"Line of descent" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... so destroy, the earlier and less improved branches: this is represented in the diagram by some of the lower branches not reaching to the upper horizontal lines. In some cases no doubt the process of modification will be confined to a single line of descent, and the number of modified descendants will not be increased; although the amount of divergent modification may have been augmented. This case would be represented in the diagram, if all the lines proceeding from (A) were removed, excepting that from a1 to a10. In the same way the ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... individual parts of the animals but the whole organism as well should be derived from the earlier forms. If, for instance, it be possible to arrange horses and their tertiary kindred in an unbroken line of descent according to the formation of their feet, whilst the other characteristics (teeth, skull-structure, etc.,) do not admit of arrangement in a corresponding series, the first line must ...
— At the Deathbed of Darwinism - A Series of Papers • Eberhard Dennert
... line of descent. I, the modern, am incontestably a man; yet I, Big-Tooth, the primitive, am not a man. Somewhere, and by straight line of descent, these two parties to my dual personality were connected. Were the Folk, before their destruction, in the process of becoming men? And did I and mine carry ...
— Before Adam • Jack London
... was the Oeohippus. He had four toes on the hind foot and three on the front one. Through a long period of development, the present day one-toed horse descended from this many-toed primitive horse. There is certainty of the line of descent of the horse because all the connecting links have been discovered in fossil form, between the primitive horse and the present day horse. Plants in like manner show all kinds of ...
— Negro Folk Rhymes - Wise and Otherwise: With a Study • Thomas W. Talley
... use in Europe to hunt people up. He says that if he ever goes back to be King of Bulgaria again he is going to introduce books like these. Cousin Ferdinand is getting very full of American ideas and he says that what you want to know about a man is not his line of descent but his line of credit. And he says that the whole King business in Europe has been mismanaged. He says that there should have been millions in it. I forgot to say in my diary sooner that Cousin Ferdinand's two friends, Mr. Mosenhammer and Mr. Sheehan, took him into their ...
— The Hohenzollerns in America - With the Bolsheviks in Berlin and other impossibilities • Stephen Leacock
... center of the caldron was far to the right of where they stood, and that its left rim was only a little within their direct line of descent. But to land even one foot inside that inferno would be as fatal as to ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, August 1930 • Various
... to say that I should have drowned myself. For Lake Erie was close by, and it is so much better to accept asphyxia, which takes only three minutes by the watch, than a mesalliance, that lasts fifty years to begin with, and then passes along down the line of descent, (breaking out in all manner of boorish manifestations of feature and manner, which, if men were only as short-lived as horses, could be readily traced back through the square-roots and the cube-roots of the family stem on which you have hung the armorial ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... Zedekiah, the prophet none other than Jeremiah, and the scribe, as a matter of course, Baruch. The usefulness of this fine-spun analogy becomes apparent when we recall that Queen Victoria boasts descent from Fergus of Scotland, and so is furnished with a line of descent which would justify pride if it rested on fact instead of fancy. On the other hand, imagine the dismay of Heinrich von Treitschke, Saxon par excellence, were it proved that he is a son of the ten ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... fear nothing. It sat down at the top of the slope, and stuck its claws well into the ice in front of it. I ran back to the foot of the slope to meet it. Its claws lost hold, and it came down thundering, like a huge round stone from a mountain side. I stood, and, measuring exactly its line of descent, stuck the butt of my spear into the ice with the point sloping upwards. Then I retired to see the end, for I did not dare to stand near to it. It happened as I had wished: the bear came straight on my spear. The point ...
— Red Rooney - The Last of the Crew • R.M. Ballantyne
... sensation of drinking whiskey with my Headmaster's double, but I enjoy creeping down the companion-way to the Mate's room. And I, being of the true line of descent, with my father held in memory still, am welcome. I am taken into this old sea-dog's confidence, and we talk. I have learnt, I think, the delicate art of asking questions of the men who do the world's work. Perhaps because I ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee |
