"Mastodon" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... reasonable to suppose that from the earliest ages one man has asked another such questions as these: "Which is the nearest way home?" "Which is the easiest or pleasantest way?" "How can we find a way that will enable us to dodge the mastodon and the plesiosaurus?" "How can we get there without ever crossing the track of the enemy?" All these are elementary route problems, and they can be turned into good puzzles by the introduction of some conditions that complicate matters. A variety of such complications ...
— Amusements in Mathematics • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... the indifferent stars since the ice-wave swept into their last retreats, and crushed among the rocks that bear their fossil forms, the fauna of the preglacial period, the Ichthyosaurus, the Brontosaurus, the Guyas Cutis (or Ring-tailed Roarer), the Mastodon, ...
— The Disentanglers • Andrew Lang
... adjoining sheet; and forty different decoctions for imparting strength. Then after a few score yards of invitation to debauch there came, with characteristic admirable English common sense, a cure for indigestion, so large that it would have given ease to a mastodon who had by inadvertence swallowed an elephant. And then there were the calls to pleasure. Astonishing, the quantity of palaces that offered you exactly the same entertainment twice over on the same night! Astonishing, ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett
... other private and public collections at Philadelphia, which I have only seen cursorily; that of the Medical School, for instance, and that of the older Peale, who discovered the first mastodon found in the United States, now mounted in his museum. Beside these, there is the collection of Dr. Griffith, rich in skulls from the Gulf of Mexico; that of Mr. Ord, and others. During my stay in Philadelphia, ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... salt sea was divided from the land, and the rocks were cloven by the hand of Omnipotence, and the sweet spring came bursting upward from the fragrant earth, and light and flowers came together to welcome the birthday of the glad and glorious gift. Here, many a century back, the giant mastodon trod the earth into deep hollows, as he moved upon his sounding path. Then came another time. In the hollow of the three hills, the Indian raised his bark wigwam, and the smoke of his council fire curled up like a mist-wreath in the ...
— The Three Brides, Love in a Cottage, and Other Tales • Francis A. Durivage
... is based. This corresponds roughly to the Pleistocene epoch of geology; it is included along with the much shorter time during which civilization has existed, in the latest and shortest of the geological periods, the Quaternary. It was the age of the mammoth and the mastodon, the megatherium and Irish deer and of other quadrupeds large and small which are now extinct; but most of its animals were the same species as now exist. It was marked by the great episode of the Ice Age, when considerable parts of the earth's ...
— Dinosaurs - With Special Reference to the American Museum Collections • William Diller Matthew
... elephants, and other animals. From Suetonius we learn that Augustus Caesar pleased himself by adorning his palaces with so-called giants' bones of incredible size, preferring these to pictures or images. From their enormous size we must believe they were mastodon bones, as no contemporary animals show such measurements. Bartholinus describes a large tooth for many years exhibited as the canine of a giant which proved to be nothing but a tooth of a spermaceti whale (Cetus dentatus), quite a common fish. Hand described ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... of King Ptush to our wild districts in search of a fresh hunting-ground for himself and his son, Prince Ptutt, brought about a very serious condition of affairs in respect to the mastodon, or what some persons refer to as the Antediluvians. This most distinguished personage, wearying of the affairs of state in his own land, gave over the reins of government for a while to his Grand Vizier, and on behalf of the ...
— The Autobiography of Methuselah • John Kendrick Bangs
... "Only a frozen mastodon," he grinned sheepishly, as they came to his side. "Guess he's been dead ten thousand years, to say the least. But honest, doesn't he look natural standing there in ...
— Lost In The Air • Roy J. Snell
... vain the speeding and shyness; In vain the plutonic rocks send their old heat against my approach; In vain the mastodon retreats beneath his own powder'd bones; In vain objects stand leagues off, and assume manifold shapes; In vain the ocean settling in hollows, and the great ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... to go forth on their great journey across the continent, they were admonished by Thomas Jefferson that they would in all likelihood encounter in their travels, living and stalking about, the mammoth or the mastodon, whose bones had been found in the great salt-licks of Kentucky. We smile now at such a supposition; yet it was not unreasonable then. No man knew that tremendous country that lay beyond the ...
