"Larva" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... considering is the favorite haunt of this hateful little monster, and he who does not find it lying in wait when turning up land that has been long in sod, may deem himself lucky. The reader need not draw a sigh of relief when I tell him that I mean merely the "white grub," the larva of the May-beetle or June-bug, that so disturbs our slumbers in early summer by its sonorous hum and aimless bumping against the wall. This white grub, which the farmers often call the "potato worm," is, in this region, the strawberry's most formidable foe, and, by devouring the roots, ...
— Success With Small Fruits • E. P. Roe
... molt the active feeding larva changes to the still active but non-feeding pupa (Fig. 59). The head and thorax are closely united and a close inspection will reveal the head, antennae, wings and legs of the adult mosquito folded away beneath the pupal skin. Instead of the breathing-tube on the eighth segment ...
— Insects and Diseases - A Popular Account of the Way in Which Insects may Spread - or Cause some of our Common Diseases • Rennie W. Doane
... Caterpillars are also similarly protected. Many exactly resemble in tint the leaves they feed upon; others are like little brown twigs, and many are so strangely marked or humped, that when motionless they can hardly be taken to be living creatures at all. Mr. Andrew Murray has remarked how closely the larva of the peacock moth (Saturnia pavonia-minor) harmonizes in its ground colour with that of the young buds of heather on which it feeds, and that the pink spots with which it is decorated correspond with the flowers and flower-buds ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace
... tremulous with tadpoles just bursting their gelatinous envelopes; there were little pond snails creeping out into life, and under the green skin of the rush stems the larvae of a big Water Beetle were struggling out of their egg cases. I doubt if the reader knows the larva of the beetle called (I know not why) Dytiscus. It is a jointed, queer-looking thing, very muscular and sudden in its movements, and given to swimming head downward with its tail out of water; the length of a man's ...
— The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth • H.G. Wells
... carelessly wind a thread or two about it, in a perfunctory way, bury her jaws in its body, and in less than half a minute suck out its juices to the last drop, leaving the empty shell unhurt, like a dry skeleton or the slough of a dragon-fly larva. But when wasps or other large and dangerous insects got entangled in the webs, the hunters proceeded with far greater caution. Lucy, indeed, who was a decided coward, would stand and look anxiously at the doubtful intruder for several seconds, feeling the web with her claws, and running ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... crossed plants in Pot 1 died; another became much diseased and stunted; and the third never grew to its full height. They seemed to have been all injured, probably by some larva gnawing their roots. Therefore all the plants on both sides of this pot were rejected in the subsequent measurements. When the plants were fully grown they were again measured to the tips of the highest leaves, and the eleven crossed plants now ...
— The Effects of Cross & Self-Fertilisation in the Vegetable Kingdom • Charles Darwin
... Larva also means a skeleton, and Trimalchio, following the Egyptian custom, has one brought in and placed on the table during his famous feast. It is, as one would expect, of silver, and the millionaire freedman points the usual ...
— Greek and Roman Ghost Stories • Lacy Collison-Morley
... before the members of the Association. It is that of controlling the butternut curculio. This insect is very bad on butternut, heartnut and Persian walnuts, with us it does not attack black walnuts or hickories. I fear that it is going to prove hard to control, as the larva is of the boring type, being found inside the green nuts, inside the new growth of the terminals and in the fleshy part of the leaf stems. In these places it cannot be reached by poisons. It appears that we will have to work entirely on the adult beetles. These eat very little and seem to ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Thirty-Seventh Annual Report • Various
... creatures and turned them loose in her parks, while Rochester, with what was then considered great public spirit, purchased one hundred for herself. But the most progressive city in this respect was Philadelphia. She had long been troubled with the spanworm on her trees. This detestable larva had the unpleasant fashion of lowering itself by a long silken thread from the shade trees then so abundant in that beautiful city. The spanworms traveling around over the clothing of the passersby were so objectionable to everybody that it was with greatest delight that Philadelphia heard ...
