"Cowry" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... varieties of the most curious and beautiful shells. They were of all sizes, and of every conceivable shape and colour. The surfaces of some were smooth and highly polished; others were scolloped, or fluted, or marked with wave-like undulations. There were little rice and cowrie shells; mottled tiger shells; spider shells, with their long, sharp spikes; immense conches, rough, and covered with great knobs on the outside, but smooth and rose-lipped within, and of many delicate hues. There were some that resembled ...
— The Island Home • Richard Archer
... (Kwei-chau), province. Cuinet, Vital, on Turkman villages, on Mosul Kurds. Cuirbouly. Cuju. Cuncun (Han-Chung) province. Cunningham, General A. Cups, flying. Curds and Curdistan. Currency, copper token, in India, salt; leather; Cowrie, see Cowries. Currency, paper, in China, attempt to institute in Persia; alluded to. Current, strong south along East Coast of Africa. Currents, Cape of, or Corrientes. Curtains, Persian. Curzola Island, Genoese victory at, Polo's galley at; ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... plaits in which men and women arrange their hair, and especially those of the women, are often decorated with ornaments. Small cowrie and other shells, or native or European beads, or both, are strung by women on to these plaits, sometimes in a line along all or the greater part of the length of the plait, sometimes as a pendant at the end of it, and sometimes in both ways; and any other small ornamental object ...
— The Mafulu - Mountain People of British New Guinea • Robert W. Williamson
... "Cowrie" (Cyproea moneta) see vol. iv. 77. The Badam or Bidam (almond) used by way of small change in India, I have ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... distant roaring, and marveled at the mystery of the ocean song being thus forever kept alive, inland. Shells seem so much like work of human hands, and are often so marked as with letters, that it is not strange that faith soon found the supernatural in them. The magic shell of all others is the cowrie. Why the Roman ladies called it porcella, or little pig, because it has a pig's back, is the objective explanation of its name, and how from its gloss that name, or porcellana, was transferred to porcelain, ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland |
