"Tadpole" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... and began to fish. In a moment a tadpole swallowed the hook. Pinkie Whiskers jerked him out of the water and put the ...
— Hazel Squirrel and Other Stories • Howard B. Famous
... aback the stranger laughed. It was as though a curious little tadpole which he held under his glass should suddenly lift its tail and ...
— The Story of an African Farm • (AKA Ralph Iron) Olive Schreiner
... intestines were seated there. These little creatures adhered strongly to any substance that they were laid on, and caused an irritating feeling to the skin if placed on it; they swam with great rapidity when put into seawater, and in their movements in swimming much resembled a tadpole; their tails were merely ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 2 (of 2) • George Grey
... alteration. In its earliest form the young batrachian, living in the water, breathes as a fish does by gills, either free and projecting as in the water-newt, or partially covered by integument as in the tadpole. But the gills disappear as the lungs gradually become developed: the duration of the process being on an average one hundred days from the time the eggs were first deposited. After this important change, the true batrachian is incapable any longer ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent
... murderously, "that is what you are always figuring on. Debts don't mean anything to you, because you aren't worth a damn. But debts count with me. You owe me $40,000 on this bright idea of yours, and your leases aren't worth a tadpole ...
— The Desert Fiddler • William H. Hamby
... pithy sayings which, according to tradition, the philosopher bequeathed to posterity in rhythmical form and sententious brevity, this is notably recorded: "Humble yourselves, my descendants; the father of your race was a 'twat' (tadpole): exalt yourselves, my descendants, for it was the same Divine Thought which created your father that develops itself in ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... Stone's Landing! One by one its meagre parcel of inhabitants packed up and moved away, as the summer waned and fall approached. Town lots were no longer salable, traffic ceased, a deadly lethargy fell upon the place once more, the "Weekly Telegraph" faded into an early grave, the wary tadpole returned from exile, the bullfrog resumed his ancient song, the tranquil turtle sunned his back upon bank and log and drowsed his grateful life away as in the ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 4. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... was a tadpole,' said Arthur, indignantly; and then, it seeming somewhat a funny idea to him, he began to laugh in the hoarsest, croakiest kerthumps, which brought him to his senses again. Then he added, to the little brown bird which fluttered about him in some agitation, 'No, ...
— Prince Lazybones and Other Stories • Mrs. W. J. Hays
... 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. ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Adventures on Strange Islands • Roger Thompson Finlay
... nursery arrangements. Of course you know the Surinam toad—whom not to know argues yourself unknown—that curious creature that carries her eggs in little pits on her back, where the young hatch out and pass through their tadpole stage in a slimy fluid, emerging at last from the cells of this living honeycomb only when they have attained the full amphibian honours of four-legged maturity. Well, Aspredo among cat-fish manages her brood in much the same fashion; only she carries her ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... possible of one which his family has pursued before him—for the professions will assuredly one day become hereditary. The ideal railway director will have begun at fourteen as a railway porter. He need not be a porter for more than a week or ten days, any more than he need have been a tadpole more than a short time; but he should take a turn in practice, though briefly, at each of the lower branches in the profession. The painter should do just the same. He should begin by setting his employer's palette and cleaning ...
— Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the Canton Ticino • Samuel Butler
... other monster which has sensation, is a measure of all things; then while we were reverencing him as a god he might have produced a magnificent effect by expounding to us that he was no wiser than a tadpole. For if truth is only sensation, and one man's discernment is as good as another's, and every man is his own judge, and everything that he judges is right and true, then {90} what need of Protagoras to be our instructor at a high figure; and why should we be less ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall
... you are neither the one nor the other—like a tadpole with legs, neither frog nor pollywog. But you ...
— The Maid-At-Arms • Robert W. Chambers
... spiritual larvae, sculling about in the dark by the aid of their caudal extremities, instead of standing on their legs, and breathing by gills, instead of taking the free air of heaven into the lungs made to receive it. Of course we never try to keep young souls in the tadpole state, for fear they should get a pair or two of legs by-and-by and jump out of the pool where they have been bred and fed! ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... Cleeve's bedroom faced the west, and nothing would satisfy him but that his bed should be so pulled round as to give him a view of the low sky, in which the as yet minute tadpole of fire was recognizable. The mere sight of it seemed to lend him sufficient resolution to complete his own cure forthwith. His only fear now was lest, from some unexpected cause or other, the comet would vanish before he could get to ...
— Two on a Tower • Thomas Hardy
... contentment, for now he was less hungry. By and by some foolish tadpoles came wriggling along. 'I'll just try catching one of them for practice. Maybe they are good to eat,' thought Mr. Heron, and just as before darted his head and great bill downward and caught a tadpole. ...
— Mother West Wind "How" Stories • Thornton W. Burgess
... thousand feet or thereabouts, on the extreme pinnacle of which is erected a signal station, called the Vigia, which, at the instant I saw it, was telegraphing to some craft out at sea. As for the city, to assume our friend Mr Bang's mode of description, it was shaped like a tadpole, the body representing the city, and the suburb the tail; or a stewpan, the city and its fortifications being the pan, while the handle, tending obliquely towards us, was the Raval, or long street, extending Savannahward, without the walls. ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... Influences," (whatever they are,) we should think he might consider his education completed, and his head would even then be as great a wonder as that of the schoolmaster in the "Deserted Village." In the same way, a man might have seen a horse, (if only a clothes-horse,) a dog, a cat, and a tadpole, and yet never have seen the elephant,—a most blame-worthy neglect of opportunities. But let us apply Mr. Choate's syllogistic process to the list of this extraordinary nameless person's acquirements. The Republican ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... clear, they sent a snooper in first. It was a robot, looking slightly like a short-tailed tadpole, six feet long by three feet at the thickest. It transmitted a view of the tunnel as it went slowly in; the air, it found, was breathable, and there were no harmful radiations or other dangers. According to the plans, there should be a big room at the other end, slightly curved, a hundred ...
