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Larva   Listen
noun
Larva, Larvae  n.  (pl. L. larvae, E. larvas)  
1.
(Zool.) Any young insect from the time that it hatches from the egg until it becomes a pupa, or chrysalis. During this time it usually molts several times, and may change its form or color each time. The larvae of many insects are much like the adults in form and habits, but have no trace of wings, the rudimentary wings appearing only in the pupa stage. In other groups of insects the larvae are totally unlike the parents in structure and habits, and are called caterpillars, grubs, maggots, etc.
2.
(Zool.) The early, immature form of any animal when more or less of a metamorphosis takes place, before the assumption of the mature shape.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Larva" Quotes from Famous Books



... sacrificing each other's feelings on the altar of experimental cookery, in herding sheep with the assistance of paper novels, and in writing exceedingly long letters to the North. This wall-tent was the larva of the ranch. But the arid southern country proved inconvenient, and collecting their effects in a prairie-schooner and driving their flocks before them, they effected a masterly change of base, which brought them two hundred miles to the northward and set them down in a delightful ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various

... is better off, the free swimming larva, or the perfect cirrhipod, rooted for ever ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley

... left alive. Every egg and larva was destroyed; every queen was burned. And every last soldier and worker had lost her life in the vain attempt at rescue. Suddenly one of the villagers, who had been helping to carry Corrus and Dulnop to the spot, pointed out ...
— The Devolutionist and The Emancipatrix • Homer Eon Flint

... Furiae larva circumivit urbem, dictitans se exploratorem ab inferis venisse, delaturum daemonibus ...
— The Anatomy of Melancholy • Democritus Junior

... periodically, with the rising and descending of the sap; annual plants die at the end of the season, persisting in germinal state within a bulb, a rhizome, or a root before coming again to the light; in "metamorphoses," we find that the germ (the egg) becomes a larva (a worm), and then dies as a chrysalis, to be reborn ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal

... habits of thinking were such, that his opinions must have been in a state of constant change. Coleridge says in a letter: "His (Shelley's) discussions, tending towards atheism of a certain sort, would not have scared me; for me it would have been a semitransparent larva, soon to be sloughed, and through which I should have seen the true image—the final metamorphosis. Besides, I have ever thought that sort of atheism the next best religion to Christianity; nor does the better faith I have learned from Paul ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald

... tremulous with tadpoles just bursting their gelatinous envelopes; there were little pond snails creeping out into life, and under the green skin of the rush stems the larvae of a big Water Beetle were struggling out of their egg cases. I doubt if the reader knows the larva of the beetle called (I know not why) Dytiscus. It is a jointed, queer-looking thing, very muscular and sudden in its movements, and given to swimming head downward with its tail out of water; the length of a man's top thumb joint ...
— The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth • H.G. Wells

... form of certain living organisms, before they are fully developed. Thus, the tadpole is the larva of the frog. A great many insects are bred from what are called grubs, or caterpillars. All these ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Adventures on Strange Islands • Roger Thompson Finlay

... like melilot or woodruffe, which does not pass away after the specimen has been dried for years. In some species of Marasmius, there is a decidedly strong odour of garlic, and in one species of Hygrophorus, such a resemblance to that of the larva of the goat moth, that it bears the name of Hygrophorus cossus. Most of the fleshy forms exhale a strong nitrous odour during decay, but the most powerful we remember to have experienced was developed by a very large ...
— Fungi: Their Nature and Uses • Mordecai Cubitt Cooke

... like burnished copper; the feet are shining green." This beetle appears in June and July, and does not confine its work to the base of the tree, but attacks the trunk in any part, and sometimes the larger branches. The eggs are deposited in cracks or crevices of the bark, and soon hatch. The young larva eats its way through the bark and sapwood, where it bores broad and flat channels, sometimes girdling and killing the tree. As it approaches maturity, it bores deeper into the tree, working upward, then eats out to the bark, but not quite through the bark, where it ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 443, June 28, 1884 • Various

... the hive, generally, in the night—makes an incision into the glue or cement with her sting, and leaves her eggs deposited in the glue, where it remains secure from the bees; it being guarded by the timber on its sides. Thus, while a maggot, (larva) the moth uses the cement for food until it arrives so far towards a state of maturity as to be able to spin a web, which is more fully explained in ...
— A Manual or an Easy Method of Managing Bees • John M. Weeks

... of Stygian deeps, as are the thoughts of spirits like Randal Leslie's. Wings have they, but only the better to pounce down,—draw their nutriment from unguarded material cuticles; and just when, maddened, you strike, and exulting exclaim, "Caught, by Jove!" wh-irr flies the diaphanous, ghostly larva, and your blow falls on your own ...
— My Novel, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... of mortar, sparingly applied, hold them together. The outside of the cell thus assumes the appearance of a piece of rustic architecture, in which the stones project with their natural irregularities; but the inside, which requires a more even surface in order not to hurt the larva's tender skin, is covered with a coat of pure mortar. This inner whitewash, however, is put on without any attempt at art, indeed one might say that it is ladled on in great splashes; and the grub takes care, after finishing its mess of honey, to make ...
— The Mason-bees • J. Henri Fabre