— The Passing of the Frontier - A Chronicle of the Old West, Volume 26 in The Chronicles - Of America Series • Emerson Hough
... faced by perpendicular granite crags, which they ascended on the backs of some friendly condors.... The summit proved to be an extensive plateau, the site of a prehistoric city, built of pedunculated wood-pulp. Lying among the ruins was a gigantic mastodon in excellent preservation, which Mr. Roosevelt brought ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, May 13, 1914 • Various
... deal of naturalisation in the different Malay islands, and which I have thought to certain extent would account for anomalies. Timor has been my greatest puzzle. What do you say to the peculiar Felis there? I wish that you had visited Timor: it has been asserted that a fossil mastodon or elephant's tooth (I forget which) had been found there, which would be a grand fact. I was aware that Celebes was very peculiar; but the relation to Africa is quite new to me and marvellous, and almost passes belief. It is as anomalous as the relation of plants in South-West Australia ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant
... to find stones and dirt in the ice, and before we had gone ten miles, found the frozen carcass of an immense mastodon—its great tusks only showing above the level; but its huge, woolly body quite plainly visible in the ice. The ice was melting, and there were many streams running towards the open water. It was warmer as we proceeded. Dirt and rocks became the rule, ...
— Danger Signals • John A. Hill and Jasper Ewing Brady
... yielded. In these beds to the north of the Salt Range there have been found remains of Dinotherium, forms related to the ancestors of the giraffe and various other mammals, some of them, like the Sivatherium, Mastodon, and Stegodon, being animals of great size. On the northern side of the Salt Range three fairly well-defined divisions of the Siwalik series have been recognised, each being conspicuously fossiliferous—a feature that is comparatively rare in the Siwalik hills further to the south-east, where ...
— The Panjab, North-West Frontier Province, and Kashmir • Sir James McCrone Douie
... He did not know what to say. He glanced from face to face in the absent way of a man who has lost the power of thought and is seeking somewhere to find the thing that will start it going again. The face of Jim O'Brien, a Mastodon King and old-time comrade, caught his eyes. It was as a cue to him, seeming to rouse him to do what he would never have dreamed ...
— The Call of the Wild • Jack London
... of hoofed mammals, of which the elephant is the sole survivor, began, so far as known, in the Eocene, in Egypt, with a piglike ancestor the size of a small horse, with cheek teeth like the Mastodon's, but wanting both trunk and tusks. A proboscidian came next with four short tusks, and in the Miocene there followed a Mastodon (Fig. 346) armed with two pairs of long, straight tusks on which rested ...
— The Elements of Geology • William Harmon Norton
... very limited areas which they evidently inhabited at one period. M. Albert Gaudry found, in the deposits of a mountain stream at Pikermi in Greece, an abundance of large mammalia such as are nowhere to be found living together at the present time. Among them were two species of Mastodon, two different rhinoceroses, a gigantic wild boar, a camel and a giraffe larger than those now living, several monkeys, carnivora ranging from martens and civets to lions and hyaenas of the largest size, numerous antelopes of at least five distinct genera, and besides these many forms altogether ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... fifty cents each, or a bushel might be had at $160. In the succeeding years Vick's Hundred Seed, Brown's, Pitt's, Prolific, Sugar Loaf, Guatemala, Cluster, Hogan's, Banana, Pomegranate, Dean, Multibolus, Mammoth, Mastodon and many others competed for attention and sale. Some proved worth while either in increasing the yield, or in producing larger bolls and thereby speeding the harvest, or in reducing the proportionate weight of the seed and increasing that of the lint; but the test of planting ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... sprinkled it upon the earth, and this produced many worms. The worms were then collected and scattered again. They matured into infants and these were then collected and scattered and became full-grown Dakotas. The bones of the mastodon, the Dakotas think, are the bones of Unktehees, and they preserve the with the greatest care in the medicine bag." Neill's Hist. Minn., p. 55. The Unktehees and the Thunder-birds are perpetually it war. There are various accounts of the creation of man. Some say that ...
