dressing-gown), with a black velvet collar, having a gold embroidered stag on each side, gilt stag-buttons, with rich embossed edges; an acre of buff waistcoat, and a most antediluvian pair of bright yellow-ochre buckskins, made by White, of Tarporley, in the twenty-first year of the reign of George the Third; they were double-lashed, back-stiched, front-stiched, middle-stiched, and patched at both knees, with a slit ...
— Jorrocks' Jaunts and Jollities • Robert Smith Surtees
... Bagdad,' the court poets of Al Mamoun (son of the far-famed Haroun al Raschid) 'drew gorgeous pictures of the contents of the pyramid's interior.... All the treasures of Sheddad Ben Ad the great Antediluvian king of the earth, with all his medicines and all his sciences, they declared were there, told over and over again. Others, though, were positive that the founder-king was no other than Saurid Ibn Salhouk, a far greater one than the other; and these last gave many more minute ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... come to listen to a debate, for which the entertainment committee had provided, between the venerable patriarch Noah and the late eminent showman P. T. Barnum. The question to be debated was upon the resolution passed by the committee, that "The Animals of the Antediluvian Period were Far More Attractive for Show Purposes than those of Modern Make," and, singular to relate, the affirmative was placed in the hands of Mr. Barnum, while to Noah had fallen the task of upholding the virtues of the modern freak. It is with the party on mere pleasure bent that ...
— A House-Boat on the Styx • John Kendrick Bangs
... to rest, the hour succeeding sunset providing them with a fuller repast than any other part of the day. No sooner has the Swallow disappeared, than the Whippoorwill and the Night-Jar come forth, to prey upon the larger kinds of aerial insects. The Bat, an animal of an antediluvian type, comes out at the same time, and assists in lessening these multitudinous swarms. The little Owls, though they pursue the larger beetles and moths, direct their efforts chiefly at the small quadrupeds that steal out in the early evening to nibble the tender herbs and grasses. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... identifying himself with the celestial intelligences, possessed the philosopher's stone—he could cure all diseases, and prolong life to as many centuries as he pleased; it being by the very same means that Adam and the antediluvian patriarchs prolonged theirs. Life was an emanation from the stars—the sun governed the heart, and the moon the brain. Jupiter governed the liver, Saturn the gall, Mercury the lungs, Mars the bile, and Venus the loins. In the stomach of every ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... key that was unlocking her own; welcomed him openly and was maddeningly respectful to him. This made him rage. What did she think he was, anyhow? An old professor, an antiquarian, an archaeologist? She might as well consider him an antediluvian at once! ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... bows upon every bit of ice we could get near, without getting into a scrape with the commodore; and, from the ease with which they cut through the rotten stuff around our position, I already foresaw a fresh era in arctic history, and that the fine bows would soon beat the antediluvian "bluffs" out ...
— Stray Leaves from an Arctic Journal; • Sherard Osborn
... course I am, you old reptile-hunting, butterfly-chasing antediluvian! But, come on; Byzantium is gorging its diamond-swathed girth yonder with salad and champagne; and I'm ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... only by their being closely pressed together. The manner in which it balances itself after such leaps is also admirable: our ballet-dancers would consider it a model of a perfect a plomb. The monster of the antediluvian world, the mammoth, must have been an inhabitant of this country, since many of its bones have been ...
— A New Voyage Round the World, in the years 1823, 24, 25, and 26, Vol. 2 • Otto von Kotzebue
... had better be actin' out a commentary on modern sins. What business has he to be rakin' over the old ashes of Sodom and Gomorrah for bones of antediluvian sinners, and leave his livin' flock to be burnt and choked by the fire and flames of the present volcano of crime, the Liquor System, that ...
— Around the World with Josiah Allen's Wife • Marietta Holley
... faithful and formative creatures of themselves, or unfaithful and de-formative. And this distinction between the creatures who, blessing, are blessed, and evermore benedicti, and the creatures who, cursing, are cursed, and evermore maledicti, is one going through all humanity; antediluvian in Cain and Abel, diluvian in Ham and Shem. And the question for the public of any given period is not whether they are a constitutional or unconstitutional vulgus, but whether they are a benignant or malignant vulgus. So also, whether it is indeed ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... the earth was washed with the regenerating waters of a terrible flood. Millions were suddenly cut off, with their handiwork and antediluvian civilisation. The swelling floods subsided, and the God-avenging waters retired to their appointed place. The earth again stood forth in virgin strength, lonely, bare, and citiless, but with a potency and promise inviting and grand. Across these swelling floods ...
— The Lost Ten Tribes, and 1882 • Joseph Wild
... standing still but moving. The ferrymen swung the oars evenly in time; Semyon lay with his stomach on the tiller and, describing a semicircle in the air, flew from one side to the other. In the darkness it looked as though the men were sitting on some antediluvian animal with long paws, and were moving on it through a cold, desolate land, the land of which one sometimes dreams ...
