"Fossil" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of the fossils of Solenhofen to be sold in Bavaria; the best in existence, containing many specimens unique for perfectness, and one, unique as an example of a species (a whole kingdom of unknown living creatures being announced by that fossil). This collection, of which the mere market worth, among private buyers, would probably have been some thousand or twelve hundred pounds, was offered to the English nation for seven hundred; but we would not give seven hundred, and the whole series would have ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... old fossil!" David cried. "And I'm not going to take that back or be sorry for saying it. Hadn't he better sense than to throw a wet blanket on ...
— Patchwork - A Story of 'The Plain People' • Anna Balmer Myers
... Brent, the drunkard, and of the terrible, the unspeakable Margaret, his wife. They could not forget that he was born and lived the first years of his life on the "mean" street, when it was a mean street; and when any obstinate old fossil was told of the youth's promise, he would shake his head, as who should say, "What good can come out ...
— The Uncalled - A Novel • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... Kentucky which have given him immortality—through the valley of the Kentucky and the Licking, and along the "Belle Riviere" (Ohio) as low as the falls. He visited the Big Bone Lick and examined the wonderful fossil remains of the mammoth found there. Along the great buffalo roads, worn several feet below the surface of the ground, which led to the Blue Licks, he saw with amazement and delight thousands of huge shaggy ...
— The Conquest of the Old Southwest • Archibald Henderson
... men will be destroyed when the earth sinks into the sea and becomes mud, and that the race will begin anew from the beginning; and this transformation takes place for all worlds."(7) Here, then, we see this earliest of paleontologists studying the fossil-bearing strata of the earth, and drawing from his observations a marvellously scientific induction. Almost two thousand years later another famous citizen of Italy, Leonardo da Vinci, was independently to think out similar conclusions from like observations. But not ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... voyages in opposition to wind and tide, and a power placed in human hands which seems almost unlimited. To these novel and still extending improvements may be added others, whish, though of a secondary kind, yet materially affect the comforts of life, the collecting from fossil materials the elements of combustion, and applying them so as to illuminate, by a single operation, houses, streets, and even cities. If you look to the results of chemical arts you will find new ...
— Consolations in Travel - or, the Last Days of a Philosopher • Humphrey Davy
... Of INFUSORIAL ANIMALCULES, Living and Fossil, containing Descriptions of every Species, British and foreign; the methods of procuring and viewing them, &c., illustrated by numerous Engravings. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 218, December 31, 1853 • Various
... bachelor retirement. My host described a mammal's tooth that weighed nearly fourteen pounds, which had been taken from a phosphate mine; it had been sent to a public room at Beaufort, South Carolina. A fossil shark's tooth, weighing four and a half pounds, was also found, and a learned ichthyologist has asserted that the owner of this remarkable relic of the past must have been one ...
— Voyage of The Paper Canoe • N. H. Bishop
... access to kings or to gain lawsuits, and a Roman citizen was put to death in the reign of Claudius for bringing such an amulet into court. Pliny had seen this "egg." It was about the size of an apple, with a cartilaginous skin covered with discs.[1137] Probably it was a fossil echinus, such as has been found in Gaulish tombs.[1138] Such "eggs" were doubtless connected with the cult of the serpent, or some old myth of an egg produced by serpents may have been made use of to ...
— The Religion of the Ancient Celts • J. A. MacCulloch
... has a prosperous Western-style capitalist economy, with a per capita GDP comparable to levels in industrialized West European countries. Rich in natural resources, Australia is a major exporter of agricultural products, minerals, metals, and fossil fuels. Of the top 25 exports, 21 are primary products, so that, as happened during 1983-84, a downturn in world commodity prices can have a big impact on the economy. The government is pushing for increased exports of manufactured goods, but competition in international markets ...
— The 1992 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... 4. "A fossil flat-iron." This antediluvian relic was found imbedded in a Sandy deposite opposite Surrey-street, near ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, September 25, 1841 • Various
... never answered any one in my life, not even you, or Esther, or the man who said that my fossil bird was a crocodile. Why do you want me to ...
— Esther • Henry Adams
... referring chiefly to the fact that no one else was down, seemed to have no interest for Mr. Norbury; who, however, noted that no new topic had dawned upon the conversation when he returned from a revision of the breakfast-table. The fact was that the Hon. Percival had detected in Miss Dickenson a fossil, and was feeling ashamed of a transient interest in her last night, when she had shown insight, under the guidance—suppose we say—of champagne. Her bloom had gone off, too, in a strange way, and bloom was a sine qua non to this gentleman. She ...
— When Ghost Meets Ghost • William Frend De Morgan
... he exclaimed scoffingly. "Pooh! some old fossil who'll come here—I'll tell you how! He'll ask for the responsible authorities. That's Simon Crood and Company. He'll hear all they've got to say. They'll say what they like. He'll examine their documents. ...
— In the Mayor's Parlour • J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher
... in the mass, David, and no one living can do it better. I am like most women, I think: I deal with the individual. That is all the difference. When do the Annerses go out to the fossil-beds?" ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde
... privilege to their ancestors! That is an irrational interference with the liberty of the players which hardly anybody nowadays ventures to defend in principle, and which is only upheld in some half-hearted way (save in the case of that fossil anachronism, the Duke of Argyll) by supposed arguments of convenience. It won't last long now; there is talk in the committee of "mending or ending it." It shows the long-suffering nature of the poor blind ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen
... primitive Yankee should become extinct, as now seems very probable, Lowell's masterly portrait of him will remain, and future generations can reconstruct him from it, as Agassiz reconstructed an extinct species of mammal from fossil bones. ...
— Cambridge Sketches • Frank Preston Stearns
... "that's his speciality—folklore, occultism, all that flummery. If you knocked at his door with the original Sleeping Beauty on your arm he'd only fuss round her with cushions and hope that she'd had a good night. Found a seed once—chipped it out of an old fossil, and grew it in a pot in his study. About the most dilapidated weed you ever saw. Talked about it as if he had re-discovered the Elixir of Life. Even if he didn't say anything in actually so many words, there was the way he went about. That of itself was enough to have started the ...
— Malvina of Brittany • Jerome K. Jerome
... individual or species may come to an end; species may be exterminated, but we know of no instance of individuals coming into existence except by the process of reproduction or generation from pre-existing individuals. Further, we know from the evidence of fossil remains that the animals existing in former periods were very different from those existing now, and that many of the existing forms, such as man, mammals, birds, bony fishes, can only be traced back in the succession ...