— Legends of the Northwest • Hanford Lennox Gordon
... cling-tos. For of the women since the beginning of the world, Dolly, which survived? The cling-tos. They alone were able to live, and to have baby-girls who survived—if cling-tos. The others, and the babies of the others, they starved; that's all, Dolly, they starved. No mastodon steak for them, Dolly; no nice wing-bone of ictiosaurus—they starved. So that there are now no others—or mighty few. You, Dolly, being alive and well and a woman, are inevitably ...
— The Trimming of Goosie • James Hopper
... who had dug up the tooth of the mastodon was Louis Bloche. Details were wanting. As to his history, it was comprised in one of the volumes of the Lisieux Academy, and he could not lend his own copy, as he was afraid of spoiling the collection. With regard to the alligator, it had been discovered in the month of November, 1825, under the ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert
... Dec. 6, says "there is now on exhibition at the rooms of the State Board of Agriculture, or headquarters of the Geological Corps, a section of the femur or thigh bone of an animal of the mastodon species, the fossilized remains of which were recently discovered in Union county. These remains were found in a drift formation about three feet below the surface, and are similar to the remains of the Megatherium found in other parts of ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various
... the rock, like the phantoms before the doomed Macbeth. They lived in hollows, woods, and mud huts—perhaps in caves of the neighbouring rocks. Behind them stood an earlier band. No man was there. Huge elephantine forms, the mastodon, the hippopotamus, the tapir, antelopes of monstrous size, the megatherium, and the myledon—all, for the moment, in juxtaposition. Further back, and overlapped by these, were perched huge-billed birds and swinish creatures as large as horses. ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... intend to let mere hunger conflict with our desire for exploration," was Emma Dean's firm reminder. "Given a chance, we may find something wonderful. We may dig the prehistoric mastodon from some snug corner where he burrowed several thousand years ago. ...
— Grace Harlowe's Problem • Jessie Graham Flower
... a Bengal tiger, and the Dryad a boa-constrictor or crocodile,—the tragedy which followed would have been worthy of the pen of any sporting and dramatic historian. I can only say that, being transacted in such objectionable proximity to myself, the thing was as impressive as any combat of mastodon and iguanodon could ...
— Lords of the Housetops - Thirteen Cat Tales • Various
... space to describe some of the beautiful bacteria and gigantic worms that formerly inhabited the earth. Such an aggregation of actual, living Silurian monsters, any one of which would make a man a fortune to-day, if it could be kept on ice and exhibited for one season only. You could take a full grown mastodon to-day, and with no calliope, no lithographs, no bearded lady, no clown with four pillows in his pantaloons and no iron-jawed woman, you could go across this continent and successfully ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... we come to look for them they are not there. Geology knows nothing about them. It has plenty of distinct, well-defined species—trilobites, and ammonites, and echinoderms, palms, ferns, firs, and mosses, all sorts of quadrupeds from a mouse to a mastodon, and all just as clean-cut and well-defined as the species of existing animals. Mr. Darwin can not find his connecting links between the species, which ought to have been a hundred times more plentiful than the species they connected. These connecting links are missing ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... annihilation of its predecessor, till we come down to the present—is there no future progress for this earth as a planet? Is there to be no other era, where man himself, like the sauruses, like the mastodon, shall have passed away, to be succeeded by some nobler animal structure, some loftier intelligence, some more cunning invention ...