— The Schoolmistress and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... of the mountain. He also proved, entirely to his own satisfaction, that the sun, instead of being greater, was very much smaller than the earth. The earth was, according to him, a moderately sized plane, the inhabited parts of which were separated from the antediluvian world by the ocean, and at the four corners of the whole were the pillars which supported the heavens, so that the whole universe was something like a big glass exhibition case, on the top of which was the firmament, ...
— The Story of Geographical Discovery - How the World Became Known • Joseph Jacobs
... the brim with ineffable peace and beauty. The vast expanse of water was without a ripple, mirroring all the changing shades of the sunset glow. Miles and miles of a desolate sandbank lay like a huge amphibious reptile of some antediluvian age, with its scales glistening in shining colours. As our boat was silently gliding by the precipitous river-bank, riddled with the nest-holes of a colony of birds, suddenly a big fish leapt up to ...
— Sadhana - The Realisation of Life • Rabindranath Tagore
... none of them is she adequately revealed. As Mr. Matthew Arnold said, many years ago, 'We do not know George Sand unless we feel the spirit which goes through her work as a whole.' With this spirit, however, M. Caro has no sympathy. Madame Sand's doctrines are antediluvian, he tells us, her philosophy is quite dead and her ideas of social regeneration are Utopian, incoherent and absurd. The best thing for us to do is to forget these silly dreams and to read Teverino and Le Secretaire Intime. Poor M. Caro! This spirit, which he treats with such ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... embodying them with an instantaneous thought, and therefore we often find sculptures from his hand left at the critical point of their struggle to get out of the marble. The statue of St. Matthew looks like the antediluvian fossil of a human being of an epoch when humanity was mightier and more majestic than now, long ago imprisoned in stone, and ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... differ in structure from their ancestors of ancient times, and would differ from them according "to the degree of the modifying power."[149] Again, he says, "The animals living to-day have been derived by a series of uninterrupted generations from the extinct animals of the antediluvian world."[150] He gave as an example the crocodiles of the present day, which he believed to have descended from the fossil forms. While he admitted the possibility of one type passing into another, separated by characters ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... old Hebrew sheiks thought them impious enough, for daring to build brick walls instead of keeping to the good old- fashioned tents, and gathering themselves into a nation instead of remaining a mere family horde; and gave their own account of the myth, just as the antediluvian savages gave theirs of that strange Eden scene, by the common interpretation of which the devil is made the first inventor of modesty. Men are all conservatives; everything new is impious, till we get accustomed to it; and if it fails, the ...
— Yeast: A Problem • Charles Kingsley
... asleep, when the birds are on one leg, when even the little armadillo is quiet, and the monkeys have ceased their chatter, he — I mean the hippopotamus — and the elephant, and the long-necked giraffe, perhaps may lay their heads together and have a colloquy about the great silent antediluvian world which they remember, where mighty monsters floundered through the ooze, crocodiles basked on the banks, and dragons darted out of the caves and waters before men were made to slay them. We who lived before railways are ...
— Some Roundabout Papers • W. M. Thackeray
... up in this belief, and though he unconsciously felt that the Devil ought to be expelled from our creed, he did not dare to attempt the reform of humanity by annihilating the mischief-maker: he could not rob man of his dearest spiritual possession; had he thought of consigning the Devil to the antediluvian period of our moral and social formation, he never could have succeeded in his reform. The Devil, in fact, was his strongest helpmate; he could describe the ritual of the Romish Church as the work of the Evil Spirit, produced to delude mankind. ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... one of the greatest we have in history. See Bianchini's curious and important observations on this Vesuvius, and its seven several great eruptions, with their remains vitrified, and still existing, in so many different strata under ground, till the diggers came to the antediluvian waters, with their proportionable interstices, implying the deluge to have been above two thousand five hundred years before the Christian era, according to our ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus
... dried it in the sun, and then baked it under a bonfire, like in Foul Play. And most of the things were such queer shapes that they should have done for almost anything—Roman or Greek, or even Egyptian or antediluvian, or household milk-jugs of the cavemen, Albert's uncle said. The pots were, fortunately, quite ready and dirty, because we had already buried them in mixed sand and river mud to improve the colour, and not remembered to ...
— The Wouldbegoods • E. Nesbit
... Dora had said nothing. Now as she stood by the old gig, toppling forward with its shafts resting upon the floor, she thought she had never seen such a horrible, antediluvian old trap in her life. Nothing could add so much to her disappointment in going so soon, as going in that thing. If there had been anything to say which might prevent her brother from carrying out his intention, she would have said it, but so far ...
