"Describer" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to get up an agitation (but I shall not succeed, and indeed doubt whether I have time and strength to go on with it), against the practice of Naturalists appending for perpetuity the name of the FIRST describer to species. I look at this as a direct premium to hasty work, to NAMING instead of DESCRIBING. A species ought to have a name so well known that the addition of the author's name would be superfluous, and a [piece] of empty vanity. (His contempt for the self- regarding spirit in a naturalist is illustrated ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... very pleasant describer of men and manners, thus sketches him:—"In Parliament he was invariably habited in a full-dress suit of clothes, commonly of a dark colour, without lace or embroidery, close buttoned, with his sword thrust through the pocket. His countenance was ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 55, No. 340, February, 1844 • Various
... as truly, though not perhaps in as marked a degree, as the excitement of love, fear, rage, or jealousy. The vividness of the descriptions or declamations in Donne or Dryden, is as much and as often derived from the force and fervour of the describer, as from the reflections, forms or incidents, which constitute their subject and materials. The wheels take fire from the mere rapidity of their motion. To what extent, and under what modifications, this may be admitted to act, I shall attempt to define in an after remark ...
— Biographia Literaria • Samuel Taylor Coleridge
... incapacity to understand the diverse springs of human action, Mr. Reade is clearly no novelist in the true sense of the term. He is, however, an admirable describer and a capital story-teller. He is consequently always entertaining and secure of his reader. Yet, inasmuch as he professes to relate and describe only actual facts, we cannot but regret that he should have adopted a form which is ill suited to this object, and which ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. 12, No. 32, November, 1873 • Various
... As a describer of life and manners, he must be allowed to stand perhaps the first of the first rank. His humour, which, as Steele observes, is peculiar to himself, is so happily diffused as to give the grace of novelty to domestic scenes and daily occurrences. He never "o'ersteps the modesty ...
— Lives of the Poets: Addison, Savage, and Swift • Samuel Johnson
... may be of use to somebody. "The apex of the carina is expanded into a two-lobed plain petal, the lobes of which are emarginate. This appendix is of a bright rose colour, and forms the principal part of the flower." The describer relaxes, or relapses, into common language so far as to add that 'this appendix' "dispersed among the green foliage in every part of the shrub, gives it a pretty ...
— Proserpina, Volume 2 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin |
