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More "Insect" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Bugs of every size and aspect met my eyes wherever they turned. I felt for the moment as I suppose a man may feel in a fit of delirium tremens. Presently my attention was drawn towards a very odd-looking insect on the mantelpiece. This animal was incessantly raising its arms as if towards heaven and clasping them together, as though it ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... sounded short as a twanged string, and the next moment a late foxglove spire, naked save for its topmost bell, quivered beneath the onslaught of the arched brown and yellow body. The heat haze shimmered on the distant horizon like an insect's wing, but was tempered on the moorland height by the capricious wind, and Ishmael ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... Almighty! King of nations! earth Thy footstool, heaven Thy throne! Thine the greatness, power, and glory, Thine the kingdom, Lord, alone! Life and death are in Thy keeping, and Thy will ordaineth all: From the armies of Thy heavens to an unseen insect's fall. ...
— Quiet Talks on the Crowned Christ of Revelation • S. D. Gordon
... down in angry crimson that ate like fire through the sullen heart of clouds banked low along the horizon. In Varia's garden the shrill insect voices were hushed; the trees drooped their leaves motionless. It was a hot and breathless night, when thunder muttered distantly and vague lightnings played hide-and-seek among the clouds, and the earth was still as an animal that ...
— Nicanor - Teller of Tales - A Story of Roman Britain • C. Bryson Taylor
... of coal; or like the bowlder that forms the pencil point of a mighty iceberg, scratching the rocks in its movement across a submerged plain, destined to be upheaved as a continent in some future convulsion; or like the coral insect, which, in forming his separate cell, unconsciously assists in laying the foundation of islands and vast regions of solid earth; we, the creatures of the hour, all unconscious of the record we are making, leave imperishable ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... yet smoother and darker water, separated from the rest as if by an invisible cobweb, boom of the water nymphs, resting on it. From a hilltop you can see a fish leap in almost any part; for not a pickerel or shiner picks an insect from this smooth surface but it manifestly disturbs the equilibrium of the whole lake. It is wonderful with what elaborateness this simple fact is advertised—this piscine murder will out—and from ...
— Walden, and On The Duty Of Civil Disobedience • Henry David Thoreau
... did not fear him,—this creature in gray. She stood stock-still, and stared at him, so near that he could see her wink her starry eyes, with the white rings round them. She stamped one hoof, kicked an insect from her ear with another, snorted again, wheeled around, and at last broke away for the thick shelter of the trees, lightly and swiftly as a breeze which skims from one ...
— Camp and Trail - A Story of the Maine Woods • Isabel Hornibrook
... spirit and matter. . . . The belief that material bodies return to dust, hereafter to rise up as spiritual bodies with material sensations and desires, is incorrect. . . . The caterpillar, transformed into a beautiful insect, is no longer a worm, nor does the insect return to fraternise with or control the worm. . . . There is no bridge across the gulf which divides two such opposite conditions as the spiritual, or incorporeal, ...
— Modern Saints and Seers • Jean Finot
... Matthew Hopkins, 'Witch-Finder General'— was to tie down the accused in some painful or at least uneasy posture for twenty-four hours, during which time relays of watchers sat round. It was supposed that an imp would come and suck the witch's blood; so any fly, moth, wasp or insect seen in the room was a familiar in that shape, and the poor wretch was accordingly convicted of the charge. Numerous confessions are recorded to have been extracted in this manner from ailing and doting crones by Master Hopkins, cf. Hudribras, Part ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I (of 6) • Aphra Behn
... The Beetle, an insect peculiarly sacred to the Buddhists, was the Egyptian sign of Phthah, the Father of Gods; and in the hieroglyphics it stands for the name of that deity, whose head is either surmounted by a beetle, or is itself ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... is on patrol up the Parang River in the Malay peninsula. On board are the midshipman, Bob Roberts, and the ensign, Tom Long. Their friendly bickering goes on throughout the book. Various tropical indispositions trouble them, and also of course the insect life in the air and saurian life in the river is of no help. It is hard to know which of the natives are on their side, and which not, and there is a great deal of two-facedness. We are introduced to various fruits. ...
— Middy and Ensign • G. Manville Fenn
... Onondaga, New York, and sallying out whenever he was hungry, would eat an Indian or two and pick his teeth with their ribs. The red men had no arms that could prevail against it, but at last the Holder of the Heavens, hearing their cry for aid, came down and attacked the insect. Finding that it had met its match, the mosquito flew away so rapidly that its assailant could hardly keep it in sight. It flew around the great lake, then turned eastward again. It sought help vainly of the witches that brooded in the sink-holes, or ...
— Myths And Legends Of Our Own Land, Complete • Charles M. Skinner
... by report of the French Court to cause her to shrink instinctively, as from a repulsive insect, at the name of the mistress of Louis XV. She trembled at the thought of Angelique's infatuation, or perversity, in suffering herself to be attracted by the glitter of the vices of the ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby
... all life. The hemlocks no longer chanted riotous gladness. There was a dirge to-night of futility, monotonous age-old eons of useless effort, the useless fall of the forest giant to the dry rot of slug and insect. It was as if Wayland's spirit stood back and listened to the conflicting contentions of two other men, the one who wanted to breast the stream and the one who wanted to go with the current; one full of blind, red-blood courage, the other full of cold white-corpuscled ...
— The Freebooters of the Wilderness • Agnes C. Laut
... remain at home, I entered into an arrangement with her that she was to supply me with board and lodgings for three pounds a week, and henceforth resisting all Curzon Street temptations, I trudged home to eat a chop. I studied the servant as one might an insect under a microscope. "What an admirable book she would make, but what will the end be? if I only knew ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... managed her attack upon Vivian with more art than could be expected from so silly a woman; but we must consider that all her faculties were concentrated on one object; so that she seemed to have an instinct for coquetry. The most silly animals in the creation, from the insect tribe upwards, show, on some occasions, where their interests are immediately concerned, a degree of sagacity and ingenuity, which, compared with their usual imbecility, appears absolutely wonderful. The opinion which Vivian had early formed of the ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. V - Tales of a Fashionable Life • Maria Edgeworth
... casually remarked, "I shall go in here, and come out there—over a thousand miles of Trail," and as he looked at me in wonder, I had a sudden realization of what that remark meant. A vision of myself, a minute, almost indistinguishable insect—creeping hardily through an illimitable forest filled my imagination, and a momentary awe fell ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... ago, a wicked atheist had written an article in a magazine manifesting how evil nature was, how the animals preyed upon one another, how everything from the tiniest insect to the largest elephant suffered and suffered and suffered. How even the vegetation lived a short life of agony and frustration, and then fell into foul decay.... Brandon had read the article against his will, and had then hated the writer of ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... most completely unaware was Franklin Kane, who sat, as usual, just outside the circle in the sun, balancing his tea-cup on his raised knees and 'Fletcherising' a slice of cake. Gerald had glanced at him as one might glance—Althea had felt it keenly—at some nice little insect on one's path, a pleasant insect, but too small to warrant any attention beyond a casual recognition of type. But Franklin, who had a casual interest in nobody, was very much aware of the newcomer, and he gazed attentively at Gerald ...
— Franklin Kane • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... engaged on their hands and knees searching all over the ground for the identical ivy leaf where Babs had placed the rescued insect, when a voice sounded in their ears, and Judy raised her head to see pretty Mildred ...
— A Young Mutineer • Mrs. L. T. Meade
... vanished into dust again. And other kings usurped their place, Who called themselves of Kintu's race, And worshipped Kintu; not as he, The mild, benignant deity, Who held all life a holy thing, Be it of insect or of king, Would have ordained, but with wild rite, With altars heaped, and dolorous cries, And savage dance, and bale-fires light, An unaccepted sacrifice. At last, when thousand years were flown, The great Ma-anda filled the throne: A prince of generous heart and high, Impetuous, ...
— Verses • Susan Coolidge
... "She had one husband—only one. It was Jean Jacques Barbille. She could only treat one as she treated me—me, her husband. But you, what had you to do with that! You used her—so!" He made a motion as though to stamp out an insect with his foot. "Beautiful, a genius, sick and alone—no husband, no child, and you used her so! That is why I shall kill you to-night. We will ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... 'Annales des Science. Nat.' (3rd series, Zoolog.) tome 5 page 6.)) which deposits its eggs within the stamens of a Scrophularia, and secretes a poison which produces a gall, on which the larva feeds; but there is another insect (Misocampus) which deposits its eggs within the body of the larva within the gall, and is thus nourished by its living prey; so that here a hymenopterous insect depends on a dipterous insect, and this depends ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin
... the king's sword and killed the bee—and the king, too. A similar parable is put into the mouth of Buddha. A bald carpenter was attacked by a mosquito. He called his son to drive it away; the son took the axe, aimed a blow at the insect, but split his father's head in two, in killing the mosquito. In the Anvar-i-Suhaili, the Persian translation of the Pantschatantra, it is a tame bear who keeps the flies from the sleeping gardener by throwing a stone ...
— Italian Popular Tales • Thomas Frederick Crane
... Francos: did not God design That e'en the insect should his life enjoy? Indeed, his joyous song of gratitude Doth only cease that he may puncture make To meet requirements which God hath ordained. Hence it were well to nature's laws obey, For e'en this ...
— 'A Comedy of Errors' in Seven Acts • Spokeshave (AKA Old Fogy)
... season,—spends almost all its existence in a form where the distinction of sex lies dormant: a few days, I might almost say a few hours, comprise its whole sexual consciousness, and the majority of its race die before reaching that epoch. The law of sex is written absolutely through the whole insect world. Yet everywhere it is written as a secondary and subordinate law. The life which is common to the sexes is the principal life; the life which each sex leads, "as such," is a minor and ...
— Women and the Alphabet • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... the three long, open windows subdued the sun-glare, yet the very odour of the cut flowers in the room seemed oppressive, while without could be heard the busy hum of insect life. ...
— The House of Whispers • William Le Queux
... a great mind to fight for his penates, and twice made a vehement demonstration of attack; but his heart failed him, and he retreated to a neighbouring mango branch, whence a few minutes after we saw him making short dashes after his insect prey, apparently oblivious of the domestic calamity that had ...
— The Nests and Eggs of Indian Birds, Volume 1 • Allan O. Hume
... nocturnal cotillon; while the sounds heard are nightly noises in a Southern States forest, semi-tropical, as the wild creatures who have their home in it. The green cicada chirps continuously, "Katy did— Katy did;" the hyladae, though reptiles, send forth an insect note; while the sonorous "gluck-gluck" of the huge rana pipiens mingles with the melancholy "whoo-whooa" of the great horned owl; which, unseen, sweeps on silent wing through the shadowy aisles of the forest, leading the lone traveller to fancy ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... Two young people can tell a great deal to each other under certain circumstances in the mid-watch of a starlit night. The lap, lap of the wavelets whispering against the schooner's hull, the drone of the surf on a distant bar, and the sounds of insect life from the shore were ...
— Sheila of Big Wreck Cove - A Story of Cape Cod • James A. Cooper
... tree. All locusts come from eggs. In first coming from the egg, they are not winged, but look like grub worms. After a while these grubs cast off their skins, and become locusts. Now, there is a kind of locust which is seventeen years in changing from the egg to the full insect It is this kind which is so numerous every seventeen years. If you go into the field when they are coming from the ground, you will see the grass and plants covered ...
— The Summer Holidays - A Story for Children • Amerel
... Wound-motive comes the sweet woodland music and the breath of the blessed morning, fragrant with flowers and fresh with dew. It is one of those incomparable bursts of woodland notes, full of bird-song and the happy hum of insect life and rustling of netted branches and waving of long tasseled grass. I know of nothing like it save ...
— Parsifal - Story and Analysis of Wagner's Great Opera • H. R. Haweis
... lives in the rivers of India, and feeds upon insects, cannot afford to wait until the insects which thrive upon the leaves of aquatic plants fall into the water. So as he cannot leap high enough to catch them, he fills his mouth with water and squirts it at an insect with such aim and force that he rarely fails to knock the insect into the water where he can easily catch it. Many other animals squirt various liquids, occasionally in attack, but most times in defence. The fish makes a ...
— The Human Side of Animals • Royal Dixon
... fungoid diseases where the mycelium of the fungus grows into the tissue and spots the leaves, eventually causing them to fall, thus robbing the plant of its only means of elaborating food. Its most deadly enemy in the insect world is a small insect of the lepidopterous variety, which is known as the coffee-leaf miner. It is closely related to the clothes moth and, like the moth, bores in its larval stage, feeding on the mesophyl of the leaves. This gives ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... unexpected arrival. Wrapped in a large cloak which covered up her convent uniform, she looked, as compared with the gay girls around her, like a poor sombre night-moth, dazzled by the light, in company with other glittering creatures of the insect race, fluttering with graceful movements, transparent ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... his autobiography, describes his "insect-like" devotion to creed in the green infancy of ritualism. In his early teens at boarding-school he and his mates, with half sincerity, followed a classmate to compline, donned surplices, tossed censers, ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... not properly disposed of. These carcasses should be buried deeply, so that spore formation may be prevented and no animal have access to them. By exercising this precaution the disease will not be disseminated by flies and other insect pests. ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture
... several interesting and important communications sent to the Royal Society during his lifetime. One of these was a report on what he calls "Pneumatical Experiments." "Upon including in a vacuum an insect resembling a beetle, but somewhat larger," he says, "when it seemed to be dead, the air was readmitted, and soon after it revived; putting it again in the vacuum, and leaving it for an hour, after which the air was readmitted, it was observed ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... with which some of the salmon approached the fly, and after darting away from it, returned and sported round it, as if perfectly aware of the deceitful manner by which the hook was hid; but in a reckless moment, just as the fly was moved along the top of the water, resembling the living insect with such exactitude that I could be deceived, they would make a sullen plunge, and then as if aware of the foolish act they had committed, secure their death by running away with the whole line before they could possibly feel the hook. A slight jerk is given to the tackle, and ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... words, when the fly, whose antennae were longer than usual, and were turned towards the little prattler, gave such a leap that Mademoiselle Tom Thumb trembled. The wings of the insect fluttered, and made a little sharp noise, which, however, had nothing terrible in it, and Piccolissima perceived that her companion was laughing. It was evident that the fly must laugh with his wings, because he could not laugh in any other way. It was with his ...
— Piccolissima • Eliza Lee Follen
... brilliance, but one which is likely to crack and scale when exposed. They are not much used. Shellac is the most common and the most useful of the spirit varnishes. Its basis is resin lac, a compound resinous substance exuded from an East India scale insect (Carteria lacca) found mostly in the province of Assam. The term "lac" is the same as "lakh" which means 100,000 and is indicative of the countless hosts of insects which are the source from which this ...
— Handwork in Wood • William Noyes
... by a parity of Reason suppose that it still proceeds gradually through those Beings which are of a Superior Nature to him; since there is an infinitely greater space and room for different Degrees of Perfection, between the Supreme Being and Man, than between Man and the most despicable Insect. This Consequence of so great a variety of Beings which are superior to us, from that variety which is inferior to us, is made by Mr. Lock, in a Passage which I shall here set down, after having premised, that notwithstanding there is such infinite ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... The insect can be divided, because it has limbs with which to move; and an intelligence higher than man can doubtless see emanations from those particles of light. But a monad is indivisible! Think of each cubic inch of this great earth containing a million grains of sand, and those ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams
... most lovely time of the year. The sun was still warm, but the dreaded black fly and other insect pests of the region had disappeared before the sharp frosts that occurred every night. The hilly banks of the St. Maurice were covered with unbroken forest, and "the woods of autumn all around, the vale had put their glory on." Presently Trenton saw Miss Sommerton, accompanied by old Mrs. Perrault, ...
— One Day's Courtship - The Heralds Of Fame • Robert Barr
... walking here the prisoner saw a little mound of earth rising between two of the great stones of the floor. At first he thought that some tiny worm or insect was trying to build a house for itself. Looking closer he saw that it was only the home of a little plant. The stray seed had been brought by the wind, and it was now sending its roots down into the crevice between the stones. "Poor little plant!" said the prisoner, "what ...
— A Kindergarten Story Book • Jane L. Hoxie
... plants and souls to bees, might wrap a drama of destiny about this insect. She would command a leading place in a cast which included the butterfly that gave silk to the world, the mosquito that helped to prove the germ theory of disease, and the caterpillar that loosed the apple which revealed the law of ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... black insect with shell-like wings flew in Orne's port, settled in his close-cropped red hair. Orne pulled the insect gently from his hair, released it. Again it tried to land in his hair. He ducked. It flew across the bridge, out the ...
— Missing Link • Frank Patrick Herbert
... the scientific point of view, and look with impartial interest at this industrial cannibalism," returned Perry, sarcastically. "Eat or be eaten that's what enlightened self-interest has come to. After all, Ralph would say, it is nature, the insect world over again, the victim duped and crippled before he is devoured, and the lawyer—how shall I put it?—facilitating the ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... thinking of the assignation, he entered the chamber. And having entered that hall enveloped in deep gloom, that wretch of wicked soul came upon Bhima of incomparable prowess, who had come a little before and who was waiting in a corner. And as an insect approacheth towards a flaming fire, or a puny animal towards a lion, Kichaka approached Bhima, lying down in a bed and burning in anger at the thought of the insult offered to Krishna, as if he were the Suta's Death. And having approached Bhima, Kichaka possessed by lust, and his heart ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... true, in the height of his power; but, at his uprising, the air is filled with harmonious sounds, the insect tribes are on the wing, and unite their feeble voice in the universal ...
— The Little Quaker - or, the Triumph of Virtue. A Tale for the Instruction of Youth • Susan Moodie
... like everything else in these parts, and goes down headlong. Run to fetch your hat—and it's night. Wink at the right time of black night—and it's morning. Everything is in extremes. There is an insect here (I forget its name, and Fletcher and Roche are both out) that chirps all day. There is one outside the window now. The chirp is very loud, something like a Brobdingnagian grasshopper. The creature is born to chirp—to progress in chirping—to ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 1 (of 3), 1833-1856 • Charles Dickens
... prep and has sloping shoulders and weighs one hundred and eleven stripped, he is making you look like a bale of hay that has been dumped by mistake on an athletic field. And when he gets a team in the gymnasium between halves, with the game going wrong, and stands up before them and sizes up their insect nerve and rubber backbone and hereditary awkwardness and incredible talent in doing the wrong thing, to say nothing of describing each individual blunder in that queer nasal clack of his—well, ...
— At Good Old Siwash • George Fitch
... the golden-wing leaned far out of his oaken walls, and called from morning to night. Hard-working parents rushed hither and thither, snatching, digging, or dragging their prey from every imaginable hiding-place. It was woful times in the insect world, so many new hungry mouths to be filled. All this life seemed to stir the young kings: they grew restless; they were late. Their three little heads, growing darker every day, bobbed this ...
— Little Brothers of the Air • Olive Thorne Miller
... and his steps were long and swift. His guide was before him. Whatever his pace, whether fast or slow, the distance between them never seemed to change. The bird would dart aside, perhaps to catch an insect, but it always returned promptly ...
— The Lords of the Wild - A Story of the Old New York Border • Joseph A. Altsheler
... Each insect thing that comes in Spring To gladden this sad earth, It flits and whirls and pipes and skirls, It chirps in mocking mirth A merry song the whole day long To see the Swank abroad. But every Glug, whoe'er he be, Salutes, with grave humility And deference to noble ...
— The Glugs of Gosh • C. J. Dennis
... are known as navel oranges. As soon as the Florida season ends, the California season begins; consequently, the market season for this fruit is a lengthy one. The russet of oranges is caused by the bite of an insect on the skin. To be shipped, oranges are packed in cases that will contain from 48 to 400 ...
— Woman's Institute Library of Cookery, Vol. 5 • Woman's Institute of Domestic Arts and Sciences
... had breath enough neither to answer nor to catechize Kirkwood. They found seats on the forward deck and rested there in grim silence, both fretting under the enforced restraint, while the boat darted, like some illuminated and exceptionally active water insect, from pier to pier. ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... heartily wished that Kitely was dead—dead and buried, and his secret with him; he wished that it had been anywise possible to have crushed the life out of him where he sat in that easy chair as soon as he had shown himself the reptile that he was. A man might kill any poisonous insect, any noxious reptile at pleasure—why not ...
— The Borough Treasurer • Joseph Smith Fletcher
... regions of the air, pursuing its noisy congeners, or swooping down with that peculiar hollow rushing sound, as of a person blowing into some empty vessel, when it seizes with wide-extended bill its insect prey. ...
— Canadian Crusoes - A Tale of The Rice Lake Plains • Catharine Parr Traill
... have already stated, there were no worms in the forest because of the ants, which allow no insect to be underground near the surface. As for the grass, it takes no very intelligent person to see that it cannot exist under the trees of the tropical forest. If a few blades of grass are to be found on the edge of streamlets it does not follow that you can eat them. ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... have them, sir, from the smallest insect up to man, from the poorest and humblest to the richest and most powerful! Enmity is the law ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... was followed by Mr. Crutchley. He would not eat with us, but was chatty and in goodhumour, and as usual, when in spirits, saucily sarcastic. For instance, it is generally half my employment in hot evenings here to rescue some or other poor buzzing idiot of an insect from the flame of a candle. This, accordingly, I was performing with a Harry Longlegs, which, after much trial to ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... happiness which it is so well able to give. There is not a worm we tread upon, nor a rare leaf that dances merrily as it falls before the autumn winds, but has superior claims upon our study and admiration. The child who plucks a rose to pieces, or crushes the fragile form of a fluttering insect, destroys a work which the highest art could not create, nor man's ...
— The True Citizen, How To Become One • W. F. Markwick, D. D. and W. A. Smith, A. B.
... fly shook the round of the silver net; No insect the swift bird chased; Only two travellers moved and met ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... Land is a smaller but much more splendid insect than the English wasp; it has four orange-coloured wings, and horns and legs of the same colour, a hard body, and a formidable sting. It is an inhabitant of the forest, and is at war with a spider that makes its hole in the sandy places, and which is armed ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 10, No. 279, October 20, 1827 • Various
... those in a similar situation in some parts of Europe. The training of quails for the same cruel purpose of butchering each other furnishes abundance of employment for the idle and dissipated. They have even extended their enquiries after fighting animals into the insect tribe, in which they have discovered a species of gryllus, or locust, that will attack each other with such ferocity as seldom to quit their hold without bringing away at the same time a limb of their antagonist. These little creatures are fed and kept apart in bamboo cages; ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... The body has been in the ground two years. It is worn away; it is clay to clay. Where the heart moulders, a greenish dust, the stake is thrust. Late August it is, and night; a night flauntingly jewelled with stars, a night of shooting stars and loud insect noises. Down the road to Tilbury, silence—and the slow flapping of large leaves. Down the road to Sutton, silence—and the darkness of heavy-foliaged trees. Down the road to Wayfleet, silence—and the whirring scrape of insects in the branches. Down the road to Edgarstown, ...
— Men, Women and Ghosts • Amy Lowell
... except they have been evolved under other conditions, when they might for a period persist. We have, indeed, only to picture to ourselves what the consequence of a continuance of summer would be on insect life to arrive at an idea of the antagonistic influences obtaining in such worlds to ...
— The Birth-Time of the World and Other Scientific Essays • J. (John) Joly
... ocean, of the storm, the glory of sunrise over a dishevelled sea, the ineffable melancholy of twilight rising from an unknown strand; then the solemn coldness of moonlight watches, the scent of the burnt land under the fierce sun, when all nature was hushed save the dreamy buzz of insect-life: the green coolness of underwood or forest, the unutterable harmony of the sighing breeze, and the song of wild birds during the long patient ambushes of partisan war; the taste of bread in hunger, of the stream in the fever of thirst, of approaching sleep ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... readily inoculated by artificial means, the chinquapins, especially varieties of the northern bush forms, quite often escape natural infection, doubtless because of their small size, smooth bark, and less liability to insect attacks. ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association, Report of the Proceedings at the Seventh Annual Meeting • Various
... terrible wilderness, John supported himself by eating locusts—the literal insect, which is still greatly esteemed by the natives—and wild honey, which abounded in the crevices of the rocks; while for clothing he was content with a coat of coarse camel's hair, such as the Arab women make still; and a girdle of skin about his loins. ...
— John the Baptist • F. B. Meyer
... old-fashioned dress coat and jean trousers, they used to follow him to the shore, and watch him as he walked along it with his eyes fixed upon the ground. Suddenly he would stop, fall upon his hands and knees, crawl slowly onward, and then with one hand catch something on the sand; an insect, perhaps. He would stick it upon a pin, put it in his hat, and go on his way; and the boys would whisper to one another that there was a mad baker in Thurso. Once he picked up a nut upon the beach, and said ...
— Captains of Industry - or, Men of Business Who Did Something Besides Making Money • James Parton
... certain plant, bird, insect, beast, man or nation, rises by intrinsic force and predation to dangerous increase, a devouring parasite, or formidable rival, is invariably fostered within its shadow. In good time there is war to ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort
... with admiration in the presence of this hidalgo from the land of knights who was dressed as plainly as a shopkeeper of Gibraltar, yet who could transform himself into a glorious insect of brilliant hues, armed with a mortal sting. And Aguirre did not disturb her illusions, answering affirmatively, with all the simplicity of a hero. Yes; he had a golden costume, that of the consul. He possessed ...
— Luna Benamor • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... shone down upon the fields covered with yellow grain. Far in the distance carriage-wheels softly slipped along the road. There was a torpor in the air—not a bird's cry, not an insect's hum. Gorju cut himself a switch and ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert
... pressed wild-flowers from the desert, and the collection of butterflies and trap-door spiders and other insects in my 'Buggery,' as Norman calls it. When I showed him all the data I had collected from text-books and encyclopaedias about the insect and plant life of the desert, and all the notes I had made myself from my own observations, he actually whistled with surprise. He sat and fired questions at me like a Gatling gun for nearly an hour, winding up by asking me if I had any idea what a valuable collection I had made, ...
— The Little Colonel's Chum: Mary Ware • Annie Fellows Johnston
... what we name space—sphere of unnumbered spirits; Illustrious the mystery of motion, in all beings, even the tiniest insect; Illustrious the attribute of speech—the senses—the body; Illustrious the passing light! Illustrious the pale reflection on the new moon in the western sky! Illustrious whatever I see, or hear, ...
— Poems By Walt Whitman • Walt Whitman
... preyed upon him night and day like that insect which, having once entered the brain of an elk, gnaws ceaselessly at it until the miserable victim's last breath is drawn. While he retained for Pepeeta a devotion which tormented him with its intensity, his guilt made him tremble ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... the enthusiastic welcome which they have given to "the republic" in his humble person. The phylloxera has destroyed the vineyards of this or that region, but "the republican minister of agriculture" is successfully extirpating the injurious insect. The new schoolhouses of another city owe their magnificence "to the deep solicitude of the republic for the education of the masses," while the recently constructed bridge over the river is the work of "the engineers ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 23, October, 1891 • Various
... candles are always made of what I beg to designate as vegetable stearine. When the candles, which are made by dipping, are of the required diameter, they receive a final dip into a mixture of the same material and insect-wax, by which their consistency is preserved in the hottest weather. They are generally coloured red, which is done by throwing a minute quantity of alkanet-root (Anchusa tinctoria), brought from Shan-tung, into the mixture. Verdigris is sometimes employed to dye them green.' We are not aware ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 436 - Volume 17, New Series, May 8, 1852 • Various
... insect life there runs what is recognized as the law of protective assimilation. It represents the necessity under which a creature lives to pretend to be something else as a condition of continuing to be itself. The rose-colored flamingo, curving its long neck in volutions ...
— The Mettle of the Pasture • James Lane Allen
... CHIGOE, an insect which infests the skin of the feet, multiplies incredibly, and is a great annoyance to the negro, who, however, is pretty expert in ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... after-reflection; and here am I in London for the first time as a free man, and, to my own mind, master of my destiny. It really seems at moments as if one might pat it into any form one chose; and it really seems at times as if one were an insect without wings at the bottom of some unfathomable cranny. The fog of my first week in London is, I believe, historic, and its five or six days of tearful blindness and catarrh began to look as if they would reach to the very crack of doom. Those fog-bound days, in ...
— Recollections • David Christie Murray
... see the foolishness o' being a heathen and a infidel, and turn to the Lord! You 'ain't got no teeth, and it takes your wife to herd you. 'And the Lord multiplied the tribulations of his enemy.' You got no more show standin' up agin the Lord than an insect would have ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... knew they still stood close beside him. The voice went on peremptorily. "Stand still if you don't want to be pinned against the wall like an insect." ...
— The Deaves Affair • Hulbert Footner
... plantation at large; for I believe the proprietor at Shirley is reckoned A1 as a farmer. I have before alluded to the blight which destroyed so many fine elms on both shores of the James River. The withering insect appeared at Brandon; but the lady of the house soon proved that she knew the use of tobacco as well as the men, by turning a few hogsheads of the said weed into water, making thereby a murderous decoction, with which, by the intervention ...
— Lands of the Slave and the Free - Cuba, The United States, and Canada • Henry A. Murray
... are pierced through above the joints. It does not carry its eggs like the rest, but encloses them in a kind of cup covered with its silk. It lodges itself in a kind of nut made of the same silk, and hung to the branches of the trees. The web which this insect weaves is so strong, that it not only stops birds, but cannot even be broken by men without ...
— History of Louisisana • Le Page Du Pratz
... draining as it does two extensive slopes. No sooner had we pitched our camp, built a boma of thorny acacia, and other tree branches, by stacking them round our camp, and driven our animals to grass; than we were made aware of the formidable number and variety of the insect tribe, which for a time was another source of anxiety, until a diligent examination of the several ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... without despair, reverses which it was impossible for me to avoid? How often did I behold hurricanes and inundations destroy the fine harvest that I had protected with so much labour against the buffaloes, the wild boars, the monkeys, and even against an insect more destructive still than all the other pests which I have just mentioned—the locust, one of the plagues of Egypt, apparently transported into this province, and which almost regularly, every seven years, leave the isles ...
— Adventures in the Philippine Islands • Paul P. de La Gironiere
... Eliza would like to come down. Then she asked her daughters again if they thought Eliza would come pleasantly. Her remarks showed the track of her will as it veered round from refusal to assent, as bubbles in muddy water show the track of a diving insect. Finally, because the young man had a strong will, and was quite decided as to what he thought best, the girls were sent to ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... one of my nests of the Fuscous ant (Formica fusca), they all began running about in search of some place of refuge. If now I covered over one small part of the nest, after a while some ant discovered it. In such a case, however, the brave little insect never remained there, she came out in search of her friends, and the first one she met she took up in her jaws, threw over her shoulder (their way of carrying friends), and took into the covered part; then both came out again, found two more friends ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... from late afternoon to three in the morning, when the life of trees and grasses and ponds ceases for a short while before it begins again at dawn, the air is full of the busy voices of the insect world. Until we came south to Morogoro, to the land of mangoes, coconut, palms, bamboos, we had known the shrill voice of cicadas and the harsh metallic noises of crickets in grass and trees. But here we made two new acquaintances, and charming little voices they had too. One lived in the grass ...
— Sketches of the East Africa Campaign • Robert Valentine Dolbey
... attributes without the help of the book of Job, then his view of things is beyond my understanding. Nor is it only in the large things that we see the ever present solicitude of some intelligent force. Nothing is too tiny for that fostering care. We see the minute proboscis of the insect carefully adjusted to fit into the calyx of the flower, the most microscopic hair and gland each with its definite purposeful function to perform. What matter whether these came by special creation or by evolution? We know as a matter of fact that ...
— The Stark Munro Letters • J. Stark Munro
... the whole party shouted: "Excellent:" and Chia Cheng nodding his head; "You beast, you beast!" he ejaculated, "it may well be said about you that you see through a thin tube and have no more judgment than an insect! Compose another stanza," he consequently ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... haven't so much to show you there. Of course, it's a dog-gone good thing to get familiar with these diseases and see what you are up against, because all through the history of nut culture, and so forth, one of the basic defects has been the failure to appreciate the importance of insect and disease factors. And we are very much in need of more basic research along those lines, but I agree with Dr. Crane that at present we have a limited amount to show ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Incorporated 39th Annual Report - at Norris, Tenn. September 13-15 1948 • Various
... designed to sketch attractively and simply the wonders of reptile and insect existences, the changes of trees, rocks, rivers, clouds, and winds. This is done by a family of children writing letters, both playful and serious, which are addressed to all children whom ...
— Rollo in Naples • Jacob Abbott
... breaks, or the food runs out, and you're a million million miles from someplace you don't care about any more because you're dead. All frozen up in space ... preserved like a piece of meat in a cold storage locker. And then maybe in a million years or so some lousy insect man from Jupiter comes along and finds you and takes you away ...
— To Each His Star • Bryce Walton
... birds in a cloud fly up From their sweet feeding in the fruit; The droning of the bees and flies Rises gradual as a lute; Is it for fear the birds are flown, And shrills the insect-drone? ...
— Songs of Childhood • Walter de la Mare
... aware from the first of the dull red marks on the walls of the room, where bed-bugs had been slain with slipper heels by angry owners of the blood; but we were not in search of luxury, and we had our belongings and a can of insect-bane brought down from the hotel at once. The fact that stallions squealed and fought in the stalls across the courtyard scarcely promised us uninterrupted sleep; but sleep is not to be weighed in the balance against the ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... received, he soon began to fly at higher game, the King and Queen being the most frequent marks for his satirical shafts. In 1786 appeared The Lousiad, a Heroi-Comic Poem, taking its name from a legend that on the King's dinner plate there had appeared a certain insect not usually found in such exalted quarters. Other objects of his attack were Boswell, the biographer of Johnson, and Bruce, the Abyssinian traveller. W., who wrote under the nom-de-guerre of "Peter Pindar," had a remarkable vein of humour and wit, which, while intensely comic to ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... foot of that tree, pondering this subject, I observed a very strange-looking insect engaged in a very curious kind of occupation. Peterkin's eye caught sight of it at the same instant ...
— The Gorilla Hunters • R.M. Ballantyne
... stroked his beard. The judge with the sickly face, his puffy neighbor, and the prosecuting attorney regarded the prisoners sidewise. And behind the judges the Czar in a red military coat, with an indifferent white face looked down from his portrait over their heads. On his face some insect was creeping, or a ...
— Mother • Maxim Gorky
... see, capacity to suffer, one may come Ito understand all things. In an insect's death are hinted all disasters. Through a knot-hole can be seen the sky and ...
— Chantecler - Play in Four Acts • Edmond Rostand
... the sky, from the sky to the hills, and the sea; to every blade of grass, to every leaf, to the smallest insect, to the million waves of ocean. Yet this earth itself appears but a mote in that sunbeam by which we are conscious of one narrow streak in the abyss. A beam crosses my silent chamber from the window, and atoms are visible in it; a beam slants between the fir-trees, and particles ...
— The Story of My Heart • Richard Jefferies
... endeavouring to put the author upon a level with Warburton, "Nay," said the Doctor, "he has given him some smart hits, but the two men must not be named together: a fly, sir, may sting a stately horse, and make him wince; but one is but an insect, and the other ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... crossing the desert was great; not a bird nor an insect was to be seen moving through the air; but the nights were beautiful and perfectly still, gentle breezes cooling the air. By digging a few inches into the hot, loose soil, a cool and soft bed was obtained. Through wide districts the surface was covered with ...
— Great African Travellers - From Mungo Park to Livingstone and Stanley • W.H.G. Kingston
... herself with her own broad leaf. High up against the intense sky, its hard, burnished foliage glittering in the sunlight, the magnolia spread its dark boughs, adorned with their queenly white flowers. Not a bird nor an insect seemed unmated. The little wren stood and sung to his sitting wife his loud, ecstatic song, made all of her own name,—Matilda, Urilda, Lucinda, Belinda, Adaline, Madaline, Caroline, or Melinda, as the case ...
— Dr. Sevier • George W. Cable
... medicated water in a poisonous spray, and row after row of the blighted hops was relieved of the insect enemies, while the farmer's men kept the fire going, the water boiling, and the poison brewing ...
— The Queen's Scarlet - The Adventures and Misadventures of Sir Richard Frayne • George Manville Fenn
... the University of Wisconsin its first wide sympathetic support. It was the discovery by a professor in one of the western universities of the means of inoculating with some fatal disease, and so exterminating, an insect that destroyed wheat and oats, which gave that professor a chancellorship, I am told, and his university more liberal appropriations. But those achievements and fames, while not to be belittled, I have no wish to catalogue and recite here. I am thinking of the ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley
... few minutes, however, his lethargy was overcome; the men were aroused; the tents were struck; the longship was pushed off, and, under the influence of thirty pair of oars, it crept like a monstrous insect ...
— Erling the Bold • R.M. Ballantyne
... found all over the United States east of the Rocky Mountains. It is small in size, about a foot long and slender, and hides under stones, where it probably feeds on the worms and forms of insect life ...
— Pathfinder - or, The Missing Tenderfoot • Alan Douglas
... body of the insect became singularly suggestive of Pawkins, just as the chess king ...
— The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... the other is that of animals that have shells or horny coats, in which characteristically the shell is thin at the joints, and thick between them (look at the next lobster's claw you can see, without eating). You know, also, that though the crustaceous are titled only from their crusts, the name 'insect' is given to the whole insect tribe, because they are farther jointed almost into sections: it is easily remembered, also, that the projecting joint means strength and elasticity in the creature, and that all its limbs are useful to it, ...
— Proserpina, Volume 1 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... Bruhier, physician, printed at Paris in 1744, pp. 102, 103, &c., it is shown that they have seen some who have been under water forty-eight hours, others during three days, and during eight days. He adds to this the example of the insect chrysalis, which passes all the winter without giving any signs of life, and the aquatic insects which remain all the winter motionless in the mud; which also happens to the frogs and toads; ants ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... edge of the stream. He saw the frog lean forward, and then the butterfly vanished. It seemed like a piece of magic. The child knew that the frog had caught the butterfly, but how? The fluttering insect was more than a foot from the frog when it disappeared, and he was sure that the frog had neither jumped nor snapped at the butterfly. What he saw, he saw as plainly as you see your hand in the ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... wash lemons before grating them, not only to remove any foreign matter sticking to them, but in order to remove the tiny insect eggs so often seen on them in the disguise of black specks. They may be kept fresh indefinitely, if wiped perfectly dry and placed in a sealed top ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter
... Admiral Grace Hopper (an early computing pioneer better known for inventing {COBOL}) liked to tell a story in which a technician solved a persistent {glitch} in the Harvard Mark II machine by pulling an actual insect out from between the contacts of one of its relays, and she subsequently promulgated {bug} in its hackish sense as a joke about the incident (though, as she was careful to admit, she was not there when it happened). For many years the logbook associated ...
— THE JARGON FILE, VERSION 2.9.10
... sir, it is only a water-bug," he observed, rescuing the insect upon his thumb-nail. "You need not have been frightened, however, ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 25, September 17, 1870 • Various
... umbrella-tree) one of the most singular trees of the eastern coast-line of tropical Australia; a slender stem, about thirty feet in height, gives off a few branches with immense digitate dark and glossy leaves, and long spike-like racemes of small scarlet flowers, a great resort for insects and insect-feeding birds. Soon after the ship had come to an anchor, some of the natives came off in their canoes and paid us a visit, bringing with them a quantity of shell-fish (SANGUINOLARIA RUGOSA), which they eagerly exchanged for biscuit. For a few days afterwards we occasionally met them on the ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... troublesome in libraries, eating the bindings. Keating's Insect Powder will keep them away from books, but only so long as it ...
— Bookbinding, and the Care of Books - A handbook for Amateurs, Bookbinders & Librarians • Douglas Cockerell
... the only world to which all else in the firmament were obsequious attendants, but a mere insignificant speck among the host of heaven! Man no longer the centre and cynosure of creation, but, as it were, an insect crawling on the surface of this little speck! All this not set down in crabbed Latin in dry folios for a few learned monks, as in Copernicus's time, but promulgated and argued in rich Italian, illustrated by analogy, by experiment, and with cultured ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... both are bad when they are basely chosen; but of the two, I repeat, it is restraint which characterizes the higher creature, and betters the lower creature: and, from the ministering of the archangel to the labour of the insect,—from the poising of the planets to the gravitation of a grain of dust,—the power and glory of all creatures, and all matter, consist in their obedience, not in their freedom. The Sun has no liberty—a dead leaf ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin
... on the threshold of oblivion by contact with some of the angles of the coach, and feeling that I was unconsciously assuming, in imitation of a humble insect of my childish recollection, that spherical shape which could best resist those impressions, when I perceived that the moon, riding high in the heavens, had begun to separate the formless masses of the shadowy landscape. Trees isolated, in clumps and assemblages, changed places before my window. ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... leaves contract on the slightest injury; the dionaea muscipula, which was lately brought over from the marshes of America, presents us with another curious instance of vegetable irritability; its leaves are armed with spines on their upper edge, and are spread on the ground around the stem; when an insect creeps on any of them in its passage to the flower or seed, the leaf shuts up like a steel rat-trap, and destroys its enemy. See Botanic Garden, ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... passed. We had gathered, damp and disconsolate, in the only available shelter of the camp. For the long summer had ended unexpectedly to us; we had one day found ourselves caught like the improvident insect of the child's fable with gauzy and unseasonable wings wet and bedraggled in the first rains, homeless and hopeless. The scientific Lacy, who lately spent most of his time as a bar-room oracle in the settlement, ...
— The Heritage of Dedlow Marsh and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... streets of cities dead and silent for many ages, and searched out deep chasms which when the world was young had felt the surge of the restless seas. No form of life winged its way through the darkness and called to its mate. No beast of prey rent the air with its challenge. No insect chirped. No slimy shape crawled over the rocks. Dark and solemn, mysterious and still, the earth sped on through ...
— Omega, the Man • Lowell Howard Morrow
... Star-Fish. Neither can I present the structural elements of the Mollusk plan, without reminding them of an Oyster or a Clam, a Snail or a Cuttle-Fish,—or of the Articulate plan, without calling up at once the form of a Worm, a Lobster, or an Insect,—or of the Vertebrate plan, without giving it the special character of Fish, Reptile, Bird, or Mammal. Yet I insist that all living beings are but the different modes of expressing these formulae, and that all animals have, within ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... described in the Laws of Menu, ii. 191 to 218, 242, 8. "By censuring his preceptor, though justly, he will be born an ass; by falsely defaming him, a dog; by using his goods without leave, a small worm; by envying his merit, a larger insect or reptile." As the Roman law did not contemplate the possibility of parricide, that of Menu has no provision against the ...
— Nala and Damayanti and Other Poems • Henry Hart Milman
... since, from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous, assuming ever more varied shapes, till at last they have reached their present enormous variety of tree, and shrub, and herb, and seaweed, of beast, and bird, and fish, and creeping insect. Evolution throughout has been one and continuous, from nebula to sun, from gas-cloud to planet, from early jelly-speck to man or elephant. So at least evolutionists say—and of course they ought to ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... opening like that made by ants in decayed wood, rubs its eyes and examines its antennæ, as bees always do before leaving their hive, then takes flight. At the same instant several bees come by us loaded with our honey and settle home with that peculiar low, complacent buzz of the well- filled insect. Here then, is our idyl, our bit of Virgil and Theocritus, in a decayed stump of a hemlock-tree. We could tear it open with our hands, and a bear would find it an easy prize, and a rich one, too, for we take ...
— The Writings of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... our August holiday at the seaside in apartments, and suffered many things in consequence—an uninterrupted succession of mixed odours of cooking from early morning till late at night; fleas and other insect pests, which seemed to thrive mightily on the powders put down for their extermination; landladies afflicted with spasms and inordinate thirst, and landladies' cats with unappeasable appetites; cramped quarters, of course, which ...
— The Harmsworth Magazine, v. 1, 1898-1899, No. 2 • Various
... was not dead, only badly stunned. The next morning, as he was walking around his granaries, they exploded with a loud noise; and all the rice flew away in the form of insects, and vanished from his sight. This kind of insect which originated from the rice we call doron (from the Spanish word duro), on account of the toughness of ...
— Filipino Popular Tales • Dean S. Fansler
... Polednice, or "noon-lady," who roams around only at noon, and substitutes changelings for real children; the Lithuanian and Old Prussian Laume, a child-stealer, whose breast is the thunderbolt, and whose girdle is the rainbow; the Servian Wjeschtitza, or witches, who take on the form of an insect, and eat up children at night; the Russian "midnight spirit," who robs children of rest and sleep; the Wendish "Old mountain-woman"; the German (Brunswick) "corn-woman," who makes off with little children ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... above his countryman in literary acquirements, if we may judge by his treatment of the names of Schwann and Lieberkuhn, whom he repeatedly calls Schawn and Leiberkuhn, and by the indignity which he offers to the itch-insect by naming it Aearus Scabiaei. It is not necessary to give further examples; but, if the general statement be disputed, we are prepared to speckle the book with corrections until it looks like a sign-board with a charge of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various
... tenant already, haven't we?" smiled Allan. "Well, I guess we sha'n't have to disturb her, unless perhaps for a while, when I cut away this poison ivy here." He pointed at the glossy triple leaf. "No poisonous thing, whether plant, snake, spider, or insect, is going to stay in this Eden!" ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... I said, — the world is in the wrong. But the same quenchless fever of unrest That thrilled the foremost of that martyred throng Thrilled me, and I awoke . . . and was the same Bewildered insect plunging for the flame That burns, and must burn somehow ...
— The Children of the Night • Edwin Arlington Robinson
... on the mountain-side the cattle lay placidly, and a mare whinnied to her colt. The air was soft and warm and drowsy with the scent of many flowers, the sounds of nestling birds, the drone of an insect here and there, the ...
— The Master-Knot of Human Fate • Ellis Meredith
... stolen cattle, and they would visit the punishment for the crime upon him. Evidence would be cooked up of course, and the retribution would be so swift that his friends would not be able to save him. This time his enemy would take no chances. He would be wiped out like a troublesome insect. The thing was diabolic in ...
— Mavericks • William MacLeod Raine
... a wonderful machine had been here revealed to his gaze—manipulated without a word, marshaled by signs, and composed entirely of strangers! And to think that all this insect-like marvel of industry, so expeditious, and done on so huge a scale, had been going on daily under his own roof, and he had known nothing of it! So this was how his palace was cleaned for him, and why it never showed a ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... Of obvious insect injuries, there are two general types,—those wrought by insects that bite or chew their food, as the ordinary beetles and worms, and those wrought by insects that puncture the surface of the plant and derive their food by sucking the juices, as scale-insects and plant-lice. The ...
— Manual of Gardening (Second Edition) • L. H. Bailey
... from beholding vanity," says a good man, when he sees a display of graceful ornament. What, then, must he think of the Almighty Being, all whose useful work is so overlaid with ornament? There is not a fly's leg, nor an insect's wing, which is not polished and decorated to an extent that we should think positive extravagance in finishing up a child's dress. And can we suppose that this Being can take delight in dwellings and modes of life or forms of worship ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... very kind and thoughtful thing, for which he deserved a bottle of the Royal Tokay, such as even Napoleon could not obtain. When the cheering was done, and every eye was fixed upon the blushing Scudamore—who felt himself, under that fixture, like an insect under a lens which the sun is turning into a burning-glass—the Chairman perceived his sad plight, and to give him more time and more spirit, ...
— Springhaven - A Tale of the Great War • R. D. Blackmore
... that he perceived his doom, gave way to one of those fearful bursts of rage which no experience had succeeded in teaching him to curb. He howled till the dirt sticking about the vaulted ceiling, and the earth choking up the air-hole, dropped piecemeal to the ground, and every insect that had ears covered them up the best way it could to prevent its becoming instantaneously deafened by the horrid sound; then tearing round and round and round the confined space of his cell, till ...
— The Adventures of a Bear - And a Great Bear too • Alfred Elwes
... Symonds, in his autobiography, describes his "insect-like" devotion to creed in the green infancy of ritualism. In his early teens at boarding-school he and his mates, with half sincerity, followed a classmate to compline, donned surplices, tossed censers, arranged ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... red rock, gray rock, creamy rock, yellow, pink, blue, chocolate, carmine, crimson rock, soft rock, hard rock; sunshine, shadow, wind and quietude; winter, summer, autumn, spring-and that was all! A lifeless world, as yet unprepared for insect, reptile, beast, man, flower or tree. Perhaps a solitary sea-bird with strong pinion flew over it, and gazed into its lifeless depths with wonder, or a dove flew from some earlier and habitable land over this ...
— The Grand Canyon of Arizona: How to See It, • George Wharton James
... sound, for any sound, the creaking of a board, the snapping of a twig, the ticking of an insect—there was none—the silence was the silence of stone. I thought of worms; I imagined countless legions of them making their way to me from the surrounding mouldering coffins. Every now and then I uttered a shriek as something cold and slimy touched my skin, ...
— Byways of Ghost-Land • Elliott O'Donnell
... now lost their beauty. A few years since, a severe frost killed the trees to the ground, and when they sprouted again from the roots, a new enemy made its appearance—an insect of the coccus family, with a kind of shell on its back, which enables it to withstand all the common applications for destroying insects, and the ravages of which are shown by the leaves becoming black and sere, and the twigs perishing. In October last, a gale drove ...
— Letters of a Traveller - Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America • William Cullen Bryant
... the vale, Bare, rocky mountains, to all living things Inhospitable; on whose sides no herb Rooted, no insect fed, no bird awoke Their echoes, save the eagle, strong of wing; A lonely plunderer, that afar Sought ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 234, April 22, 1854 • Various
... the big question which confronts every bird when it opens its eyes on the first snowy morning of winter. Not only has the whole aspect of the country been changed, but the old sources of food have passed away. Not a caterpillar is to be found on the dead leaves, and not a winged insect is left to come flying {87} by; hence other food must be looked for in new directions. Emboldened by hunger, the Starlings alight at the kitchen door, and the Juncos, Sparrows, Downy Woodpeckers, and Nuthatches come to feed on the window-sill. Jays and Meadowlarks haunt ...
— The Bird Study Book • Thomas Gilbert Pearson
... perfect stillness of the pool near the opposite shore. A fish had leaped at some unseasonable insect on the surface, or one of the overhanging trees had dropped a dead twig upon it, and in the lazy doubt which it might be, I lay and watched the ever-widening circle fade out into fainter and fainter ripples toward the shore, till it weakened to nothing in the eye, and, so far as the senses ...
— A Pair of Patient Lovers • William Dean Howells
... to the Senate on the 10th of February last information touching the prohibition against the importation of fresh fruits from this country, which had then recently been decreed by Germany on the ground of danger of disseminating the San Jose scale insect. This precautionary measure was justified by Germany on the score of the drastic steps taken in several States of the Union against the spread of the pest, the elaborate reports of the Department of Agriculture ...
— Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents • William McKinley
... on; the pilgrim at length gained the summit of the mountain, a small and rugged table-land, strewn with huge masses of loose and heated, rock. All around was desolation: no spring, no herbage; the bird and the insect were alike mute. Still it was the summit: no loftier peaks frowned in the distance; the pilgrim stopped, and breathed with more facility, and a faint smile played over his languid ...
— Alroy - The Prince Of The Captivity • Benjamin Disraeli
... up the valley between the close, snow-topped mountains, whose white gleamed above me as I crawled, small as an insect, along the dark, ...
— Twilight in Italy • D.H. Lawrence
... old cares away. During the next year he should be able to pay off what he owed, and then he would begin to put by. But, while he thus speculated, his eye fell upon his over-worked horses, and the anxious face of his old bailiff, and a vague fear crept, like a loathly insect, over the fluttering leaves of his hopes; for he had staked all on this cast; he had so mortgaged his land that at this moment he hardly knew how much of it was his own; and all this to raise still higher the social ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... "As readily can you mingle fire and frost as spirit and matter. . . . The belief that material bodies return to dust, hereafter to rise up as spiritual bodies with material sensations and desires, is incorrect. . . . The caterpillar, transformed into a beautiful insect, is no longer a worm, nor does the insect return to fraternise with or control the worm. . . . There is no bridge across the gulf which divides two such opposite conditions as the spiritual, or incorporeal, ...
— Modern Saints and Seers • Jean Finot
... the ceaseless murmur of the insect life about them the night was absolutely still—so still that the striking of the ships' bells in the harbor came to them sharply across the surface of the water, and they could hear from time to time the splash of some great fish and the steady creaking of an oar in a rowlock that grew ...
— Soldiers of Fortune • Richard Harding Davis
... FLY.—So many birds have been cited in support of the various flying theories that the house fly, as an example has been disregarded. We are prone to overlook the small insect, but it is, nevertheless, a sample which is just as potent to show the efficiency of wing surface as the ...
— Aeroplanes • J. S. Zerbe***
... amount of latent torment there is in boys, ready to come out the moment an object presents itself. It is not exactly cruelty. The child that tears the fly to pieces does not represent to himself the sufferings the insect undergoes; he merely yields to an impulse to disintegrate. So children, even ordinarily good children, are ready to tease any child who simply looks teasable, and so provokes the act. Now the Bruces were not good children, as was natural; and they despised Annie ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald
... I have heard it, And I must hear that word again? 'Tis bitter; Importunate it comes upon me, like an insect That, driven once away, returns to buzz About my face.... The victory is in vain! The field is heaped with corpses; scattered wide, And broken, are the rest—a most flourishing Army, with which, if it were still united, And it were mine, mine truly, I'd engage ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... as a stag to me. Had he not broken silence, he were safe, And yet I surely knew that could not be. If one's transparent as an insect is, That looks now red, now green, as is its food, One must beware of any mysteries, Lest e'en the vitals show the ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various
... looped on another insect phenomenon, and went on casting. Rodman, I perceived, was engaged with a salmon on the other bank. Presently I raise and hook another, but he ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various
... himself that the work was his, and that he had saved society. That the fly should imagine he is moving the coach is natural enough; but that the horses, and the wooden lumbering machine, and the passengers should take it for granted that the light gilded insect is carrying them ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... saw Ernest examining one of the figs very attentively. "Oh! papa!" said he, "what a singular sight; the fig is covered with a small red insect. I cannot shake them off. Can they be the Cochineal?" I recognized at once the precious insect, of which I explained to my sons the nature and use. "It is with this insect," said I, "that the beautiful and rich scarlet dye ...
— The Swiss Family Robinson; or Adventures in a Desert Island • Johann David Wyss
... one of several interesting and important communications sent to the Royal Society during his lifetime. One of these was a report on what he calls "Pneumatical Experiments." "Upon including in a vacuum an insect resembling a beetle, but somewhat larger," he says, "when it seemed to be dead, the air was readmitted, and soon after it revived; putting it again in the vacuum, and leaving it for an hour, after which the air was readmitted, it was observed that the insect required ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... bullfinch scolding in his cage, the rare old shells and china on the old-fashioned cabinets that Mary so well remembered; and the silk patchwork sofa-cover, the old piano, and Miss Faithfull's arm chair by the fire, her little table with her beautiful knitting, and often a flower or insect that she was copying; for she still drew nicely; and she smiled and consented, as Louis pulled out her portfolios, life-long collections of portraits of birds, flowers, or insects. Her knitting found a sale at the workshop, where the object was well known, and ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. I) - or, The Clue of Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... claiming rights and powers for himself above the rest, would ye not laugh consumedly? Yet if thou lookest to his body alone, what creature canst thou find more feeble than man, who oftentimes is killed by the bite of a fly, or by some insect creeping into the inner passage of his system! Yet what rights can one exercise over another, save only as regards the body, and that which is lower than the body—I mean fortune? What! wilt thou bind with thy mandates the free spirit? Canst thou force from its ...
— The Consolation of Philosophy • Boethius
... muddy water. But on their first day's ramble Mac and Mick discovered about two miles from the camp a fine pool of stagnant water. It lay in the bottom of a rocky gorge, a shallow basin at the foot of what was a small waterfall during the winter rains. It was swarming with insect life, but, unheeding such minor details, Mac and Mick soon stripped off their clothes and made the best of it. Next day they came armed with towels, soap and all the permanganate of potash their kits could muster. At the worst this browny-pink ...
— The Tale of a Trooper • Clutha N. Mackenzie
... I were, of course, aware that in the insect world the ocelli served the same purpose that the degenerate pituitary body once served ...
— Police!!! • Robert W. Chambers
... like an awful, gigantic kind of insect—immense, golden-winged beetles or dragonflies or things of that sort—at once ugly and beautiful—than like anything else; only that they were a thousand and a million times as big. And with all this there was something partly human about them, too. Luckily for Perseus, their faces were completely ...
— Famous Tales of Fact and Fancy - Myths and Legends of the Nations of the World Retold for Boys and Girls • Various
... imagine, that a park was planted for them alone, by an ostentatious monarch, and that the sole object of his goodness was to furnish them with a superb residence? But, according to theology, man is, with respect to God, far below what the vilest insect is to man. Thus, by theology itself, which is wholly devoted to the attributes and views of the Divinity, ...
— Good Sense - 1772 • Paul Henri Thiry, Baron D'Holbach
... to the dimpling water, there was a flash of a bronze body—a streak of light along the surface of the pool—and two widening circles showed where the master of the hole had leaped for some insect prey. ...
— Hiram The Young Farmer • Burbank L. Todd
... up and started off after the same preparatory dressing and taking of bearings as before. Then I took particular pains to lay down the exact course so I would be able to trace it to the hive. Before doing so, however, I made an experiment to test the worth of the impression I had that the little insect found the way back to the box by fixing telling points in its mind. While it was away, I picked up the honey-box and set it on the stake a few rods from the position it had thus far occupied, and stood there watching. In a few minutes I saw the bee arrive ...
— The Story of My Boyhood and Youth • John Muir
... his nature from the subjection of time and space; he is no longer a "puny insect shivering at a breeze"; he is the glory of creation, formed to occupy all time and all extent; bounded, during his residence upon earth, only to the boundaries of the world, and destined to life and immortality ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... the fibre spun by the larvae or caterpillars of a moth, Bombyx mori, as they enter the chrysalis stage of existence. The silk-growing industry includes the care and feeding of the insect in all its stages. The leaves of the white mulberry-tree (morus alba) are the natural food of the insect, and silk-growing cannot be carried on in regions where this tree does not thrive. Not all areas that produce the mulberry-tree, however, will also grow the silk-worm; the ...
— Commercial Geography - A Book for High Schools, Commercial Courses, and Business Colleges • Jacques W. Redway
... he had killed, and then looked among the waste paper for more, standing with his bare foot raised, and with ready slipper, for the bite of this insect, which grows to a large size in Porto Rico, is anything but pleasant, though it is said never to cause death, except perhaps in the case of some person whose blood is ...
— The Motor Girls on Waters Blue - Or The Strange Cruise of The Tartar • Margaret Penrose
... time of furnishing pollen, when they are brought out into the light. In protecting pistillate flowers from the pollen of their own trees, with the nut tree group where pollen is wind-borne rather than insect borne, I find that the better way is to cover the pistillate flowers with paper bags, the thinner the better, the kind that we get at the grocery store. It is best to pull off the undeveloped male flowers if they happen to be on the same ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association, Report of the Proceedings at the Third Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association
... rounded and worn away by the constant abrading action of the wind, the snow, the hail, and possibly the rain, which has beaten upon them through unnumbered years. It is no wonder that this is a lifeless solitude; there is nothing here capable of sustaining the life of even the meanest insect. Let us return to the ship, my friends, and hasten over this part of our journey; we shall meet with nothing worthy of interest until we reach the Pole, which itself will probably prove to be merely an undistinguishable spot in just ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... raise the hill two or three inches above the surrounding level. On the top of the hill thus formed, plant twelve or fifteen seeds; and, when the plants are well up, thin them out from time to time as they progress in size. Finally, when all danger from bugs and other insect depredators is past, leave but two or three of the most stocky and promising plants to a hill. When the growth is too luxuriant, many practise pinching or cutting off the leading shoots; and, when ...
— The Field and Garden Vegetables of America • Fearing Burr
... have thought the cannon also had a soul; but a soul full of hatred and rage. This sightless thing seemed to have eyes. The monster appeared to lie in wait for the man. One would have at least believed that there was craft in this mass. It also chose its time. It was a strange, gigantic insect of metal, having or seeming to have the will of a demon. For a moment this colossal locust would beat against the low ceiling overhead, then it would come down on its four wheels like a tiger on its four paws, and begin to run at the man. He, supple, nimble, ...
— International Short Stories: French • Various
... calls of hunger, and Silas, in his solitude, had to provide his own breakfast, dinner, and supper, to fetch his own water from the well, and put his own kettle on the fire; and all these immediate promptings helped to reduce his life to the unquestioning activity of a spinning insect. He hated the thought of the past; there was nothing that called out his love and fellowship towards the strangers he had come amongst; and the future was all dark, for there was no Unseen Love that cared ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol IV. • Editors: Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... produce it for our benefit. Vermin was everywhere; night and day it crawled gaily over the walls and ceiling, about our bodies, and into our very food, and, although the subject did not interest us, a naturalist would have delighted in the ever-changing varieties of insect life. Of the latter, cockroaches were, I think, the most objectionable, for they can inflict a nasty poisonous bite. Oddly enough, throughout Siberia I never saw a rat, although mice seem to swarm in every building, ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... take a squirt-gun and a pint of insect powder and destroy these little, hairy caterpillars who infest all parts of Paris and make it impossible for a respectable woman to venture ...
— Europe Revised • Irvin S. Cobb
... to be very short of legs compared with many of their distant relatives. Thus, while no member of the insect tribe—when grown up—has more than six legs, the Centipede or the Millipede may, as their names imply, possess a far greater number—as many, indeed, as two hundred and forty-two! But there is one curious likeness between the legs of the insects and those ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... like a lost boat over a cataract down into a whirlpool of white roads far below, I saw afar a black dot crawling like an insect. I looked again: I could hardly believe it. There was the slow old woman, with her slow old donkey, still toiling along the main road. I asked my friend to slacken, but when he said of the car, "She's wanting to go," I knew it was all ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... the earth with beauty; He touched the hills with light; He crowned the waving forest With living verdure bright; He taught the bird its carol, He gave the wind its voice, And to the smallest insect Its moment to rejoice. ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... rabbit burrow; dark strids, tremendous cataracts, 'deep glooms and sudden glories' in every foot-broad rill which wanders through the turf.... Nature, as every one will tell you who has seen dissected an insect under the microscope, is as grand and graceful in her smallest ...
— Hold Up Your Heads, Girls! • Annie H. Ryder
... pangs that wait the hour Of calmest dissolution! yet weak man Dares, in his timid piety, to live; And veiling Fear in Superstition's garb, He calls her Resignation! Coward wretch! Fond Coward! thus to make his Reason war Against his Reason! Insect as he is, This sport of Chance, this being of a day, Whose whole existence the next cloud may blast, Believes himself the care of heavenly powers, That God regards Man, miserable Man, And preaching thus of Power and Providence, ...
— Poems, 1799 • Robert Southey
... kreitajxo. Creator kreinto. Creature estajxo. Credence kredo. Credible kredebla. Credit kredito. Creditor kreditoro. Credulity kredemo. Creed kredo. Creep rampi. Creole Kreolo. Crest tufo. Crevice fendo—ajxo. Crew maristaro. Cricket (insect) grilo. Crime krimo. Criminal krimulo. Criminally kriminale. Crimson rugxega. Cripple kripligi. Cripple kriplulo. Crippled kripla. Crisis krizo. Crisp friza. Critic kritikisto. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... aquaticum.—Linnaeus informs us that the horses in Sweden by eating of this plant are seized with a kind of palsy, which he supposes is brought upon them, not so much by any noxious qualities in the plant itself, as by a certain insect which breeds in the stalks, called by him for that reason Curculio paraplecticus [Syst. Nat. 510]. The Swedes give swine's dung for ...
— The Botanist's Companion, Vol. II • William Salisbury
... third or posterior division of the insect body: consists normally of nine or ten apparent segments, but actual number is a mooted question: bears no functional legs in ...
— Explanation of Terms Used in Entomology • John. B. Smith
... June be refulgent With flowers in completeness, All petals, no prickles, Delicious as trickles Of wine poured at mass-time, And choose One indulgent To redness and sweetness; Or if with experience of man and of spider, She use my June lightning, the strong insect-ridder To stop the fresh spinning,—why ...
— Obiter Dicta • Augustine Birrell
... handsomely marked with rows of yellow spots near the margin of its wings, and on the hind wings, which are tailed, there is also a row of blue spots, and near the lower angle an orange-colored eye with a black dot in the centre. The wings of this handsome insect expand from three to ...
— Harper's Young People, October 12, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... properly disposed of. These carcasses should be buried deeply, so that spore formation may be prevented and no animal have access to them. By exercising this precaution the disease will not be disseminated by flies and other insect pests. ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture
... and as the plants generally grow in groups, it is very probable that some flowers are pollinated by the wind. The fact that many pandans have very fragrant blossoms makes it almost certain that in the majority of cases insect pollination takes place. In a few forms that have a very disagreeable odor, pollination is effected by night ...
— Philippine Mats - Philippine Craftsman Reprint Series No. 1 • Hugo H. Miller
... hands," and then shake them with a motion so rapid, that—like Carathis, the mother of the Caliph Vathek, who, when her hour of doom had come, "glanced off in a rapid whirl, which rendered her invisible"—the eye failed to see either web or insect for minutes together. Nothing appeals more powerfully to the youthful fancy than those coats, rings, and amulets of eastern lore, that conferred on their possessors the gift of invisibility. I learned, too, to take an especial interest in what, though they belong ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... galleries, and the birds for an orchestra; and unless the minister preached because his heart was so full of love to God that he couldn't help preaching, I should rather hear my Maker preach to me, in the soft whisper of the leaves, the happy hum of the tiny insect, and the low, soft ...
— Little Ferns For Fanny's Little Friends • Fanny Fern
... beloved insect Aristotle gives a copious account. He describes two separate species, which we still recognize easily; a larger one and the better singer, the other smaller and the first to come and last to go with the summer season. He recognized ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... bee has sucked; yet it is not a reproduction of the odour or flavour of any particular flower, but becomes something different when it has gone through the process of transformation which that little insect is able to effect. Hence, in the case of painters, arises the superiority of original compositions over portrait painting. Reynolds was exercising a higher faculty when he designed Comedy and Tragedy contending for Garrick, ...
— Memoir of Jane Austen • James Edward Austen-Leigh
... interesting, from the variety of moisture-loving plants which took Dale's attention, and the brightly coloured insects, which took that of Saxe, while the mule was perfectly content to wait while a halt was called to capture insect or secure plant; the solemn-looking animal standing fetlock-deep in the water, and browsing on the herbage in the various crannies among ...
— The Crystal Hunters - A Boy's Adventures in the Higher Alps • George Manville Fenn
... which they migrated, that comparatively little change took place in their forms or habits. Of course, just in proportion as the islands got stocked I noticed that the changes were less and less marked; for each new plant, insect, or bird that established itself successfully tended to make the balance of nature more similar to the one that obtained in the mainland opposite, and so decreased the chances of novelty ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... domesticated, which will not, sooner or later, respond liberally to good cultivation and persistent selection. * * * Weeds are weeds because they are jostled, crowded, cropped and trampled upon, scorched by fierce heat, starved, or, perhaps, suffering with cold, wet feet, tormented by insect pests or lack ...
— Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers • Arthur Brisbane
... conception, Baffles wholly and destroys it, Or unto completion brings it, Bringeth out its faults or virtues, Shewing where its merit lieth. Then shall every beast that liveth, Every bird and every reptile, Every fish and every insect, Raise their own peculiar voices— (Terrible, or sweet, or puny); And will testify their own way Of the powers of King Nimaera, Who their being's fire feedeth, Gives them space for life and glory, With that limit ends their being; For no hidden spirit have they Image to the holy ...
— A Leaf from the Old Forest • J. D. Cossar
... school pupils can be made familiar with the best modes of planting and cultivating the various crops, and with the diseases and insect enemies which threaten them; the selection of seed; the rotation of crops, and many other practical things applying directly to their home life. School gardens of vegetables and flowers constitute another center of interest and information, and serve to unite the ...
— New Ideals in Rural Schools • George Herbert Betts
... against fate—to try to escape the inevitable issue—is almost puerile. When the duration of a centenarian and that of an insect are quantities sensibly equivalent—and geology and astronomy enable us to regard such durations from this point of view—what is the meaning of all our tiny efforts and cries, the value of our anger, ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... he then hastens to thank them for the enthusiastic welcome which they have given to "the republic" in his humble person. The phylloxera has destroyed the vineyards of this or that region, but "the republican minister of agriculture" is successfully extirpating the injurious insect. The new schoolhouses of another city owe their magnificence "to the deep solicitude of the republic for the education of the masses," while the recently constructed bridge over the river is the work ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 23, October, 1891 • Various
... Brahminical trinity, was born under it. This tree is extensively planted around the temples of the Hindus, and many religious devotees pass their lives under its shade for its sanctifying influence. It is useful for other purposes; for the lac-insect feeds upon its leaves, and the women get a kind of caoutchouc from its sap, which they ...
— Across India - Or, Live Boys in the Far East • Oliver Optic
... also several little animals, all of the same species, which swam about on the surface of the water with the greatest rapidity, performing the same kind of evolutions that we see in a little black and white insect (Gyrinus) which swims on the top of tranquil pools ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 2 (of 2) • George Grey
... there is nothing beyond old age, we call that long: all these things are said to be long or short, according to the proportion of time they were given us for. Artistotle saith there is a kind of insect near the river Hypanis, which runs from a certain part of Europe into the Pontus, whose life consists but of one day; those that die at the eighth hour die in full age; those who die when the sun sets are very old, ...
— Cicero's Tusculan Disputations - Also, Treatises On The Nature Of The Gods, And On The Commonwealth • Marcus Tullius Cicero
... be crossed at a single step, whenever God shall give permission. The Sun of Righteousness has been gradually drawing nearer and nearer, appearing larger and brighter as He approached, and now He fills the whole hemisphere, pouring forth a flood of glory, in which I seem to float, like an insect in the beams of the sun; exulting, yet almost trembling, while I gaze on this excessive brightness, and wondering, with unutterable wonder, why God should deign thus to shine upon a sinful worm"-(Cheever). [307] In the immediate view ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... shoulder as if disturbed by the buzzing of some insect, then with unruffled composure turned back to the girl. His eyes looked straight into hers for perhaps ten seconds, then in the same purposeful fashion he set her free and deliberately turned upon the man ...
— Charles Rex • Ethel M. Dell
... far along the barren valley in which the river once flowed—each have their attraction, which varies with the changing light, while many a happy hour may be spent in watching the many coloured lizards which play among the rocks, the curious mantis and twig-insects, and other strange specimens of insect life which abound here; while, should you weary of sight-seeing and the glare of light, quietude and repose may be found among the fruit-laden fig-trees of Kitchener's Island, or in the ...
— Peeps at Many Lands: Egypt • R. Talbot Kelly
... John liked it better in the winter than in the summer, in spite of the extreme cold. The cold was steady and could be depended upon; moreover, it was healthful and invigorating. In summer, John never quite became accustomed to the ravages of the black fly, the mosquito, and other insect pests of that region. His first interview with the black fly left his face in such a condition that he was glad he ...
— A Woman Intervenes • Robert Barr
... very funny insect that you do not often spy, And it isn't quite a spider, and it isn't quite a fly; It is something like a beetle, and a little like a bee, But nothing like a wooly grub that climbs upon a tree. Its name is quite a hard one, ...
— A Book for Kids • C. J. (Clarence Michael James) Dennis
... new-NAMED mineral, and I hardly attempted to classify them. I must have observed insects with some little care, for when ten years old (1819) I went for three weeks to Plas Edwards on the sea-coast in Wales, I was very much interested and surprised at seeing a large black and scarlet Hemipterous insect, many moths (Zygaena), and a Cicindela which are not found in Shropshire. I almost made up my mind to begin collecting all the insects which I could find dead, for on consulting my sister I concluded that ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... a bee more than most any creature," James told Cora, "because the insect rises above holidays and works seven days a week all its life ...
— The Torch and Other Tales • Eden Phillpotts
... section furnishes two illustrations of long-standing neglect, both well worthy of consideration for their pregnant suggestiveness. The Federal Department of Agriculture recently scored a notable success in dealing with an insect pest which was threatening the cotton-growing industry with economic ruin. The boll-weevil, like the legal and medical professions, thrives upon the follies of humanity. It attacks the cotton plants which have been weakened by bad ...
— The Rural Life Problem of the United States - Notes of an Irish Observer • Horace Curzon Plunkett
... and lieutenants is unusual, but it looks as if mine had taken an interest in me, because when he noticed my insect-bitten face, he sent me down some dope he had used with good effect in India. I expect the mosquitoes in India were the ordinary kind, but, believe me, trench "skeeters" are constructed differently and are proof against the general's ...
— "Crumps", The Plain Story of a Canadian Who Went • Louis Keene
... one's dress in the way grasshoppers do. Jakie was in his cage, but he noticed the stranger instantly, and I opened the door for him. He went at once to look at the grasshopper, and when it hopped he was so startled that he hopped too. Then he picked the insect up, but he did not know what to do with it, so he dropped it again. Again the grasshopper jumped directly up, and again the jay did the same. This they did over and over, till every one was tired laughing at them. It looked as if they were ...
— Good Stories For Great Holidays - Arranged for Story-Telling and Reading Aloud and for the - Children's Own Reading • Frances Jenkins Olcott
... peculiarities of the Christian fathers, such as St. Ambrose calling Jesus "the good scarabaeus, who rolled up before him the hitherto un-shapen mud of our bodies;" a thought which seems to have been borrowed as much from the hieroglyphics as from the insect's habits; and perhaps from the Egyptian priests in some cases, using the scarabous to denote the god Horus-Ra, and sometimes the word only begotten. We trace this thought on the Gnostic gems where Ave see a winged griffin rolling before him a wheel, the emblem of ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 11 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... soul begins its conscious course at the bottom of the scale of being, and, gradually rising through birth after birth, climbs along a discriminated series of improvements in endless aspiration. Here the scientific adaptation and moral intent are thought to lead only upwards, insect travelling to man, man soaring to God; but by sin the natural order and working of means are inverted, and the series of births lead downward, until expiation and merit restore the ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... my hand and took him by the collar. I felt as though I were grasping some unclean insect, from whom the sting might ...
— The Lost Ambassador - The Search For The Missing Delora • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... sweet Francos: did not God design That e'en the insect should his life enjoy? Indeed, his joyous song of gratitude Doth only cease that he may puncture make To meet requirements which God hath ordained. Hence it were well to nature's laws obey, For e'en this insect, as it wings its way, ...