... These hastily laid batches of eggs, expelled perhaps by the exigencies of an ovary incapable of further delay, seem to me in serious danger; for the seed in which the grub must establish itself is as yet no more than a tender speck of green, without firmness and without any farinaceous tissue. No larva could possibly find sufficient nourishment there, unless it waited for the ...
— A Book of Exposition • Homer Heath Nugent

... on that day the grasshoppers which had eaten off the twenty thousand acres of wheat in the fields of the Golden Belt Wheat Company, as though it had been cropped, rose and left the Missouri Valley. They will never come back, for they are ploughed under in the larva every year by the Colorado farmers who have invaded the plains where once the "hoppers" had their nursery; but all this, even if he had known it, would not have cheered up John that day. For he knew that he owed one hundred and fifty thousand dollars to Eastern stockholders ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White

... to be the work of an insect which I am just beginning to study, one of the flat-headed borers, and the reason you have not seen the larva is that it is very small. It is not half an inch long. In the second year it comes out as an adult. I judge that control measures should be used in the spring, when I think without doubt that it would feed ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Fifteenth Annual Meeting • Various

... Walsh shows that a complete gradation exists between species which are absolutely unaffected by change of food and cases where "difference of food is accompanied by marked and constant differences, either colorational, or structural, or both, in the larva, pupa and imago states."), most of which was new to me. I have since received your paper on willow-galls; this has been very opportune, as I wanted to learn a little about galls. There was much in this paper which has interested me extremely, on gradations, etc., and ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin

... catastrophes that probably most accelerated the fall of Greek civilisation was malarial fever. The parasite of this disease is carried from man to man by Anopheline mosquitoes. These insects, during the stage of egg, larva, and nympha, live in water, and afterwards, as developed insects, in the air. The breeding-grounds, where the eggs are laid, are shallow pools of stagnant water. For that reason the disease is most common in marshy ...
— Birth Control • Halliday G. Sutherland

... old uncomfortable vein, for he found in a tree a little bundle of sticks from four to six inches long, all the sticks placed lengthwise, the whole looking like a small bunch of firewood. Comale knew what this bundle was, well enough, for many a time he had found this kind of a nest of the larva of a moth. He knew it was lined with fine spun silk, and that the heathen people said that the moth used once to be a real person who stole wood, and who, having died, came back to earth again in the form of a moth, condemned, ...
— Out of the Triangle • Mary E. Bamford

... her child. It had not any hair or nails, for it had come before its time, but when she saw this human larva move its limbs and open its mouth, and when she touched its wrinkled little face, her heart overflowed with happiness, and she knew that she would never feel weary of life again, for her love for the atom she ...
— The works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 5 (of 8) - Une Vie and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant 1850-1893

... "maddick" was, of course, a maggot in north-country language, but it was not that she had a liking for the larva of a fly, but for the fruit in which that maggot lived for as a gardener's wife she knew well enough that very often those were the finest pears, the first to ripen, that they fell off the tree and were useless for the purpose of dessert, ...
— A Life's Eclipse • George Manville Fenn

... bluebottle, and lives in huts and dwellings. But his ways are different, for he bites a hole into one's skin, usually the back or arms, and lays an egg therein. In about ten days this egg develops into a fully grown larva, in other words a white maggot with a black head. It looks for all the world like a boil until one squeezes it and pushes the squirming head outside. But woe to him who having squeezed lets go to get the necessary forceps; for the larva leaps back within, ...
— Sketches of the East Africa Campaign • Robert Valentine Dolbey

... chick; the patent of royalty is in the cell and in the food; the cell being much larger, and the food a peculiar stimulating kind of jelly. In certain contingencies, such as the loss of the queen with no eggs in the royal cells, the workers take the larva of an ordinary bee, enlarge the cell by taking in the two adjoining ones, and nurse it and stuff it and coddle it, till at the end of sixteen days it comes out a queen. But ordinarily, in the natural course of events, ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks

... free from earthly dust? And is that of which you complain so bitterly anything else than the earthly husk which encloses every mortal existence of man as well as of woman?—it is the soil in which the plant must grow; it is the chrysalis in which the larva becomes ripe for its change of life! Can you actually be blind to that higher and nobler life which never developes itself more beautifully than in a peaceful home? Can you deny that it is in the sphere of family and friendship where man lives most perfectly and best, ...
— The Home • Fredrika Bremer

... damage is done to crops of wheat by the Hessian fly. The female deposits from one to eight or more eggs upon a single plant of wheat, between the vagina or sheath of the inner leaf and the culm nearest the roots; in which situation, with its head towards the root or first joint, the young larva pass the winter. They eat the stem, which thus becomes weak, and breaks; but are checked by another insect, called the destructor, otherwise whole crops of wheat ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 334 Saturday, October 4, 1828 • Various