— The Girl at Cobhurst • Frank Richard Stockton
... on high in the Representatives' Chamber, the emblem of a silence too sacred, as would seem, to be observed except on Sundays. Eloquent Philip Vandal, I appeal to you as a man and a brother, let us two form (not an Antediluvian, for there are plenty, but) an Antidiluvian Society against the flood of milk-and-water that threatens the land. Let us adopt as our creed ...
— The Function Of The Poet And Other Essays • James Russell Lowell
... and house is still owned by two antediluvian spinsters of the name of La Sarthe—exquisite specimens of Early Victorian gentility. They are very poor and proud and narrow-minded, and they have a great-niece living with them, the most remarkable little female intelligence I have ever ...
— Halcyone • Elinor Glyn
... executed them. Later she learned that there were a number of smaller painting-rooms right and left, above and below, but the dirtiest room of all was that in which lumps of clay lay casually about on tables and rests and on the floor, where embryonic things perched upon tripods, like antediluvian birds and saurians, and where the daughters of Praxiteles and sons of Phidias pursued their claggy but fascinating studies under a sculptor who possessed the inestimable gift of teaching more than he knew himself. It was all very unromantic. Strange ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer
... analyzing the then stellar dust. For toothbrushes and their purchase are determined by the nature of human beings, not by the nature of embryonic stars. And Spinoza's doctrine of necessity maintains that all events are determined by their proper causes, not that everything is immediately caused by some antediluvian event. And this is true even though we can start from any event in the present, no matter how trivial, and go back to an event causally antecedent, and from that to another, even until we recede into the stellar dust itself. But this only amounts to saying, ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... Pollnitz was ill at ease; for three days he had sought relief diligently, but had no alleviation. He found himself in the antediluvian condition of our great forefather Adam, while he loitered away his time in Paradise. Like Adam, Pollnitz had no gold. Our good baron found this by no means a happy state, and his heart was full of discontent and ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... article on "Antediluvian Archaeology in its relation to Genesis and the Iliad," and now all that remains to do is to carry the rest of my books down to the new library, make catalogue, consider subjects for five more speeches, write thirty-six letters and postcards, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., November 8, 1890 • Various
... bear it through the intricate mazes of the forest; now diving down and disappearing altogether in the umbrageous foliage of a dell; anon reappearing on the other side and scrambling up the bank on all-fours, he and the canoe together looking like some frightful yellow reptile of antediluvian proportions; and then speeding rapidly forward over a level plain until he reached a sheet of still water above the rapids. Here he deposited his burden on the grass, and halting only for a few seconds to carry a few drops of the clear water to his lips, retraced his steps to bring ...
— The Young Fur Traders • R.M. Ballantyne
... the suet-like inundation of the flesh had not dared here. The chin was only slightly doubled; the cheeks just a shade too plump. Neither was the eye heavy of lid or sunk down behind a ridge of cheek. Between her eyes and upper lip, Miss Hoag looked her just-turned twenty; beyond them, she was antediluvian, deluged, smothered beneath the creamy billows and ...
— Humoresque - A Laugh On Life With A Tear Behind It • Fannie Hurst
... Match." First Buss plate. He introduced a farcical incident not in the text—the ball knocking off the fielder's hat, who is quite close to the batsman. A very poor production. Observe the "antediluvian" shape of the bat—no paddings on the legs. The sketch is valuable as showing how not to interpret Dickens' humour, or rather how to interpret it in a strictly literal ...
— Pickwickian Manners and Customs • Percy Fitzgerald
... version of "Atlantis, the Antediluvian World" was prepared from input provided by Mr. J.B. Hare. For an HTML text with the illustrations from the original see his web ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... many grievances afflict this vast mass of buildings, buried under the Palais de Justice and the quay, like some antediluvian creature in the soil of Montmartre; but the worst affliction is that it is the Conciergerie. This epigram is intelligible. In the early days of the monarchy, noble criminals—for the villeins (a word signifying the peasantry in ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... and Miss Opie, who had seen her on board,—the latter with many injunctions to ascertain that two old-fashioned hirsute trunks containing her wardrobe were really put into the steamer at Quebec. Bluebell had treated herself to a smart little portmanteau for the cabin, being rather ashamed of her antediluvian luggage. She had ten sovereigns in her purse, that had been scraped together among them as a provision for any emergency. The Rolleston children had sent her a travelling-bag; but not even a message came from Cecil, which saddened Bluebell, but did not make her resentful, ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... legends do not speak of an antediluvian race, nor of any family who escaped the waters. Michabo, the spirit of the dawn, their supreme deity, alone existed, and by his power formed and peopled it. Nor did their neighbors, the Dakotas, though firm ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... I can see, sir," says mine host, handing back our glass, "seeing as this here is the Blawing Stwun, his self," putting his hand on a square lump of stone, some three feet and a half high, perforated with two or three queer holes, like petrified antediluvian rat-holes, which lies there close under the oak, under our very nose. We are more than ever puzzled, and drink our second glass of ale, wondering what will come next. "Like to hear un, sir?" says mine host, setting down Toby Philpot on the tray, ...