— The Cosmic Computer • Henry Beam Piper
... activities. True play never practises what is phyletically new; and this, industrial life often calls for. It exercises many atavistic and rudimentary functions, a number of which will abort before maturity, but which live themselves out in play like the tadpole's tail, that must be both developed and used as a stimulus to the growth of legs which will otherwise never mature. In place of this mistaken and misleading view, I regard play as the motor habits and spirit of the past of the race, persisting in the present, as rudimentary functions sometimes ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... book from under his pillow, and begin reading, leaning his head on his hand, and turning his back to the room. Soon, however, a noise of striving urchins arose, and muttered encouragements from the neighbouring boys of "Go it, Tadpole!" "Now, young Green!" "Haul away his blanket!" "Slipper him on the hands!" Young Green and little Hall, commonly called Tadpole, from his great black head and thin legs, slept side by side far away by the door, and were for ever playing one another tricks, which ...
— Tom Brown's Schooldays • Thomas Hughes
... sitting up all night in neighbourly converse with an echo of elegant leisure, went out in the grey of the morning to obtain a cheap breakfast. Seeing a tadpole approach, ...
— Cobwebs From an Empty Skull • Ambrose Bierce (AKA: Dod Grile)
... than the fish in the scale of life is the frog. Although he begins life as a fish, and in the tadpole state breathes by gills, he soon discards the water-diluted air of the pond, and with perfect lungs boldly inhales the pure air of the upper world. His life as a tadpole, although so fish-like, is much inferior to true fish life: for though ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various
... in the midst of our Museums and Scientific Schools, how little we yet know of the common things before our eyes. Our savans still confess their inability to discriminate with certainty the egg or tadpole of a frog from that of a toad; and it is strange that these hopping creatures, which seem so unlike, should coincide so nearly in their juvenile career, while the tritons and salamanders, which border so closely on each other in their maturer state as sometimes ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 • Various
... into the form of a comet—that is, a globe, and a bearded tail to it, diminishing gradually to a point. This beautiful constellation seemed very sportive and delightful. It was much in the form of a tadpole! and, without ceasing, went, full of playful giddiness, up and down, all over the heaven on the concave surface of the nutshell. One time it would be at that part of the heavens under my feet, and in the next ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen • Rudolph Erich Raspe
... a mermaid and a tadpole?" asked another in a loud voice, and without a pause continued, "Why, one drops its tail and the other holds onto it. Ha, ha! Ho, ...
— The Sea Fairies • L. Frank Baum
... he was well and happy, and went on talking. "Did you know that I was once a tadpole just like those little creatures ...
— Buttercup Gold and Other Stories • Ellen Robena Field
... is a tadpole, is sprinkled all over with very fine spots, which look like gold-dust, while the frog ...
— Friends and Helpers • Sarah J. Eddy
... queen regent so horrified Major Brent that his congested features assumed the expression of an alarmed tadpole. ...
— A Young Man in a Hurry - and Other Short Stories • Robert W. Chambers
... louder than ever, with one eye on the poor jaded bird, and said: "What a contemptible little thing you are, to be sure!" Gander White, Esq., the portly barn-yard alderman, hissed at him, and even Duck Waddler, the tadpole ...
— Queer Stories for Boys and Girls • Edward Eggleston
... one of its forepaws, to the great admiration of the two children, who were sitting on the floor beside it. It was an artful-looking kitten, all black, with a very large head and a very small body. It reminded Owen of a tadpole. ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... whirlpool, over bog and quagmire, that hath laid knives under his pillow, and halters in his pew, set ratsbane by his porridge, made him proud at heart to ride on a bay trotting horse over four-inch bridges, to curse his own shadow for a traitor; who eats the swimming frog, the toad, the tadpole, the wall-newt, and the water-newt; that in the fury of his heart, when the foul fiend rages, swallows the old rat and ditch dog, drinks the green mantle off ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Bampfylde Moore Carew • Unknown
... portraits of the ordinary British legislator, or been more alive to the stupefying influences of a parliamentary career. We have gone through a peaceful revolution since Disraeli first sketched Rigby and Taper and Tadpole from the life; but the influences which they embodied are still as powerful, and a parliamentary atmosphere as little propitious to the pure intellect, as ever. Coningsby, if he still survives, must have lost many illusions; he ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... month or so, a tadpole comes out of the egg. There are swarms of them wriggling about the water, with heads and bodies and tails, but no legs. In about six weeks more the legs begin to grow, and gradually the tadpole changes into a frog. See what a number of young frogs there ...
— Woodside - or, Look, Listen, and Learn. • Caroline Hadley
... breath to spare, But gasping for breath he could only respond By pointing—be pointed, alas! |TO THE POND|. 'Twas e'en so; poor dear Knight, with his "specs" and his hat, He'd gone poking his nose into this and to that; When close to the side of the bank, he espied An uncommon fine tadpole, remarkably fat! He stooped;—and he thought her His own;—he had caught her! Got hold of her tail—and to land almost brought her, When—he plumped head and ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... to the edge of the pond to look at the pink and white lotus. One summer day, as a little frog, hardly out of his tadpole state, with a small fragment of tail still left, sat basking on a huge round leaf, one monk said to ...
— Japanese Fairy World - Stories from the Wonder-Lore of Japan • William Elliot Griffis
... subverts that foolish opinion of their dropping from the clouds in rain, showing that it is from the grateful coolness and moisture of those showers that they are tempted to set out on their travels, which they defer till those fall. Frogs are as yet in their tadpole state; but, in a few weeks, our lanes, paths, fields, will swarm for a few days with myriads of those emigrants, no larger than my little finger nail. Swammerdam gives a most accurate account of the method and situation in ...
— The Natural History of Selborne, Vol. 1 • Gilbert White
... seem to me," I said, "to be anything else. You talk like a tadpole. Haven't you any other interest in life? What about home, and patriotism, and Shakespeare—all those sort of things? Why not give it a square meal, and silence it for an hour or two; leave yourself free to think ...
— They and I • Jerome K. Jerome
... that saint. It is well that in this quarrelsome world we quarrel furiously about tastes; since agreeing too closely about the objects to be liked and appropriated would breed much more fighting than is bred by disagreeing. That little human tadpole, which the old toad of a father would not suffer to stay ten minutes in his house, proved as welcome at the nunnery of St. Sebastian as she was odious elsewhere. The superior of the convent was aunt, by the mother's side, to the new-born stranger. She, therefore, ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... frogs and toads, newts and salamanders of the present day, we may say that they made among other acquisitions the following: true ventral lungs, a three-chambered heart, a movable tongue, a drum to the ear, and lids to the eyes. It is very interesting to find that though the tongue of the tadpole has some muscle-fibres in it, they are not strong enough to effect movement, recalling the tongue of fishes, which has not any muscles at all. Gradually, as the tadpole becomes a frog, the muscle-fibres grow in strength, and make it possible for ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... body below, and thought, at first, he was killed by the bursting of his rifle; but when his companion, who had leaped down to his assistance, helped him, reeking and muddy, from the dominions of the tadpole, and placed him, uninjured, though stunned, on his legs, we could not resist a burst of merriment at his countenance of unmitigated disgust, as the liquid filth oozed from the ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... that they are larvae. There is, I believe, in Nature no instance of a transition by this species of metamorphosis from a more perfect to a less perfect animal. The tadpole has a resemblance to a fish before it becomes a frog; the caterpillar and the maggot gain not only more perfect powers of motion on the earth in their new state, but acquire organs by which they inhabit ...
— Consolations in Travel - or, the Last Days of a Philosopher • Humphrey Davy
... the axolotl are members. The Zoological Society are fortunate enough to possess specimens of both the black and white axolotl. This creature, which is a native of Mexico, has a strange life-history not unlike that of the frog. It has a sort of tadpole stage of existence, in which it is furnished with a collar of gills and lives in the water. After a while it loses its gills, and its tail and legs grow much less fish-like. There is a kind of lizard look about ...
— Little Folks (Septemeber 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... the floor. He tried to fall on his knees before me, but the rope was so short that he was able to go only part of the way down, and presented a most ludicrous appearance, with his toes scraping the icy floor and his arms thrown out as if he were paddling like a tadpole. "Oh, have mercy upon me, sir," he said, "and help me get out of this dreadful place. If you go to the hole and call up it's you, they will pull me up; but if they get you out first they will never think of me. I am ...
— My Terminal Moraine - 1892 • Frank E. Stockton
... freely on the neck and they creep on short imperfect legs. But the Lizard is clothed with scales, while the body of the Salamander is naked, and the young of the former is complete when hatched, while the Tadpole born from the Salamander has a life of its own to live, with certain changes to pass through before it assumes its mature condition; during the early part of its life it is even destitute of legs, and has gills like the Fishes. Above the Lizards and Salamanders, highest in the class of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... implicating tadpole! Wasn't I ordhered to hold convarse wid me prisoner? Spake win Ye're spoke ter and be civil, Or I'll jolt the teeth troo ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... When Razzle-dazzle starts to think, give him a chance," said Happy Mather. "Who asked your opinion? You're nothing but a tadpole, anyhow." ...
— Skippy Bedelle - His Sentimental Progress From the Urchin to the Complete - Man of the World • Owen Johnson
... shows that the rudimentary and perfect pistils are essentially alike in nature. An animal may possess various parts in a perfect state, and yet they may in one sense be rudimentary, for they are useless: thus the tadpole of the common salamander or water-newt, as Mr. G.H. Lewes remarks, "has gills, and passes its existence in the water; but the Salamandra atra, which lives high up among the mountains, brings forth its young full-formed. This animal never lives in the water. Yet if we open a gravid female, ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... of God and to turn to their right use all of life's unfolding powers constitutes a religious program. For even those primitive instincts which pass and perish often stir into consciousness and operation other more noble functions or are transmuted into recognized virtues. Popularly speaking, the tadpole's tail becomes his legs. Success in suppressing the precivilized qualities of the boy results in a "zestless automaton" that is something less than a man. Everything that characterizes the boy, however bothersome and unpromising it may seem, is to ...
— The Minister and the Boy • Allan Hoben
... along with the 7th H.L.I. were the leading battalions. As Queant and Pronville were found to be unoccupied the barrage was cancelled and these places were occupied without a fight and a section of the Hindenburg Line near Tadpole Copse was held. This line was held until the 7th when we were relieved and went into a bivouac area near St. Leger. The day we came out we got heavily shelled with gas and had a number of casualties. We had a good ...
— The Fifth Battalion Highland Light Infantry in the War 1914-1918 • F.L. Morrison
... of Mavis the elder girls were not entirely in sympathy with the new movement. They considered the Pioneers exhibited signs of swollen head, and nicknamed their society the 'Tadpole Club,' declaring its members to be still in that elementary stage of their development. They made very merry at their expense, and poked fun at Merle for having ...
— Monitress Merle • Angela Brazil
... if his shoulders were broad the rest of his body was not in the same proportion—for he narrowed as he descended, his hips being very small, and his legs as thin as those of a goat. His real name was Todpoole, but the people invariably called him Tadpole, and he certainly in appearance somewhat reminded you of one. He was a facetious little fellow, and, it was said, very ...
— Poor Jack • Frederick Marryat
... ink on white paper a very black spot about half an inch in diameter, with a tail about an inch in length, so as to resemble a tadpole, as in Plate II.; look steadfastly for a minute on the center of this spot, and, on moving the eye a little, the figure of the tadpole will be seen on the white part of the paper; which figure of the tadpole ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... better 'n' say as he believed in tadpoles himself. Luther Law was flat agin' tadpoles, but Rufus never let up till he got him to admit that if the Lord could make a man out of a monkey He could make him out of a tadpole, too. 'N' then, when he'd got him so far, what do you think, Mrs. Lathrop,—what do you think!—Mrs. Macy said as Mrs. Kitts said as Mrs. Grummel said if that young man did n't look right square into Luther's face 'n' say as to his order o' thinkin' it wasn't ...