... San Agustin, is broad and in tolerable repair; but before arriving there, it is so little attended to, that during the rainy season it might be passed in canoes; yet this immense formation of ferruginous larva and porphyritic rock lies conveniently in its vicinity. A large sum, supposed to be employed in mending the road, is collected annually at the toll, close to San Antonio. For each carriage two dollars are asked, and for carts and animals in proportion. The proprietor of this ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca

... Esq., F.R.S. (the coralline Ellis), asserts, in a letter to the Royal Society, dated June 5th, 1766, in his account of the mud inguana, an amphibious biped from South Carolina, that the water-eft, or newt, is only the larva of the land-eft, as tadpoles are of frogs. Lest I should be suspected to misunderstand his meaning, I shall give it in his own words. Speaking of the opercula or coverings to the gills of the mud inguana, he proceeds to say that, "The form of these pennated coverings approaches very near to what ...
— The Natural History of Selborne, Vol. 1 • Gilbert White

... The larva of this species forms a dwelling for itself, similar in form and structure to that of its American ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre

... by thorough digging and mixing about an inch in depth of old manure; wood ashes and decayed sweepings having a quantity of goat or sheep dung in it is well suited for the seed-bed at this season. Cow dung is apt to have the larva of the dung beetle in it—a very large caterpillar which destroys young plants by eating through the stem under ground. The bed having been thoroughly watered, the seed may be sown broadcast or in lines, and covered with a quarter of an inch of fine, dry, sandy soil, and shaded from ...
— The Cauliflower • A. A. Crozier

... that may be normally produced from the same parents, otherwise absurd errors are perpetrated. The young, the male, and the female of the same species have frequently been described under different names as distinct species or even genera. For example, the larva of marine crabs was formerly described as a distinct genus under the name of Zoaea, and in the earlier part of the nineteenth century a lively controversy on the question was carried on between a retired naval ...
— Hormones and Heredity • J. T. Cunningham

... resemble in tint the leaves they feed upon; others are like little brown twigs, and many are so strangely marked or humped, that when motionless they can hardly be taken to be living creatures at all. Mr. Andrew Murray has remarked how closely the larva of the peacock moth (Saturnia pavonia-minor) harmonizes in its ground colour with that of the young buds of heather on which it feeds, and that the pink spots with which it is decorated correspond with the flowers and flower-buds of ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace

... of monsters which fearfully haunt the mind of every child and appear in everything that he sees, the relic perhaps of a form long dead, hallucinations of the first days after emerging from chaos, from the fearful slumber in his mother's womb, from the awakening of the larva from the ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland

... this, thinking that the spirit of Caesar would soon land at Cannes and breathe upon this larva; but the silence was unbroken and they saw floating in the sky only the paleness of the lily. When these children spoke of glory, they were answered: "Become priests;" when they spoke of hope, of love, of power, of ...
— The Confession of a Child of The Century • Alfred de Musset

... noticing by letter, within a week, may have J. C. attend with his specimens. The subject is a curious change in the formation of Lobsters from various species of the Winkle, the Winkle being considered the larva;. ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan

... the most harmful of the insect pests of grapes in the grape-belt along the shores of Lake Erie in Ohio, Pennsylvania and New York. This root-worm (Fig. 37) is the larva of a grayish-brown beetle (Fidia viticida), shown in Fig. 38. The worms feed at first on the rootlets and later on the bark of the larger roots of the vines so that the injured plants show roots devoid of rootlets ...
— Manual of American Grape-Growing • U. P. Hedrick

... thin arms and sharp elbows, and scanty chevelure of leaves; the Auld Brig o' Doon (No. 4),—a daring arch that leaps the sweet stream at a bound, more than half clad in a mantle of ivy, which has crept with its larva-like feet beyond the key-stone; the Twa Brigs of Ayr, with the beautiful reflections in the stream that shines under their eyebrow-arches; and poor little Alloway Kirk, with its fallen roof and high gables. Lift your hand to your ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, Issue 45, July, 1861 • Various

... advocates of the development-theory allude to the metamorphosis of animals and plants as supporting their view of a change of one species into another. They compare the passage of a common leaf into the calyx or crown-leaves in plants, or that of a larva into a perfect insect, to the passage of one species into another. The only objection to this argument seems to be, that, whereas Nature daily presents us myriads of examples of the one set of phenomena, showing it to be a norm, not a single instance of the other has ever been known to occur either ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various

... worm became less and less terrifying; no longer appearing, say, the size of the boa constrictor. A few moments of this harmless meandering about Mr. Flint's hand and arm, and of a sudden he wore his true colors of an inoffensive and law-abiding larva, anxious only to attend strictly to his own legitimate business, the Gargantuan feeding of himself into the pupa from which he would presently emerge one of the most magnificent of native moths. Gingerly Mr. Flint ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler

... winged moth, endowed with new faculties and living a new life in a new sphere, he conceives that so the human soul may, in the fulness of time, disentangle itself from the imprisoning meshes of this world of larva, a thing of spirit beauty, to sail through heavenly airs; and henceforth he engraves a butterfly on the tombstone in vivid prophecy of immortality. Thus a moralizing observation of natural similitudes teaches man to hope for an ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger

... has four well marked periods: First, the egg; second, the grub or larva; third, the chrysalis or pupa; fourth, the imago, or perfect insect. The eggs are small, ovate, yellowish white objects, which hatch in about fifteen to thirty days. The larvae are small legless grubs, quite large at the apex of the abdomen and tapering ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 822 - Volume XXXII, Number 822. Issue Date October 3, 1891 • Various

... Solitude, or in Work. And of a truth, work is the balm of the sore mind of the world. God and Solitude are luxuries which only a few among us nowadays can afford. But he who lives in the three, though his life be that of a silk larva in its cocoon, is he not individually considered a good man? Is he not a mystic, though uncreative, centre of goodness? Surely, his influence, his Me alone considered, is living and benign, and though it is not life-giving. He is a flickering taper under a bushel; and this, billah, ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani

... villages in the hills. The foothill Indians were not a particularly intelligent lot. They were Diggers, so named on account of their habits of digging in the ground for roots, and the larva of various insects for food. Eggs of ants, and the maggots found in wasp's nests were ...
— Down the Mother Lode • Vivia Hemphill

... stood on end. That awful solitude, what mysterious and preternatural being could penetrate! 'Who's there?' he cried, in new alarm; 'what spectre—what dread larva, calls upon ...
— The Last Days of Pompeii • Edward George Bulwer-Lytton

... equally well on character which was fully only in full age. Selection could tend to alter no character in foetus, (except relation to mother) it would alter less in young state (putting on one side larva condition) but alter every part in full-grown condition. Look to a foetus and its parent, and again after ages foetus and its <i. e. the above mentioned parents> descendant; the parent more variable ...
— The Foundations of the Origin of Species - Two Essays written in 1842 and 1844 • Charles Darwin

... produce drones. Fecundated produce workers; theory therefor, 44. Aphides but once impregnated for a series of generations. Knowledge necessary for success, Queen bee, process of laying, 45. Eggs described. Hatching, 46. Larva, its food, its nursing. Caps of breeding and honey cells different, 47. Nymph or pupa, working. Time of gestation. Cells contracted by cocoons sometimes become too small. Queen bee, her mode of development, 48. Drone's development. Development of young bees slow in cool weather or ...
— Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-Bee - A Bee Keeper's Manual • L. L. Langstroth

... have remarked, in the sea; and we may be pretty certain that their eggs are hatched out into what we call larvae, or imperfectly developed animals, precisely similar to the young, or larvae, of the marine mussel of our seas. Now, this larva has the form of a tiny little creature covered with 'swimming' hairs. By the constant waving motions of these hairs, the little body is driven through the water, till at last, reaching a favourable spot, or tired out, they settle down ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various

... myself that I had killed the mother and lost this atrophied creature, this larva of the stable, born and raised amid the manure, this man who, if brought up like others, would have ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant

... embryotic progress female. A certain number of them are afterwards advanced to the more powerful sex. For proof of this, the economy of bees is cited; when they wish to raise a queen-bee, or true female, they prepare for the larva a more commodious cell, and feed it with delicate food. But we shall here stop to remark on the author's ...
— An Expository Outline of the "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation" • Anonymous

... numerous as in the wet season, but some kinds remain and lay their eggs at this time—for instance, the ground doves (Chamaepelia). The trees retain their verdure throughout, and many of them flower in the dry months. Lizards do not become torpid, and insects are seen both in the larva and the perfect states, showing that the aridity of the climate has not a general influence on the development of the species. Some kinds of butterflies, especially the little hairstreaks (Theclae), ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates

... All day long the Larva of the Dragon-Fly was crawling up and down the Water-Lily's stalk. "Dear me, how stupid it must be to be a Water-Lily!" it said, and peeped ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten

... germ may be evolved into different forms according to circumstances. Thus, during its earlier stages, every embryo is sexless—becomes either male or female as the balance of forces acting upon it determines. Again, it is a well-established fact that the larva of a working-bee will develop into a queen-bee, if, before it is too late, its food be changed to that on which the larvae of queen-bees are fed. Even more remarkable is the case of certain entozoa. The ovum of a tape-worm, getting into its natural ...
— Essays on Education and Kindred Subjects - Everyman's Library • Herbert Spencer

... of the giant octopus, the devil fish of Indian Ocean legend, multiplied a thousand times," he replied. "When the octopus lays its eggs, they hatch out into the larval form. The free swimming larva is known as a trochosphere, and I am positive that that is what we see; but look at the size of the thing! Man alive, if that ever developed, I ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, December 1930 • Various