— Tom Brown's Schooldays • Thomas Hughes
... have been in a sense the disciple, as he was the most illustrious antitype of Christ, even centuries previous to his incarnation! The cross is indeed the centre of union and the point of attraction to all ages and nations. There the antediluvian and patriarchal saints associate with those of later times, imbibing one spirit, coalescing upon one principle, meeting in one sacred spot, conjoined in one fraternal band! The wise and the good of a former dispensation looked forward with anticipating pleasure ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox
... silence supreme! Not a shriek, not a scream, Scarcely even a howl or a groan, As the man they called "Ho!" told his story of woe In an antediluvian tone. ...
— The Best Nonsense Verses • Various
... carved into an amazing multitude of towers, buttes, spires, pinnacles, some of them several hundred feet high, and all shimmering under a dazzling sun. It was a marvellous mighty desert of bare rock, chiselled by the ages out of the foundations of the globe; fantastic, extraordinary, antediluvian, labyrinthian, and slashed in all directions by crevices; crevices wide, crevices narrow, crevices medium, some shallow, some dropping till a falling stone clanked resounding into the far hollow depths. Scarcely could we travel a ...
— A Canyon Voyage • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... breakfast-table, the occurrences of the preceding day—"On my conscience!" exclaimed Tallyho, "were the antediluvian age restored, and we daily perambulated the streets of this immense Metropolis during a hundred years to come, I firmly believe that every hour would bring ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... science, by making a turn for tumid metaphor and the love of display necessary ingredients in the character of its votaries, extirpating from among them that simplicity which was so fatal an obstacle to the progress of Newton,—and turning the newly discovered joint of an antediluvian reptile into a theme of perennial and ambitious declamation; nothing is said about those discussions on baptismal fonts, those discoveries of trochees for iambics, or the invention of new potatoe boilers, which in the days of Hegel, Berryer, Schlosser, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... admiration which he received from others. He was an oracle on the subject of 'Nature.' Having eaten nothing for two years, except Graham bread, vegetables without salt, and fruits, fresh or dried, he considered himself to have attained an antediluvian purity of health,—or that he would attain it, so soon as two pimples on his left temple should have healed. These pimples he looked upon as the last feeble stand made by the pernicious juices left from the meat he had formerly eaten ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume I. (of X.) • Various
... for a gun he always kept loaded. The doctor armed himself, and held himself in readiness to fire upon an animal which, by its dimensions, recalled the antediluvian quadrupeds. He neared the ship in immense leaps; Shandon and the doctor fired at the same time, when, suddenly, the report of their firearms, shaking the atmospheric stratum, produced an unexpected effect. The doctor looked attentively, ...
— The English at the North Pole - Part I of the Adventures of Captain Hatteras • Jules Verne
... wonderful discovery! The mythology of Egypt was based on original tradition, handed down from Antediluvian times! From further investigation, it was evident that the substance of Hindoo mythology came from the same source; as also that of the Greeks, Chinese, Mexicans, and Scandinavians. This is how the Druids got the cross also: it was in the hand of their demi-god Thor, the second person of their ...
— From Death into Life - or, twenty years of my ministry • William Haslam
... the madness of the moment. Were George Cruikshank called upon, for instance, to depict a lady fording a puddle on a rainy day, and were he averse (for he is the modestest of artists) to displaying too much of her ankle, he would assuredly make manifest, beneath her upraised skirts, some antediluvian pantalet, bordered by a pre-Adamite frill. But the keen-eyed Mr. Leech would be guilty of no such anachronism. He would discover that the mysterious garments in question were ofttimes encircled by open-worked ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... until a rod of clear sand amid the alders invites his feet; and now our steady approach compels him to seek a new retreat. It is a bird of the oldest Thalesian school, and no doubt believes in the priority of water to the other elements; the relic of a twilight antediluvian age which yet inhabits these bright American rivers with us Yankees. There is something venerable in this melancholy and contemplative race of birds, which may have trodden the earth while it was yet in a slimy and ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... that a passionate mob, its unearthly admixture of laughter with fury, of vacancy with deadly concentration, is as terrible as some uncouth antediluvian, or the unfamiliar monsters of the sea, or one of the giant plants that make men shudder with mysterious fear. The history of our own country in the eighteenth century tells of the riots against meeting-houses in Doctor Sacheverell's time, and the riots against papists and their abettors ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... was known as an agreeable musician, a composer of various drawing-room melodies, judge if he was likely to be famous in 183l! In 1844, the year in which the single drama of this obscure life began, Sylvain Pons was of no more value than an antediluvian semiquaver; dealers in music had never heard of his name, though he was still composing, on scanty pay, for his own orchestra or for ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... the most corrupt period of human history. Noah, Abraham, and Moses did not stand more isolated amidst universal wickedness than did the Phrygian slave and the imperial master of the world. And as the piety of Noah could not save the antediluvian empires, as the faith of Abraham could not convert idolatrous nations, as the wisdom of Moses could not prevent the sensualism of emancipated slaves, so the lofty philosophy of Aurelius could not save the Empire ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IV • John Lord
... his cares between the strata and Dolores' kodak, how even his photography could not spoil Aunt Alda; how charming a group of sisters Dolores contrived to produce; how Adrian was the proud pioneer into a coach adorned with stalactites and antediluvian bones; how Anna collected milkwort and violets for Aunt Cherry; how a sly push sent little Joan in a headlong career down a slope that might have resulted in a terrible fall, but did only cause a ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... better not come here again, sir.' Seedeybuck, being of the same opinion, had since fastened himself on to Sir Harry Scattercash, who found him in meat, drink, washing, and lodging. They were all attired in red coats, of one sort or another, though some of which were of a very antediluvian, and others of a very dressing-gown cut. Bouncey's had a hare on the button, and Seedeybuck's coat sat on him like a sack. Still a scarlet coat is a scarlet coat in the eyes of some, and the coats were not a bit more unsportsmanlike ...
— Mr. Sponge's Sporting Tour • R. S. Surtees
... small. The silent ships came and went from the wharf, the chisels clinked in the quarries; file after file of whitey-brown horses, in strings of eight or ten, painfully dragged down the hill the square blocks of stone on the antediluvian wooden wheels just as usual. The lightship winked every night from the quicksands to the Beal Lantern, and the Beal Lantern glared through its eye-glass on the ship. The canine gnawing audible on the Pebble-bank had been repeated ever since at each tide, but ...
— The Well-Beloved • Thomas Hardy
... necessitate a revision of current views with regard to the cradle of Babylonian civilization. The most remarkable of the new documents is one which relates in poetical narrative an account of the Creation, of Antediluvian history, and of the Deluge. It thus exhibits a close resemblance in structure to the corresponding Hebrew traditions, a resemblance that is not shared by the Semitic-Babylonian Versions at present known. But in matter the Sumerian tradition is more primitive than any of the Semitic versions. ...
— Legends Of Babylon And Egypt - In Relation To Hebrew Tradition • Leonard W. King
... flowing and flowing in, until the living were lost in the rush of the returning dead who had reclaimed their own. Then, as his dream became more fantastic, the huge cathedral itself seemed to change into the wreck of some mighty antediluvian vertebrate; its flying-buttresses arched round like ribs, its piers shaped themselves into limbs, and the sound of the organ-blast changed to the wind whistling ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... down from the Mont Blanc of his isolation and solitariness into the same climate of sympathy with his audience. Tear away the old sofa, ragged and spring-broken, on which the pastors of forty years have been obliged to sit, and see whether there are any cats in your antediluvian pulpit. ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage
... way, traveled so unhealthily far, left his more or less—mostly less—safe home wood at all, had it not been that it is sometimes with hedgehogs as it is with men—in the warm seasons—their fancy turns to thoughts of love. Prickles's fancy had so turned, not lightly, for he was of an ancient and antediluvian race, heavy in thought, but certainly to love. And love, I want you to realize, in the wild, or anywhere else, for the matter of that, is the very devil. "Unite and multiply; there is no other law or aim than love," one great savant despairingly assorts is Nature's cry, and ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... writes verbose essays on Female Suffrage, composed during the process known as "wringing." And when there's a Woman's Rights Convention in that locality, she sits on the platform, and applauds all the Red-Hot Resolutions with that trenchant female weapon, the umbrella, in one hand, and an antediluvian reticule the other. In the words of the Hon. MICHAEL: "She is not only a leading Reformer, sir, but a great Platformer." And Mrs. LADLE will tell you that, as a washer, she is superb. She "does up things" in a manner ...
— Punchinello, Volume 2, No. 37, December 10, 1870 • Various
... distance of a mile eastward, is cleanly cut as that of a marble inlay. It is varied with protuberances, which from hereabouts have the animal aspect of warts, wens, knuckles, and hips. It may indeed be likened to an enormous many- limbed organism of an antediluvian time—partaking of the cephalopod in shape—lying lifeless, and covered with a thin green cloth, which hides its substance, while revealing its contour. This dull green mantle of herbage stretches down towards the levels, where the ploughs ...