— Susan Clegg and Her Neighbors' Affairs • Anne Warner
... he quotes Gudernatsch as having proved that legs can be induced to grow in tadpoles at any time, even in very young specimens, by feeding them with thyroid gland. Loeb writes: 'The earlier writers explained the growth of the legs in the tadpole as a case of an adaptation to life on land. We know through Gudernatsch that the growth of the legs can be produced at any time by feeding the animal with the thyroid gland.' Obviously he thinks that these two propositions ...
— Hormones and Heredity • J. T. Cunningham
... divided into separate cells. They go on multiplying, take up water, and nourish themselves on the granular nutritive matter present from the first in the egg-cell. The little mass elongates, increases in size, and gradually assumes the form of a young tadpole. ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... and challenging, this miserable human tadpole, usurping the throne of Lais and crowned with the worship of such devotees ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... man. I keep thinking of old Albrecht and the Barbarossa.... I feel I want a wash and kind words and a quiet home. When I look at you, I KNOW I want a wash. Gott!"—he stifled a vehement yawn—"What a Cockney tadpole of ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... a famous swimmer, having been used to the water from the time he was a tadpole. And now he swam so fast, with the help of the current, that he reached the river by the ...
— The Tale of Ferdinand Frog • Arthur Scott Bailey
... of a continued effort carried on from generation to generation to inspire the air of heaven direct, they have slowly acquired the lung-function. In the young organism, true to the ancestral type, the gill still persists—as in the tadpole of the common frog. But as maturity approaches the true lung appears; the gill gradually transfers its task to the higher organ. It then becomes atrophied and disappears, and finally respiration in the adult is conducted by lungs alone.[80] We may be far, in the meantime, from saying that this is ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... a Tadpole and I was a Fish, In the Paleozoic time, And side by side on the ebbing tide, We sprawled through the ooze and slime, Or skittered with many a caudal flip Through the depths of the Cambrian fen— My heart was rife with the joy of life, For I loved ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various
... rolling in her majestic seaway, heeled her gunwale slowly into the trough of space. Disked upon this bulwark, the sun rose, and promptly Gissing woke. The poplars flittered in a cool stir. Beyond the tadpole pond, through a notch in the landscape, he could see the far darkness of the hills. That fringe of woods was a railing that kept the sky from flooding ...
— Where the Blue Begins • Christopher Morley
... exploit, which certainly throws the labours of Hercules completely into the shade. On the opposite side of the river stands a pillar, inscribed in antique hieroglyphics, which professes to record this great achievement. It is a copy of one which stands on Mount Hang; and the characters, in the tadpole style, are so ancient that doubts as to their actual meaning exist among scholars of the present day. Each letter is accordingly accompanied by its equivalent in modern Chinese. The stone purports to have been erected by Ta-yue himself—good ground for suspicion—but it has been [Page 76] proved ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin
... precedes structure? Are not the potentials dependent upon the variation which has determined this function? I am speaking now in the broadest possible terms and not confining myself to the cerebrum. Do we not find it in the tadpole who is prepared for breathing not because he wants to breathe, but because he is going to have a new kind of breathing apparatus and the duck who takes to the water because he has ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... Nigel saw the brown little fellow shooting about like a galvanised tadpole, with a small harpoon ...
— Blown to Bits - or, The Lonely Man of Rakata • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... a mind and a religious element in his nature. If man's origin be due to the monkey or the tadpole, then the monkey or the tadpole must have a mind and a religious nature; for all effects are contained in their causes. The monkey must have a mind superior to that of Newton's, and the tadpole must be more religious than man; for ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 11, November, 1880 • Various
... unseen hand of life ploughs another furrow across the egg, and we have now four cells. These divide into eight, sixteen, and so on far beyond human powers of numeration, until the beginnings of all the organs of the tadpole are formed. While we cannot, of course, follow this development, we can look at our egg every day and at last see the little wiggle heads or polliwogs (from ...
— The Log of the Sun - A Chronicle of Nature's Year • William Beebe
... queer organization, the 1st D.C. Vols., composed as it was of a cloud of independent companies—thirty-five, or thereabout, in all, I think—all made up of men from everywhere, largely in the tadpole stage of Unionism, and all sworn in for service in the District, not to go beyond the District. Early in May they were organized into eight battalions of four or five companies each, commanded by lieutenant-colonels, majors, or the senior captains. Nearly every company occupied ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 3, September 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... no longer a slim little fish, but quite a portly tadpole with rounded body and long tail, but still with no expression in his blunt-nosed face, and only two black-looking pits where ...
— The Stories Mother Nature Told Her Children • Jane Andrews
... aquatic animal mentioned by Job. Some suppose it to have been the whale, but that distinguished ichthyologer, Dr. Jordan, of Stanford University, maintains with considerable heat that it was a species of gigantic Tadpole (Thaddeus Polandensis) or Polliwig—Maria pseudo-hirsuta. For an exhaustive description and history of the Tadpole consult the famous monograph of Jane ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... do ye? Mebbe so, stranger. Fool what bought that tadpole lake done middlin' well in ...
— The Mystery of Metropolisville • Edward Eggleston
... knew how it got in there," said Mr. Keyser, clasping his hands over his knee and spitting into the stove. "Some thought Barnes must've swallowed a tadpole while drinking out of a spring and it subsequently grew inside him, while others allowed that maybe he'd accidentally eaten frogs' eggs some time and they'd hatched out. But anyway, he had that frog down there inside of him settled and permanent and perfectly satisfied with being in out ...
— Elbow-Room - A Novel Without a Plot • Charles Heber Clark (AKA Max Adeler)
... pages of color plates and nearly three hundred half-tones from photographs from life by the author. The wonderful transformation of the tadpole is fully described. ...
— A Mother's List of Books for Children • Gertrude Weld Arnold
... something like a lizard, but it has a flat tail made for swimming. What curious little feet and legs! Now, though the newt has four legs, it lays eggs; and to guard them from injury, wraps them up in the leaves of water plants, with its four paws. When the young newt is hatched, it is very like a tadpole. It is like a fish, for it breathes through gills; but as it increases in size the gills go away and the front legs appear, and then the hind ones. In a frog-tadpole the hind legs appear first, and then ...
— Ernest Bracebridge - School Days • William H. G. Kingston
... character fearfully familiar. On close inspection, no less so appeared the child's equipment; the lilac silk pelisse, the small swansdown boa, the white bonnet—the whole holiday toilette, in short, was the gala garb of a cherub but too well known, of that tadpole, Desiree Beck—and Desiree Beck it was—she, or an ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... difference, but they also know how to blink it. They know, too, that while in history-building a fact is better than a presumption, it doesn't take a presumption long to bloom into a fact when they have the handling of it. They know by old experience that when they get hold of a presumption-tadpole he is not going to stay tadpole in their history-tank; no, they know how to develop him into the giant four-legged bullfrog of fact, and make him sit up on his hams, and puff out his chin, and look important and insolent and come-to-stay; ...
— Is Shakespeare Dead? - from my Autobiography • Mark Twain
... sometimes saw objects like large tadpoles lodged diametrically across it, which Giles explained to be pheasants there at roost; and they sometimes heard the report of a gun, which reminded him that others knew what those tadpole shapes ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... little fiend, in the form of a tadpole with hairy arms and legs like a monkey's, as he ran up with four bundles of faggots, "we are doing the very best we can for your discomfort. But you damned have no consideration for us, and do not remember that we are on our feet day and night, waiting upon you," said the little devil, ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... where his teeth a passage eat: We'll rouse him from the deep retreat. But who the shelter's forced to give? 'Tis sacred Virgil, as I live! 20 From leaf to leaf, from song to song, He draws the tadpole form along, He mounts the gilded edge before, He's up, he scuds the cover o'er, He turns, he doubles, there he pass'd, And here we have him, caught ...
— Poetical Works of Johnson, Parnell, Gray, and Smollett - With Memoirs, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes • Samuel Johnson, Thomas Parnell, Thomas Gray, and Tobias Smollett
... more real and effective as a romance than anything Disraeli had previously written. There are scenes and characters in the story which will live in English literature. Thackeray could hardly have created more living portraits than "Rigby," "Tadpole," and "Taper," or "Lord Monmouth." These are characters which are household words with us like "Lord Steyne" and "Rawdon Crawley." The social pictures are as realistic as those of Trollope, and now and then as bright as those of Thackeray. ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... from a height of 5,000 feet. British shells were bursting like little bits of cotton wool over the German batteries. A German attack developed, and the airman likens the enemy's advance formation to a "large human tadpole"—a long dense column with the head spread out ...
— Tommy Atkins at War - As Told in His Own Letters • James Alexander Kilpatrick
... increase and exalt piety where it exists, and create and confirm the devotional feelings where they have lain dormant. All his facts are most curious, and the exclamation, "how fearfully and wonderfully we are made," may be extended to the ugliest tadpole that wabbles in a ditch till he is a frog, and the microscope invented by that creature ...
— The Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... all the 2,500 to 3,000 square miles of beautiful and mysterious waters, except the yearly increasing swarms of summer bathers. Not a shark, or a stingaree, to scare the timid swimmer or floater; not a minnow, or a frog, a tadpole, or a pollywog—nothing that lives, moves, swims, crawls or wiggles. It is the ideal ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... gas, grinned ghastly, inhuman, blackened faces, with staring goggle eyes. The Bishop was most frightful of all. His horse was prancing and swaying wildly, and the Bishop's transformed features were diabolic. His whole profile had altered, seemed black and shapeless as the face of a tadpole. The amazing truth burst upon Bleak. Chuff and his paraders were wearing gas-masks. These were what they had carried in their knapsacks. Indomitable Chuff, who ...
— In the Sweet Dry and Dry • Christopher Morley
... European visitors made serious {17} errors in describing Indian life. They applied European standards of judgment to things Indian. A tadpole does not look in the least like a frog. An uninformed person who should find one in a pool, and, a few weeks later, should find a frog there, would never imagine that the tadpole had changed into the frog. Now, Indian society was in what we may call the tadpole stage. It was quite ...
— French Pathfinders in North America • William Henry Johnson
... a matter of course. Sometimes a procession of tiny, but perfectly formed "Charley Frogs," as the village boys call them, just emerged from their tadpole state, may be seen making their way up from ...
— John Keble's Parishes • Charlotte M Yonge
... infest pear-orchards, in the same manner as they do apples, and are to be destroyed in the same way. The slugs on the leaves are often quite annoying. These are worms, nearly half an inch long, olive-colored, and tapering from head to tail, like a tadpole. Ashes or quicklime, sprinkled over the leaves when they are wet with dew or rain, ...
— Soil Culture • J. H. Walden
... earth, but they are not without interest here on account of the remarkable capacity which they show to adapt themselves to different surroundings. There are frogs, like the tree-frog of Martinique, and others in regions where water is scarce, which never pass through the tadpole stage; or, to be quite accurate, they lose the gills and tail in the egg, as higher land-animals do. On the other hand, there is a modern Amphibian, the axolotl of Mexico, which retains the gills throughout life, and never lives on land. Dr. Gadow has shown that the lake in which it lives is so ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... period of "borrowed characters" did not last very long, though it is thought that traces of it are to be seen in the habit of writing several characters, especially those for certain plants and animals, indifferently with or without their radicals. Thus [Ch][Ch] "a tadpole" is frequently written [Ch][Ch], without the part meaning "insect" ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... youth, boy, lad, stripling, youngster, youngun, younker[obs3], callant[obs3], whipster[obs3], whippersnapper, whiffet [obs3][U.S.], schoolboy, hobbledehoy, hopeful, cadet, minor, master. scion; sap, seedling; tendril, olive branch, nestling, chicken, larva, chrysalis, tadpole, whelp, cub, pullet, fry, callow; codlin ,codling; foetus, calf, colt, pup, foal, kitten; lamb, lambkin[obs3]; aurelia[obs3], caterpillar, cocoon, nymph, nympha[obs3], orphan, pupa, staddle[obs3]. girl; lass, lassie; wench, miss, damsel, demoiselle; maid, maiden; virgin; hoyden. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... the investigation of that remarkable batrachian, the Aaeolotel, the mode of development of which is still unknown, but which remains in its adult state in a condition similar to that of the tadpole of the frog during the earlier period of its life. Latreille describes the insects, and Valenciennes the shells and the fishes; but yet to show that he might have done the work himself, he publishes ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... Mr Tadpole that you shall stand for the old borough. With the government in our hands, as I had anticipated at the general election, success I think was certain: under the circumstances which we must encounter, the struggle will be more severe, but ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... covered with a gummy matter. The insect is caught, and the tongue returned with wonderful rapidity. The frog, when it is first hatched, has the constitution of a fish: it is purely aquatic; has a fish's heart, a fish's circulation, and a fish's gills. The tadpole swims as a fish does—by the movement, side-ways, of its tail. For the unassisted eye, and still more for the microscope, what spectacle can be more marvelous than the gradual process of change by which this tiny fish becomes a reptile? Legs bud; the fish-like ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... passage was still fresh when Byron, in the letter to Disraeli already quoted[26] (March 15th, 1820), held it up to scorn as the opinion of "a young person learning to write poetry and beginning by teaching the art. . . . The writer of this is a tadpole of the Lakes, a young disciple of the six or seven new schools, in which he has learned to write such lines and such sentiments as the above. He says 'easy were the task' of imitating Pope, or it may be of equalling him, ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... sneered at as only a flattened-out shark. There are five species of shark-like rays, which have all the outward form and appearance and vagrant mode of life of their prototype, and four species of sharks that might pass as rays. One of them, with a big head, tadpole-like tail and generally frayed and sea-tattered appearance, is, in fact, accepted in some quarters as a ray, while the shovel-like skate is ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... brain of the average Christian and that of the average Jew—certainly in Europe—is about the difference between a tadpole's brain & an archbishop's. It is a marvelous race; by long odds the most marvelous race the ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... forefathers, and common to all labourers on the land, that just as in the world of plants and animals nothing ceases to exist, but continually changes its form, the manure into grain, the grain into a food, the tadpole into a frog, the caterpillar into a butterfly, the acorn into an oak, so man also does not perish, but only undergoes a change. He believed in this, and therefore always looked death straight in the face, and bravely bore the sufferings that lead towards it, but did not care and did ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... of toads is very small, as regards the size of the individual eggs, compared with the size of the full-grown animal. Nothing would be easier than for a piece of spawn or a tiny tadpole to be washed into some hole in a mine or cave, where there was sufficient water for its developement, and where the trickling drops brought down minute objects of food, enough to keep up its simple existence. A toad brought up under such peculiar circumstances might pass ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... which we have adopted for our girls and the exclusively book education into which we have almost unconsciously drifted. You have been constrained to choose some nobler type on which to mould your scheme of female education than that of the tadpole, which is all head, no hands, a much active and frivolous tail. Your girls are brought up not to consider it beneath them to take part in the work of the house; and something of the all round capability of American women which so strikes us is doubtless owing to their not having incurred "this ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins
... a Lizard; Ah niver see thim aboot here. It must a been a two-striped Spelerpes. A Spelerpes is nigh kin to a Frog—a kind of dry-land tadpole, while a Lizard is ...
— Two Little Savages • Ernest Thompson Seton
... decorations are a trifle more complex. We may readily perceive that they represent tadpoles (Fig. 558, b b), dragonflies (Fig: 558, c c), with also the frog or toad (Fig. 558); all this is of easy interpretation. As the tadpole frequents the pools of spring time he has been adopted as the symbol of spring rains; the dragon-fly hovers over pools in summer, hence typifies the rains of summer; and the frog, maturing in them later, symbolizes the rains of the later seasons; for ...
— A Study of Pueblo Pottery as Illustrative of Zuni Culture Growth. • Frank Hamilton Cushing
... your authority—' ventured to observe Mr. Tadpole, emboldened by the presence of a duke, his patron, to struggle against the despotism ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... processes, or the evolutionary processes; they are formed on the pattern of our own brief span of life. In a few cases in the familiar life about us we see the evolutionary process abridged, and transformations like those of unrecorded time take place before our eyes, as when the tadpole becomes the frog or the grub becomes the butterfly. These rapid changes are analogous to those which in the depths of geologic time have evolved the bird from the fish or the reptile, or the seal and the manatee from a fourfooted land animal. Our common ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... forms presented by the crowns of the teeth in some seals, in certain sharks, and in some extinct Cetacea may be referred to; as also the similarity of the beak in birds, some reptiles, in the tadpole, and cuttle-fishes. As to entire external form, may be adduced the wonderful similarity between a true mouse (Mus delicatulus) and a small marsupial, pointed out by Mr. Andrew Murray in his work on the "Geographical Distribution of Mammals," p. 53, and represented ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... enormous head, in great cavities divided by cartilages, that is to be found from six to eight hundred pounds of that precious oil called spermaceti. The cachalot is a disagreeable creature, more tadpole than fish, according to Fredol's description. It is badly formed, the whole of its left side being (if we may say it), a "failure," and being only able to see with its right eye. But the formidable troop was nearing us. They had seen the whales ...
— Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea • Jules Verne
... get at the drifting grains of the Food were the little tadpoles and the little water snails; the little wriggling tadpoles in particular, once they had the taste of it, took to it with zest. But scarcely did one of them begin to grow into a conspicuous position in that little tadpole world and try a smaller brother or so as an aid to a vegetarian dietary, when nip! one of the Beetle larva had its curved bloodsucking prongs gripping into his heart, and with that red stream went Herakleophorbia IV, in ...
— The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth • H.G. Wells
... There were times when he felt decidedly hungry. And other changes had come while he lay and waited in the gravel. The embryonic fin which had made his tail so like a paddle was gone, the true dorsal and caudal and anal fins had taken their proper shape, and he looked a little less like a tadpole and a little more like a fish. He was stronger than he had been at first, and he was losing his dread of the sunlight; and so at last he left the gravel-bed, to seek his rightful place in the ...