— Hormones and Heredity • J. T. Cunningham
... spherical as if turned out by a hand-lathe. The sandstone banks opposite the island are overlain with a stratum of lignite three or four feet thick, which burns freely and makes acceptable fuel. Sections of fossil trees are also seen, and the whole thing is fascinating, one's great wish being for a larger knowledge of geology so as to read aright this strange page of ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... held towards the old lawyer rather the same sort of patronizing attitude that he had had towards the old man. It would be a rotten dinner probably followed by a deadly dull evening with a snuffy old fossil who would tell him long-winded, rambling anecdotes of what New York had been like when there were wild ...
— By Advice of Counsel • Arthur Train
... discovered by looking within upon the soul or without upon the world. A truth written upon the human heart to-day in its full play of emotions or passions, cannot be at any real variance even with a truth written upon a fossil whose poor life was gone millions of years ago. And this being so, it would also seem a truth irrefragable; that the search for each of these kind of truths must be followed out in its own lines, by its own methods, to its own results, ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various
... on the Beagle he saw from the start with the eyes of a born evolutionist. In South America he saw the fossil remains of the Toxodon, and observed, "How wonderful are the different orders, at the present time so well separated, blended together in the different points of the structure of the Toxodon!" All forms of life attracted him. He looked into the brine-pans of Lymington and found that water ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... reached before dark, that the landing there was dangerous even in daylight, and that this was the only safe harbor on the way to it. While camp was being made. I strolled along the shore to examine the rocks and the fossil timber that abounds here. All the rocks are freshly glaciated, even below the sea-level, nor have the waves as yet worn off the surface polish, much less the heavy scratches and grooves and ...
— Travels in Alaska • John Muir
... pretended to, but every one will exercise it at the peril of being banished from political communion with those who hold the reins and prescribe the policy to be pursued. Slavishness to party and obsequiousness to the popular whims go hand in hand. Political independence only occurs in a fossil state; and men's opinions grow out of the acts they have been constrained to do or sanction. Flattery, either of individual or people, corrupts both the receiver and the giver; and adulation is not of more service to the people than to kings. ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... watched. The old "sport" liked to paddle his own canoe. Fancy having to lower yourself into a chair like that! When an old Johnny got to such a state it was really a mercy when he snuffed out, and made way for younger men. How his Companies could go on putting up with such a fossil for chairman was a marvel! The fossil rumbled and said in that ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... down at your feet and examine the floor. You will not have to search long before you will almost certainly find a piece of stone like that represented in Fig. 48, which has also come from Neath Colliery. This fossil, which is the cast of a piece of a plant, puzzled those who found it for a very long time. At last, however, Mr. Binney found the specimen growing to the bottom of the trunk of one of the fossil trees with spotted stems, called Sigillaria; ...
— The Fairy-Land of Science • Arabella B. Buckley
... it was a chart of the Pacific Islands," answered Brown. "Put a feather with a fossil and a bit of coral and everyone will think it's a specimen. Put the same feather with a ribbon and an artificial flower and everyone will think it's for a lady's hat. Put the same feather with an ink-bottle, a book and a stack of writing-paper, and most men will swear they've seen a quill pen. So ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... think they were anything except what they are called. As for the fried fish, it resembles coarse red sand-paper; and you would sooner think of purchasing a penny-worth to polish the handle of a cricket bat or racket, than of trying its qualities in any other way. The "black puddings" resemble great fossil ammonites, cut up lengthwise. What the "faggots" are made of, which form such a popular dish in this neighbourhood, we have yet to learn. We have heard rumours of chopped lights, liver, suet, and onions as being the components of these dusky dainties; but he must ...
— Dickens' London • Francis Miltoun
... the lowest—from a voice in legislation to a finger in Jack Horner's pie. I looked for a department of Fish, with your lordship's name at the head of it; but I did not find it. It would be a fine department. It would divide itself naturally into three classes—living fish, fossil fish, and fish in ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... The fossil evidence clearly shows the close agreement of the Rhenish and south Devonshire areas. In north Devonshire the Devonian rocks pass upward without break into ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... represented as not only big but also stupid, and as easily overcome by keen-witted human foes like "Jack the Giant-killer." It may be that traditions of pre- historic peoples have sometimes given birth to legends of giants. Another source of stories concerning them has been the discovery of huge fossil bones, such as those of the mammoth or mastodon, which were formerly supposed to be bones of gigantic men. The ogres, who sometimes figure in folk tales, are giants with a taste for human flesh. They recall the cannibals ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... earth is clothed in a light vestment of life, which, back in geologic time, seems to have more completely enveloped it than at present, as both the arctic and the antarctic regions bear evidence in their coal-beds and other fossil remains of luxuriant ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... with him an escort— especially if his interest or cupidity were aroused—for every one would be exceedingly busy. And no fear about the interest and cupidity! The "magic" bone Kingozi had confided to Simba was a fragment of a Pleistocene fossil. Kingozi himself valued it highly, but he hoped and expected to get it back. It made excellent bait, which no scientist could resist. Of course there might be a second white man with Winkleman, but from the reported size ...
— The Leopard Woman • Stewart Edward White et al
... such an angel? . . . Why, just look at him, you old fossil, and look at yourself!" and her eyes turned to her poet. Camusot had pressed Lucien to drink till the poet's head was ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... and obtained the office of assistant to the aged professor of comparative anatomy. In the year of his appointment, he made a mark in the study which he rendered so famous, by a memoir on the Megalonyx, a fossil animal known by a few of its bones, and which, contrary to received opinion, he boldly proved to have been a gigantic sloth. This was the first of those able comparisons of the fossil with the present world ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... interest for the things they had seen. The amount of "curios" and souvenirs brought aboard would fill a museum. Pieces of projectiles and Mauser cartridge shells, fragments of an unusual red wood, and pieces of fossil rock, of which the cliff was composed, were stowed away in bags and ...
— A Gunner Aboard the "Yankee" • Russell Doubleday
... Devonian fishes, enormous Triassic reptiles, the rich and varied shells of the Jurassic, the dinosaurs and primitive birds of Cretaceous, the little early horses of Eocene, and Miocene's camels and mastodons mingling their fossil remnants in a democracy of ruin to defy the ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard
... But in getting paraffins that melt at 136, 137 or 138 degrees we have a rather definite crystalline element. Mr. Bixby has suggested the use of the earth wax which is mined in Australia. It is really a fossil paraffin and is not so granular. I found that it is not to be had in this country at the present time, however, although various dealers told me that they had it, and I obtained from a firm in New York City a misbranded specimen called ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Fourteenth Annual Meeting • Various
... which every serious Frenchman will reply to opponents, especially in public matters. But not even the comic dramatist is aware of the last state of refuse commonplace that a word of this kind represents. Refuse rhetoric, by the way, rather than Emerson's "fossil poetry," would seem to be the right name for human language as some of the processes of the several recent centuries have ...
