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Embryonic   /ˌɛmbriˈɑnɪk/   Listen
Embryonic

adjective
1.
Of an organism prior to birth or hatching.  Synonyms: embryologic, embryonal.  "Embryologic development"
2.
In an early stage of development.  Synonym: embryotic.  "An embryonic nation, not yet self-governing"



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"Embryonic" Quotes from Famous Books



... answer to the latter possibility. While providing man with everything to which he has aspired for milleniums, we instill in him, through the media of entertainment, knowledge of all the survival practices known to the backtimers who painfully nurtured civilization from an embryonic idea to its present pinnacle. We can ...
— DP • Arthur Dekker Savage

... we find the craft gilds taking entire charge of the series or cycles of "mystery plays," which were given in various towns. The words of the plays produced at York, Coventry, Chester, and Woodkirk have come down to us and are of extreme interest as embryonic forms of the drama and examples of purely vernacular language. It is quite certain that such groups of plays were given by the crafts in a number of other towns. They were generally given on Corpus Christi day, a feast which fell in ...
— An Introduction to the Industrial and Social History of England • Edward Potts Cheyney

... in a far greater measure than most of us care to admit, upon first impressions. Manifestly shallow and embryonic though we admit them to be, our first impressions crystallize, in nine cases out of ten, into our fixed or permanent opinions. And, after all, the reason for ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx

... suggestion. He was a tall, lithe fellow, with a dark, positive face: he had never removed his black gaze from the child since the moment of her appearance. Her eyes, too, seemed to be all for him—to return his scrutiny with a sort of vague pleasure, a half savage confidence ... Was it the first embryonic feeling of race-affinity quickening in the little brain?—some intuitive, inexplicable sense of kindred? She shrank from Doctor Hecker, who addressed her in German, shook her head at Lawyer Solari, who tried to make her answer in Italian; and her look always went back plaintively ...
— Chita: A Memory of Last Island • Lafcadio Hearn

... hinder pair of true thoracic limbs, forcibly bring to mind the anomalous structure of the mouth being situated in the middle of the under side of the thorax, in Limulus,—that most ancient of crustaceans, and therefore one likely to exhibit a structure now embryonic in other orders. I will only further remark, that I suspect that the truncation of the anterior end of the carapace, has been effected by the segments having been driven inwards, and consequently, that ...
— A Monograph on the Sub-class Cirripedia (Volume 1 of 2) - The Lepadidae; or, Pedunculated Cirripedes • Charles Darwin

... sensuous images to abstract conceptions and spiritual ideas. This progressive development of nature and humanity has not been a series of creations de novo, without any relation, in matter or form, to that which preceded. All of the present was contained in embryonic infoldment in the past, and the past has contributed its results to the present.[875] The present, both in nature, and history, and civilization, is, so to speak, the aggregate and sum-total of the ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker

... account in some newspaper, and if successful, made the occurrence the subject of a longer article in pamphlet or book form. He was always on the lookout for matter, which he utilized with a pen of marvelous rapidity. The gazette or embryonic newspaper was at first confined to a rehearsal of news. Defoe invented the leading article or "news-letter" of weekly comment, and the society column of ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various

... ages have been inherited from a remote period to the present day. On the view of each organism with all its separate parts having been specially created, how utterly inexplicable is it that organs bearing the plain stamp of inutility, such as the teeth in the embryonic calf or the shrivelled wings under the soldered wing covers of many beetles, should so frequently occur. Nature may be said to have taken pains to reveal her scheme of modification, by means of rudimentary organs, of embryological and homologous [corresponding] structures, but we are too blind ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - The Naturalist as Interpreter and Seer • Various

... embryonic stage of professional development, any violent impression on the instructor's mind is apt to be followed by some lasting effect on that of the pupil. No mother's mark is more permanent than the mental naevi ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... between causation in organic and inorganic Nature, seems to look for no manifestation of design in the latter except as "God overrules and controls" second causes, and, finally, refers to this overruling and controlling (rather than to a normal action through endowment) all embryonic development, the growth of vegetables, and the like. He even adds, without break or distinction, the sending of rain, frost, and snow, the flight of an arrow, and the falling of a sparrow. Somehow we must have misconceived the bearing ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray

... powerful. Whatever there is cruel, whatever there is devilish, whatever there is inhuman in the dark places of the world, shone out of the jewelled eyes which were set in that yellow female face, yellow because its substance was of gold, a face which seemed not to belong to the embryonic legs beneath, for body there was none, but to float above them. A hollow, life-sized mask with two tiny frog-like legs, that was the ...
— The Yellow God - An Idol of Africa • H. Rider Haggard

... other as they are now; while Mr. Scudder tells us, that some of the fossil insects discovered in the Coal formation of America offer characters intermediate between those of existing orders. Agassiz, again, insists strongly that the more ancient animals resemble the embryonic forms of existing species; but as the embryos of distinct groups are known to resemble each other more than the adult animals (and in fact to be undistinguishable at a very early age), this is the same as saying that the ancient ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace

... comprehension of the laws governing his environment. But in religious matters this fear has clung to man tenaciously; and while at first serving a protective function, at the present stage of civilization constitutes an embryonic impediment. The assertion of ecclesiastics that without the aid of religious learning and influence our civilization would have been retarded is a statement that a study of the development of man shows ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks

... technical idea, are free creations on a small basis, and exhibit the musician in all his versatility," says Louis Ehlert. "No work of Chopin's portrays his inner organization so faithfully and completely. Much is embryonic. It is as though he turned the leaves of his fancy without completely reading any page. Still, one finds in them the thundering power of the Scherzi, the half satirical, half coquettish elegance of the Mazurkas, and the southern, ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker

... ideas of God which he communicated by his ministry and teaching, by his character and life. But this, the real supernatural, was not obvious as such to his contemporaries. They looked for it in the lower region of physical effects. And here the Church also in its embryonic spiritual life, in its proneness to externalize religion in forms of rite, and creed, and organization, has thought to find it. Jesus' reproof, "Except ye see signs and wonders ye will not believe," is still pertinent to ...
— Miracles and Supernatural Religion • James Morris Whiton

... motive power, a desire to do something that would astound my father and eventually wring from him the confession that he had misjudged me. To be sure, I should have to wait until early manhood, at least, for the accomplishment of such a coup. Might it not be that I was an embryonic literary genius? Many were the books I began in this ecstasy of self-vindication, only to abandon them when my ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... off and on, just as they occasionally do in Florida or Southern California, is the way I figure it out," he said to the group of uneasy men who contemplated the embryonic blizzard with alarm and misgiving. "Moreover, I believe the wet, cold season is a short one here. The birds are content to stick it out. The fact there is no migration is proof enough for me that the winter ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon

... that it completely modifies the tendencies it would seem that heredity ought to pass on. The similarity of form between parent and child is not exact, because it proceeds from the peculiarities of the individual in incarnation far more than from the collective tendencies of the embryonic cells in ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal

... evidently a novel evening for them. We put the concertina away and got a drawing-board with a sheet of paper and a stick of charcoal, and everybody had to draw a pig blindfold. The usual fragmentary animals appeared, some so embryonic as to be unrecognizable by their designers, some with tails in their ears, others with too many legs. My own efforts were adjudged the best, which led Bill to express surprise that a man who couldn't draw anything at all with his ...
— Aliens • William McFee

... determining factor at this crisis. Seeing in myself an embryonic Raphael, I had a habit of preserving all kinds of odds and ends as souvenirs of my development. These, I believed, sanctified by my Midas-like touch, would one day be of great value. If the public can tolerate, as it does, thousands ...
— A Mind That Found Itself - An Autobiography • Clifford Whittingham Beers

... respect, tempered by the demands of a wise control, is exactly what is needed among children. Again and again, in dealing with young minds, the teacher who respects personality as sacred, no matter how embryonic it be, wins the victories which count for true education. Yet, all too often, we forget the claims of this reverence, in the presence of the ...
— Stories to Tell to Children • Sara Cone Bryant

... York that still looked upon Union Square as an uptown quarter. Besides that, the lone scion of respectability who wandered too freely about the region just below Manhattanville, was apt to get his head most beautifully punched at the hands of some predatory gang of embryonic toughs from the shanties on the line of ...
— Jersey Street and Jersey Lane - Urban and Suburban Sketches • H. C. Bunner

... embryonic group of Iberian nations of the fifteenth century grew into the powerful Spanish monarchy of the sixteenth. A single centralized government was created, and the divided currents of national life were gathered by it into one great stream. Notwithstanding ...
— European Background Of American History - (Vol. I of The American Nation: A History) • Edward Potts Cheyney

... by the navel-knot to the Mother, never astray, They in the ear upon ground will pour their intuitive minds, Cut man's tangles for Earth's first broad rectilinear way: Admonishing loftier reaches, the rich adventurous shoots, Pushes of tentative curves, embryonic upwreathings in air; Not always the sprouts of Earth's root-Laws preserving her brutes; Oft but our primitive hungers licentious in ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... a proper part of the thesaurus itself are contained within arrow brackets thus: . Section headings, which are not an actual part of the thesaurus proper, are included between percent (%) markers. Occasional references to numbers starting with "@" are the embryonic beginnings of a reorganized version, mentioned below. A few comments are also included within curly brackets ...
— Roget's Thesaurus