— Forest Neighbors - Life Stories of Wild Animals • William Davenport Hulbert
... engaged, is remarkable. Here are specimens of the tree frogs that can walk with their backs downwards on the most polished surfaces, and can slightly change their colour; the paradoxical frog from Surinam, which is larger as a tadpole than in its condition of maturity; the Brazilian horned toads; the American bull frogs; and the Brazilian pipa, the female of which deposits its eggs upon the back of the male, who carries them about till they burst from their shells; the repulsive siren ...
— How to See the British Museum in Four Visits • W. Blanchard Jerrold
... things drifting up towards him, Plattner stopped, staring. They were not walking, they were indeed limbless, and they had the appearance of human heads, beneath which a tadpole-like body swung. He was too astonished at their strangeness, too full, indeed, of strangeness, to be seriously alarmed by them. They drove towards him, in front of the chill wind that was blowing uphill, much ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... see a grey film around that sprig? Examine it through the pocket lens. It is a forest of glass bells, on branching stalks. They are Vorticellae; and every one of those bells, by the ciliary current on its rim, is scavenging the water—till a tadpole comes by and scavenges it. How many millions of living creatures are there on that one sprig? Look here!—a brown polype, with long waving arms—a gigantic monster, actually a full half-inch long. He is Hydra fusca, most famous, and earliest described (I think by Trembley). Ere ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... sleep. He is eccentric, even for a snake, and wears his teeth on his backbone, where they may break the egg-shell so that he may spit it away. When he first stretched his head round an egg, the viperine snakes in the same case hastily assumed him to be a very large tadpole; and since tadpoles are regarded with gastronomical affection by viperine snakes, they began an instant chase, each prepared to swallow the entire phenomenon, because a snake never hesitates to swallow anything merely on account of its size. ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 28, April 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... she replied. "'Twas a lesson we learned 'when you were a tadpole and I was a fish,' It is a bit of wisdom that lies deep in our hearts; but we shrink from it and refuse to heed it, clinging blindly ...
— The Silver Butterfly • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... you little tads," he went on coolly, waving his hand at the gathered group, "is a skate who teases this little girl. And you older boys are skates for letting the little ones do it, the whole pack of you—and I'm going to spank any little tadpole who does it hereafter, and I'm going to punch the head off any big one who allows it. It's got to stop NOW!" And as Hale dragged him off he added to the mountain boy, "and I'm going to begin with you whenever you say the ...
— The Trail of the Lonesome Pine • John Fox, Jr.
... seated many moments, and had scarcely pushed off the shore of silence into a new sea of talk, when we were interrupted by the invasion of half a dozen dogs. They were of all sorts down to no sort. Mr. Skymer called one of them Tadpole—I suppose because he had the hugest tail, while his legs were not visible ...
— A Rough Shaking • George MacDonald
... the neurenteric canal in just the same form and situation in the amphibia. A longitudinal section of a young tadpole (Figure 1.125) shows how we may penetrate from the still open primitive mouth (x) either into the wide primitive gut-cavity (al) or the narrow overlying nerve-tube. A little later, when the primitive mouth is closed, ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.1. • Ernst Haeckel
... second quarry now is, as you pass from Rydal to Grasmere, there was formerly a length of smooth rock that sloped towards the road on the right hand. I used to call it tadpole slope, from having frequently observed there the water bubbles gliding under the ice, exactly in ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth
... to think that there is something in a tadpole after all," murmurs Lord Poldoodle to himself, as the author wriggles her ...
— The Sunny Side • A. A. Milne
... the coloring of the ordinary toad. Though descended from the frog, and originally a creature of the water, the toad has long since adapted itself to live upon the dry ground. It still produces its young in the water as it did when a frog. Whereas the childhood of the frog, that is, its tadpole stage, is very long and it assumes its adult form comparatively late, just the reverse is the case of the toad. The young hasten through their tadpole stage within a few weeks, and assume the shape of the parent toad when about big enough to cover your little fingernail. ...
— The Meaning of Evolution • Samuel Christian Schmucker
... I replied, snatching a bridle and running up the orchard, where old Tadpole had been left in case of emergency. I clapped a side-saddle on his back, a hat on my head, jumped on just as I was, and galloped for my life in the direction of Bimbalong, seven miles distant. I eased my horse a little going up ...
— My Brilliant Career • Miles Franklin
... occur. To accomplish this latter end of its journey the spermatozoon is endowed with some form of motile apparatus, and this frequently takes the form of a long flagellum, or whip-like process, by the lashing of which the little creature propels itself much as a tadpole with its tail. ...
— Mendelism - Third Edition • Reginald Crundall Punnett
... it was the day it was put in. If, spite of everything, the seawater fail, then try a fresh-water aquarium. Use your tank for the pond instead of the ocean; and in the spotted newt, the tortoise, the tadpole, the caddis-worm, and the thousand other inhabitants of our inland ponds and brooks, with the weeds among which they live, you will find as much entertainment as in watching the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Number 9, July, 1858 • Various
... boudoir. It was singularly unlike the boudoirs of other lands! Black smoke, instead of whitewash, coloured the walls and ceiling. No glass hung on the wall to reflect the visage of the Arctic beauty, but there were several pegs, from one of which hung Nootka's seal-skin bad-weather jacket, the tadpole-tail of which reached to the ground, while from another depended a pair of her long waterproof boots. One half of the floor being raised about eight inches, constituted the Eskimo maiden's couch—also her chair and sofa. There was no table, but the skull ...
— The Walrus Hunters - A Romance of the Realms of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... such is the meaning officially attached to the word "vivisection," the teacher would be debarred from showing the circulation in a frog's foot or in a tadpole's tail; he must not show an animalcule, uncomfortably fixed under the microscope, nor prick his own finger for the sake of obtaining a drop of living blood. The living particles which float in that liquid undoubtedly feel as much (or as little) as ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... as yet made the attempt to define the change —as profound as that of the tadpole to the frog—between the lover and the husband. An author of ideals would not dare to proclaim that this change is inevitable: some husbands—and some wives are fortunate enough to escape it, but it is not unlikely to happen in our modern civilization. Just when it occurred ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... dowager, with the indifference of a woman who has never had a child, and cannot conceive why a little sprawling tadpole in long clothes should make such a difference. "Yes, I suppose that's a novelty," she said, "to be mother of a bit of a thing like that naturally turns a girl's head. It is inconceivable the airs they give themselves, ...