— Essays • Alice Meynell
... But the odour of camphor was unmistakable. In the universal decay this volatile substance had chanced to survive, perhaps through many thousands of centuries. It reminded me of a sepia painting I had once seen done from the ink of a fossil Belemnite that must have perished and become fossilized millions of years ago. I was about to throw it away, but I remembered that it was inflammable and burned with a good bright flame—was, in fact, an excellent candle—and I put it in ...
— The Time Machine • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... after the foundation of the most learned Academies of Ireland, a pretty little Zoological Garden was opened in the capital of the country; but no living type of the Irish wolf-dog is to be found there, nor were any 'fossil remains' of the noble animal discovered in the Wicklow Mines,[G] which were worked some fifty years back, but which, for want of capital or perseverance, only furnished a few Cronobane halfpence, and materials for a musical farce to one of the most delightful ...
— Anecdotes of Dogs • Edward Jesse
... between the devil and the dragon. What you ask is impossible. I'll tell you why," he went on, confidentially. "You know this is the land of fossil dinosaurs." ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... Amber, the fossil resin of a pine tree, was found in Sicily, the shores of the Baltic, and other parts of Europe. It was a precious stone then as now, and an article of trade with the Phoenicians, those early merchants of the Mediterranean. ...
— The Story Of Electricity • John Munro
... Of the ancient city one could see the sunburnt tower of the Capitol, the black cypresses of the Palatine, and the ruins of the palace of Septimius Severus, suggesting the white osseous carcase of some fossil monster, left there by a flood. In front, was enthroned the modern city with the long, renovated buildings of the Quirinal, whose yellow walls stood forth with wondrous crudity amidst the vigorous crests of the garden trees. And to right and left on the ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... cemented together with veins of gypsum. Both these pits are mentioned in the Government Geological Survey (pp. 152, 153) of “The country around Lincoln.” Close by the latter pit the writer once found a curious fossil, which was for some time a puzzle to all who saw it. It is now in the British Museum, and was pronounced to be an Echinus crashed ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter
... use of the strong, than when we use the weak acids. By degrees the pupil should be accustomed to employ the strong acids; such as the vitriolic, the nitric, and the muriatic, which three are called fossil acids, to distinguish them from the vegetable, or weaker acids. We may be permitted to advise the young chemist to acquire the habit of wiping the neck of the vessel out of which he pours any strong acid, as the drops of the liquor will not then burn his hand when he takes hold of the bottle; ...
— Practical Education, Volume II • Maria Edgeworth
... life or fiction. Nevertheless, such is the fortunate recuperative faculty of boyhood that day after day I would forget the horrors of that hour, and be happy in climbing over the decayed chalk acclivities of Whitby, picking up the fossil shells that nestle there. Yonder on my table, as I write, lies a coiled ammonite found there; it had been there ten thousand years or ages before I detached it from its bed, and, for aught I know, my remotest posterity may ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... fossil word. It lies just at the foot of the Wrekin, and the hill which takes that name in English must have been pronounced by the old Celtic inhabitants much like Uricon: for of course the awkward initial letter has only become silent in these later lazy centuries. The Romans turned it into Uriconium; ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... germ of the electric telegraph, which binds the intelligence of continents together, and, probably before many years have elapsed will "put a girdle round the globe." So, too, little bits of stone and fossil, dug out of the earth, intelligently interpreted, have issued in the science of geology and the practical operations of mining, in which large capitals are invested and vast numbers of ...
— How to Get on in the World - A Ladder to Practical Success • Major A.R. Calhoon
... staff could give a name to it." He took a little bone the size of a bean out of a pill-box. "So far as I am a judge this human bone is the analogue of the one which you hold in your hand. That will give you some idea of the size of the creature. You will observe from the cartilage that this is no fossil specimen, but recent. What ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... throughout Northern Russia," says Lyell, Principles, vol. 1, p. 183, "that, according to Tilesius, thousands of fossil tusks have been collected and used ...
— The Christian Foundation, April, 1880
... almost sorry the voyage is over, and so, I think, are many of my fellow passengers. Some of them are very good and nice. Miss Fox is delightful—upwards of eighty, and yet so full of interest in everything good and beautiful; she is like a piece cut out of the old past, and a very wonderful old fossil, full of energy and cleverness. Hedley desires his love, and is very well and happy. We go to 240, Drummond Street, Montreal, on Monday or Tuesday, Dick in same street, and John and E—- near. Gibson has never been ill at all! Good-bye, ...
— The British Association's visit to Montreal, 1884: Letters • Clara Rayleigh
... attracted the man appeared to be the fact that its shores are literally covered by bones, and consequently by fossil ivory. He had conceived the plan of establishing himself there, and of collecting, during the summer months, all the ivory that he could find; then when, in winter, the arm of the sea which connects Ljakow with the continent should be frozen over, to transport in a sleigh this treasure to ...
— The Waif of the "Cynthia" • Andre Laurie and Jules Verne
... north-east, over an undulating plain of sand and gravel, and at intervals the desert surface was a plain pavement of stone, of a dark slate-colour. Greater part of the route strewn with pieces of petrified wood, but no pretty fossil remains. Wood, apparently chumps of the tholh. We had all day the new range of black mountains on our right, which extend southwards far beyond the Fezzanee country to the Tibboos. Intensely cold all day, the air misty, and the wind from north-west. But I prefer this ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... elder, whose long white beard flows almost to his waist, and whose face is furrowed by a thousand storms; Anthony Jenkinson by name, the great Asiatic traveller, who is discoursing to the Christ-church virtuoso of reindeer sledges and Siberian steppes, and of the fossil ivory, plain proof of Noah's flood, which the Tungoos dig from the ice-cliffs of the Arctic sea. Next to him is Christopher Carlile, Walsingham's son-in-law (as Sidney also is now), a valiant captain, afterwards general of the soldiery in Drake's triumphant ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... sandy beds of these cliffs are remarkable for the richness of their fossil flora. From the white, grey, and brownish clays between Poole Harbour and Bournemouth, no fewer than nineteen species of ferns have been determined. The west side of Bournemouth is rich in Polypodiaceae, and the east side in Eucalypti and Araucaria. These, together with other and sub-tropical ...
— Bournemouth, Poole & Christchurch • Sidney Heath
... is very tenacious, and near the surface is generally of a brown colour, probably owing to the decomposition of the iron pyrites which it contains. It abounds in selenite or sulphate of lime, and in nodules which often contain organic remains. Fossil wood with Teredo antenautae is also met with, and pyritous casts of univalve and bivalve shells. Lower down the stratum becomes more compact and is of a bluish or blackish colour, and its fossil contents are in a fine state of preservation. During the last summer, while examining ...
— Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society - Vol. 3 - Zoology • Various
... cannon ball lies in a garden, an ornament like a shell or a fossil, among blue lobelia and green ferns. It is about as big as a cricket ball—a mere trifle to look at. What a contrast with the immense projectiles thrown by modern guns! Yet it is very heavy—quite out of proportion ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies
... "those were the days! Even if you're not going off to the wilds, maybe you might give me some kind of a job here so that my wife can't drag me off to that house party. I feel it in my very bones that old Hiram Leatherby will be there and he ALWAYS singles me out to talk about his fossil collection!" ...
— Tom Swift and His Giant Telescope • Victor Appleton
... earthenware used in smelting iron, show that iron was smelted in the remotest ages in Africa. These earthenware vessels, and fragments of others of a finer texture, were found in the delta of the Zambesi and in other parts in close association with fossil bones, which, on being touched by the tongue, showed as complete an absence of animal matter as the most ancient fossils known in Europe. They were the bones of animals, as hippopotami, water hogs, antelopes, crocodiles, identical with those now living in the country. These were the primitive ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume II (of 2), 1869-1873 • David Livingstone
... Southern confederacy, one hundred and thirty-three commissioners, representing twenty-one States, of which fourteen were non-slave-holding, met at Washington and continued in session, sitting with closed doors, until the 27th. It was a body of great dignity—a "fossil convention," the Tribune called it—whose proceedings, because of the desire in the public mind to avoid civil war, attracted wide attention. David Dudley Field represented New York on the committee on resolutions, which proposed an amendment of seven sections ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... usually been regarded as friendly to the human race. Religions, laws, sciences, arts, theories, and histories, instead of passing Ariel-like into the elements when their task is done, are made perpetual prisoners in the alcoves of dreary libraries. They have a fossil immortality, surviving themselves in covers, as poems have survived minstrels. The memory of man is made omni-capacious; its burden increases with every generation; not even the ignorance and stolidity of the past are allowed the final grace of being forgotten; ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... stairs, I went through the halls of fossil remains,—which I care little for, though one of them is a human skeleton in limestone,— and through several rooms of mineralogical specimens, including all the gems in the world, among which is seen, not the Koh-i-noor itself, ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... and the next sound that was heard was, "Have you any good fossils about you?" in a tone as if he doubted whether so small a boy knew what a fossil meant; but little Felix was equal ...
— The Long Vacation • Charlotte M. Yonge
... superstitious Indian about the biggest fright he had ever received. It was a book in which were pictured and described many of the great extinct monsters of the old times. These enormous hideous creatures, whose bones and fossil remains are still occasionally to be found, quite alarmed him. Yet the book was generally about the first one he desired ...
— Algonquin Indian Tales • Egerton R. Young
... grand old men is that we no longer have so many old men. Instead we have numbers of octogenarian sportsmen like the late Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, who have not yet been caught by the arch-reactionary fossil-collector, Senility. This is a fair omen for the future of progress. "If only the leaders of the world's thought and emotion," writes Bourne in "Youth," "can, by caring for the physical basis, keep themselves young, why, the world will ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... great work on Etymologies, Isidore took up Augustine's attempt to bring the creation into satisfactory relations with the book of Genesis, and, as to fossil remains, he, like Tertullian, thought that they resulted from the Flood of Noah. In the following century Bede developed ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... whose deepest folds were gathered around the dark oak cabinet which I now approached with a strange mingling of reverence and curiosity. Perhaps, like a geologist, I was about to turn up to the light some of the buried strata of the human world, with its fossil remains charred by passion and petrified by tears. Perhaps I was to learn how my father, whose personal history was unknown to me, had woven his web of story; how he had found the world, and how the world had left him. Perhaps I was to find ...
— Phantastes - A Faerie Romance for Men and Women • George MacDonald
... fossil remains is by all odds the strongest evidence that we have in favor of organic evolution. Paleontology holds the incomparable position of being able to point directly to the evidence showing that the animals and plants living in ...
— A Critique of the Theory of Evolution • Thomas Hunt Morgan
... a fossil tipsy-cake The sponge each morn appeared; The bath, if plenished over-night, Was frozen ere the morning light, And more that frigid water-ache Than unwashed days I feared, Now while the milder zephyrs shake Once more the winter's might, My sponge, my bath, by loss endeared, Shall dree ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100., Jan. 24, 1891. • Various
... history, and the history of the present interests him just as much—he has those Balkans under a microscope; and collects all the data on every important strike here and elsewhere. And yet where women are concerned he is a fossil. An American fossil—worst sort. Some of the young ones are just as bad...I'll have to give in. I can't break his heart. ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... deal of spirit. Stimulated either by this compliment, or by her burning indignation, that illustrious woman then added, 'Let him meet it if he can!' And, with a rigid movement of her stony reticule (an appendage of great size and of a fossil appearance), indicated that Clennam was the unfortunate person at ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... about his neck. The Tenderfoot and I stood on the log and heaved while Wes stood on the shore and pushed. Suddenly it occurred to me that if Tunemah made up his silly mind to come, he would probably do it all at once, in which case the Tenderfoot and I would have about as much show for life as fossil formations. I didn't say anything about it to the Tenderfoot, but I hitched my six-shooter around to the front, resolved to find out how good I was at wing-shooting horses. But Tunemah declared he would die for his convictions. "All ...
— The Mountains • Stewart Edward White
... for a paleontologist to construct a fish out of a single fossil scale, then there may be something of that ability in me. For truly, Clive, I am often at a loss where to draw the line between what I see and what I reason out—between my clairvoyance and my deductions. And if I made mistakes I certainly should be deeply alarmed. ...
— Athalie • Robert W. Chambers
... death must have very early resulted from the struggle for existence: many of the crowd must have jostled one another out of the conditions on which life depends. The occurrence of death, as far back as we have any fossil record of life, however, needs not to be proved by such arguments; for, if there had been no death there would have been no fossil remains, such as the great majority of those we met with. Not only was there death in the world, as far as the record ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... progress! That is the word. And economy!" he cried. "That is the true American spirit! That is what appeals to the man who is not a fossil!" This was a delicate compliment to Mr. Gratz, but Mr. Gratz was so used to receiving compliments when Mr. Smalley was talking to him that he did not blush with pleasure. He merely got red in the face. "Think of the advantage of saving one letter ...
— Mike Flannery On Duty and Off • Ellis Parker Butler
... H. (no letter.)—1. and 2. Garnetiferous quartz rock. 3 and 4. Micaceous quartz rock. 5. Granite. 6. Basalt with traces of chalcopyrite.—L. C. G.—They are fossil sharks' teeth, common in marl beds.—J. E. C.—1. Iron sulphide and lead sulphide. 2. Quartzite, with traces of galena and molybdic sulphide. 3 and 4. Dolomite. 5. Fossiliferous argillaceous limestone, containing traces of lead ...
— Scientific American, Volume XLIII., No. 25, December 18, 1880 • Various
... was comprehensible to the minds that sprang from it; there were mysteries in it, but mysteries that enticed rather than baffled, for they unfolded new glories with every discovery that man could make; even inanimate objects, the fossil, the electric current, the far-off stars, these were dust thrown off by the Spirit of the World—fragrant with His Presence and eloquent of His Nature. For example, the announcement made by Klein, the astronomer, ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... with horrible anatomical preparations and grisly skeletons; and, though the stately passages were paved with white marble, and led into rooms which would easily have accommodated crowds of guests, he went into no society save that of savants as old and fossil-like as himself; in other words, he was an old bachelor who lived entirely for his profession and the study of the great masters by the interpretation of a genuine old Stradivari. Yet the old professor had a memory; he recalled the time when he had been young who now was old—the time ...
— Stories By English Authors: Germany • Various
... tree which Haeckel has drawn up with such scientific accuracy of description, observes: "The first thing to remark is that not one of the creatures exhibited in this pedigree has ever been seen, either living or in fossil. Their existence is based entirely upon theory." (Les Emules de Darwin, ii. p. 76). "Man's pedigree as drawn up by Haeckel," says the distinguished savant, Du Bois-Reymond, "is worth about as much as is that of Homer's heroes for ...
— At the Deathbed of Darwinism - A Series of Papers • Eberhard Dennert
... craft, he always appears incompletely outfitted. The grand sweep and direction of the literary currents elude him; he is eternally on the surface, chasing bits of driftwood. The literature he knows is the fossil literature taught in colleges—worse, in high schools. It must be dead before he is aware of it. And in particular he appears ignorant of what is going forward in other lands. An exotic idea, to penetrate his consciousness, must first become stale, and even then he is apt to purge ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... levels the long lines of cliffs, or escarpments, which separate the different plains as they rise like steps one behind the other. What a history of geological change does the simply constructed coast of Patagonia reveal! In some red mud, capping the gravel, I discovered fossil bones which showed the wonderful relationship in the same continent between the dead and the living, and will, I have no doubt, hereafter throw more light on the appearance of organic beings on our earth and their ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various
... in the Hukawng valley beyond the administrative border, but the quality of the fossil resin is not very good. The amount exported varies considerably. Tourmaline or rubellite is found on the borders of the Ruby Mines district and in the Shan State of Moeng Loeng. Steatite is extracted from the Arakan hill quarries. Salt is manufactured ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... Goriat for the remaining property, with orders that everybody should return on the following day. At this height the temperature of the air was very delightful, the range at noon being only 79o. I spent the whole day specimen-hunting, and found the rocks were full of fossil shells. I killed a new snake or variety of Psammophis sibilans, and shot an interesting little antelope, Oreotragus saltatrix, the "klip-springer" of the Cape Colonist, as well as hyraxes and various small birds, which we duly preserved. My collections in this country were sent by Lieutenant ...
— What Led To The Discovery of the Source Of The Nile • John Hanning Speke
... it. I must say it once again. I am such a fossil that I permit myself the most antediluvian remarks—if I think they have a grain of truth in them. Of course, the dissimilarities are quite as striking as the likenesses. No two leaves on one linden are really the same. But you and ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith
... of a sort that sinks—except in the matter of spirits. I saw in the west counties recently a swampy field of great richness and promise. If I had stepped on it I have no doubt at all that I should have vanished; that aeons hence the complete fossil of a fat Fleet Street journalist would be found in that compressed clay. I only claim that it would be found in some attitude of energy, or even of joy. But the last point is the most important of all, for as I imagined myself sinking up to the ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... she had been a fool to attempt to fill the place of mother to these two modern young things. Their own ideas were fully made up about all questions that seemed vital to her. She had been a fossil in a back-country place all her life, and of course they felt she did not know. Well, of course she did not know much about modern society and its ways, save to dread it, and to doubt it, and to wish to keep them away from it. She was prejudiced, perhaps. Yes, she ...
— Cloudy Jewel • Grace Livingston Hill
... character are too evidently to be classed as spurious in Natural History: the Gospel of Richard Arkwright once promulgated, no Monk of the old sort is any longer possible in this world. But fancy a deep-buried Mastodon, some fossil Megatherion, Ichthyosaurus, were to begin to speak from amid its rock-swathings, never so indistinctly! The most extinct fossil species of Men or Monks can do, and does, this miracle,—thanks to the Letters of the Alphabet, ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... that the ornament itself was an antique when the Egyptian had acquired it. In another case, I had the psychometrist describe in detail the animal life, and the physical phenomena, of the age in which a fossil had existed when alive—many thousands of years ago. In the proper place in this book, I will explain just how it is possible to penetrate the secrets of the past by psychometric vision—that is to say, the psychic laws making the ...
— Clairvoyance and Occult Powers • Swami Panchadasi
... to discoveries made on the coast of Ecuador in 1860, by James S. Wilson, Esq. At various points along this coast he found "ancient or fossil pottery, vessels, images," and other manufactured articles, all finely wrought. Some of these articles were made of gold. The most remarkable fact connected with them is that they were taken from "a stratum of ancient surface earth" which was covered with a marine deposit ...
— Ancient America, in Notes on American Archaeology • John D. Baldwin
... associated, it being supposed that they might have been washed into crevices of the rocks in which the bone-breccias are found, and there, being incrusted with carbonate of lime, had the false appearance of being as ancient as the fossil bones ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... for a wonder, the truth. A curious change had come over Bolsover since the end of last term. Old Mr Mullany, good old fossil that he was, had resigned. The boys had heard casually of the event at the end of last term. But the old gentleman so seldom appeared in their midst, and when he did, so rarely made any show of authority, that the school had grown to look upon him ...
— A Dog with a Bad Name • Talbot Baines Reed
... in the Martian desert. It's as dry as a fossil bone there so his skinflint company cut corners ...
— The Velvet Glove • Harry Harrison
... collections. He owns twenty-four coins from Carteia, whereas Florez (Medallas, Madrid, 1773) shows a total of only thirty-three. Amongst his antiquities there is a charming statuette of Minerva, a bronze miniature admirably finished. He has collected the rock fauna, especially the molluscs, fossil and modern. He is preparing an album of the Flora Calpensis. His birds' nests were lately sold to an Englishman. All these objects, of immense local interest, were offered by him at the lowest possible rate to the Military Library, but who is there ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... flame, the sacred fire of Pueblo Estufas, of Greek Prytaneum, of Roman Vesta, of Persian Atish-khudahs? If the Laurentian system be the oldest upheaval of land, and its "dawn animal" the first evolution of life that left fossil footprints, where are all the missing links in ethnology, which would save science that rejects Genesis—the paradox of peopling the oldest known continent by immigration from ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... the antediluvian affairs I ever beheld, the old fellow now coming towards us is the queerest; he looks like a fossil edition of Methuselah, dug up and modernised some hundred years ago at the very least. Holloa! he's going mad I believe; I hope he does ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... protokolo. Formula formulo. Forsake forlasi. Fort fortikajxeto. Fortify (milit.) fortikigi. Fortify fortigi. Fortitude kuragxeco. Fortnight du semajnoj. Fortress fortikajxo. Fortune ricxeco. Forward! antauxen! Forward (in advance) antauxe. Forward ekspedi, sendi. Fossil elfosatajxo. Foster nutri. Foster child sucxinfano. Foul malpura. Foulard silktuko. Found fondi. Foundation fondo, fondajxo. Founder (ship) sxipperei. Foundry fandejo. Fountain ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... travelled cynic, and he, the one of his day, the iridescent Irishman, whose remembered repartees are a feast, sharp and ringing, at divers tables descending from the upper to the fat citizen's, where, instead of coming in the sequence of talk, they are exposed by blasting, like fossil teeth of old Deluge sharks in monotonous walls of our chalk-quarries. Nor are these the less welcome for the violence of their introduction among a people glad to be set burning rather briskly awhile by the most unexpected of digs ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... could not forbear the protest of my unbelief. "The mammoth, my dear sir, long ago vanished from the earth. We know it once existed by the fossil remains that we have unearthed, and by a frozen carcase that the Siberian sun saw fit to melt from out the bosom of a glacier; but we also know that no living specimen ...
— The Faith of Men • Jack London
... The fossil remains previously referred to are of course only a few of the most important, but it is remarked as a curious and notable fact that among the fossils of the lower orders of life in the Bad Lands, the heads have not been preserved. On account of scarcity of ...
— Cave Regions of the Ozarks and Black Hills • Luella Agnes Owen
... side, The tender Iguanodon and Ichthyosaurian bride; And through the enubilious air, the carboniferous breeze, Awoke, with their amphibious sighs, the silence in the trees. "To think," they cried, botaurus-toned, "when ages intervene, Our osseous fossil forms will be ...
— Dot and the Kangaroo • Ethel C. Pedley
... hyenas, visiting mosques and mausoleums. In every land he made collections of its greatest curiosities in art, literature, science, natural history, and politics. A sphinx, an obelisk, a winged bull from Nineveh, stuffed porcupines, live monkeys, fossil remains, a pinchbeck president of the United States, and many rare specimens even more curious, did he collect, and after years of wandering, by land and by sea, carry with him to his native village. There he converted an old barn ...
— The Magician's Show Box and Other Stories • Lydia Maria Child
... interrupted. "Does that old fossil look like the sort to take such a creature about for nothing? Colonel, he doesn't know himself—where those securities are! He's brought that woman ...
— The Avenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... and not esteemed very good; but I am informed that this is the case with all coal found near the surface of the earth, and, as the veins are observed to run in an inclined direction until the pits have some depth, the fossil must be of an indifferent quality. The little island of Pisang, near the foot of Mount Pugong, was supposed to be chiefly a bed of rock crystal, but upon examination of specimens taken from thence they ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... is adored in both, and round the idea of this production of new life all creeds revolve. Christian symbols and Christian ceremonies speak as plainly to the student of ancient religions as the stars speak to the astronomer, and the rocks to the geologian; Christian Churches are as full of the fossil relics of the old creeds as are the earth's strata of the bones of extinct animals. We shall expect to find, then, a family resemblance running through all Eastern creeds—of which Christianity is one—and ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant
... consequences, therefore, of a more general introduction of steam power into that new region, connected with a highway across the isthmus of Panama, no one can calculate. The experiment along the shores of Chili and Peru has already commenced; and the cheap rate at which fossil fuel can be had has proved a great facility. Under circumstances so peculiarly propitious, to what an extent, then, may not steam navigation be carried on the smooth expanse of the Southern ocean? ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... extremely mixed crowd of patriots rather too obviously "swept away silly old fads" and left the truly advanced to do as they liked. What they liked he did not and was wholly undisturbed by the circumstances of being considered a rigid old fossil. Feather herself had no need of him. An athletic and particularly well favoured young actor who shared her thrills of elation seemed to permeate the atmosphere about her. He and Feather together at times achieved the effect, between ...
— Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... A general diffusion of scientific knowledge saves the community from innumerable wasteful and foolish mistakes. In England, not many years ago, the partners in a large mining company were ruined from not knowing that a certain fossil belonged to the old red sandstone, below which coal is never found. In another enterprise, L20,000 were lost in the prosecution of a scheme for collecting the alcohol that distils from bread in baking, all of which might have been saved, had ...
— In the School-Room - Chapters in the Philosophy of Education • John S. Hart
... wider outlook the vast antiquity of the genus is considered, and its ancient richness in species and individuals,—comparing our Sierra Giant and Sequoia sempervirens of the Coast Range, the only other living species of sequoia, with the twelve fossil species already discovered and described by Heer and Lesquereux, some of which flourished over vast areas in the Arctic regions and in Europe and our own territories, during tertiary and cretaceous times—then, indeed, ...
— The Yosemite • John Muir
... pale, and there was a curious look about her whole figure. It seemed as if shrinking from something, twisting itself rigidly, as a fossil tree might shrink in a wind that ...
— Jane Field - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... The elderly male fossil of the Silurian age,—the age of mollusks,—whose habitat is some still-water club, or public reading-room, where he babbles of the morning's news, is a thousand times more tiresome than any loquacious ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 108, October, 1866 • Various
... degeneracy, so that though all possessed a high organization at first, there is found in the after creations a succession of lapses until the division of fishes now contains species ranking little above the earth-worm." "A single well defined placoid fossil in the Bala limestone as fully proves the existence of placoid fishes, during the period of its deposition, as if the rock were made up of placoid fossils, for it is not a question of numbers, but of rank." The question, ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 7, July, 1880 • Various
... progress in this group—we already have tropical land-crabs—and as far as we know there is no reason why in the future these creatures should not increase in size and terrestrial capacity. In the past we have the evidence of the fossil Paradoxides that creatures of this kind may at least attain a length of six feet, and, considering their intense pugnacity, a crab of such dimensions would be as formidable a creature as one could well imagine. ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... a preconception."—Until the birth of geology, and fossil paleontology, concurring with vast strides ahead in the science of comparative anatomy, it is a well-established fact, that oftentimes the most scientific museum admitted as genuine fragments of the human osteology what in fact belonged to the gigantic brutes of our earth in her ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... clever fellow, people said; "he would make his mark when he was older, and had got rid of his cranks;" but all the same he was not understood by the youth of his generation. "The Fossil," as they called him at Lincoln, was hardly modern enough for their taste; he was a survival of the mediaeval age—he took life too gravely, and gave himself the airs of ...