... of the church. The germ of that organization existed during Christ's personal ministry. Doctrine was given, ministers preached, baptism was administered, and people believed, but this embryonic organization could not be completely established as a church before the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. Therefore provision was made for its progressive development under the tutelage of specially inspired apostles. ...
— The Last Reformation • F. G. [Frederick George] Smith

... description of the dorsal chord in its embryological development, he shows that a certain parallelism exists between the comparative degrees of development of the vertebral column in the different groups of fishes, and the phases of its embryonic development in the higher fishes. Farther on he shows a like coincidence between the development of the system of fins in the different groups of fishes, and the gradual growth and differentiation of the fins in the embryo of the higher living fishes.* (* "Recherches sur les Poissons Fossiles", ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz

... "Dictionnaire des Termes Usites dans les Sciences Naturelles," 1834, it is defined as the production of an atypical form either by arrest or excess of development.), I should have thought that the archetype in imagination was always in some degree embryonic, and therefore capable [of] and ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin

... all of a non-spiritual, in the latter as a progressive articulated construction, with gradually increasing intelligence. In the unconscious products of nature, nature's aim to reflect upon itself, to become intelligence, fails, in man it succeeds. Nature is the embryonic life of spirit. Nature and spirit are essentially identical: "That which is posited out of consciousness is in its essence the same as that which is posited in consciousness also." Therefore "the knowable must itself bear the impress of the knower." Nature the preliminary stage, ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg

... could be substituted for the damaged enzyme, and the problem was solved. They left the planet, assuring the planetary government that laboratories on Hospital Earth would begin working at once to find a way actually to rebuild the damaged genes in the embryonic cells, and thus put a permanent end to ...
— Star Surgeon • Alan Nourse

... the Hadda Mullah's followers had three times as many killed and wounded as the candidates for the pleasures of the world to come. It would almost seem, that in the undeveloped minds of these wild and superstitious sons of the mountains, there lie the embryonic germs of economics and practical philosophy, pledges of ...
— The Story of the Malakand Field Force • Sir Winston S. Churchill

... The old woman brings news of the outer world, relates stories, curious incidents of married and unmarried life, tales of wicked wives and wronged husbands. The recluse laughs: "os in risus cachinnosque dissolvitur"; in a word, the old woman amuses the anchoress with fabliaux in an embryonic state. This is a most remarkable though little known example, for we can here observe fabliaux in a rudimentary stage, and going about in one more, and that a rather unexpected way. Is the case of this ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand

... virtue of which they are still palpitating in ours? In whose consciousness does their truest life consist—their own, or ours? Can Shakespeare be said to have begun his true life till a hundred years or so after he was dead and buried? His physical life was but as an embryonic stage, a coming up out of darkness, a twilight and dawn before the sunrise of that life of the world to come which he was to enjoy hereafter. We all live for a while after we are gone hence, but we ...
— The Humour of Homer and Other Essays • Samuel Butler

... at Grimshaw-street are pretty intelligent and controversial. They have a mutual improvement class, which is one of the best of its kind in the town, and they discuss the laws of life,—mental, physical, political, and spiritual—like embryonic philosophers bent upon rectifying all creation. Their class is prosperous, and is calculated, if correctly managed, to be of much importance to those visiting it. All such classes ought to encouraged, and we hope the Grimshaw-street essayists ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus

... produces a commotion. It acts as a stimulus or wakener to the old ideas sleeping beneath the surface. It draws them up above the surface-level; that is, into consciousness. But what ideas are thus disturbed? There are thousands of these latent ideas, embryonic thoughts, beneath the surface. Those which possess sufficient kinship to this new-comer to hear his call, respond. For in the mind "birds of a feather flock together." Ideas and thoughts which resemble the new one answer, the ...
— The Elements of General Method - Based on the Principles of Herbart • Charles A. McMurry

... locked up in their geometric solids, they remain permanently enduring forms—concessively inorganic, not functionally-endowed, matter. To speak, therefore, of the "germs of crystals," is using language that has no appreciable significance to us. Germs are embryonic, and imply a law of growth—a process of assimilation, ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright

... there are now seventy vestigial structures, e.g., vermiform appendices, useful in the lower life but worse than useless in man. When an anatomist discovered an organ in a certain animal he foretold its rudimentary existence in the embryonic man, and we are told his prophecy was fulfilled through the microscope, "just as the planet Neptune was discovered after its existence had been predicted from the disturbances produced in the orbit of Uranus." As some noble gallery owes its supremacy to centuries of ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis

... two following sentences are written, one down the margin, the other across the page. "Abortive organs eminently useful in classification. Embryonic state of organs. ...
— The Foundations of the Origin of Species - Two Essays written in 1842 and 1844 • Charles Darwin

... remove a check on the conversation and a heated discussion in tense undertones went on, it seemed interminably.... Probably very few aspects of Benham and Amanda were ignored.... Towards morning the twanging of a string proclaimed the arrival of a querulous-faced minstrel with a sort of embryonic one-stringed horse-headed fiddle, and after a brief parley singing began, a long high-pitched solo. The fiddle squealed pitifully under the persuasion of a semicircular bow. Two heads ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells

... the beginning of time appeared a small spot, which grew as embryonic life and became a human figure, known in the myth as Kuterastan, The One Who Lives Above. This creator then made light, and next Stenatlihan, Woman Without Parents. Next he created Chuganaai, The Sun, and following him Hadintin ...
— The North American Indian • Edward S. Curtis

... suggestive fact that the embryos of all reptiles, birds, and mammals show gill-clefts—a tell-tale evidence of their distant aquatic ancestry. But these embryonic gill-clefts are not used for respiration and show no trace of gills except in a few embryonic reptiles and birds where their dwindled vestiges have been recently discovered. As to the gill-clefts, they are of no use in higher Vertebrates except that the first becomes the Eustachian ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson

... stories are enjoyed. Real history is of course impossible to young children, whose idea of time is still very vague, and whose understanding of the motives and actions of those immediately around them is but embryonic. They still crave for adventure and romance, and they thrill to deeds of bravery. Bravery in the fight appeals to all boys and to most girls, and it is a question for serious consideration how this admiration is to be guided, it certainly cannot be ignored. It is legitimate ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith

... in particular! Your research work was illuminating; in view of its casual nature it was unbelievably helpful. But personally I feel that a thorough sifting of the matter requires slightly different methods. One should endeavor to get at the thing in its embryonic state, as—as it were. Don't you think so? If one could locate the place of incubation, the—er—nest from which these night birds of yours first stretched their wings, it might prove really worth while—no? And—and at the same time I'll just return ...
— Then I'll Come Back to You • Larry Evans

... to the miner, the caisson to the bridge-builder, the anti-friction metal to the mechanic for bearings. It was already known how to vulcanize rubber, and how to galvanize iron. The application of machinery in the harvest-field had begun with the embryonic reaper, while both the bicycle and the automobile were heralded in primitive prototypes. The gigantic expansion of the iron and steel industry was foreshadowed in the change from wood to coal in the smelting furnaces. The sewing-machine had brought with it, like the friction match, one of ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin

... had to," she said. "That paranoid mind of his had built up a shield we simply couldn't get through. He had plans for making himself president, you know—and all the terrifying potentialities of an embryonic Hitler." She grimaced. "We don't like being forced to kill," she said, "but ...
— Supermind • Gordon Randall Garrett

... return to phylogenetic, ontogenetic, rudimentary, unconscious, organic reactions, to atavistic, prehistoric, performed, embryonic, immature methods of response, the vestigial remnants, revivals of long ago, which have been submerged but which now reappear due to our reversionary tendencies—uprooted by dissociation, disintegration or regression, with its lapse ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10

... this and other like reflections would too long detain us. Suffice it that we have established the position that all living creatures which show any signs of intelligence, must certainly each one have already gone through the embryonic stages an infinite number of times, or they could no more have achieved the intricate process of self-development unconsciously, than they could play the piano unconsciously without any previous knowledge of the instrument. It remains, ...
— Life and Habit • Samuel Butler

... early days when the University of Cambridge was still in an embryonic state, the various newly formed communities of academic learning had no corporate centre whatever. "The chancellor and masters" are first mentioned in a rescript of Bishop Balsham dated 1276, eight years before he founded Peterhouse, the first college, and six ...
— Beautiful Britain—Cambridge • Gordon Home

... repose, some an attempt to crowd the body into as small a space as possible. Some have suggested that the corpse was tightly bound up with cords in order that the spirit might not escape and do harm to the living. Perhaps the most widely approved theory is that which considers this position to be embryonic, i.e. the position of the embryo previous to birth. None of these explanations is entirely convincing, but no better one has been put forward up to ...
— Rough Stone Monuments and Their Builders • T. Eric Peet



Words linked to "Embryonic" :   embryonic stem-cell research, embryo, immature, embryology, early



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