— Sir Tom • Mrs. Oliphant
... is in vain for him to open his eyes and his ears; nothing is to be seen but one or two hideous bats, which flap their wings in his face, and frighten him in the midst of a reverie. Nothing is on the move; no newt or tadpole is playing in the water, and nothing can be descried there but the rays of the moon, as she moves slowly o'er its surface; nor is anything to be heard except the wind whistling through the trees, or an occasional shot from the rifle of a brother sportsman, who, more happy, more clever, and better ...
— Le Morvan, [A District of France,] Its Wild Sports, Vineyards and Forests; with Legends, Antiquities, Rural and Local Sketches • Henri de Crignelle
... Ricketts. "A lucky young cub it will be that he takes on," added he, turning to a group of the small boys near. "He'll do your sums and look over your exercises for you like one o'clock. Ugh! though, I suppose every man Jack of you is a Tadpole or a Pig?" ...
— The Fifth Form at Saint Dominic's - A School Story • Talbot Baines Reed
... other yet stranger monster which has sensation, is the measure of all things; then he might have shown a magnificent contempt for our opinion of him by informing us at the outset that while we were reverencing him like a God for his wisdom, he was no better than a tadpole, not to speak of his fellow-men—would not this have produced an overpowering effect? For if truth is only sensation, and no man can discern another's feelings better than he, or has any superior right to determine whether his opinion is true or false, but each, as we have several times ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... and cast down the frogs somewhere else: but, then, more reasonable that a whirlwind could scoop up a pond, tadpoles and all—because tadpoles are more numerous in their season than are the frogs in theirs: but the tadpole-season is earlier in the spring, or in a time that is more tempestuous. Thinking in terms of causation—as if there were real causes—our notion is that, if X is likely to cause Y, but is more likely to cause Z, but does not cause Z, X is not the cause of Y. Upon this quasi-sorites, we base ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... record of a pianoforte solo shows this very clearly to the eye, because the impression made by a long note is a deeply-marked indentation succeeded by the merest shallow scratch—not unlike the impression made by a tadpole on mud—with a big head and an attenuated body. Every note marked long in pianoforte music is therefore essentially a sforzando followed by a rapid diminuendo. Anything in such music marked as a long note to be sustained ...
— Twentieth Century Inventions - A Forecast • George Sutherland
... imperceptible. Suppose that it has taken five hundred years to form the greyhound out of his wolf-like ancestor. This is a mere guess, but it gives the order of magnitude. Now, if so, how long would it take to obtain an elephant from a protozoon or even from a tadpole-like fish? Ought it not to take much more than a million times as long?" ("Genesis of ...
— Life and Habit • Samuel Butler
... has he to be such a fine swordsman?" I demanded fretfully. "Damn him! 'Tis no right of a little tadpole like him to be a great cut-throat. One could never have told from the look of him, and yet it simply teaches one to be always cautious ...
— The O'Ruddy - A Romance • Stephen Crane
... make quick work. The Rebellion is an unborn tadpole. Let us not fall into the delusion of mistaking a local commotion for a revolution. A strong active pull together will do our work in thirty days. We have only to send a column of twenty-five thousand men across the Potomac to Richmond to burn out the ...
— The Victim - A romance of the Real Jefferson Davis • Thomas Dixon
... noonday and a retreat for all the owls of the neighborhood. It was full of pits and quagmires, partly covered with weeds and mosses, where the green surface often betrayed the traveller into a gulf of black, smothering mud; there were also dark and stagnant pools, the abodes of the tadpole, the bull-frog, and the water-snake, where the trunks of pines and hemlocks lay half-drowned, half-rotting, looking like ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... entered the gates out of the hot dust beneath the glitter of the dark-curtained windows. Seaton led me at once through the little garden-gate to show me his tadpole pond, swarming with what, being myself not the least bit of a naturalist, I considered the most horrible creatures—of all shapes, consistencies, and sizes, but with whom Seaton seemed to be on the most intimate of terms. I can see his absorbed face now as he sat on his heels and fished ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... a race-meeting of any pretensions can possibly do without one whom even his enemies acknowledge to be the only accurate and high-minded sporting writer in the world? Those who care (and I devoutly hope that Mr. J., whose brains equal those of a newly-born tadpole, will not be amongst the number) can see me at any moment on pronouncing the password, "mealy-mouth," in my old place, close to the space devoted to Royalty. Yes, I shall be there. In the meantime, I propose to treat of the horses as only I can treat of them. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99., August 2, 1890. • Various
... to deter men from matrimony, but to warn them from a miscalculation which may mar their happiness. Flirtation is a very fine thing, but it's only a state of transition after all. The tadpole existence of the lover would be great fun, if one was never to become a frog under the hands of the parson. I say all this dispassionately and advisedly. Like the poet of my country, for ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... rows round and round it, sometimes on his breast, sometimes on his back; queer caddis-worms trail their self-made homesteads of leaves or twigs beside it; the Dytiscus, dorbug of the water, blunders clumsily against it; the tadpole wriggles his stupid way to it, and rests upon it, meditating of future frogdom; the passing wild-duck dives and nibbles at it; the mink and musk-rat brush it with their soft fur; the spotted turtle slides over it; the slow larvae of gauzy dragon-flies ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various
... if you are a father and your boy Edward persists in bringing his pet tadpole to the table in a glass jar, you should not punish or scold him; a much more effective and graphic method of correcting this habit would be for you to suddenly pick up the tadpole one day at luncheon and swallow it. No whipping or scolding would so impress ...
— Perfect Behavior - A Guide for Ladies and Gentlemen in all Social Crises • Donald Ogden Stewart |