— The Meaning of Evolution • Samuel Christian Schmucker
... his leaflet. "I know now what's ailing those apple trees down back of our barn. The Brown Tail moths are in them. Listen to this: 'The principal injury caused by these moths is due to the feeding habits of the larva. They attack apple, pear, plum, oak, elm and willow trees. If the infestation is bad the caterpillars are often numerous enough to devour the leaves as fast as the trees are able to develop them. ...
— The Boy Scout Fire Fighters • Irving Crump
... Mary,—a venerable duenna-like tree, with thin arms and sharp elbows, and scanty chevelure of leaves; the Auld Brig o' Doon (No. 4),—a daring arch that leaps the sweet stream at a bound, more than half clad in a mantle of ivy, which has crept with its larva-like feet beyond the key-stone; the Twa Brigs of Ayr, with the beautiful reflections in the stream that shines under their eyebrow-arches; and poor little Alloway Kirk, with its fallen roof and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various
... between species which are absolutely unaffected by change of food and cases where "difference of food is accompanied by marked and constant differences, either colorational, or structural, or both, in the larva, pupa and imago states."), most of which was new to me. I have since received your paper on willow-galls; this has been very opportune, as I wanted to learn a little about galls. There was much in this paper which has interested ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... Esq., F.R.S. (the coralline Ellis), asserts, in a letter to the Royal Society, dated June 5th, 1766, in his account of the mud inguana, an amphibious biped from South Carolina, that the water-eft, or newt, is only the larva of the land-eft, as tadpoles are of frogs. Lest I should be suspected to misunderstand his meaning, I shall give it in his own words. Speaking of the opercula or coverings to the gills of the mud inguana, ...
— The Natural History of Selborne, Vol. 1 • Gilbert White
... Leslie's. Wings have they, but only the better to pounce down,—draw their nutriment from unguarded material cuticles; and just when, maddened, you strike, and exulting exclaim, "Caught, by Jove!" wh-irr flies the diaphanous, ghostly larva, and your blow falls on your ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... The bot having selected its place of residence, attaches itself to the membranes lining the stomach and intestines, and derives its sustenance during its stay from the wound made by its hooks. In the summer the larva, after living inside the horse for about ten months, quits its hold and is expelled with the feces. Having concealed itself near the surface of the ground it becomes changed into a chrysalis from which the gadfly issues after an ...
— The Veterinarian • Chas. J. Korinek
... week the transition from larva to butterfly took place in the young, handsome, and clever Charles-Edouard, Comte Rusticoli de la Palferine. Until this moment of his life he had lived miserably, covering his deficits with an audacity equal to that of ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac
... over the ground, seeking the earnest vegetation which will furnish it a literal "breakfast." In April or May the chrysalis, surrounded by a loose cocoon formed of the hairs of the body interwoven with coarse silk, may be found in situations similar to those in which the larva passed the winter. From this, the perfect insect, the Isabella tiger moth, Pyrrharctia isabella Smith, emerges about the last of June. It is a medium sized moth, dull orange in color, with three rows of small black spots on the body, and some scattered spots of the same ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various
... of the giant octopus, the devil fish of Indian Ocean legend, multiplied a thousand times," he replied. "When the octopus lays its eggs, they hatch out into the larval form. The free swimming larva is known as a trochosphere, and I am positive that that is what we see; but look at the size of the thing! Man alive, if that ever developed, I can't ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, December 1930 • Various
... there would be no disappointment; but it soon became palpable that another class of depredators had marked our trees for their own. Little brown toes could occasionally be seen peeping from the foliage, and little bare feet left their print on the garden-soil. Humanity had evidently deposited its larva in the vicinity. There was a schoolhouse not very far away, and the children used to draw water from an old well in a distant part of the garden. It was surprising to see how thirsty they all became as the cherries ripened. It was as if the village had simultaneously agreed to breakfast on salt ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... and in the chick; the patent of royalty is in the cell and in the food; the cell being much larger, and the food a peculiar stimulating kind of jelly. In certain contingencies, such as the loss of the queen with no eggs in the royal cells, the workers take the larva of an ordinary bee, enlarge the cell by taking in the two adjoining ones, and nurse it and stuff it and coddle it, till at the end of sixteen days it comes out a queen. But ordinarily, in the natural course of events, the young queen is kept a prisoner ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... caterpillars, the shield-like covering of the dorsum of the last segment: in the embryonic larva the 11th tergite. ...
— Explanation of Terms Used in Entomology • John. B. Smith
... the larva to the fly takes place in the cell, and occupies about six weeks from the time the egg is first laid; thus, as the egg itself is not vivified for some weeks after it is deposited, the spiders have to be preserved in a sound and fresh state during that interval until the larva is in such an advanced ...
— Eight Years' Wandering in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker
... with the rising and descending of the sap; annual plants die at the end of the season, persisting in germinal state within a bulb, a rhizome, or a root before coming again to the light; in "metamorphoses," we find that the germ (the egg) becomes a larva (a worm), and then dies as a chrysalis, to be reborn as ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... Seizing opportunity and larva at the same time, the wasp stood high on its legs and pulled the worm's front end from the ground, exposing the yellowed band of the underpart. The attacker's abdomen curved beneath its own body; the stinger jabbed between ...
— They Twinkled Like Jewels • Philip Jose Farmer
... leading to them, just as in fishes; at another stage he is a reptile with a three-chambered heart, and voiding his excreta through a cloaca like other reptiles; and finally, when he enters upon post-natal sins and actualities, he is a sprawling, squalling, unreasoning quadruped. The human larva from the fifth to the seventh month of development is covered with a thick growth of hair and has a true caudal (tail) appendage, like the monkey. At this stage the embryo has in all thirty-eight vertebrae, nine of which are caudal, ...
— Communism and Christianism - Analyzed and Contrasted from the Marxian and Darwinian Points of View • William Montgomery Brown
... marvellous knowledge and skill to pierce the nerve-centre on which their power of locomotion (but none of their other vital functions) depends, so that the paralysed insect, beside which her egg is laid, will furnish the larva, when it is hatched, with a tamed and inoffensive quarry, incapable either of flight or of resistance, but perfectly fresh for the larder: in the same way Francoise had adopted, to minister to her permanent and unfaltering resolution to render the house uninhabitable to any ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... (Cecidomyia (Introduction/3. Leon Dufour in 'Annales des Science. Nat.' (3rd series, Zoolog.) tome 5 page 6.)) which deposits its eggs within the stamens of a Scrophularia, and secretes a poison which produces a gall, on which the larva feeds; but there is another insect (Misocampus) which deposits its eggs within the body of the larva within the gall, and is thus nourished by its living prey; so that here a hymenopterous insect depends on a dipterous ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin
... wax-moth (Tinea mellonella) is a most formidable enemy. She lays her eggs under the very skirts of the hive, or in the rubbish on the floor, or even in the combs of the bees; these eggs when hatched produce a small whitish worm or larva, and it is in this stage that it commits its ravages, extending its galleries through every quarter of the combs, detaching them from the tops and sides of the hives, and causing them ...
— A Description of the Bar-and-Frame-Hive • W. Augustus Munn
... beasts are very suspicious of movement above them, and all sham dead, or lie quite still, and are strangely invisible. On the other hand, they have none of the power of remaining motionless for half-an-hour like land animals. Soon what look like sticks, but are caddis larva, begin to creep on the bottom. Then more brown objects, larvae of dragon-flies and water-beetles, detach themselves from the stems of the plants and cruise up and down seeking what they may devour. Other creatures feeding and swimming among or beneath the plants crawl out on to the ...
— The Naturalist on the Thames • C. J. Cornish
... of an ovary incapable of further delay, seem to me in serious danger; for the seed in which the grub must establish itself is as yet no more than a tender speck of green, without firmness and without any farinaceous tissue. No larva could possibly find sufficient nourishment there, unless it waited ...