— Herb of Grace • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... friends in Japan, and he used to write in the Japanese character even if they understood English. That was what he chiefly used the Chinese ink for. But he also used to copy the inscriptions from these things." Here Stephen lifted from the mantelpiece what looked like a fossil Bath bun, but was actually a clay tablet covered with ...
— The Mystery of 31 New Inn • R. Austin Freeman
... Rocks are found in shallow mines in North and South Carolina, Georgia, Florida and Tennessee, and also as pebbles in the river beds. They are the fossil remains of animals. After being dug from the mines the rock is kiln dried and then ground to a very fine powder called "floats" which is used on the soil. The phosphoric acid in the floats is insoluble and becomes available only as the phosphate decays. ...
— The First Book of Farming • Charles L. Goodrich
... closely allied to species found in the mainland and in Sumatra, while the MAIAS or orang-utan (SIMIA SALYRUS) is found also in Sumatra and, though not now surviving on the continent, must be regarded as related to anthropoids whose fossil remains have been ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall
... curvature than those of the Elephas Indicus. Some have been found which describe a circle, but the curve being oblique, they thus clear the head, and point outward, downward, and backward. The numerous fossil tusks of the mammoth which have been discovered and recorded may be ranged under two averages of size, the larger ones at nine feet and a half, the smaller at five feet and a half in length. The writer has ...
— The Tree-Dwellers • Katharine Elizabeth Dopp
... pollution resulting in acid rain in both the US and Canada; the US is the largest single emitter of carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels; water pollution from runoff of pesticides and fertilizers; limited natural fresh water resources in much of the western part of the country require careful ...
— The 2004 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... been born, except so far as this, that some one may take up one of the works as of heretical character, and lay it down in disappointment, with the reflection that it is as dull as orthodoxy. For a person who was once in some vogue, it would be difficult to pick out a more fossil writer, from Aa to Zypoeus, except,—though it is unusual for (,—) to represent an interval of more than a year—his unknown opponent. This opponent, in the very year of the Des Erreurs ... published a book in two parts with the ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... large stiff pages of a folio volume, or the yellow leaves of a manuscript, in short, a poem, a code of laws, a confession of faith, what is your first comment? You say to yourself that the work before you is not of its own creation. It is simply a mold like a fossil shell, an imprint similar to one of those forms embedded in a stone by an animal which once lived and perished. Beneath the shell was an animal and behind the document there was a man. Why do you ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... Cape Byron, an interesting addition to zoology was made in a small floating shellfish, which has since proved to constitute a new genus,* throwing light, I am informed, upon many fossil univalves in the older formations; and a rare bird of the noddy kind (Anous leucocapillus) perched on the rigging towards evening, and was added to the collection; for even the beauty and innocence of a tired wanderer like it was insufficient to ...
— Narrative Of The Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Commanded By The Late Captain Owen Stanley, R.N., F.R.S. Etc. During The Years 1846-1850. Including Discoveries And Surveys In New Guinea, The Louisiade • John MacGillivray
... existing. On the shores of the Gulf of St. Lawrence detached bowlder stones appear, some of enormous size, many tons in weight; they must have come from a great distance, for nowhere in that region is there any rock of similar material. In the upper strata of the country are abundant fossil remains of distinct animal existences now unknown; they are blended with the limestone ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... and celts. Several bones which are not human have however been since found with these three skeletons, one possibly of a dog, another of a squirrel. They may be those of the funeral feast Sir William Dawson mentions in his work "Fossil Men," as usually to be looked for ...
— A New Hochelagan Burying-ground Discovered at Westmount on the - Western Spur of Mount Royal, Montreal, July-September, 1898 • W. D. Lighthall
... the inference that the rock which contains these shells has been subjected to enormous pressure in a direction at right angles to the planes of cleavage. The shells are all flattened and spread out in these planes. Compare this fossil trilobite of normal proportions with these others which have suffered distortion. Some have lain across, some along, and some oblique to the cleavage of the slate in which they are found; but in all cases ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... youth, of grace, of elegance, and attract the notice of the commercial world. She will also add to her iron ornaments, the lustre of every metal, that the whole earth can produce, with all their illustrious race of compounds, heightened by fancy, and garnished with jewels. She will draw from the fossil, and the vegetable kingdoms; press the ocean for shell, skin and coral. She will also tax the animal, for horn, bone, and ivory, and she will decorate the whole with the ...
— An History of Birmingham (1783) • William Hutton
... they been blown on to the lake, or left behind by man? or are they fossil trees, integral parts of the vegetable stratum below which is continually rolling upward? or are they of both kinds? I do not know. Only this is certain, as Messrs. Wall and Sawkins have pointed out, that not only 'the purer varieties of asphalt, such as ...
— At Last • Charles Kingsley
... forts and dungeons, pepper-box turrets, and machicolated towers. And in truth these Bad Lands are an immense ossuary where lie bleaching in the sun myriads of fragments of pachyderms, chelonians, and even, some would have us believe, fossil men, overwhelmed by unknown cataclysms ages ...
— Rubur the Conqueror • Jules Verne
... the groups of reptiles that gave rise to mammals is preserved in the fossil record, but the musculature of these reptiles has been lost forever. Nevertheless, a reasonably accurate picture of the morphology and the spatial relationships of the muscles of many of these extinct vertebrates can be inferred by studying the scars ...
— The Adductor Muscles of the Jaw In Some Primitive Reptiles • Richard C. Fox
... sense would take to Miss Mariner. If I told you how near I came to spilling the sauce-boat accidentally over that old fossil's head, you'd be surprised, Ellen. She just sat there brooding like an old eagle. If you ask my opinion, Miss Mariner's a long sight too good for her ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... nature was not questioned, nor that he was a most acute reasoner, who could unfold a proposition into its consequences as patiently, as convincingly, as a palaeontologist extorts its confession from a fossil fragment. But it was maintained that so many dehumanizing ideas were mixed up with his conceptions of man, and so many diabolizing attributes embodied in his imagination of the Deity, that his system of beliefs was tainted throughout ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... You'd find ways enough to amuse yourself without the help of an old fossil like me, I guess," blustered the clockmaker. Nevertheless it was plain to be seen the words pleased him, for he was a kind man who enjoyed doing a service for another. Moreover, Christopher had worn a path to his lonely heart ...