— 'A Comedy of Errors' in Seven Acts • Spokeshave (AKA Old Fogy)
... whether you hear an insect in the bedroom or in the garden. In the garden the voice of the insect soothes; in the bedroom it irritates. In the garden it is the hum of spring; in the bedroom it seems to belong to the same school of music as the bizz of the dentist's drill or the saw-mill. It ...
— The Pleasures of Ignorance • Robert Lynd
... go much lower than the Bushmen, and among Bushman divine myths is room for the 'swallowing trick' attributed to Cronus by Hesiod. The chief divine character in Bushman myth is the Mantis insect. His adopted daughter is the child of Kwai Hemm, a supernatural character, 'the all- devourer.' The Mantis gets his adopted daughter to call the swallower to his aid; but Kwai Hemm swallows the Mantis, the god-insect. As Zeus made his own wife change ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... went farther, and appeared to put that author upon a level with Warburton, 'Nay, (said Johnson,) he has given him some smart hits to be sure; but there is no proportion between the two men; they must not be named together. A fly, Sir, may sting a stately horse and make him wince; but one is but an insect, and the other is a horse still.' BOSWELL. Johnson in his Preface to Shakespeare (Works, v. 141) wrote:—'Dr. Warburton's chief assailants are the authors of The Canons of Criticism, and of The Revisal of Shakespeare's Text.... The one stings like a fly, sucks a little blood, ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... quick eyes, keen brain, his telescope, his telephone, and heaven knows what instruments. And out on every beautiful fresh morning of spring come the butterflies of modern warfare—two or three of our own planes, low down; and then a white insect very, very high—now hidden behind a cloud, now appearing again across the rift. It is delightful to stand there and watch it all like a play. The bombs, if they drop 'em, are worth risking ...
— Letters from France • C. E. W. Bean
... there. The Easter holidays accounted for Giselle's unexpected arrival. Wrapped in a large cloak which covered up her convent uniform, she looked, as compared with the gay girls around her, like a poor sombre night-moth, dazzled by the light, in company with other glittering creatures of the insect race, fluttering with graceful movements, transparent wings ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... knowledge acquired in the commencement of their professional career? Lesser criminals, it is said, are every day convicted with ease and expedition—how is it, therefore, that the cobweb of the law holds fast the small ephemerae which chance to stray across its filmy mesh, but that the gaudy insect of larger form and greater strength so often breaks through, his flight perhaps arrested for a moment, as he feels the insidious toil fold close about him? It is, however, only for a moment; one mighty effort breaks his bonds—he is free—and flies off ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXIX. January, 1844. Vol. LV. • Various
... forms that survive accidental destruction, succumb in the second struggle for life in which the determining factor is some slight individual variation, e.g., a little longer neck in the case of the giraffe, or a wing shorter than usual in the case of an insect on an island. The whole theory of struggle, as formulated by Darwin, is, therefore, a violent assumption. Men of science now recognize that "egoism and struggle play a very subordinate part in organic development, in comparison with co-operation and social action." What, indeed, but ...
— At the Deathbed of Darwinism - A Series of Papers • Eberhard Dennert
... from the American press is Episodes of Insect Life, by ACHETA DOMESTICA, just reprinted by J. S. Redfield. The natural history and habits of insects of every class are delineated by a close observer with remarkable minuteness, and in a style of unusual ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... looked below at the house—a doll's house; at the toy corrals and tiny sheds and stables. Slim, walking down the hill, was a mere pigmy—a short, waddling insect. At least, to a girl unused to gazing from a height, each object seemed absurdly small. Flying U coulee stretched away to the west, with a silver ribbon drawn carelessly through it with many a twist and loop, fringed with ...
— Chip, of the Flying U • B. M. Bower
... scarlet-blossomed; they in their turn support myriads of lichens and other verdant parasites. The plants shoot up with marvellous rapidity, and glitter with flowers of the rarest hues and shapes, or bear quantities of luscious fruit, pleasant to the eye and sweet to the taste. The air resounds with the hum of insect-life; through the bright green leaves of the banana skim the sparkling humming-birds, and gorgeous butterflies of enormous size float, glowing with every colour of the rainbow, on the flower-scented breezes. But over all this beauty—over ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... wadys. But all is now burnt, scorched, dried up, and the nakedness of the Saharan ridges is responded to with a hideous barrenness from the intervening plains and valleys. Not a single living creature was visible or moving; not a wild or tame animal, not a bird nor an insect, if we except a tiny lizard, which seems to live as a salamander in heat and flames, now and then crossing our path at the camel's foot, and a few flies, which follow the ghafalah, but have no home or habitation in The Dried-up Waste. Nor was there a sound, ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... girl Lucretia a mere walking vanity bag: idle, shiftless, eager for compliments, and without two ideas in her vain little head. "Whoever is at the bottom of the affair, she isn't," was his mental comment. "She is just a gadfly, just a gaudy, useless insect, born without a sting, or the spirit to use one if ...
— Cleek, the Master Detective • Thomas W. Hanshew
... insult as one might treat the bite of an insect in the face of some imminent danger. He did not reply to it; he did not appear to have heard it. His eyes traveled over me, as though they had been sightless, and challenged Paul's. In the excitement of the moment, his words sounded tame, ...
— A Monk of Cruta • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... the gathering darkness, she descended the long slope. The approaching night seemed sad, with autumn song of insects. All about her breathed faith, from the black hills above, the gray slopes below, from the shadowy void, from the murmuring of insect life in the grass. The rugged fallow ground under her feet seemed to her to be a symbol of faith—faith that winter would come and pass—the spring sun and rain would burst the seeds of wheat—and another summer would see the golden fields of waving grain. If she ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... cruelly; every faculty of his being was strained and concentrated in the one sense of hearing; sounds so faint as to be imperceptible reverberated in his ears like the crash of thunder; the plash of a distant waterfall, the rustling of a leaf, the movement of an insect in the grass, were like the booming of artillery. Was that the tramp of cavalry, the deep rumbling of gun-carriages driven at speed, that he heard down there to the right? And there on his left, what was that? was it not the sound of stealthy whispers, stifled voices, a party creeping up to surprise ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola
... case of the Rattle-snake. He who has merely shaken the rattle of a dead snake, can form no just idea of the sound produced by the living animal. Professor Shaler states that it is indistinguishable from that made by the male of a large Cicada (an Homopterous insect), which inhabits the same district.[27] In the Zoological Gardens, when the rattle-snakes and puff-adders were greatly excited at the same time, I was much struck at the similarity of the sound produced ...
— The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals • Charles Darwin
... [and] the staff of life for mankind.* He maketh to live the fish in the river,* and the geese and the feathered fowl of the sky.* He giveth air to the creature that is in the egg. He nourisheth the geese in their pens.* He maketh to live the water-fowl,* and the reptiles and every insect that flieth.* He provideth food for the mice in their holes,* he nourisheth the flying ...
— The Literature of the Ancient Egyptians • E. A. Wallis Budge
... an answer. He was good; she was fond of him; he had millions; what could it be but yes? Yet, while her mind sank, like a feather floating downwards in still air, to final, inevitable acquiescence, while the little clock ticked with a fine, insect-like note, and the flames made a soft flutter like the noise of shaken silk, a blackness of chaotic suffering rose suddenly in her, and her thoughts were whirled far away. In flashes, dear and terrible, she saw it—her ruined youth. It rose in dim symbolic pictures, the ...
— Franklin Kane • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... settled down over the land while they sat there, and before them the great yellow equatorial moon rose slowly over the trees. With the darkness came a greater silence, for the myriad insect life was still. This great silence of Central Africa is wonderfully characteristic. The country is made for silence, the natives are created to steal, spirit-ridden, devil-haunted, through vast tracks of lifeless forest, where nature ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... with less. The difficulty is due, in part, to lack of skill; in part to lack of judgment in selecting good material with which to work; but in some regions it is due to the attacks of the bud-worm, Proteopteryx deludana, more than to anything else. The buds are eaten out and destroyed by this insect at the time they start into growth. In certain sections spring working of pecans has been abandoned entirely owing to the destruction wrought by this pest. But notwithstanding all the drawbacks, pecan trees ...
— The Pecan and its Culture • H. Harold Hume
... an unimportant exception, the candles are always made of what I beg to designate as vegetable stearine. When the candles, which are made by dipping, are of the required diameter, they receive a final dip into a mixture of the same material and insect-wax, by which their consistency is preserved in the hottest weather. They are generally coloured red, which is done by throwing a minute quantity of alkanet-root (Anchusa tinctoria), brought from Shan-tung, into the mixture. Verdigris ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 436 - Volume 17, New Series, May 8, 1852 • Various
... rather unfortunate kill, Willy, by your bare hand on your bare arm. You must learn to be cognizant of our insect friends and insect enemies." ...
— Master of None • Lloyd Neil Goble
... wheels in his tireless flight, graceful as a thistledown, soaring through space without a seeming motion of the wings, emitting a whirring sound from wings and tail feathers, and darting, now and again, with the swiftness of light after some insect that comes under ...
— Byways Around San Francisco Bay • William E. Hutchinson
... Heartach; no pleasant assemblage of shelves, and pools, and creeks, about which a child might play for a whole summer without weariness, like the Bell Rock or the Skerryvore, but one oval nodule of black-trap, sparsely bedabbled with an inconspicuous fucus, and alive in every crevice with a dingy insect between a slater and a bug. No other life was there but that of sea-birds, and of the sea itself, that here ran like a mill-race and growled about the outer reef for ever, and ever and again, in the calmest weather, roared and spouted on the rock itself. Times were different upon Dhu Heartach when ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... found only in America and chiefly in the tropics, are insect-eating birds, generally having a grayish colored plumage, sometimes adorned with a slight crest or a coronal mark of orange, red, or yellow. Only two of the species found in North America are gaudy in plumage, the Vermilion, and the Derby Flycatchers. They all have the habit ...
— The Bird Book • Chester A. Reed
... largely used by all cotton states, with the exception of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas, which do not require that kind of fertilizer. In addition, the boll weevil has become a dreaded enemy of the cotton plant. The insect world produces quite an army of little fiends, that viciously attack and reduce the crop, many have disappeared, but the boll weevil is, at present, the arch-enemy; it is a small beetle which bores into the bolls to deposit ...
— Bremen Cotton Exchange - 1872/1922 • Andreas Wilhelm Cramer
... leopards darted among the trees. But the country—whether forest, mud-flat, or prairie—was always damp and feverish: a wet land steaming under a burning sun and humming with mosquitoes and all kinds of insect life. ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill
... Inglis, "only don't be so impetuous; go quietly after the butterfly till you get within reach, and then press the net down firmly and quickly, or close it over the prize. If you go so impetuously you agitate the air, and drive a volume of it before you, which not only alarms the insect, but helps to force it out ...
— Hollowdell Grange - Holiday Hours in a Country Home • George Manville Fenn
... water Whose banks seem lonely as the path of light Crossing mid ocean south of Capricorn. Her son steals warily after a butterfly And is as hushed with hope to capture it As are the birds with heat. An insect hum Circles the spot as round a cymbal's rim, Long after it has clanged, tingles a throb Which in a dream forgets the parent sound, Oppressed by this protracted and awe-filled pause, She hardly dares to wade the stream and ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... reached Concord, and to Concord Church he, like the rest of mankind who accepted a material universe, remained always an insect, or something much lower — a man. It was surely no fault of his that the universe seemed to him real; perhaps — as Mr. Emerson justly said — it was so; in spite of the long-continued effort of a lifetime, he perpetually fell back into the heresy that if anything universal was unreal, ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... quickness, and they are no sooner produced than they are destroyed together. Notwithstanding the sulphureous exhalations from the lake, the quantity of vegetable matter generated there and its heat make it the resort of an infinite variety of insect tribes, and even in the coldest days in winter numbers of flies may be observed on the vegetables surrounding its banks or on its floating island's, and a quantity of their larvae may be seen there sometimes encrusted and entirely destroyed by calcareous matter, ...
— Consolations in Travel - or, the Last Days of a Philosopher • Humphrey Davy
... whom Father Daniel ministered. Father Daniel was just closing the morning services on July the 4th, 1648. His tawny people were on their knees repeating the responses of the service, when from the forest, humming with insect and bird life, arose a sound that was neither wind nor running water—confused, increasing, nearing! Then a shriek broke within the fort palisades,—"The enemy! the Iroquois!" and the courtyard was in an uproar indescribable. Painted redskins, naked but for ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... living human creature, she sat down under one of the largest trees, with a satisfactory little sigh. Miss Jo loved the madrono. It was a cleanly tree; no dust ever lay upon its varnished leaves; its immaculate shade never was known to harbor grub or insect. ...
— Mrs. Skaggs's Husbands and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... unusual series of bird and insect stories for boys and girls from three to eight years ...
— The Tale of the The Muley Cow - Slumber-Town Tales • Arthur Scott Bailey
... a panic of fear—ridiculous, puerile fear, I forcibly withdrew my gaze and concentrated it abstractedly on the ground at my feet. I then listened, and in the rustling of a leaf, the humming of some night insect, the whizzing of a bat, the whispering of the wind as it moaned softly past me, I fancied—nay, I felt sure I detected something that was not ordinary. I blew my nose, and had barely ceased marvelling at the loudness of its reverberations, before the piercing, ghoulish ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... gay. All but the Sylph—with careful thoughts opprest, Th' impending woe sat heavy on his breast. He summons strait his Denizens of air; 55 The lucid squadrons round the sails repair: Soft o'er the shrouds aerial whispers breathe, That seem'd but Zephyrs to the train beneath. Some to the sun their insect-wings unfold, Waft on the breeze, or sink in clouds of gold; 60 Transparent forms, too fine for mortal sight, Their fluid bodies half dissolv'd in light, Loose to the wind their airy garments flew, Thin glitt'ring textures of the filmy dew, Dipt in the ...
— The Rape of the Lock and Other Poems • Alexander Pope
... an ashy whiteness and a general smell of dampness were the abiding peculiarities of the apartment. The eyes of the owner had become possessed of a microscopic power of discovering the minutest speck that might have been envied by any scientific observer of insect life. ...
— Little Tora, The Swedish Schoolmistress and Other Stories • Mrs. Woods Baker
... spring flowers, and so followed out the season. She made special pets of the birds, locating nest after nest, and immediately projecting herself into the daily life of the occupants. "No one," she says, "ever taught me more than that the birds were useful, a gift of God for our protection from insect pests on fruit and crops; and a gift of Grace in their beauty and music, things to be rigidly protected. From this cue I evolved the idea myself that I must be extremely careful, for had not my father tied a 'kerchief over my mouth when he lifted me for a peep ...
— At the Foot of the Rainbow • Gene Stratton-Porter
... numbered five Akshauhinis. Of the sons of Pandu there were then three Akshauhinis. After the slaughter of innumerable heroes, protected by Arjuna, they came to battle. The Suta's son Karna, though a fierce warrior, encountering Partha, came to his end on the second day, like an insect encountering a blazing fire. After the fall of Karna, the Kauravas became dispirited and lost all energy. Numbering three Akshauhinis, they gathered round the ruler of the Madras. Having lost many car-warriors and elephants and horsemen, the remnant of the Pandava army, numbering ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... learn about roots: I, who dug all the ditches about Spoon River. Look at my elm! Sprung from as good a seed as his, Sown at the same time, It is dying at the top: Not from lack of life, nor fungus, Nor destroying insect, as the sexton thinks. Look, Samuel, where the roots have struck rock, And can no further spread. And all the while the top of the tree Is tiring itself out, ...
— Spoon River Anthology • Edgar Lee Masters
... grown and was steadily growing smaller. Very strong this sensation, and, unless one wrestled with it firmly, translating itself in the mental sphere as a vaguely distressful notion that one was nothing but a tiny insect at war with ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... that future study may tell man enough about insects to enable him to eradicate them. This, however, is more than can be reasonably expected, for the more we cultivate the earth the better we make conditions for these enemies. The insect thrives on the work of man. And having made conditions ideal for the insect, with great expanses of cultivated food fitted to his needs, it is an optimist who can believe that at the same time we can make other conditions which will be so unfavorable as to cause him to disappear completely. The ...
— Astounding Stories, April, 1931 • Various
... hostility of the young gentry had become an intolerable nuisance in my daily life. So, with such pedestrian reasons in my mind, I could have none of the heady enthusiasm of passion. I wanted him and his kind cleared out of my way, like a noisome insect, but I had no flaming hatred of him to give ...
— Salute to Adventurers • John Buchan
... smell of sprouting grass! In a blur the violets pass. Whispering from the wildwood come Mayflower's breath and insect's hum. Roses carpeting the ground; Thrushes, orioles, warbling sound:— Swing me low, and swing me high, To ...
— McGuffey's Fourth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... still to be written. There still exists a widespread opinion that the coral reef and the coral island are the work of an "insect." This fabulous insect, accredited with the genius of Brunel and the patience of Job, has been humorously enough held up before the children of many generations as an example of industry—a thing to be admired, a model ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... fenny places in the night-time, emitting a glimmering light, have been regarded by the ignorant as malicious spirits endeavoring to deceive the bewildered traveler and lead him to destruction. The plaintive note of the mourning dove, the ticking noise of the little insect called the death-watch, the howling of a dog in the night-time, the meeting of a bitch with whelps, or a snake lying in the road, the breaking of a looking-glass, and even the falling of salt from the table, and the curling of a fiber of wick in a burning candle, together with ...
— Popular Education - For the use of Parents and Teachers, and for Young Persons of Both Sexes • Ira Mayhew
... suggests besides, that the universe is not rough-hewn, but perfect in its details. Nature will bear the closest inspection; she invites us to lay our eye level with the smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain. She has no interstices; every part is full of life. I explore, too, with pleasure, the sources of the myriad sounds which crowd the summer noon, and which seem the very grain and stuff of which eternity is made. Who does not remember the shrill roll-call ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau
... miserable, pining for liberty, hating its prison, dreading the visits of its jailor, and so harassed in its terror that in some cases the poor little heart is broken, and in a few hours death is the result. In the following simple sketches of animal, bird, and insect life, I have tried to show how confidence must be gained, and the little wild heart won by quiet and unvarying kindness, and also by the endeavour to imitate as much as possible the natural surroundings of its own life before its capture. I must confess it requires ...
— Wild Nature Won By Kindness • Elizabeth Brightwen
... slave, presume to look so high? That crawling insect, who from mud began, Warmed by my beams, and kindled into man? Durst he, who does but for my pleasure live, Intrench on love, my great prerogative? Print his base image on his sovereign's coin? 'Tis treason if he stamp his love ...