— A Changed Man and Other Tales • Thomas Hardy
... in some way, reflect glory on the church, or show the royal approval of the Inquisition." We cannot undertake to say what discoveries might be made by a person who should carefully examine the collection of papers at Simancas. A scholar on whom the antediluvian length of life necessary for such a labor had been bestowed might also be endowed with commensurate powers of intellect that might lead to the most astonishing results. Our own knowledge of the collection is limited to a very ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... soil, resembling more the chaos of some primary elemental upheaval than the work of man; while halfway down, a long flume straddled its narrow body and disproportionate legs over the chasm, like an enormous fossil of some forgotten antediluvian. At every step smaller ditches crossed the road, hiding in their sallow depths unlovely streams that crept away to a clandestine union with the great yellow torrent below, and here and there were the ruins of some cabin ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... sure you are the identical white pigeon that Noah let out of the ark; for nothing less antediluvian could ask such obsolete, such utterly dead and buried questions! I love dearly and sincerely rich laces, old wines, fine glass, heavy silver, blooded horses fast and fiery, large solitaires, rare camei; and all these comfortable nice little things I shall truly honour, and tenaciously ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... discordance that went by that name, was furnished by two cowboys with banjos and an antediluvian gentleman with a fiddle. Nevertheless, it was music that could be danced to, and there was no ...
— The Rustlers of Pecos County • Zane Grey
... all, and I find every chance in my favour. The bride will arrive here on the day of our wedding: my servant will be one witness; some stupid old Welshman, as antediluvian as possible—I leave it to you to select him—shall be the other. My servant I shall dispose of, and the ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 1 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... could gather them up), this did not prevent at least one representative of the navy from passing that barrier. This was the Australian submarine, A2. It may not be generally known that Australia had two submarines at the outbreak of war. These would appear antediluvian alongside the latest underwater monster, but, nevertheless, one of these accomplished a feat such as no German submarine has ever approached. The first of our submarines met an unknown fate as it disappeared somewhere near New Guinea. There has been much ...
— "Over There" with the Australians • R. Hugh Knyvett
... they consisted of high earthy cliffs with the open plains of the Pampas reaching to the edge of their summits. Frequently the telescope revealed projecting from the cliffs the bones of the megatherion, mastodon, milodon, and other huge antediluvian animals, of which, however, neither Jack nor Terence knew the names. Sometimes they were so distinct that they were remarked by the men, who wondered how such strange animals could have found ...
— The Three Lieutenants • W.H.G. Kingston
... write my date, that I am fifty years old to-day. My John says it is no such thing, and that I am only thirty; but I begin to feel antiquated, dilapidated, and antediluvian, etc., etc. ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... rudest monuments appear indestructible, the lofty mounds of earth have withstood like the heavy pyramids of Egypt, the lapse of countless ages, some even appear now covered with a dress of new soil, or even diluvial coat, as if they were antediluvian! ...
— The Ancient Monuments of North and South America, 2nd ed. • C. S. Rafinesque
... Knowledge of the Ancients by W. H. Tillinghast, in Winsor's "Narrative and Critical History of America," I. 15. He mentions (I. 19, note) a map printed at Amsterdam in 1678 by Kircher, which shows Atlantis as a large island midway between Spain and America. Ignatius Donnelly's "Atlantis, the Antediluvian World" (N. Y. 1882), maintains that the evidence for the former existence of such an island is irresistible, and his work has been very widely read, although it is not ...
— Tales of the Enchanted Islands of the Atlantic • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... a boys' school—"Maison d'Education, Dirigee par M. Jules Saindou, Bachelier et Maitre es Lettres et es Sciences," and author of a treatise on geology, with such hauntingly terrific pictures of antediluvian reptiles battling in the primeval slime that I have never been able to forget them. My father, who was fond of science, made me a present of it on my sixth birthday. It ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... a clue to all the others, and show the lucidity of his judgment, is this, which has ever dwelt in my memory, "The Apocalypse is written ecstasy." He regarded the Bible as a part of the traditional history of the antediluvian nations which had taken for its share the new humanity. He thought that the mythology of the Greeks was borrowed both from the Hebrew Scriptures and from the sacred Books of India, adapted after their own fashion by ...
— Louis Lambert • Honore de Balzac
... (yellow), the Bronze (red), and the Iron (black). As has been already indicated, Mr. R. Brown, jun., shows that "the Indian system of Yugas, or ages of the world, presents many features which forcibly remind us of the Euphratean scheme". The Babylonians had ten antediluvian kings, who were reputed to have reigned for vast periods, the total of which amounted to 120 saroi, or 432,000 years. These figures at once recall the Indian Maha-yuga of 4,320,000 years 432,000 x 10. Apparently the Babylonian ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... of the Precincts, the "dark entry," the rich heraldries of the blackened and mouldering cloister, the ruined overgrown spaces where the old monastery stood, the stones of which furnished material for the rambling prebends houses, now "antediluvian" in their turn; are ready also to climb the scaffold-poles always to be found somewhere about the great church, or dive along the odd, secret passages of the old builders, with quite learned explanations (being proud of, and therefore painstaking about, ...
— Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... All the branches, however, were gone; the tree had been uprooted, transported, whirled and worn by deluges; then to commemorate the victory of the water sprites, it had been changed into stone. The sight of these remnants of antediluvian woodlands made history seem the reminiscence of a child. They were already petrifactions when the human ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... inclined to think pretty things thrown away upon an antediluvian creature of forty, but if Ruth could have had a glimpse of herself as "others saw her" at that moment, she might have been more content. The subdued lamp-light dealt kindly with the old blue serge coat and skirt, the pink scarf at her neck matched the colour on her ...
— The Fortunes of the Farrells • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... is given with more than Talmudic exaggeration in the Targum of Jonathan ben Uzziel, while the author of the Book of Jasher (chap. lxv., verses 23, 24) makes the camp and the mountain forty miles in extent. The giant here figures in antediluvian tradition. He is said to have been saved at the Flood by laying hold of the ark, and being fed day by day through a hole in the side of the ark by Noah himself. A tradition which says the soles of his feet were forty miles long ...
— Hebraic Literature; Translations from the Talmud, Midrashim and - Kabbala • Various
... Saharan waste evidences of the same thing have been found. I know of a place out West that is literally strewn with oyster-shells, and yet no man living has the slightest idea how they came there. It may have been the Massachusetts Bay of a pre-historic time, for all we know. It may have been an antediluvian Coney Island, for all the world knows. Who shall say that this little upset of mine found here an oyster-bed, shook all the oysters out of their bed into space, and left their clothes high and dry in a ...
— The Idiot • John Kendrick Bangs
... the great matters relating to himself, and all the little matters he collected in his rounds relating to others. Among other personalities, he indulged his satirical fluency on the scientific collectors. The Antiquarian Society were twitted as medal-scrapers and antediluvian knife-grinders; conchologists were turned into cockleshell merchants; and the naturalists were made to record pompous histories of stickle-hacks and cockchafers. Cautioned by Martin Folkes, President of the Royal Society,[284] not to attempt his ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... former days at the patience of the antediluvian world, that they could endure a life almost millenary, and with so little variety as seems to have fallen to their share. It is probable that they had much fewer employments than we. Their affairs lay in a narrower compass; their libraries were indifferently furnished; philosophical ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. IV (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland II • Various
... Palestine. Here you saw the same dusty, primitive roads and quaint bullock carts, that were hewn out of soft wood and joined together with thongs of rawhide and built without the vestige of iron or other metal. There were the same antediluvian plows, made of two sticks, as used in ancient Egypt at the time of the Exodus, when Moses led the Jews out of captivity to their Promised Land. The very atmosphere, so dry and exhilarating, seemed strange. In this transparent air, objects which were twenty ...
— Tales of Aztlan • George Hartmann
... the incense of sacrifice, streaming up and mingling with the rays of the rising sun. His noble family, and all flesh saved, are grouped round about him. There is Ham, at the foot of the green hillock, standing, in his antediluvian, rakish recklessness, near the long-necked giraffe, type of his Africa,—his magnificent wife, seated on the grass, her little feet nestling in the tame lion's mane, her long black hair flowing over crimson drapery and covered with gems from ...
— Slavery Ordained of God • Rev. Fred. A. Ross, D.D.
... broad swords made of black birch, the edges of which were inlaid with the teeth of animals, or the shells of fish, ground sharp. Besides these, were skulls of great size and in good preservation, stone pipes, pouches, and so on; also some enormous teeth and bones of an antediluvian animal, found in the Bras Dor lake in Cape Breton. It was, take it altogether, the most complete collection of relics of this interesting race, the Micmacs, and of natur's products to be found in ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... work in the primary colors. If you should prefer something a little less advanced...." He waved his maulstick vaguely, as if in reference to the professorial practice of Munich, or to the antediluvian school ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller
... are of this nature and character—the symbolism often being so elaborate that the original thought is not perceived. As Mr. Coates remarked: "When a 'psychometer' places a geological specimen to his forehead, and describes an 'antediluvian monster,' roaring and walking about, no one but a very shallow individual would imagine for a moment that the psychometer was actually seeing the original," but rather that he obtained a faint and dream-like impression of the world at that ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... If the antediluvian sinners were any thing like the modern ones, Noah must have been richer than the Rothschilds, or he never could have obtained their services; which he must have done, or it could never be truthfully said, "according to all that God commanded him, so ...
— The Deluge in the Light of Modern Science - A Discourse • William Denton
... contrary, communicates serenity and equipoise to all the faculties, active or passive, and with respect to the temper and moral feelings in general it gives simply that sort of vital warmth which is approved by the judgment, and which would probably always accompany a bodily constitution of primeval or antediluvian health. Thus, for instance, opium, like wine, gives an expansion to the heart and the benevolent affections; but then, with this remarkable difference, that in the sudden development of kind-heartedness which accompanies inebriation there is always more or less of a ...
— Confessions of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas De Quincey
... to believe what Jack was telling me; whereupon he fell into an harangue of such affectionate and sustained vehemence that when the hinges creaked again I was never able to determine. Was ever such usage made before of an antediluvian monster? ...
— Aftermath • James Lane Allen
... that is put into the town now and then by very bad news from abroad, one should be quite stupefied. There is nobody left but two or three solitary regents; and they are always whisking backwards and forwards to their villas; and about a dozen antediluvian dowagers, whose carcasses have miraculously resisted the wet, and who every Saturday compose a very reverend catacomb at my old Lady Strafford's. She does not take money at the door for showing them, but 'you pay twelvepence apiece under the denomination of card-money. Wit and beauty, indeed, ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... that we had ever seen before, being fashioned apparently from a strip of solid silver, with a bar placed across to serve as a handle, and leaving some nicks cut in the edge of the bar. It was more like a model of an antediluvian railway key ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... with him our mode of sporting so different from that of England, and when in imagination I carried him along with me into the dells and dark ravines, and described to him the chase and death-struggle of the ferocious wolf, or the odd characters and antediluvian customs of the primitive people amongst whom I passed the days of my happy boyhood, astonished, he could hardly believe that such sports and such singular personages existed within so short a distance of ...
— Le Morvan, [A District of France,] Its Wild Sports, Vineyards and Forests; with Legends, Antiquities, Rural and Local Sketches • Henri de Crignelle
... let some sparks escape into a bundle of straw, which kindling quickly, spread the conflagration over every part of their poor mansion, till it was reduced to ashes. Together with the cottage (a sorry antediluvian makeshift of a building, you may think it), what was of much more importance, a fine litter of new-farrowed pigs, no less ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Vol. V (of X) - Great Britain and Ireland III • Various
... souls, to say nothing of herds and flocks past all reckoning. These had all perished: ox, cow, horse, mule, ass, sheep, or goat, not one survived—only the camels. These arid and adust creatures, looking like the mummies of some antediluvian animals, without the affections or sensibilities of flesh and blood—these only still erected their speaking eyes to the eastern heavens, and had to all appearance come out from this long tempest ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... classification of. geological arrangement of. incrustations of. nature of. subterranean fires in. caverns of. varieties of. worship of. antediluvian. auriferous. of Cabo Blanco. which compose the island of Teneriffe. of the plains. painted ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V3 • Alexander von Humboldt
... the pool, like a beam of golden light which gleams through the chinks of a shutter into a room in Spain, that has been carefully darkened for a siesta. When the sun rose above the old crater that some antediluvian revolution had filled with water, its rocky sides took warmer tones, the extinct volcano glowed again, and its sudden heat quickened the sprouting seeds and vegetation, gave color to the flowers, and ripened the fruits of this forgotten ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... passing townward is a butcher's cart, canopied with its arch of snow- white cotton. Behind comes a "sauceman," driving a wagon full of new potatoes, green ears of corn, beets, carrots, turnips, and summer- squashes; and next, two wrinkled, withered, witch-looking old gossips, in an antediluvian chaise, drawn by a horse of former generations, and going to peddle out a lot of huckleberries. See there, a man trundling a wheelbarrow-load of lobsters. And now a milk-cart rattles briskly onward, covered with green canvas, and conveying the contributions ...
— The Toll Gatherer's Day (From "Twice Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... I entertain to them a sentiment very like respect, resulting from my belief that they belong to antediluvian races. The great convulsion which doomed our ancestors, in the eighteenth century of the world, to fish was a season ...
— The Physiology of Taste • Brillat Savarin
... equal to the perpetration of whatever had not been already done to bring Heraldry into contempt. This was accomplished first, by gravely discoursing, in early heraldic language, upon the imaginary Heraldry of the patriarchal and antediluvian worthies: making a true coat of arms of Joseph's "coat of many colours," giving armorial ensigns to David and Gideon, to Samson and Joshua, to "that worthy gentilman Japheth," to Jubal and Tubal-Cain, and crowning the whole by declaring that ...
— The Handbook to English Heraldry • Charles Boutell
... been the state of antediluvian sinners, when the spirit had ceased to strive with them, ...
— Sermons on Various Important Subjects • Andrew Lee |