... verse to remember, so we will try again; and there now we are rewarded by the capture of a dyticus larva—a creature with a long body—in some respects reminding one of a shrimp. Oh! look at his jaws, how wide he opens them! You see that the last segment of the body is provided with a long pair of bristly tails, by means of which the creature can suspend itself ...
— Country Walks of a Naturalist with His Children • W. Houghton

... suggestion on the point of vanishing, and then illuminated and embodied, a celestial maggot stuck to the round of a cloud like a caterpillar to the edge of a leaf. We gazed at it silently, I cannot say for how long. The beam of light might have pinned the bright larva to the sky for the inspection of interested Londoners. Then somebody spoke. "I think it is coming ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson

... the egg is laid, the young larva commences its formation, which in a short time (about one month) is perfected. It lies in the egg in a quiescent state till early spring. If the egg remain in the country where it is laid, and is kept at a pretty even temperature, and free from ...
— Scientific American, Volume XXIV., No. 12, March 18, 1871 • Various

... very cautiously bit a tiny piece off one end, hesitated, with his face looking very peculiar before beginning to chew it, but bravely going on; and directly after his face lit up just as his cousins were about to explode with mirth, and he popped the rest of the larva into his mouth, and held out his hand ...
— The Dingo Boys - The Squatters of Wallaby Range • G. Manville Fenn

... to Strutt's adopted by the popular, "mumm is said to be derived from the Danish word mumme, or momme in Dutch (Germ. larva), and signifies disguise in a mask, hence a mummer." In the Promptorium Parvulorum we have "Mummynge, mussacio, vel mussatus": it was a pantomime in dumb show, e.g. "I mumme in a mummynge;" "Let us go mumme (mummer) to nyghte in women's apparayle." "Mask" and "Mascarade," for persona, ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton

... Echinus Larva: a sucking sea-urchin! Hang it, if I had known you hadn't seen one, I'd have brought up half-a-dozen ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley

... Seizing opportunity and larva at the same time, the wasp stood high on its legs and pulled the worm's front end from the ground, exposing the yellowed band of the underpart. The attacker's abdomen curved beneath its own body; the stinger jabbed between two segments of the ...
— They Twinkled Like Jewels • Philip Jose Farmer

... Monarch Butterfly may be collected upon the milkweed and brought in, so that the whole life history or metamorphosis of this beautiful insect, from the egg through the larva or caterpillar stage and the pupa or chrysalis stage to the adult butterfly, may be watched. The larvae or caterpillar must be supplied daily with fresh milkweed leaves. Other butterflies and moths and many other insects may be reared in the same ...
— Scouting For Girls, Official Handbook of the Girl Scouts • Girl Scouts

... over the turf and investigating it far and wide, in its search for a grey grub, contrive to discern the precise point in the depth of the subsoil where the larva is slumbering in immobility? "Neither touch nor sight can come into play, for the grub is sealed up in its burrow at a depth of several inches; nor the scent, since it is absolutely inodorous; nor the hearing, since its immobility is ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros

... of Pessimism, the child is a mere human larva, weak, perverse, disagreeable, the heir of mortality, with all manner of "defects of doubt and taints of blood," gathered in the long ...
— The Philosophy of Despair • David Starr Jordan

... distinctly revealing; infinitely more so than the duller mottling of the jararaca and other dangerous snakes of the genus lachecis. In the same place, however, we found a striking example of genuine protective or mimetic coloration and shape. A rather large insect larva—at least we judged it to be a larval form, but we were none of us entomologists—bore a resemblance to a partially curled dry leaf which was fairly startling. The tail exactly resembled the stem or continuation of the midrib of the dead leaf. The flattened body was ...
— Through the Brazilian Wilderness • Theodore Roosevelt

... marvellous knowledge and skill to pierce the nerve-centre on which their power of locomotion (but none of their other vital functions) depends, so that the paralysed insect, beside which her egg is laid, will furnish the larva, when it is hatched, with a tamed and inoffensive quarry, incapable either of flight or of resistance, but perfectly fresh for the larder: in the same way Francoise had adopted, to minister to her permanent ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust

... family of man. These things are most remarkable about this memorable trans-migration of one faith into another, of an imperfect into a perfect religion, viz., that the early stage had but a slight resemblance to the latter, nor could have prefigured it to a human sagacity more than a larva could prefigure a chrysalis; and, secondly, that whereas the product, viz., Christianity, never has been nor will be in any danger of ruin, the germ, viz., the Judaic idea of God, the great radiation through which the Deity kept open His communication with man, apparently ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey

... the house, had floated up, generation after generation, into that abode of helpless brooding, and there hung hovering above the fast fleeting life below, which now, in its turn, was ever sending up like fumes from heart and brain, to crowd the dim, dreary, larva haunted, dream wallowing chaos of half obliterated thought and feeling. To Florimel it looked a dread waste, a region deserted and forgotten, mysterious with far reaching nooks of darkness, and now ...
— Malcolm • George MacDonald

... favorable conditions of temperature and moisture the egg state may last hardly more than 8 hours. The maggots which issue from the eggs are very small and transparent. They grow rapidly, completing the growth of the larva stage in three days under the most favorable conditions, although this stage usually lasts from 4 to 7 days. The larval period may be prolonged greatly by low temperature or by dryness or scarcity of the larval food. As the larvae (fig. 6) attain full ...
— The House Fly and How to Suppress It - U. S. Department of Agriculture Farmers' Bulletin No. 1408 • L. O. Howard and F. C. Bishopp

... the Northern nations mock, of course, at these revellers, thumbs are bitten, threats exchanged, and we shall see what comes of the quarrel. But the hall bells chime half-past noon; it is dinner-time in Oxford, and Stoke, as he throws off his mask (larva) and vine-leaves, mutters to himself the equivalent for "there WILL be a row about this." There will, indeed, for the penalty is not "crossing at the buttery," nor "gating," but—excommunication! (Munim. Academ., i. 18.) Dinner ...
— Oxford • Andrew Lang

... class, Plants and Insects, is based upon the same conception as that of Flowers and Birds. The insect is represented with the plant which is his habitat when in the stage of caterpillar and larva, or flying above the flowers and plants upon which he subsists on reaching the stage of butterfly and insect. Certain books add to this fourth class a ...
— Chinese Painters - A Critical Study • Raphael Petrucci

... pickaninny, urchin; bantling, bratling^; elf. youth, boy, lad, stripling, youngster, youngun, younker^, callant^, whipster^, whippersnapper, whiffet [U.S.], schoolboy, hobbledehoy, hopeful, cadet, minor, master. scion; sap, seedling; tendril, olive branch, nestling, chicken, larva, chrysalis, tadpole, whelp, cub, pullet, fry, callow; codlin, codling; foetus, calf, colt, pup, foal, kitten; lamb, lambkin^; aurelia^, caterpillar, cocoon, nymph, nympha^, orphan, pupa, staddle^. girl; lass, lassie; wench, miss, damsel, demoiselle; maid, maiden; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... one of the crossed plants in Pot 1 died; another became much diseased and stunted; and the third never grew to its full height. They seemed to have been all injured, probably by some larva gnawing their roots. Therefore all the plants on both sides of this pot were rejected in the subsequent measurements. When the plants were fully grown they were again measured to the tips of the highest leaves, ...
— The Effects of Cross & Self-Fertilisation in the Vegetable Kingdom • Charles Darwin

... temporaria of Linneus lives in the water in spring, and on the land in summer, and catches flies. Of the rana paradoxa the larva or tadpole is as large as the frog, and dwells in Surinam, whence the mistake of Merian and of Seba, who call it a frog fish. The esculent frog is green, with three yellow lines from the mouth to the anus; the back transversely gibbous, the hinder feet palmated; ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin

... most excruciating pain in his stomach, and which continued for so long a period, that his case became desperate, and his life was even despaired of. In this predicament, the medical gentleman to whom he applied administered to him a most violent emetic, and the result was the ejection of the larva, and which remained alive for a quarter of an hour after its expulsion. Upon questioning the man as to how it was likely that the insect got into his stomach, he stated that he was exceedingly fond of watercresses, and often gathered and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 348, December 27, 1828 • Various

... farther. lava, larva. halm, harm. calve, carve. talk, torque. daw, door. flaw, floor. yaw, yore. law, lore. laud, lord. maw, more, gnaw, nor. raw, roar. ...
— Society for Pure English, Tract 2, on English Homophones • Robert Bridges

... come to the practical deduction from these facts. It is clear that the only time when the scalebug can emigrate and infest a new tree is the time when it is a larva, that is, when it has the power of locomotion. In countries with a pronounced winter this time begins much later than with us, but it ends about the same time, that is, the beginning of August. I have seen the male of Aspidiotus in February, so that the active ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 286 - June 25, 1881 • Various

... week the transition from larva to butterfly took place in the young, handsome, and clever Charles-Edouard, Comte Rusticoli de la Palferine. Until this moment of his life he had lived miserably, covering his deficits with an audacity equal to ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac

... custom mentioned by Herodotus. Lucian saw such an image brought in at a feast. The Greeks adopted the idea, but beautified it, using a winged Genius of death instead of a mummy. The Romans also had their "larva."] ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... always, as in this case, prompts the individual to look after the welfare of the species. The care with which an insect selects a certain flower or fruit, or piece of flesh, or the way in which the ichneumon seeks the larva of a strange insect so that it may lay its eggs in that particular place only, and to secure which it fears neither labour nor danger, is obviously very analogous to the care with which a man chooses a woman of ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer

... loam which we are considering is the favorite haunt of this hateful little monster, and he who does not find it lying in wait when turning up land that has been long in sod, may deem himself lucky. The reader need not draw a sigh of relief when I tell him that I mean merely the "white grub," the larva of the May-beetle or June-bug, that so disturbs our slumbers in early summer by its sonorous hum and aimless bumping against the wall. This white grub, which the farmers often call the "potato worm," is, in ...
— Success With Small Fruits • E. P. Roe