— The Works of John Dryden, Volume 5 (of 18) - Amboyna; The state of Innocence; Aureng-Zebe; All for Love • John Dryden
... knew him well. We had got acquainted some days before, and I thanked the boy for the name. It is an insect that hovers before your eye as you thread the streams, and you are forever vaguely brushing at it under the delusion that it is a little spider suspended from your hat-brim; and just as you want to see clearest, into your eye it goes, head and ears, and is caught between the lids. You miss your ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... time, they keep on the move, hoping the fleas will jump off on somebody else. When we came here we were flealess, but every person we have come near to seems to have contributed some fleas to us, until now we are loaded down with them, and we find in our room at the hotel a box of insect powder, which, is charged in with the candles. The king, who is a boy about three years older than I am, is full of fleas, too, and he jumps around from one place to another, like he was shaking himself to get rid of them. He gets up in the morning and goes out horseback riding, and jumps ...
— Peck's Bad Boy Abroad • George W. Peck
... of an evening, and the feelings engendered in him by the scene were wild, of a truth indescribable. He turned from the luxuriant foliage, to the stars aflame above, and he followed the fireflies as they danced. The woods were vocal with the hum of insect life, and balm loaded the breezes as they blew softly. These things at first oppressed his senses as so novel, so strange, that his mind almost hovered between the realms of ...
— The Romance of a Pro-Consul - Being The Personal Life And Memoirs Of The Right Hon. Sir - George Grey, K.C.B. • James Milne
... which we had made up our minds. Is it that we despise little things; that we are not prepared for them; that they take us in our careless, unguarded moments, and tease us out of our ordinary patience by their petty, incessant, insect warfare, buzzing about us and stinging us like gnats, so that we can neither get rid of nor grapple with them; whereas we collect all our fortitude and resolution to meet evils of greater magnitude? Or is it that there is a certain stream of irritability that is continually fretting upon ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... struck the monstrous fly, but did not hurt it. The fly stood with hairy legs braced under its bulging body. Its multiple eyes were staring at the humans. And with its size must have come a sense of power, for it seemed to Alan that the monstrous insect was abnormally alert as it stood measuring its adversaries, gathering itself ...
— Beyond the Vanishing Point • Raymond King Cummings
... Histories. But where are the antennae you spoke of?" "The antennae!" said Legrand, who seemed to be getting unaccountably warm upon the subject; "I am sure you must see the antennae. I made them as distinct as they are in the original insect, and I presume ...
— Selections From Poe • J. Montgomery Gambrill
... tell her how in those days the people of the world being so wicked that God during a terrible fit of anger made it rain for forty days and forty nights, causing the destruction of every living thing on earth except one Noah, his family and a male and female of every animal, bird and insect, who were saved by being taken aboard of a huge ark built for the purpose by Noah. And then after every living thing not aboard the boat was destroyed, how the waves receded, Noah and his flock were safely landed upon a mountain peak, and God put a bow into the sky as a pledge that he would ...
— Born Again • Alfred Lawson
... Word Scarabaeus. Veneration of the Ancient Egyptians for the scarabaeus. Entomology of the insect. Symbolism of according to Plutarch, Pliny and Horapollo. Its astronomical value. Worship of insects by other peoples. Symbolism, with the Egyptians, of the scarabaeus. Uses ...
— Scarabs • Isaac Myer
... in rocky places, and is very common. It is esteemed for food by the Aborigines; is much infested by an Isopode named NETTONG, or TOORT, by the natives. This insect inserts its whole body into a pocket by the side of the anus, separated from the gut by a thin membrane. The fish to which the insect adheres are yellow; those which are free from it are of a beautiful purple colour. Caught by ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... darting away from it, returned and sported round it, as if perfectly aware of the deceitful manner by which the hook was hid; but in a reckless moment, just as the fly was moved along the top of the water, resembling the living insect with such exactitude that I could be deceived, they would make a sullen plunge, and then as if aware of the foolish act they had committed, secure their death by running away with the whole line before they could possibly feel the hook. A slight ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... more quickly. Three steps and he had brought his foot down hard. Jerry did not enjoy killing even a spider but this time it seemed necessary, though he carefully refrained from looking at the dead insect. ...
— Jerry's Charge Account • Hazel Hutchins Wilson
... induced to yield under such attention is a marvel. The bountiful earth has another meaning when you see what she can be made to bring forth. Although we are in December, the sun shines bright, and it is quite warm. I sat down several times under the hedge-rows, and heard the constant hum of insect life around me. Butterflies flitted about, the bees gathered honey, and all looked and felt like a day in June. The houses of the people which we saw were poor, and the total absence of glass causes them to look like deserted hovels; but closer inspection ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie
... passionless as a cat's. Being very gentle, as men are who act on a fixed plan of conduct, he seemed to make his wife happy by never contradicting her; he allowed her to do the talking, and was satisfied to move with the deliberate tenacity of an insect. ...
— Parisians in the Country - The Illustrious Gaudissart, and The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... quickly ceased his splashing and resumed his footgear, heroically refraining from rubbing the affected parts. After a short interval of staring at the glowing heavens, as if the sight fairly fascinated him, Perk again spoke, this time finding something of more importance than insect bites to ...
— Eagles of the Sky - With Jack Ralston Along the Air Lanes • Ambrose Newcomb
... wooded to the peak, the lawns And winding glades high up like ways to Heaven, The slender coco's drooping crown of plumes, The lightning flash of insect and of bird, The lustre of the long convolvuluses That coil'd around the stately stems, and ran Ev'n to the limit of the land, the glows And glories of the broad belt of the world, All these he saw; but what he fain had seen ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... are at rest it is possible to observe some kind of motion in them. Trees and stones never move unless acted upon by external force, while the infant and the tiniest insect can execute a great variety of movements. Even in the deepest sleep the beating of the heart and the motion of the chest never cease. In fact, the power to execute spontaneous movement is the most characteristic property ...
— A Practical Physiology • Albert F. Blaisdell
... up my shorts—but I preferred the icy wind to the stinking cattle-stalls and insect-infested straw below. We were packed in like sardines. Men were retching and groaning, cussing and growling. At last I found a coil of rope. It was a huge coil with a hole in the centre—something like a large bird's nest. I got into this hole and curled up ...
— At Suvla Bay • John Hargrave
... brain is advertised of an insect's sting, so quickly did Aladdin recognize the voice and know that his brother. Jack was calling to him. He turned, and saw a little freckled boy, in a uniform much too big for him, trailing ...
— Aladdin O'Brien • Gouverneur Morris
... ceaselessly occupied. We have seen that, long before a sentence was written, he had invented and studied, in its remotest branches, the life-history of the characters who were to move in his play. Nothing was unknown to him of their experience, and for nearly two years, like a coral-insect, he was building up the scheme of them in silence. Odd little objects, fetiches which represented people to him, stood arranged on his writing table, and were never to be touched. He gazed at them until, as if by some feat of black magic, he turned them into living ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... elsewhere; it will be found in the natural craving to extinguish life, which exists in his soul. Why does a child impulsively strike at a butterfly as it flits past him? He cares nothing for the insect when once it is beaten down at his feet, unless it be quivering in its agony, when he will watch it with interest. The child strikes at the fluttering creature because it has life in it, and he has an instinct within him impelling him to destroy ...
— The Book of Were-Wolves • Sabine Baring-Gould
... other men expend on their nearest and dearest Lord Marshmoreton lavished on seeds, roses and loamy soil. The hatred which some of his order feel for Socialists and Demagogues Lord Marshmoreton kept for roseslugs, rose-beetles and the small, yellowish-white insect which is so depraved and sinister a character that it goes through life with an alias—being sometimes called a rose-hopper and sometimes a thrips. A simple soul, Lord Marshmoreton—mild and pleasant. Yet put him among the thrips, and he became a dealer-out of death and slaughter, a destroyer ...
— A Damsel in Distress • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... therefore go hurrying about and collecting honey, bee-like buzzing here and there impatiently from a knowledge of what is to be aimed at; but let us open our leaves like a flower and be passive and receptive—budding patiently under the eye of Apollo and taking hints from every noble insect that favours us with a visit—sap will be given us for meat and dew for drink. . ...
— The Enjoyment of Art • Carleton Noyes
... nothing to this, especially as she distinctly heard at that moment the hum of some winged insect. It was a wasp, a real one, not the insect of Lavinia's fervid imagination. The windows were open and it had found its way in from Lamb's Conduit Fields, at a happy moment allying ...
— Madame Flirt - A Romance of 'The Beggar's Opera' • Charles E. Pearce
... will not rest quiet. I must move elsewhere. [Moving a few steps off, and casting a glance around.] How now! he is following me here. Help! my dear friends, help! deliver me from the attacks of this troublesome insect. ...
— Hindu Literature • Epiphanius Wilson
... with horror at the description I had given of those terrible engines, and the proposal I had made. "He was amazed, how so impotent and grovelling an insect as I" (these were his expressions) "could entertain such inhuman ideas, and in so familiar a manner, as to appear wholly unmoved at all the scenes of blood and desolation which I had painted as the common effects of those destructive machines; whereof," he said, "some evil genius, ...
— Gulliver's Travels - into several remote nations of the world • Jonathan Swift
... the grass, jostling the horses and their riders, and leaving them far in the rear. The screaming eagle rode high above among the clouds of smoke, and many smaller birds fell suffocated to the ground; while all the insect tribe took wing, and everything that had life strove to escape ...
— The Pilgrims of New England - A Tale Of The Early American Settlers • Mrs. J. B. Webb
... of his collection. At certain seasons of the year the Euplectella speciosa, Gray, or Venus baskets, locally known as Regaderas, can be obtained in quantities; they are found in the Cebu waters. The Eup. spec, is the skeleton secretion of an insect of the Porifera division. The basket is a series of graceful fretted spirals. Also fine Pina stuffs can ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... reach Buddha's heaven. The belief in the transmigration of souls explains the vegetarian diet of the Buddhist. No zealous Buddhist will touch meat or even eggs, neither will he kill the smallest insect, lest he should thus inadvertently murder a relative.[2] The men care but little for any religion beyond a ...
— History of Education • Levi Seeley
... of her complicated heart there existed at this minute a little pang of disappointment, for a reason she would not allow herself to recognize. Oak had not once wished her free that he might marry her himself—had not once said, "I could wait for you as well as he." That was the insect sting. Not that she would have listened to any such hypothesis. O no—for wasn't she saying all the time that such thoughts of the future were improper, and wasn't Gabriel far too poor a man to speak sentiment to ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... inventions, and crushed under the foot of a passer-by. But there is another danger! When they meet with the form that answers to their soul, and which not unfrequently is that of a baker's wife, they do as Raphael did, as the beautiful insect does, they die ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... a Fly one day disputed as to their respective merits. "Vile creeping insect!" said the Fly to the Ant, "can you for a moment compare yourself with me? I soar on the wing like a bird. I enter the palaces of kings, and alight on the heads of princes, nay, of emperors, and only ...
— The Talking Beasts • Various
... has five fingers. The peculiar thing about these hands is that the middle finger is elongated a great deal—it is about twice as long as the others. This is to enable it to scoop a special sort of insect out of special cracks in the special trees it frequents. Now, how did the finger begin to elongate? A little lengthening would be absolutely no good, as the cracks in the trees are 2 inches or 3 inches deep. It must have varied from the ordinary length to one twice as long at once. ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford
... and bids that the lamps be put out: on its return to the abode of the dead it will suffer for having shown itself: it describes the fiery torments which will be its lot. Poor fool! it has been lured to its destruction, like the insect of summer that flies into the flame. Summoning the winds to its aid, it puts out the ...
— Tales of Old Japan • Algernon Bertram Freeman-Mitford
... among the tall weeds or under the trees by the half-hour, staring at vacancy. This distressed her very much; then to her great relief and joy she discovered that I was there with a motive which she could understand and appreciate: that I was watching some living thing, an insect perhaps, but oftener a bird—a pair of little scarlet flycatchers building a nest of lichen on a peach tree, or some such beautiful thing. And as she loved all living things herself she was quite satisfied that I was not going queer in my head, for that ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson
... flitting, white-fire insect Little, dancing, white-fire creature, Light me with your little candle, Ere upon my bed I lay me, Ere in sleep I ...
— The Song Of Hiawatha • Henry W. Longfellow
... when they are nobly chosen, and both are bad when they are basely chosen; but of the two, I repeat, it is restraint which characterizes the higher creature, and betters the lower creature: and, from the ministering of the archangel to the labour of the insect,—from the poising of the planets to the gravitation of a grain of dust,—the power and glory of all creatures, and all matter, consist in their obedience, not in their freedom. The Sun has no liberty—a ...
— The Two Paths • John Ruskin
... together, and seem to share a common life. One of these insects fastens itself on some hidden rock; sometimes it may be on an extinct volcano which is not lofty enough to appear above the waves, and on this foundation they begin to build, the insect, as it shapes its cells of coral, filling them with beings like itself, so that every tiny chamber has its inmate. Soon the whole rock is covered below the water with a fine network of delicate coral, and from the tops of the ...
— Famous Islands and Memorable Voyages • Anonymous
... and no oyster on it, he felt as though it had escaped, but he made no sign. He went on talking with the lady as though nothing had happened. He glanced down at his shirt bosom, and was at once on the trail of the oyster, though the insect had got about two minutes start of him. It had gone down his vest under the waistband of his clothing, and he was ...
— Peck's Compendium of Fun • George W. Peck
... if, as your royal and imperial highness were walking in your garden, an insect appealed plaintively to you not to crush it, you would turn aside, and so avoid doing the poor creature ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
... far past, while an ashy whiteness and a general smell of dampness were the abiding peculiarities of the apartment. The eyes of the owner had become possessed of a microscopic power of discovering the minutest speck that might have been envied by any scientific observer of insect life. ...
— Little Tora, The Swedish Schoolmistress and Other Stories • Mrs. Woods Baker
... and slept awhile; then awoke to the worst solitude a vexed soul knows—those terrible "small hours" of the morning. Then, every mere insect of evil omen that daylight has kept in bounds grows to the size of an elephant, and what was the whirring of his wings becomes discordant thunder. Then palliatives lose their market-value, and every clever self-deception that stands between us and acknowledged ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... generally grow in groups, it is very probable that some flowers are pollinated by the wind. The fact that many pandans have very fragrant blossoms makes it almost certain that in the majority of cases insect pollination takes place. In a few forms that have a very disagreeable odor, pollination is effected by ...
— Philippine Mats - Philippine Craftsman Reprint Series No. 1 • Hugo H. Miller
... August holiday at the seaside in apartments, and suffered many things in consequence—an uninterrupted succession of mixed odours of cooking from early morning till late at night; fleas and other insect pests, which seemed to thrive mightily on the powders put down for their extermination; landladies afflicted with spasms and inordinate thirst, and landladies' cats with unappeasable appetites; cramped ...
— The Harmsworth Magazine, v. 1, 1898-1899, No. 2 • Various
... this grass?" he asked timorously. "A snake," he added, looking up at her confidingly, "is the only insect I am afraid of." ...
— The Awakening of Helena Richie • Margaret Deland
... the curse of large districts in the United States, sowing its evil seeds broadcast in our land, and daily closing its iron grasp upon its victims, who could wish for the extermination of so useful an insect as the mosquito? ...
— Four Months in a Sneak-Box • Nathaniel H. Bishop
... Miranda," said Marchmont mater; "the pet you mean is the last sweet insect you have collected; is it not, my dear child?" she said, anxious for the fair fame of the owner of the fine exhibit ...
— A Heart-Song of To-day • Annie Gregg Savigny
... saturnine face. Racey knew the latter by sight and reputation. The man was one Skeel and rejoiced in the nick-name of "Alicran." The furtive scorpion whose sting is death is not indigenous to the territory, but Mr. Skeel had gained the appellation in New Mexico, a region where the tail-bearing insect may be found, and when the man left the Border for the Border's good the name ...
— The Heart of the Range • William Patterson White
... by that infinite variety of decoration in which she revels, binding tree to tree in a tangle of anaconda-like lianas, and dwindling down from these huge cables to airy webs and hair-like fibres that vibrate to the wind of the passing insect's wing. ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson
... datu was not dead, only badly stunned. The next morning, as he was walking around his granaries, they exploded with a loud noise; and all the rice flew away in the form of insects, and vanished from his sight. This kind of insect which originated from the rice we call doron (from the Spanish word duro), on account of ...
— Filipino Popular Tales • Dean S. Fansler
... I used to listen, in bed, to your music at school." Interesting would be a record of the germs and first causes of all the greatest poets' conceptions! The elder Brunei's first hint for his "shield," in constructing the tunnel under the Thames, was taken from watching the labor of a sea-insect, which, having a projecting hood, could bore into the ship's ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... who—but of her anon. I said with men, and with the thoughts of men, 60 I held but slight communion; but instead, My joy was in the wilderness,—to breathe The difficult air of the iced mountain's top,[131] Where the birds dare not build—nor insect's wing Flit o'er the herbless granite; or to plunge Into the torrent, and to roll along On the swift whirl of the new-breaking wave Of river-stream, or Ocean, in their flow.[132] In these my early strength exulted; or To follow through the night the moving moon,[133] 70 The stars and ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... when this happened, there came from one side or the other a volley of rifle shots, that sounded like the crack of stock-whips, and once or twice a bullet passed over their heads with the buzz as of some vicious stinging insect. Here and there, where the bottom lay in soft and clayey soil, they walked through mud that came half-way up to the knee, and each foot had to be lifted with an effort, and was set free with a smacking suck. Elsewhere, if the ground was gravelly, the rain ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... The male is a beautiful, tiny, two-winged midge, but the female is a wingless, footless, little sack, without eyes or other organs of special sense, which lies motionless under a flat, thin, circular, reddish scale composed of wax and two or three cast skins of the insect itself. The insect has a long, slender, flexible, sucking beak, which is thrust into the leaf or stem or fruit of the orange on which the "scale bug" lives, and through which the insect sucks the orange sap, which is its only food. It lays eggs under its body, ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... diseases and insect pests increased, winds broke down many of the unpruned trees, frosts often blighted the entire crop of fruit, and the uncultivated, sod-choked trees produced fruit that was less in quantity and ...
— Checking the Waste - A Study in Conservation • Mary Huston Gregory
... words of the Siddhas, Devala came down, descending from one region to another in due order. Indeed, he repaired to his own sacred asylum very quickly, like a winged insect. As soon as he entered his abode he beheld Jaigishavya seated there. Then Devala, beholding the power derived through Yoga of Jaigishavya's penances, reflected upon it with his righteous understanding and approaching that great ascetic, O king, with humility, addressed the high-souled ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... some day. What reward do they expect? It is this—to rest as Buddha does—to sleep forever and ever. This is the reward they look for. Every one in Burmah thinks he has been born a great many times into the world,—now as an insect,—now as a bird,—now as a beast, and he thinks that because he was very good,—as a reward he was made a man. Then he thinks that if he is very good as a poor man, he shall be born next time to be a rich ...