— Wild Northern Scenes - Sporting Adventures with the Rifle and the Rod • S. H. Hammond
... take the style of those heroic times? For nature brings not back the Mastodon, Nor we those times; and why should any man Remodel models? these twelve books of mine Were ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... Denton gave the psychometrist a minute piece of the enamel of the tooth of a mastodon, which had been found thirty feet below the surface of the earth. The psychometrist had not the slightest knowledge of the character of the tiny flake of enamel handed her, but nevertheless reported: "My impression is that ...
— Clairvoyance and Occult Powers • Swami Panchadasi
... Waliszewski tells us, he "joined to the roughness of a Russian barin all the coarseness of a Dutch sailor." Such in brief suggestion was Peter I. of Russia, half-savage, half-sovereign, the strangest jumble of contradictions who has ever worn the Imperial purple—"a huge mastodon, whose moral perceptions ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... nourishment and increase, and for the reproduction, in some way, of living forms like itself. How all living things on earth, including the endless variety of plants, and all the diversity of animals—insects, fishes, birds, the ichthyosaurus, the mastodon, the mammoth, and man—have descended from the primordial animalcule, he thinks, may be accounted for by the operation of ...
— What is Darwinism? • Charles Hodge
... of nature and art very well to each other, by suggesting that these great masses of stone were transported by means of the mastodon, whose remains are occasionally disinterred in ...
— The Story of Extinct Civilizations of the West • Robert E. Anderson
... have been thinking of such huge creatures as the megatherium and mastodon, but his words seem to limit the extinction of species to the denizens of a hot climate which had turned colder. It is not at all likely that Buffon meant this, as the passage quoted at p. 146 of this work will suffice to show. ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... word. Lying next to the logs, some large animal was breathing so heavily in Wallie's ear that it sounded like a bellows. He peered through a crack and saw something that looked like a mastodon in the darkness tugging at a sack he had used for chinking. It was not a horse and was too large for his Jersey. It flashed through his mind that it might be a roaming silvertip ...
— The Dude Wrangler • Caroline Lockhart
... to understand the nature of glaciers clearly, let us turn back to those remote ages that rolled over this Earth long before man was created. Let us in spirit leap back to the time when no living creature existed, even before the great mastodon began to leave his huge foot-prints on the ...
— The Ocean and its Wonders • R.M. Ballantyne
... sewing-machine, and a printing-press supposed to have been used by Benjamin Franklin, and many other interesting things. The Natural History Museum also contains much to attract the visitor's attention. Here I saw the skeleton of a mastodon about ten feet tall and twenty feet long; also the tusks of an extinct species of Indian elephant, which were nine feet and nine inches long. There is also an elephant tusk on exhibition ten feet long and weighing two ...
— A Trip Abroad • Don Carlos Janes
... morality can be expressed by the words Left—or Right. 'Shall I take the path to the right, when my child is being threatened with death by a pterodactyl, or shall I take the path to the left when a mastodon is threatening to put a foot ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... other plains of South America, is shown by the facility with which they have there run wild and enormously multiplied, since introduced from the Old World not long ago. There was no wild American stock. Yet in the times of the mastodon and megatherium, at the dawn of the present period, wild-horses—certainly very much like the existing horse—roamed over those plains in abundance. On the principle of original and direct created adaptation of species to climate and other conditions, why were they not reproduced, when, after ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... its muzzle rising, falling, or veering slightly from side to side with each discharge, thus causing the shells to fall at wide distances. The poisonous nature of the immense volumes of gas poured out by the mastodon when in action necessitated the withdrawal of its crew to a safe distance. But once set in motion it needed no attendant. It had been tested by a preliminary shot the day before, which had been directed to a point several miles outside the walls of Paris, the effect of which had been ...
— The Man Who Rocked the Earth • Arthur Train
... the protruding tusk, corresponds perfectly to the formation of the lower jaw and teeth in the Manatee. Some resemblance of the Dinotherium to the Mastodon suggested a comparison with that animal as the next step in the investigation, when it was found that at the edge of the lower jaw of the latter there was a pit with a small projecting tooth, also corresponding exactly in its position to the tusk in the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various |
