"Reptilian" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... armed with plates. These it has a habit of rubbing together, and by this means it produces a shrill, chirruping sound, which actually attracts crickets and grasshoppers toward the noise, so that they fall easy prey to this reptilian trapper. So in colour, sound, motion, and many other ways, animals act and react upon each other, a useful and necessary habit being perverted by an enemy, so that the death of the creature results. Yet it would never be claimed that the ...
— The Log of the Sun - A Chronicle of Nature's Year • William Beebe
... removed from its reptilian ancestors—a bird that is at home under the water and hunts its prey there on the wing—is the black cormorant. There is a colony of several hundred of them on the face of a sea-cliff ...
— Under the Maples • John Burroughs
... Snakes! No, Punch begs the ophidian's pardon! The slimiest slug in the filthiest garden Is not so revolting as these are, These ultra-reptilian rascals, who spy Round our homes, and, for pay, would, with treacherous eye, Find flaws in the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98 January 11, 1890 • Various
... to a conclusion. Carlie and Georgie bowed; Marjorie Jones and Baby Rennsdale curtesied, and there was loud applause. In fact, the demonstration became so uproarious that some measure of it was open to suspicion, especially as hisses of reptilian venomousness were commingled with it, and also a hoarse but vociferous repetition of the dastard words, "Carrie dances ROTTEN!" Again it was the work of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern; but the plot was ...
— Penrod and Sam • Booth Tarkington
... many of the big fish-eating cannibal fish there are in Reelfoot. Here, bigger than anywhere else, you find the garfish, all bones and appetite and horny plates, with a snout like an alligator, the nearest link, naturalists say, between the animal life of today and the animal life of the Reptilian Period. The shovel-nose cat, really a deformed kind of freshwater sturgeon, with a great fan-shaped membranous plate jutting out from his nose like a bowsprit, jumps all day in the quiet places with mighty splashing sounds, as though ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... Pellucidar succeeded in overthrowing the mighty Mahars, the dominant race of reptilian monsters, and their fierce, gorilla-like soldiery, the ...
— Pellucidar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... past geological ages are an example of this kind These fishes which preceded the appearance of reptiles present a combination of ichthyic and reptilian characters not to be found in the true members of this class, which form its bulk at present. The Pterodactyles, which preceded the class of birds, and the Ichthyosauri, which preceded the Cetacea, are other examples of such prophetic ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... with an indescribable gait, cat-like yet awkward, carrying his high shoulders almost hunched. He placed the lantern in a niche in the wall, never turning away the reptilian gaze of those eyes which must haunt my dreams forever. They possessed a viridescence which hitherto I had supposed possible only in the eye of the cat—and the film intermittently clouded their brightness—but I can ...
— The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu • Sax Rohmer
... the following day Kai Lung was finally brought up for judgment in accordance with the venomous scheme of the reptilian Ming-shu. In order to obscure their guilty plans all justice-loving persons were excluded from the court, so that when the story-teller was led in by a single guard he saw before him only the two whose ...
— Kai Lung's Golden Hours • Ernest Bramah
... is mythical, represented according to locality by some known animal which seems to indicate best the mythical conception. Some figures evidently refer to the alligator, and others apparently to the iguana; that on plates 4 and 5 of the Dresden Codex is purely mythical, but contains reptilian characteristics. ...
— Day Symbols of the Maya Year • Cyrus Thomas
... bear-trap, but the loosely braided strands of baru fiber slip between the pointed teeth. The leader holds. The natives haul at the line as sailors haul at a halliard. Soon there emerges from the churning waters a long and incredibly ugly snout, followed by a low, reptilian head, with venomous, heavy-lidded, scarlet eyes, a body as broad as a row-boat and armored with horny scales, and finally a tremendous tail, twice as long as an elephant's trunk and twice as powerful, that spells death for any human being that comes within its reach. Sometimes it happens ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... that this idea is contradictory to the previous suggestion that the absorption of nourishment by the intra-uterine embryo was the cause of the gradual decline of the process of yolk-secretion by the ova in the ovary, but it is not really so. Originally in the reptilian ancestor, or in the Monotreme, the ovum in the follicle secreted yellow-coloured yolk. The materials for this, at any rate, passed through the follicle cells, and it is probable that these cells were not entirely passive, but ...
— Hormones and Heredity • J. T. Cunningham
... the latter, the most important are species belonging to the genera Megalichthys and Rhizodus, comprising large fishes, with rhomboidal scales, unsymmetrical ("heterocercal") tails, and powerful conical teeth. These fishes are sometimes said to be "sauroid," from their presenting some Reptilian features in their organisation, and they must have been the scourges of the Carboniferous seas. The remains of Placoid fishes in the Carboniferous strata are very numerous, but consist wholly of teeth and fin-spines, referable to forms more or less closely ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... word recently introduced and now overworked, meaning a task, or performance in one's trade, or calling,—doubtless a variant of stint, without that word's suggestion of allotment and limitation. It is still in the reptilian ...
— Write It Right - A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults • Ambrose Bierce
... primitive fancy may be roused even more strongly in darkness than by daylight. How living seem the smoulderings and the flashings of the tide on nights of phosphorescence!—how reptilian the subtle shifting of the tints of its chilly flame! Dive into such a night-sea;—open your eyes in the black-blue gloom, and watch the weird gush of lights that follow your every motion: each luminous point, as seen through the flood, like ...
— In Ghostly Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... features, among which we may find the modern representatives of these earliest Vertebrates. Of these two groups one consists chiefly now of the Gar-Pikes of our Western waters, though the Sturgeons share also in some of their features. In these fishes there is a singular union of reptilian with fish-like characters. The systems of circulation and of respiration in them are more complicated than in the common fishes; the structure of the skull resembles that of the skull in reptiles, and they have other reptilian characters, such as their ability to move the head upon ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... did not seem to shrink in numbers. But the carpentering party were able to do their work in safety, and when, after the interval for dinner had ended, Uncle Paul and his nephew carried on what Rodd called a reptilian execution, the Spaniard's crew were lying about in the sunshine asleep upon their deck. They were too idle to take any interest in the shooting, while their captain, a rather marked object in the ...
— The Ocean Cat's Paw - The Story of a Strange Cruise • George Manville Fenn |