— A Book of Exposition • Homer Heath Nugent
... wall-tent within a day's ride of the Rio Grande, and were seriously occupied in sacrificing each other's feelings on the altar of experimental cookery, in herding sheep with the assistance of paper novels, and in writing exceedingly long letters to the North. This wall-tent was the larva of the ranch. But the arid southern country proved inconvenient, and collecting their effects in a prairie-schooner and driving their flocks before them, they effected a masterly change of base, which brought them two hundred miles to the northward and set them down in a delightful pasture-land, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... form of certain living organisms, before they are fully developed. Thus, the tadpole is the larva of the frog. A great many insects are bred from what are called grubs, or caterpillars. All these are ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Adventures on Strange Islands • Roger Thompson Finlay
... transfigured; he was the street Arab, he becomes the titi.[18] Theatres are a sort of ship turned upside down with the keel in the air. It is in that keel that the titi huddle together. The titi is to the gamin what the moth is to the larva; the same being endowed with wings and soaring. It suffices for him to be there, with his radiance of happiness, with his power of enthusiasm and joy, with his hand-clapping, which resembles a clapping of wings, to confer on that narrow, dark, fetid, sordid, unhealthy, hideous, abominable keel, ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo
... know! Perhaps a larva or a chrysalis, out of whose trance-like life a man one day will be created. She seems a child, but isn't one; she is a sort of child, and yet not like one. Drags downward, when the man pulls up. Drags upward, when ...
— The Road to Damascus - A Trilogy • August Strindberg
... the child is a mere human larva, weak, perverse, disagreeable, the heir of mortality, with all manner of "defects of doubt and taints of blood," gathered in the long experience ...
— The Philosophy of Despair • David Starr Jordan
... persistent odour somewhat like melilot or woodruffe, which does not pass away after the specimen has been dried for years. In some species of Marasmius, there is a decidedly strong odour of garlic, and in one species of Hygrophorus, such a resemblance to that of the larva of the goat moth, that it bears the name of Hygrophorus cossus. Most of the fleshy forms exhale a strong nitrous odour during decay, but the most powerful we remember to have experienced was developed by a very large specimen of Choiromyces meandriformis, a gigantic subterranean ...
— Fungi: Their Nature and Uses • Mordecai Cubitt Cooke
... caterpillars leave the webs and crawl down the trees to hunt for places beneath the bark, under sticks, weeds and trash in which to pupate. A light, flimsy cocoon, composed of silk and the hairs of the larva, is made. From this, in due time, a beautiful moth, an inch or an inch and a quarter across the wings, emerges. The wings are pure white or white spotted with black or brownish-black. The eggs are laid in masses ...
— The Pecan and its Culture • H. Harold Hume
... coal tar products, and that it often takes place under the influence of bacteria. It is further known that parasites can produce tumor-like growths in plants. The large, rough excrescences on the oaks are produced by a fly which lays its eggs in or beneath the bark, and the larva which develops from the egg secretes a substance which causes the cells about it to multiply, and a huge mass is formed which serves the developing insect for both food and protection. Large tumor-like masses are formed on the roots and stalk of ...
— Disease and Its Causes • William Thomas Councilman
... grotesque, of monk or painter in the early North, would have failed to give to the visage of imp or fiend that aspect of deadly malignity which spoke to the shuddering nature in those eyes alone. All else so dark,—shrouded, veiled and larva-like. But that burning glare so intense, so livid, yet so living, had in it something that was almost HUMAN in its passion of hate and mockery,—something that served to show that the shadowy Horror was not all a spirit, but partook of ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... all infested plants at once, as no good remedy has as yet been found. The cut-worm, especially in newly set beds, may sometimes prove destructive of the sprouting young canes. The raspberry-borer is the larva of a small, flattish, red-necked beetle, which bores to the center of the canes during summer growth, and kills ...
— Home Vegetable Gardening • F. F. Rockwell
... in the sea; and we may be pretty certain that their eggs are hatched out into what we call larvae, or imperfectly developed animals, precisely similar to the young, or larvae, of the marine mussel of our seas. Now, this larva has the form of a tiny little creature covered with 'swimming' hairs. By the constant waving motions of these hairs, the little body is driven through the water, till at last, reaching a favourable spot, or tired out, they settle down at the bottom ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various |