— Christopher and the Clockmakers • Sara Ware Bassett
... appear to be reddish and grey granites and altered slate (possibly bearing fossils). The Cloudmaker appears to be diorite; Mt. Buckley sedimentary. The suggested formation is of several layers of coal with sandstone above and below; interesting to find if it is so and investigate coal. Wood fossil conifer appears to have come from this—better to get leaves—wrap fossils up ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... penetrating gleam of intelligence through the dark abysses of innumerable ages, and exclaim: "This clay, upon which I gaze, was of the human period. This coin, this meerschaum, this china shepherdess, this prayer-book with gilt edges, this Sporting Times, were the inseparable companions of a fossil species of Englishmen who once colonised this globe, and minute traces of whom have been found in its most widely separated regions. Alas that the action of marine and subaerial denuding agents has deprived ...
— 'That Very Mab' • May Kendall and Andrew Lang
... watched him ordering their excellent dinner she wondered what he would think of Ann's father. She could hear him calling Centralia a God-forsaken spot and Ann's father a benighted fossil. Doubtless he would speak of the Reverend Saunders as a type fast becoming obsolete. "And the quicker the better," she could ...
— The Visioning • Susan Glaspell
... not a strange story? so utterly unlike anything which we see now;—so utterly unlike anything which we ought to see now? And yet it may have been good in its time. It looks out on us from the dim ages, like the fossil bone of some old monster cropping out of a quarry. But the old monster was good in his place and time. God made him and had need of him. It may be that God made those three poor monks, and ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... ancient complex of crystalline schists and granitic rocks, large extents of which are covered by a sandstone formation ("Beacon Sandstone," Ferrar), on the whole horizontally bedded, which is at least 1,500 feet thick, and in which Shackleton found seams of coal and fossil wood (a coniferous tree). This, as it belongs to the Upper Devonian or Lower Carboniferous, determines a lower limit for the age of the sandstone formation. Shackleton also found in lat. 85deg. 15' S. beds of limestone, which he regards as underlying ...
— The South Pole, Volumes 1 and 2 • Roald Amundsen
... which Braisted and I, sitting alone on the main hatch, in the rain, privately remembered our Fatherland. There was on board an American sea-captain, of Norwegian birth, as I afterwards found, who would gladly have joined us. The other passengers were three Norwegians, three fossil Englishmen, two snobbish do., and some jolly, good-natured, free-and-easy youths, bound to Norway, with dogs, guns, rods, fishing ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... an old fossil," dowager lady Chia observed. "I'm no good whatever. My eyesight is dim; my ears are deaf, my memory is gone. I can't even recollect any of you, old family connections. When therefore any of our relations come on a visit, I don't see them for fear lest I should be ridiculed. All I can manage ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... energetic agents in geology; and the whole eleven afford not the least rational idea of their causes; nor of any means of preventing, predicting, or escaping their ravages. The best geologists have described fossil tracks as the footprints of gigantic birds, which others equally as authoritative pronounce the tracks of frogs and lizards. Indeed, a good part of every geological treatise, and of the time of every association of geologists, ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... young man, an' not become a fossil like some of the fellers in big cities, but I git a heap of rubbin' with me rollin', an' that ...
— Glen of the High North • H. A. Cody
... countries have grown and fallen through many ages, whence morasses of immense extent; and from these as the more soluble parts were washed away first, were produced sea-salt, nitre, iron, and variety of acids, which combining with calcareous matter were productive of many fossil bodies, as flint, sea-sand, selenite, with the precious stones, and perhaps the diamond. See additional ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin
... the earth turned up; a workman's tin mug stuck and roasted and hardened into what looks like solid rock—a fossil, as though it had been ...
— A Diary Without Dates • Enid Bagnold
... that must charm all who love our country and our country's poetry, in its every age." As for the villanelle, M. De Banville declares that it is the fairest jewel in the casket of the muse Erato; while the chant royal is a kind of fossil poem, a relic of an age when kings and allegories flourished. "The kings and the gods are dead," like Pan; or at least we no longer find them able, by touch royal or divine, to ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... where the short rein is very universal, the double part of the bridle is prolonged by a single strap; this strap is used as a whip, and hence the whip of the Hussar attached to the reins; hence, also, as I imagine, the Austrian driving rein described page 54. When fossil remains of the extinct postboy shall be discovered, it will be seen that he used the short rein, and with great propriety; since his horse may be said to have been always "au trot," and needed only ...
— Hints on Horsemanship, to a Nephew and Niece - or, Common Sense and Common Errors in Common Riding • George Greenwood
... From the greatest depth a fragment of pottery was obtained. Ninety-five of these borings were made in various places, but on no occasion was solid rock reached. The organic remains were all recent; not a trace of an extinct fossil occurred, but an abundance of the residues of burnt bricks and pottery. In their examination from Essouan to Cairo, the French estimated the mud deposit to be five inches for each century. From an examination of the results at Heliopolis, Mr. Horner makes ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... off discouraged; but we assured him that the man was far ahead of many specimens we had met. We never see an opossum in Virginia—a fossil animal in most other places—but it seems the sign of the moral stratification around. There are many varieties of opossum in Virginia,—political and religious: Saturn, who devours his offspring, has not ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... process of adjustment, a constantly growing experience. By the study of the Christian revelation it is always finding new meanings in old truths, new modes of application of familiar practices. This simply means that the Christian is alive and not a fossil. It means that his relation to our Lord is such that it opens to him inexhaustible depths of experience. It is easy to see this in the concrete by taking up the life of almost any saint. It is easy to ...
— Our Lady Saint Mary • J. G. H. Barry
... of fossil saurians, or animals of the lizard tribe, have, as our scientific readers are aware, been found at Lyme, in Dorsetshire; but the world would to this day have remained ignorant of the treasures England possessed, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 382, July 25, 1829 • Various
... "While the 'cream' of the Fourth Race gravitated more and more toward the apex of physical and intellectual evolution, thus leaving as an heirloom to the nascent Fifth (the Aryan) Race the inflectional, highly developed languages, the agglutinative decayed and remained as a fragmentary fossil idiom, scattered now, and nearly limited to the aboriginal tribes of America." Note the words I have italicized, marking the evolution of the "inflectional" languages as an attendant phenomenon on physico-intellectual evolution, compare the passage with von Humboldt's thesis, already ...
— Commentary Upon the Maya-Tzental Perez Codex - with a Concluding Note Upon the Linguistic Problem of the Maya Glyphs • William E. Gates |
