"Battering ram" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... ground. Even with this extended neck the giraffe's legs are so exceedingly long that he is obliged to spread his front feet when he wishes to reach the ground with his head. The elephant has pursued exactly the reverse plan. Using his tremendous head as a battering ram in fighting, and using his enormous tusks both in battle and in uprooting young trees, a lengthened neck is absolutely out of the question. Furthermore his front teeth have grown so prodigiously that ...
— The Meaning of Evolution • Samuel Christian Schmucker
... the verb 'torqueo,' 'to twist,' from their being formed by the twisting of hair, fibre, or strips of leather. The different sorts were called 'balistae' and 'catapultae.' The former were used to impel stones; the latter, darts and arrows. In sieges, the 'Aries,' or 'battering ram,' which received its name from having an iron head resembling that of a ram, was employed in destroying the lower part of the wall, while the 'balista' was overthrowing the battlements, and the 'catapulta' ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso
... accustomed to normal gravity of the heavy planet, and even the metal of the dome was not beyond the pounding of its hammer. What they had mistaken for a battering ram, was the brown tip of the mammoth insect. From end to end it measured over sixty feet. The men finally turned away in disgust, as it writhed ...
— Wanted—7 Fearless Engineers! • Warner Van Lorne
... served to distract the attention of the defenders. To meet such assailants the Tyrians had let down huge blocks of stone into the sea, which prevented the approach of the ships, and hindered those on board from using the battering ram. These blocks the Macedonians endeavoured to weigh up and remove by means of cranes; but their vessels were too unsteady for the purpose, whereupon they proceeded to anchor them. The Tyrians went out in boats well protected, and passing under the stems and sterns of the vessels, ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... head-long, bull-like rushes, the Butterfly Man managed to send him sprawling again. Then he himself caught one well-aimed blow, and went staggering; but before slow-moving and raging Jan could follow up his advantage, with a lightning-like quickness the Butterfly Man made a battering ram of his head, caught Jan in the pit of the stomach, and even as he fell Jan went down, too, and went down underneath. Desperately, fighting like a fiend, John Flint kept him down. And presently using every wrestler's trick that he knew, and bringing ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler
... Lover! lend me a help to give back what we've borrowed to its rightful owner. 'S blood! but I feel an appetite. This night-air takes me in the wind like a battering ram. I thought I had laid in a stout four-and-twenty hours' stock of Westphalian Wurst at Master Groschen's supper-table. Good stuff, washed down with superior Rhine wine; say your Liebfrauenmilch for my taste; though, when I first tried it, I grimaced ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... longer did he seek silence, for he knew now that the thing had gone beyond the sphere of chance. He threw his weight against the wooden panel; but the thick skeel of which it was constructed would have withstood a battering ram. From ...
— The Chessmen of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... the Assumption has been torn away by the people to supply arms; two women of the people have been crushed by a charge of the Municipal Guard; the shop of Lepage, the armorer, in the Rue Richelieu, has been entered by means of the pole of an omnibus used as a battering ram; and barricades rise on the Rue ...
— Edmond Dantes • Edmund Flagg
... the pumps for days while it sucked through opening seams the life-blood of his helpless craft. The game here would be to lift its victim on the back of a smooth under-roller and with mighty effort hurl it like a battering ram against the shore rocks, shattering ...
— The Veiled Lady - and Other Men and Women • F. Hopkinson Smith
... rigidly on all her sides by the water. Water is non-compressible like steel. Now when the T. N. T. explodes, even some distance away, the violent expending concussion is communicated to this hollow shell just as though a battering ram struck it. The submarine can't give any because the surrounding water holds her in place. So ...
— Aircraft and Submarines - The Story of the Invention, Development, and Present-Day - Uses of War's Newest Weapons • Willis J. Abbot
... MEURIOT. I don't care for you a little, Therese! I care for you very much indeed. I like you because you're brave and hurl yourself against obstacles like a little battering ram, and because you're straight and honest and one can depend ...
— Woman on Her Own, False Gods & The Red Robe - Three Plays By Brieux • Eugene Brieux
... BATTERING RAM. An instrument used for battering down walls before gunpowder was known in Europe: it is frequently borne as a charge in a coat ...
— The Manual of Heraldry; Fifth Edition • Anonymous
... was pitched, that last autumn in the ministry of Jesus of Nazareth. A few years further on, if the warriors of the Emperor Tiberius could then have foreseen the future, Titus was to quarter his famous legions on that vantage point; and from its elevation he was to hurl himself as a resistless battering ram against the Holy City. But, on this autumn day, when these chronicles begin, no blare of trumpets was summoning the Roman soldiery to arms; only the feet of the camp sentinels, as they walked their appointed rounds, broke the ...
— An Easter Disciple • Arthur Benton Sanford
... aimed the muzzle of the hose, and Big Ivan of the Bridge let go of the rope and sprang at him. The fist of the great Russian went out like a battering ram; it struck the steward between the eyes, and he dropped upon the deck. He lay like one dead, the muzzle of the hose ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1915 - And the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... combination work. "A chain is no stronger than its weakest link," and, in a modified sense, a team is no stronger than its weakest player. That one weaker player would be unerringly "sized up" by the sharp-eyed scouts of the opposition and they would plunge against him like a battering ram. ...
— Bert Wilson on the Gridiron • J. W. Duffield
... January himself, and not a savage beast that was acting the part of a battering ram and rapidly demolishing the pilot house, paused for a second; then, moving to a new position, he began once more hammering at ...
— The Circus Boys On the Mississippi • Edgar B. P. Darlington
... old battering ram of feudal times with which the ancestors of Kaiser William used to knock down the castles of the baron robbers has been approximated by his warring tribes. With the retreat of the German troops from ...
— Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights • Kelly Miller
... She took a sudden notion to stop right here, I coaxed and cajoled her, but she wouldn't budge. Then my dander riz, I spit on my hands and hit her a whang on the tail, and she raised up her heels and kicked out like a battering ram." ...
— Jack Wright and His Electric Stage; - or, Leagued Against the James Boys • "Noname"
... blockhouse within, in which the sixteen occupants of the place were lodged, unsuspicious of danger. Troyes approached at night. Iberville and Sainte-Helene with a few followers climbed the palisade on one side, while the rest of the party burst the main gate with a sort of battering ram, and rushed in, yelling the war-whoop. In a moment, the door of the blockhouse was dashed open, and its astonished inmates captured in ...
— Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV • Francis Parkman
... coming up, but finding their weapons useless, they suddenly snatched him up, one at either arm and either leg, and two grasping him by the head-piece, and darted away with him, carrying his bulging metal body between them like a battering ram, while he ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, May, 1930 • Various |