— Far Off • Favell Lee Mortimer
... whirring sound, there flew into the room a big insect, two inches long ... it flew in, circled round, ...
— Dream Tales and Prose Poems • Ivan Turgenev
... trotting. Flowers. Armadillo. Fire-flies. Singular Fandango. Epiphytes. The Junta. Indian Life. Decorative Art. Horses. Jalapa. Anglo-Mexicans. Insect-life. Monte. Fate of Antonio. Scorpion. White Negress. Cattle. Artificial lighting. Vera Cruz. Further Journey. St. Thomas's. Voyage to England. Future ...
— Anahuac • Edward Burnett Tylor
... would stand forth in sufficient importance to make the swing of the tyrant's hand effective. But as it is, the man's poverty and friendlessness and meagerness of life render it difficult to find out vulnerable points of attack. He remains hidden (perdue) and, like the midge of the egg of an insect (nit), is safe ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... upon it fiercely. Its propeller was a shimmering, cobwebby disk before it. It seemed to hang motionless—so short was Bell's view of it—between earth and sky: a fat glistening body as of a monstrous insect. Bell could even see ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, June, 1930 • Various
... noises of the earth Come with softest rustle; The shy, sweet feet of life; The silky mutter of moth-wings Against my restraining palm; The strident beat of insect-wings, The silvery trickle of water; Little breezes busy in the summer grass; The music of crisp, whisking, scurrying leaves, The swirling, wind-swept, frost-tinted leaves; The crystal splash of summer rain, Saturate with the odours ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... Clarke, without being more than pleased to recognise in the border the indefatigable Barberini bee? We are human enough to glance at the pictures of sacred scenes as on a tale that is told, but that potent insect makes us at once acquainted with a family of renown, puts us on a friendly footing with a great cardinal of the house, reminds us of sundry wanderings of our own in Rome; and then, suddenly flashes from its wings a memory of the great ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... Then you have a peep into the winding maelstroem-funnel of another of the spider family. Poe must have suffered metempsychosis into the body of a blue-bottle, when he wrote his "Descent into the Maelstroem"; for such an insect, hanging midway down that treacherous, sticky descent, and seeing Death creeping up from the bottom to grasp him, might have a clear idea of what was undergone ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 27, January, 1860 • Various
... waiting beast of prey desired, and so, with the infinite patience of the wild hunter, the ape-man crouched motionless and silent as a graven image until the fruit should be ripe for the plucking. A poisonous insect buzzed angrily out of space. It loitered, circling, close to Tarzan's face. The ape-man saw and recognized it. The virus of its sting spelled death for lesser things than he—for him it would mean days of anguish. He did not move. His glittering eyes ...
— Jungle Tales of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... certain person, in an inn far down in a valley of Westmoreland, and in the little town called Kirby Lonsdale, was busy reading the Caledonian Mercury—for it was not more easy to say where the winged Mercury of that time would not go, than it is to tell where a certain insect without wings, "which aye travels south," might not be found in England as an immigrant. It was at least no wonder that the paper should contain an account of the romance wrapped up in the case Napier versus Napier; and certainty, if we could ...
— Wilson's Tales of the Borders and of Scotland, Vol. XXIII. • Various
... country where the pay is cruelly inadequate, where but few horses, sheep, or cattle can exist, where the natives are unbelievably lazy and insolent, and where, while there is no society of congenial spirits, there is a superabundance of animal and insect pests. Still, so great are gold, ivory, and rubber, and so many are the men who will take big chances for little pay, that every foot of the West Coast is preempted. As the ship rolls along, for hours from the rail you see miles and miles of steaming yellow sand ...
— The Congo and Coasts of Africa • Richard Harding Davis
... prudence was powerless, achieved their total destruction. For two whole years clouds of locusts traversed the country regularly with the Monsoon,[109] and reduced the hopes of the cultivator to nothing. When two days from Lucknow, we ourselves saw the ravages committed by this insect. It was perfect weather; suddenly we saw the sky overcast; a darkness like that of a total eclipse spread itself abroad and lasted a good hour. In less than no time we saw the trees under which we were camped stripped of their leaves. The next day as ...
— Three Frenchmen in Bengal - The Commercial Ruin of the French Settlements in 1757 • S.C. Hill
... the wisest of men and the greatest of poets and have them graven in immortal marble. They will represent only the supreme summits of achievement since the beginning of the world. Pascal shall be entitled to but one thought, Newton to but one star, Darwin to but one insect, Galileo to but one grain of dust, Tolstoi to but one charity, Heinrich Heine to but one verse, Shakespeare to but one cry, Wagner ...
— Romance of the Rabbit • Francis Jammes
... note, p. 101. Cf. Johnson's criticism of Edwards as recorded by Boswell: "Nay (said Johnson) he has given him some sharp hits to be sure; but there is no proportion between the two men; they must not be named together. A fly, Sir, may sting a stately horse, and make him wince; but one is but an insect, and the other is a horse still" (ed. Birkbeck ...
— Eighteenth Century Essays on Shakespeare • D. Nichol Smith
... to bear. The southerly winds are very unfavorable to their growth, and parts opened by the knife admit the air, and kill the bloom. This tree is perhaps more infested by ants than any other; and the black contracted appearance of the leaves is much attributed to this insect. From this persuasion, which is pretty general, various methods have been tried to keep them off. Human ordure laid round the boll of the tree will prevent their appearing so long as it retains moisture, but not longer; tar has been applied ...
— Statistical, Historical and Political Description of the Colony of New South Wales and its Dependent Settlements in Van Diemen's Land • William Charles Wentworth
... controversy, Milton invests with the moral indignation of a prophet denouncing the enemies of Jehovah. He expends a wealth of vituperative Latin which makes us tremble, till we remember that it is put in motion to crush an insect. ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison
... supposed to have been intended as charms, have been found on several mummies, which, at various times, have been brought to Europe. Plutarch informs us that the soldiers wore rings, on which the representation of an insect resembling our beetle, was inscribed; and we learn from Aelian, that the judges had always suspended round their necks a small figure of Truth formed of emeralds. The superstitious belief in the virtues of talismans is yet far from being extinct, ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... graceful as a thistledown, soaring through space without a seeming motion of the wings, emitting a whirring sound from wings and tail feathers, and darting, now and again, with the swiftness of light after some insect that comes under his ...
— Byways Around San Francisco Bay • William E. Hutchinson
... monkeys and even of leopards darted among the trees. But the country—whether forest, mud-flat, or prairie—was always damp and feverish: a wet land steaming under a burning sun and humming with mosquitoes and all kinds of insect life. ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill
... spoke up a little boy with black hair, and eyes which would have been bright if the lids had not shut them out of sight,—"I know; Utah is inhabited by a religious INSECT called Mormons." ...
— Dotty Dimple at Play • Sophie May
... over a face, when the wind tosses great branches to and fro; but the Muse was not favourable. A few birds scattered here and there at wide intervals on either side of the valley sang the little broken songs of late autumn; and there was a great stir of insect life in the grass at my feet. The path up to this coign of vantage, where I think I shall make it a habit to ensconce myself a while of a morning, is for a little while common to the peasant and a little ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 23 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... found some little grazing, from a plant called ahgul. Starting at sunrise, they had another fatiguing day, over the same kind of desert, without seeing one living thing that did not belong to the kafila, not a bird, nor even an insect; the sand is beautifully fine, round, and red. It is difficult to give the most distant idea of the stillness and beauty of a night scene, on a desert of this description. The distance between the resting places is not sufficiently great, for the dread of want of water ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... full of the odour of musk, as from the unseen presence of some musk-breathing insect or animal. The shadows were deep and mysterious, the rays of light which pierced the foliage, already touched by the finger of autumn, seemed like shafts of moonlight shining through the storied windows of a cathedral. A ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... he pulled at the fabric, he was unable to tear it. So, still wearing the livery of the off-world men, Ross continued on his way, hardly caring where he went or how. The mud plastered on him by his frequent falls was some protection against the swarm of insect life his passing stirred into attack. However, he was able to endure a swollen face and slitted eyes, being far more conscious of the wrenching feeling within him than the ...
— The Time Traders • Andre Norton
... sprouting grass! In a blur the violets pass. Whispering from the wildwood come Mayflower's breath and insect's hum. Roses carpeting the ground; Thrushes, orioles, warbling sound: Swing me low, and swing me high, To the warm ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V2 • Charles H. Sylvester
... close to him would notice the intruder, might even retreat before the menace of more mosquitoes, and the rapturous twilight opportunity for opening his confidence would pass forever. His instinct was all to protect her. But how? To slap at the insect with his cap or his hand was unthinkable. He found himself blushing at the very thought! Yet how to warn her without acknowledging that his attention had been concentrated on the lower graceful silhouette? ...
— Skippy Bedelle - His Sentimental Progress From the Urchin to the Complete - Man of the World • Owen Johnson
... a night, how sweet, how sweet is life, Even to the insect piper with his fife! And must your troubled face still bear the blight Of strength that runs itself to waste in strife? For love's own heart should throb through all the light Of such ...
— Songs, Merry and Sad • John Charles McNeill
... scratch in his hand while performing a post-mortem examination. All that medical science could suggest was done to no avail. * * * * * In the summer of 1896 a young woman 22 years of age was bitten on the leg by an insect. Several physicians were called in but their treatment gave no relief; blood-poisoning set in; it was decided to amputate the leg, but before it could be done she died. * * * * * In July, 1896, a veterinary ...
— Alcohol: A Dangerous and Unnecessary Medicine, How and Why - What Medical Writers Say • Martha M. Allen
... kinds by the names of angurek warna and katong'ging; the first of which I apprehend to be the anggrek bunga putri (Angraecum scriptum, R.) and the other the anggrek kasturi (Angraecum moschatum, R.) or scorpion-flower, from its resembling that insect, as the former does the butterfly. The musky scent resides at the extremity of ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... dish for eight days. They were, in reality, not leaves, but insects, which, from their resembling leaves, are enabled to escape the attacks of other creatures; indeed, they were the well-known leaf-insect of ...
— Notable Voyagers - From Columbus to Nordenskiold • W.H.G. Kingston and Henry Frith
... seemed! Sometimes a twig would snap, or a buzzing insect would pause, as if to look at her, but no one came ...
— Dorothy Dainty at the Mountains • Amy Brooks
... chin in both hands. The old circuit rider and his wife had gone to bed. A whippoorwill was crying with plaintive persistence far up a ravine, and the night was deep and still about her, save for the droning of insect life from the gloomy woods. Straight above her stars glowed thickly, and in a gap of the hills beyond the river, where the sun had gone down, the evening star still hung like a great jewel on the velvety violet curtain of the night, and upon that her eyes were fixed. On the spur above, her keen ...
— The Heart Of The Hills • John Fox, Jr.
... of the affections of men do indeed live, we are told, in the insect world. So beautifully ...
— The Galaxy, Volume 23, No. 2, February, 1877 • Various
... fortified mission of Ste. Marie. Round it were some two thousand Hurons to whom Father Daniel ministered. Father Daniel was just closing the morning services on July the 4th, 1648. His tawny people were on their knees repeating the responses of the service, when from the forest, humming with insect and bird life, arose a sound that was neither wind nor running water—confused, increasing, nearing! Then a shriek broke within the fort palisades,—"The enemy! the Iroquois!" and the courtyard was in an uproar indescribable. Painted redskins, naked but ...
— Canada: the Empire of the North - Being the Romantic Story of the New Dominion's Growth from Colony to Kingdom • Agnes C. Laut
... mineral, animal, vegetable kingdom—each helps him to realize, however faintly, her many manifold beauties: to give some idea, however slight, of that glorious flood of colour, which light lets loose upon the world. Metal, ore, earth, stone; root, plant, flower, fruit; beast, fish, insect—in turn aid the arduous task. The painter's box is a very museum of curiosities, from every part of the universe. For it, the mines yield their treasures, as well as the depths of the sea: to it come Arab camel, and English ox, cuttle-fish ...
— Field's Chromatography - or Treatise on Colours and Pigments as Used by Artists • George Field
... full information on all branches of Nature study," broke in the bookagent, with a tired note sounding in his voice for the first time; "forestry, insect life, bird migration, reclamation of waste lands. As I was saying, no man who has to deal with the varied interests ...
— The Toys of Peace • Saki
... a Dutch entomologist, born at Amsterdam, where he settled as a doctor, but turning with enthusiasm to the study of insect life, made important contributions to, and practically laid the foundations of, entomological ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... hall-mark of ownership. But a compromise was finally agreed upon, whereby we were to run the beeves through the chute and cut the brush from their tails. In a four or five year old animal this tally-mark would hold for a year, and in no wise work any hardship to the animal in warding off insect life. In case of any loss on the trail my employer agreed to pay one dollar a head for regathering any stragglers that returned within a year. The proposition was a fair one, the ranchmen yielded, and we ran ...
— Reed Anthony, Cowman • Andy Adams
... walking vanity bag: idle, shiftless, eager for compliments, and without two ideas in her vain little head. "Whoever is at the bottom of the affair, she isn't," was his mental comment. "She is just a gadfly, just a gaudy, useless insect, born without a sting, or the spirit to use one if she ...
— Cleek, the Master Detective • Thomas W. Hanshew
... as St. Ambrose calling Jesus "the good scarabaeus, who rolled up before him the hitherto un-shapen mud of our bodies;" a thought which seems to have been borrowed as much from the hieroglyphics as from the insect's habits; and perhaps from the Egyptian priests in some cases, using the scarabous to denote the god Horus-Ra, and sometimes the word only begotten. We trace this thought on the Gnostic gems where Ave see a winged griffin rolling before him a wheel, ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 11 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... repelling in Mr. Hanks. Indeed, he seemed rather a mild man, but when he turned on me a pair of large spectacles I felt suddenly as though I were a curious insect being examined under magnifying-glasses. Mr. Hanks, with his thin, pale face and dishevelled hair, appeared more an entomologist than a militant editor. In a moment, however, I saw him in action. He shot his bare arm across the littered desk, he seemed to try to destroy his brass bell, and ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... blameful, scolding myself, condoling with myself, vowing the whole problem a plague and a cheat. This idle wandering might have lasted until dawn, had it not been for my neighbour in the room to my left, who began to talk with a low buzz as of a night-insect humming in a bed-curtain. The surging of the voice amused me; I lay quite still and listened to it. Now it rose loud—I gleaned a word, and was pleased; now it fell—and I fretted; but anon another voice was added to the first, and, if the one had pleased me, the ...
— The Iron Pirate - A Plain Tale of Strange Happenings on the Sea • Max Pemberton
... and while he was marvelling at her imperturbability, he had heard her screaming with fright at the sight of an ear-wig. He had rushed to her help, imagining that she was in terrible danger, and had found her trembling and shuddering because this pitiful insect had crawled on to her dressing-gown.... He had been very frightened when he heard her screaming to him for help, and he suffered so strange a reaction when he discovered that her trouble was trivial ...
— The Foolish Lovers • St. John G. Ervine
... child of nature—one who knew more about his mother than any other child she had. Yet he was not a Calvinist. He did not get his inspiration from any book, but from every star in the heavens, from the insect in the sunbeam, from the flowers in the meadows, ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... jessamine, Rear'd high their flourish'd heads between, and wrought Mosaic, under foot the violet, Crocus, and hyacinth, with rich inlay Broider'd the ground, more colour'd than with stone Of costliest emblem other creature here, Beast, bird, insect, or worm, durst enter none, Such was their awe of man. In shadier bower More sacred and sequester'd, though but feign'd, Pan or Sylvanus never slept, nor nymph Nor Faunus haunted. Here, in close recess, With flowers, garlands, and sweet smelling herbs, Espoused ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... bursts of rage which no experience had succeeded in teaching him to curb. He howled till the dirt sticking about the vaulted ceiling, and the earth choking up the air-hole, dropped piecemeal to the ground, and every insect that had ears covered them up the best way it could to prevent its becoming instantaneously deafened by the horrid sound; then tearing round and round and round the confined space of his cell, till there seemed to him fifty windows instead of ...
— The Adventures of a Bear - And a Great Bear too • Alfred Elwes
... do all kinds of work. Indispensable, absolutely necessary. Perpetually, continually. Centiped, an insect with a great number of feet. Economize, to save. Dispatch, diligence, haste. Penstock, a wooden tube for conducting water. Chores, the light work of the household either within ...
— The New McGuffey Fourth Reader • William H. McGuffey
... nature with a sense of greater space and freedom. It suggests besides, that the universe is not rough-hewn, but perfect in its details. Nature will bear the closest inspection; she invites us to lay our eye level with the smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain. She has no interstices; every part is full of life. I explore, too, with pleasure, the sources of the myriad sounds which crowd the summer noon, and which seem the very grain and stuff of which eternity is made. Who does not remember the shrill roll-call of the harvest fly? ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau
... on the parchment refused to give way to further polishing, however, and remembering a bottle of ammonia I kept for insect bites, I mixed some with kaffir beer and poured it on the head of the tomtom. One touch of the handkerchief was sufficient once the strong alkali got to work, and out came the grand old face of Nelson and ...
— Uncanny Tales • Various
... to booklovers!—the same eye is occupied by all the grotesquerie of insect life in the revel over that unhappy tome lurking in the plum tree's crevice of Browning's Garden Fancy, which creeps and crawls with beetle and spider, worm and eft.[33] Or it is night and moonlight by the sandy shore, and for a moment—before love ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... resemblances above mentioned between ant and human societies, there are nevertheless three far-reaching differences between insect and human organization and development to ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... otherwise be possible. The wasp now walked entirely round the hole, pushing carefully back the loose sand which seemed likely to fall in again. This done, she was up and away. She was in search now of the insect near which to lay her egg, but although she came in sight of several, ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. V, August, 1878, No 10. - Scribner's Illustrated • Various
... V.50: All diligence of spirit.] "With the whole bent of my mind." A happy phraseology; in ridicule, at the same time that it was in conformity with the style of the airy, affected insect ...
— Hamlet • William Shakespeare
... you insist upon your bitter Osher smile, why shut your eyes to the palpable analogy suggested? Naturalists assert that the Solanum, or apple of Sodom, contains in its normal state neither dust nor ashes, unless it is punctured by an insect (the Tenthredo), which converts the whole of the inside into dust, leaving nothing but the rind entire, without any loss of color. Human life is as fair and tempting as the fruit of 'Ain Jidy,' till stung and poisoned by ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... pavement—it wants a jail and a poor-house more. The idea of a pavement in a one-horse town composed of two gin-mills, a blacksmith-shop, and that mustard-plaster of a newspaper, the Daily Hurrah! The crawling insect, Buckner, who edits the Hurrah, is braying about this business with his customary imbecility, and imagining that he ...
— Editorial Wild Oats • Mark Twain
... ear," said Benoni, still playing the same notes, so that the constant monotony of them buzzed like a vexatious insect in Nino's hearing. Still the old man sawed the bow over the same strings without change. On and on, the same everlasting chord, till Nino thought ...
— A Roman Singer • F. Marion Crawford
... struggle of a day when all this great, yet minute world lived, slept, woke and worked, subject to one Will—a Will mighty enough to control the universe, precise enough to make perfect and beautiful the down upon the wing of an insect invisible except under a powerful microscope? Why should she fret, or ...
— Sara, a Princess • Fannie E. Newberry
... each beauteous flower, Iris all hues, roses, and jessamin, Reared high their flourished heads between, and wrought Mosaick; underfoot the violet, Crocus, and hyacinth, with rich inlay Broidered the ground, more coloured than with stone Of costliest emblem: Other creature here, Bird, beast, insect, or worm, durst enter none, Such was their awe of Man. In shadier bower More sacred and sequestered, though but feigned, Pan or Sylvanus never slept, nor Nymph Nor Faunus haunted. Here, in close recess, ...
— Paradise Lost • John Milton
... a very dismal goal, according to your theory," grumbled the Old Maid. "I should hate to feel myself an insect in a hive, my little round of duties apportioned to me, my every action regulated by a fixed law, my place assigned to me, my very food and drink, I suppose, apportioned to me. Do think of ...
— Tea-table Talk • Jerome K. Jerome
... it, And I must hear that word again? 'Tis bitter; Importunate it comes upon me, like an insect That, driven once away, returns to buzz About my face.... The victory is in vain! The field is heaped with corpses; scattered wide, And broken, are the rest—a most flourishing Army, with which, if it were still united, And it were mine, mine truly, I'd engage To overrun all Italy! ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... out the season. She made special pets of the birds, locating nest after nest, and immediately projecting herself into the daily life of the occupants. "No one," she says, "ever taught me more than that the birds were useful, a gift of God for our protection from insect pests on fruit and crops; and a gift of Grace in their beauty and music, things to be rigidly protected. From this cue I evolved the idea myself that I must be extremely careful, for had not my father tied a 'kerchief over my mouth when he lifted me for a peep into ...
— At the Foot of the Rainbow • Gene Stratton-Porter
... faintest sound startled me! A falling leaf; a blade of grass moved by an insect; a snake or a lizard gliding out of my path; the squeal of a monkey; the fluttering of a bird's wings as it flew up to its perch, all ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... plagues of locust, no animal or insect pests to destroy our crops or herbage. Rabbits had been introduced and turned loose at various times, but, instead of multiplying until they had become as numerous as the sand on the seashore, as had been the case in other parts of Australia, ...
— The Book of the Bush • George Dunderdale
... the branches at the edge of the clearing others could be detected sitting with outstretched antenna ready to take flight at the least alarm. It was a glorious spot, and one which will always live in my memory as exhibiting the insect-life of the tropics in unexampled luxuriance. For the three following days I continued to visit this locality, adding each time many new species to my collection-the following notes of which may be interesting to entomologists. October 15th, 33 species of beetles; ...
— The Malay Archipelago - Volume II. (of II.) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... said," he began at length, withdrawing his eyes reluctantly from an usually large insect upon the ceiling and addressing himself to the maiden, "that there are few situations in life that cannot be honourably settled, and without any loss of time, either by suicide, a bag of gold, or by thrusting a despised antagonist over ...
— Kai Lung's Golden Hours • Ernest Bramah
... bars of gold and light vibrated over the tawny waters, and darkness fell like a black sword, cutting the day from the night. The voices of the birds from the tree-tops, here and there died down, and as if to enhance the silence, insect voices came from under the grass. I got on my elephant's back and sat there quietly, for as the evening Silence goes by, each man must make his prayer. As the Silence walked on, I could see the grass waving in zig-zag curves across the river. It was always ...
— Kari the Elephant • Dhan Gopal Mukerji
... I had got into mischief in the shape of an ant's nest, and gave me the first instalment of a lesson I learned in due time very thoroughly, that the beauties of Jamaica are to be enjoyed with a very cautious regard to the paramount rights of the insect creation. ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. IV. October, 1863, No. IV. - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... could it be? Scavengers? The web gives us a complete census on everything inside it. The only animals inside the ring are more wart-hogs and, despite their appearance, they aren't carnivorous. Strictly grass-eaters. Besides, no animal, no insect, no process of decay could completely consume animals without a trace. There are no bones, no ...
— The Planet with No Nightmare • Jim Harmon
... watery lane, and the roll of the oars in the rowlocks ceased, the silence became profound, almost oppressively so, marked and emphasised as it was by the lap and gurgle of the water against the boat's planking. Not a bird was here to be seen; not even an insect—except the mosquitoes, by the by, which soon began to swarm round us in numbers amply sufficient to atone for the absence of all other life. But the picture presented to our view by the long avenue of variegated foliage, looped and festooned in every direction with ...
— The Congo Rovers - A Story of the Slave Squadron • Harry Collingwood
... gazing indolently at whatever or whoever happened along; instead of wretched cobble-stone pavements, I walked on a firm foundation of coral, built up from the bottom of the sea by the absurd but persevering insect of that name, with a light layer of lava and cinders overlying the coral, belched up out of fathomless perdition long ago through the seared and blackened crater that stands dead and harmless in the distance now; instead of cramped and crowded ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... said Wendy, writing her essay on Insect Pests, "to have to find out whether your insect has a biting or a sucking mouth, so as to know whether you must spray the beastie direct, or apply poison to the plant. I'd feel rather like a dentist examining ...
— A harum-scarum schoolgirl • Angela Brazil
... all the tribes of animated beings, has a power been given to nullify this feeling. Beast, bird, and insect, attend to the wants of their offspring, accordingly as those wants require much or little assiduity. But woman, if she will, can drug and stupefy this feeling. She can commit the charge of her child to dependants ...
— Trials and Confessions of a Housekeeper • T. S. Arthur
... the Brahminical trinity, was born under it. This tree is extensively planted around the temples of the Hindus, and many religious devotees pass their lives under its shade for its sanctifying influence. It is useful for other purposes; for the lac-insect feeds upon its leaves, and the women get a kind of caoutchouc from its sap, which ...
— Across India - Or, Live Boys in the Far East • Oliver Optic
... in the Orient. While readily inoculated by artificial means, the chinquapins, especially varieties of the northern bush forms, quite often escape natural infection, doubtless because of their small size, smooth bark, and less liability to insect attacks. ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association, Report of the Proceedings at the Seventh Annual Meeting • Various
... of vision which could not see at a glance that fly and insect were one and the same, is, as you say, enough to account for its being the writer's only sonnet (there is one more however which I ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... course, they must take SOME new course or die. There is nothing strange in the fact that similar beings puzzled similarly should take a similar line of action. I grant, however, that it is hard to see how change of food and treatment can puzzle an insect into such "complex growth" as that it should make a cavity in its thigh, grow an invaluable proboscis, and betray a practical knowledge of difficult ...
— Life and Habit • Samuel Butler
... vines. A quail killed in a potato field in Pennsylvania and examined by a government entomologist had in its stomach the remains of one hundred twenty-six bugs. The quail is one of the most valuable insect-eating birds of its size in the world; and yet there are so-called sportsmen all over the land, thousands of them, who insist on having legal authority to kill every quail they can find during at least three months of each year. Then there is a whole army of game-hogs ...
— News Writing - The Gathering , Handling and Writing of News Stories • M. Lyle Spencer
... when preparing vegetables for the table, the stalks and stems, and the peelings of apples, potatoes, etc., should all be used for stock, care being taken, of course, to cleanse them well first, cutting out any insect-eaten or ...
— The Healthy Life, Vol. V, Nos. 24-28 - The Independent Health Magazine • Various
... resented the vicious slap and flew straight for Sary's red head. She unceremoniously ducked and ran. But the insect buzzed after her with evil intent, so Sary ran for her sanctuary, slamming the screen door safely between herself and her pursuer. The audience watching beside the table laughed ...
— Polly of Pebbly Pit • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... American, flea means a small insect armed with a bayonet, who is wont to jab it into you and then hop, skip, and jump to the next place to be attacked. There is an advantage in having fleas on you instead of "cooties" in that in one of his extended jumps said flea is liable to land on the fellow next ...
— Over The Top • Arthur Guy Empey
... seen a fly that had fallen into syrup crawling over the floor, dragging its sticky legs and wings along with the utmost difficulty. It was plain that the wretched insect must die, though it still struggled, and made frantic efforts to regain its feet. At the time he had turned away from it in disgust, and now he saw it again, as in a feverish dream. Then he suddenly thought of a fight that he had once witnessed between ...
— Sanine • Michael Artzibashef
... express their sufferings. Once, indeed, Harry was caught twirling a cock-chafer round, which he had fastened by a crooked pin to a long piece of thread: but then this was through ignorance and want of thought; for, as soon as his father told him that the poor helpless insect felt as much, or more than he would do, were a knife thrust through his hand, he burst into tears, and took the poor animal home, where he fed him during a fortnight upon fresh leaves; and when he was perfectly ...
— The History of Sandford and Merton • Thomas Day
... well out at sea between Mazzorbo and Murano. The ruddy arches overhead were reflected without interruption in the waveless ruddy lake below. Our black boat was the only dark spot in this sphere of splendour. We seemed to hang suspended; and such as this, I fancied, must be the feeling of an insect caught in the heart of a fiery-petalled rose. Yet not these melodramatic sunsets alone are beautiful. Even more exquisite, perhaps, are the lagoons, painted in monochrome of greys, with just one touch of pink upon a western cloud, ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... rise again; Nikkolay nodded to someone out of sight. A cool hand touched his chin, and he smelled a woman's perfume, nothing at all like Elaine's. Something like a small insect bit him on the neck. The ...
— Space Viking • Henry Beam Piper
... singing its wings. Poor wee beastie! let me save it, if it be not too late." And she chased the insect most patiently until the blue-gray wings fluttered ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... a Time Margaret Benson To a Mouse Robert Burns The Grasshopper Abraham Cowley On the Grasshopper and Cricket John Keats To the Grasshopper and the Cricket Leigh Hunt The Cricket William Cowper To a Cricket William Cox Bennett To an Insect Oliver Wendell Holmes The Snail William Cowper The Housekeeper Charles Lamb The Humble-Bee Ralph Waldo Emerson To a Butterfly William Wordsworth Ode to a Butterfly Thomas Wentworth Higginson The Butterfly Alice Freeman Palmer Fireflies Edgar ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 1 (of 4) • Various
... kind!— which had been displayed in the workmanship, I rapidly arrived at the conclusion that it was the most uncomfortable carpet I had ever seen. I wagged my finger at the repeated portrayals of the— to me!—unspeakable insect. ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... tay see, wau wau tay see, Flitting white fire insect, Waving white fire bug, Give me light before I go to bed, Give me light before I go to sleep! Come, little dancing white fire bug, Come, little flitting white fire beast, Light me with your bright white flame, Light me with your ...
— Two Indian Children of Long Ago • Frances Taylor
... invaded them! Mosquitoes—myriads of them—buzzed busily about, seeking whom they might devour! The mosquito of the Philippines is well entitled to be called an insect of prey. He is a big fellow, tireless, always hungry and a valiant fighter. The men who lay on the ground carefully wrapped themselves in their blankets, with their hands tucked in. Their heads and necks were protected by collapsible nets that they ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys in the Philippines - or, Following the Flag against the Moros • H. Irving Hancock
... her mouth to wail. Then she suddenly changed her mind, climbed down, and going over to Huz began whispering vigorously into his ear. Her warm breath tickled Huz and he flopped his ear to drive away the annoying insect. Jilly beamed, calling joyfully to her mother: "Huz say ess, Mamma, ...
— Chicken Little Jane on the Big John • Lily Munsell Ritchie
... contrasted with broad masses of rich grey-brown shadow—they agreed that it was incomparably more beautiful when viewed by the full light of day and in all the glory of brilliant sunshine. A thousand gorgeous colours on leaf and blossom, on gaily-plumaged bird and bright-winged insect, charmed their eyes and enriched the foreground of the picture; while the dense masses of foliage, with their subtle gradations of colour, light, and shade, as they gradually receded into the background, and finally melted into the rich purply grey of the extreme distance, balanced ...
— The Pirate Island - A Story of the South Pacific • Harry Collingwood
... very top layer of fluffy, crumbly, moist soil mixed with leaf material and humus, are the animals that begin the process of humification. Many of these primary decomposers are larger, insect-like animals commonly known to gardeners, including the wood lice that we call pill bugs because they roll up defensively into hard armadillo-like shells, and the highly intrusive earwigs my daughter calls pinch bugs. There are also numerous types ...
— Organic Gardener's Composting • Steve Solomon
... sun, the god of their worship, a core of seeds and fringe of petals representing their best effort to mimic the flaming disc and far-flung corona of the sun. Man seeks less ardently, and so more ineffectively in his will and imagination to image God. In the reverent study of insect and animal life we gain some hint of what we have been and what we may become—something corresponding to the grub, a burrowing thing; to the caterpillar, a crawling thing; and finally to the butterfly, a ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... the old man, with the air of an officious waiter, lifted it with a flourish, disclosing, inside the cracked font, a white pudding-basin, inside which, again, reposed a species of beetle known as a "devil's coach-horse." The Archdeacon, peering in and evidently recognizing the insect and its popular designation, and looking much shocked, exclaimed with some warmth: "Dear me! I should scarcely have expected to find ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... still——" he said. "I don't recommend the Amazon, a huge river of course, but unless you are interested in rubber or entomology. The insect ...
— Gossamer - 1915 • George A. Birmingham
... with only half-interest at the gorgeous insect; then, turning away a little impatiently, "I don't know how you can be out here so much and not try to make it a little tidier," she said vexedly. "I only wish I had a machine, or shears or something, and more time, and I would do ...
— The Carroll Girls • Mabel Quiller-Couch
... place. But Brentano loves the Rhine, and Eichendorff's landscape is genuinely Silesian. Caroline and Dorothea know nothing of the mood which makes Bettina throw herself prone in the grass to watch an insect crawl over her hand. ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: - Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English, Volume 5. • Various
... Assyrians, Virgil is the most ancient writer, who expressly mentions the soft wool which was combed from the trees of the Seres or Chinese; [62] and this natural error, less marvellous than the truth, was slowly corrected by the knowledge of a valuable insect, the first artificer of the luxury of nations. That rare and elegant luxury was censured, in the reign of Tiberius, by the gravest of the Romans; and Pliny, in affected though forcible language, has condemned the thirst of gain, which explores the last ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... of honour and happiness will come, said the doctor, 'days when you will think no more of Miss Pew than of an insect which once stung you.' ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... go on and leave him; so we stopped to rest, and watch him as he was hopping and bounding along through a tolerably open sunlit part, full of growth of the most dazzling green. Now he neared the insect; now it dashed off again, and led him a tremendous chase, till, just as the doctor shouted to him to return, we saw him make a dab down with ...
— Bunyip Land - A Story of Adventure in New Guinea • George Manville Fenn
... soldiers on each side of the engine wind the arm down until it is almost level with the ground. When the arm is set free, it springs up and hurls the stone forth from its sling." In early times the weapon was called a "scorpion," for like this dreaded insect it bore ...
— Artillery Through the Ages - A Short Illustrated History of Cannon, Emphasizing Types Used in America • Albert Manucy
... upon him night and day like that insect which, having once entered the brain of an elk, gnaws ceaselessly at it until the miserable victim's last breath is drawn. While he retained for Pepeeta a devotion which tormented him with its intensity, his guilt made him tremble in her presence. ...
— The Redemption of David Corson • Charles Frederic Goss
... obtained the grace of Mahadeva can never succeed to devote oneself to Mahadeva for a single day or for half a day or for a Muhurta or for a Kshana or for a Lava (very small unit of time). At the command of Mahadeva I shall cheerfully become a worm or an insect, but I have no relish for even the sovereignty of the three worlds, if bestowed by thee, O Sakra. At the word of Hara I would become even a dog. In fact, that would accord with my highest wish. If not given by Maheswara, I would not have the sovereignty of the very deities. ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 4 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... Should a Boeotian attach it to an insect's wing, and, taking advantage of a violent north wind, throw it by means of a tube into the arsenal and the fire once get hold of the vessels, everything would soon be devoured by ...
— The Acharnians • Aristophanes
... for the first time—could deliver a wound twice as deep and deadly as the ordinary wasp. She was, in short, a queen-wasp; a queen of the future, if Fate willed; a queen as yet without a kingdom, a sovereign uncrowned, but of regal proportions and queenly aspect, for all that; for in the insect world royalties are fashioned upon a super-standard that marks them off from the ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... warm summer day had the ephemeron insect frolicked round the oak tree's head—lived, moved about, and found itself happy; and when the little creature reposed for a moment in calm enjoyment on one of the great fresh oak leaves, the tree ...
— The Sand-Hills of Jutland • Hans Christian Andersen
... to the living Banded Ant-eater (Myrmecobius) of Australia (fig. 158). Amphilestes and Phascolotherium (fig. 184) are also believed by the same distinguished anatomist and palaeontologist to have been insect-eating Marsupials, and the latter is supposed to find its nearest living ally in the Opossums (Didelphys) of America. Lastly, the Stereognathus of the Stonesfield Slate is in a dubious position. It may have been a Marsupial; but, upon the whole, Professor ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... did; but if he is restrained from bad actions by no higher motive than fear of present punishment, his goodness cannot be very great. A good man, Charles, always takes delight in conferring happiness on all around him; nor would he offer the smallest injury to the meanest insect that was capable of feeling. 'I am sure,' said the boy, 'I have often seen you kill wasps, and spiders too; and it was but last week that you bought a mouse-trap yourself to catch mice in, although you are so angry now with me.' 'And pray,' resumed ...
— The Life and Perambulations of a Mouse • Dorothy Kilner
... Sea-Urchin or a Star-Fish. Neither can I present the structural elements of the Mollusk plan, without reminding them of an Oyster or a Clam, a Snail or a Cuttle-Fish,—or of the Articulate plan, without calling up at once the form of a Worm, a Lobster, or an Insect,—or of the Vertebrate plan, without giving it the special character of Fish, Reptile, Bird, or Mammal. Yet I insist that all living beings are but the different modes of expressing these formulae, and that all animals have, within ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... conditions in the low-lying Nyassaland and Uganda borders in the summertime caused the British soldiers more suffering and deaths than their enemies. Insect pests like the tsetse fly swarm around Lake Victoria Nyanza, while different fevers of peculiarly malignant varieties lie in wait to attack the European. There is the terrible sleeping sickness that spares neither white nor black race. The great lake cannot be bathed in without danger for its abounds ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... the insect race, ordained to keep The silent sabbath of a half year's sleep! Entom'd beneath the filmy web they lie And wait the influence of a kinder sky; When vernal sunbeams pierce the dark retreat, The heaving tomb distends with vital heat; The full ...
— The History of Insects • Unknown
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