... structures on the one hand, to which its own breathing organs bear direct relation on the other. Again, the delicate and complex pedicellariae of Echinoderms, with a certain process of development (through a secondary larva) found in that class, together with certain other exceptional modes of development, have been brought forward. The development of colour in certain apes, the hood of the cobra, and the rattle of the rattlesnake have also been cited. Again, difficulties as to the process of formation ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart

... flesh, fowl, and vegetables. They are fond of all kinds of berries and sweet fruits. They "go crazed" after honey, climbing bee-trees and robbing the nests. They dig for roots—such as groundnuts and prairie-turnips. They lick up the larva of insects greedily, turning over great logs to get at them. In the south they tear open the nests of turtles and alligators, and devour the eggs; and, where there are settlements, they steal into the fields and eat quantities of young corn and potatoes, making sad havoc with ...
— The Boy Hunters • Captain Mayne Reid

... Lank maldika. Lantern lanterno. Lap leki, lekumi. Lapis lazuli lapis lazuro. Lapse (of time) manko, dauxro. Larceny sxtelo. Larch lariko. Lard porkograso. Larder mangxajxejo. Large granda. Largely grandege. Lark alauxdo. Larva larvo. Larynx laringo. Lascivious voluptema. Lash (to tie) alligi. Lash (to whip) skurgxi. Lass junulino. Lassitude lacigxo. Lasso kaptosxnuro. Last (continue) dauxri. Last lasta. Last but one ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes

... In Tro-Cortesianus 28c (Pl. 3, fig. 3) is shown a second insect larva with curiously formed mouth parts. It is represented as attacking agave which is springing from the ground as shown by the Caban signs in the codex. Hough (1908, p. 591) has shown this to be the larva of Acentrocneme kollari Felder, "called by the Mexicans guson, and in Nahuatl ...
— Animal Figures in the Maya Codices • Alfred M. Tozzer and Glover M. Allen

... the wound covers up the egg, and the sap, flowing from the tree, forms a sort of nut which finally hardens and produces a most bitter substance deposited by the fly. The nut is about the size of a marble, and must be gathered before the larva is hatched out. It is the most valuable nut ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Exploring the Island • Roger Thompson Finlay

... squeeze the brain and do even this with a wise discretion; they are careful not to drive their sting into this fundamental centre of life; not one of them ever thinks of doing so, for the result would be a corpse which the larva would despise. The Spider, on the other hand, inserts her double dirk there and there alone; any elsewhere it would inflict a wound likely to increase resistance through irritation. She wants a venison for consumption without delay and brutally thrusts ...
— The Life of the Spider • J. Henri Fabre

... tomb-paintings from thenceforward ceasing to depict the mummy, represented the double only. They portrayed it "under the form which he had on this earth," wearing the civil garb, and fulfilling his ordinary functions. The corpse was regarded as merely the larva, to be maintained in its integrity in order to ensure survival; but it could be relegated without fear to the depths of the bare and naked tomb, there to remain until the end of time, if it pleased the gods to preserve it from robbers or archaeologists. At the period ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 6 (of 12) • G. Maspero

... doubt lessens the danger of incurring haematuria."[14] This is bestowing upon ignorant and savage negroes a psychical acuteness which far transcends that of the laity of civilized races! What do the Wa-kamba know of sanitation, haematuria, and the larva of Bilharzia![E] Circumcision among these people always occurs at puberty, and is, unquestionably, a phallic rite. Parenthetically, it may be stated here that a few of the primitive peoples still in existence appear to have grasped the idea of the life-giving principle, and to have ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir

... tumour, then, of course, the inoculating instinct of these animals could not have been developed by natural selection. But, given these two conditions, and it appears to me there is nothing very much more remarkable about an accidental correlation between the effects of a parasitic larva on a plant and the needs of that parasite, than there is between the similarly accidental correlation between a hydated parasite and the nutrition furnished to it by the tissues of a warm-blooded animal. Doubtless the ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes

... allied to the poisonous bug (as it is called) of Persia, 'Argos reflexus', respecting which such marvelous accounts have been recorded, and which the statement respecting the carapato or tampan would partially confirm." Mr. W. also thinks that the poison- yielding larva called N'gwa is a "species of chrysomelidae. The larvae of the British species of that family exude a fetid yellow thickish fluid when alarmed, but he has not heard that any of them are ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone

... soft, partially decayed wood, each busy little mother places the pellets of pollen and nectar paste, then when her eggs have been laid on the food supply in separate nurseries and sealed up, she dies from exhaustion, leaving her grub progeny to eat its way through the larva into the chrysalis state, and finally into that of a winged bee that flies away to liberty. These are the little bees so constantly seen about ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan

... Dufour in '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 ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin

... is to be sought in an Ascidioid form. Goodsir long ago insisted upon the resemblance between Amphioxus and the Ascidians; but the notion of a genetic connection between the two, and especially the identification of the notochord of the Vertebrate with the axis of the caudal appendage of the larva of the Ascidian, is a novelty which, at first, takes one's breath away. I must confess, however, that the more I have pondered over it, the more grounds appear in its favour, though I am not convinced that there is any real parallelism ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley

... is not a fish. A fish takes the water in through his mouth continually, and it runs over his gills, and out behind through his gill-covers. So the gills suck-up the air out of the water, and send it into the fish's blood, just as they do in the newt-larva. ...
— Madam How and Lady Why - or, First Lessons in Earth Lore for Children • Charles Kingsley

... Larva also means a skeleton, and Trimalchio, following the Egyptian custom, has one brought in and placed on the table during his famous feast. It is, as one would expect, of silver, and the millionaire freedman ...
— Greek and Roman Ghost Stories • Lacy Collison-Morley

... below the freezing-point of mercury, and where the animal cannot seek protection from it by creeping down to a stratum of earth which never freezes, presupposes that either the insect itself, its egg, larva, or pupa, may be frozen stiff without being killed. Only very few species of these small animals, however, appear to survive such a freezing test, and the actual land-evertebrate-fauna of the Polar countries is therefore exceedingly scanty in comparison ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold

... forgive its existence. As a rule he digs himself in with his dream and with the arts, until the time comes when he has got used to his incarnation, and the grub has achieved its agonizing passage from larva to winged insect. What a need he has for peace and meditation during these April days so full of the trouble of maturing life! But they come after him to the bottom of his burrow, look him up, drag him from the dark while still so tender in his new-made ...
— Pierre and Luce • Romain Rolland

... quickly back, so much afraid was she of this unclean being, who was as hideous as a larva and nearly as ...
— Salammbo • Gustave Flaubert

... him flitting above the edge of the highest surge. I believe that the reason of this migration of sea-gulls, and other sea-birds, to the land, is their security of finding food; and they may be observed, at this time, feeding greedily on the earth-worms and larva, driven out of the ground by severe floods: and the fish, on which they prey in fine weather in the sea, leave the surface and go deeper in storms. The search after food is the principal cause why animals change their places. The different ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 323, July 19, 1828 • Various

... hunting carnivorous animals. She would then carelessly wind a thread or two about it, in a perfunctory way, bury her jaws in its body, and in less than half a minute suck out its juices to the last drop, leaving the empty shell unhurt, like a dry skeleton or the slough of a dragon-fly larva. But when wasps or other large and dangerous insects got entangled in the webs, the hunters proceeded with far greater caution. Lucy, indeed, who was a decided coward, would stand and look anxiously at the doubtful intruder for several seconds, feeling the web with her claws, and running ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen

... inflow and outflow of currents of water necessary for respiration, which is effected by means of filamentous abdominal tracheal gills, the two ends of the tube are open. Sometimes the cases are fixed, but more often portable. In the latter case the larva crawls about the bottom of the water or up the stems of plants, with its thickly-chitinized head and legs protruding from the larger orifice, while it maintains a secure hold of the silk lining of the tube by means ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various

... large larva is discovered and disturbed it withdraws its head into the first body-ring, inflating the margin, which is of a bright red colour. There are two intensely black spots on this margin in the appropriate position for eyes, and the whole appearance is that ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes

... the soft muddy bottom. You see numberless bits of stick. Watch awhile, and those sticks are alive, crawling and tumbling over each other. The weed, too, is full of smaller ones. Those live sticks are the larva-cases of the Caperers—Phryganeae—of which one family nearly two hundred species have been already found in Great Britain. Fish up one, and you find, amid sticks and pebbles, a comfortable silk case, tenanted by a goodly ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley

... on the ground. It will then be found that the white portion, which should become the bulb, has been pierced to the centre by a fleshy, shining maggot, a quarter of an inch in length, this being the larva of an ashy-coloured, ill-looking, two-winged fly. Where this plague has acquired such a hold as to be a serious nuisance, care should be taken to clear out all the old store of Onions instantly upon a sufficiency of young Onions becoming available ...
— The Culture of Vegetables and Flowers From Seeds and Roots, 16th Edition • Sutton and Sons

... view of the subject. Is it not possible that it may be the larva of some large unknown animal inhabiting these limestone cavities? Its feet are not in harmony with the rest of its organisation; and were they removed, it would have all the characters ...
— Consolations in Travel - or, the Last Days of a Philosopher • Humphrey Davy

... into a young eel or 'elver'; and Professor Grassi, who had a big share in elucidating the whole matter, tells us the curious fact that he found the Sicilian fishermen well acquainted with the little transparent larva (the Leptocephalus of modern naturalists), that they knew well what it was, and that they had a name for it—Casentula. Now Aristotle, in a passage which I think has been much misunderstood (and which we must admit to be in part erroneous), tells ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various

... many-whorled TURRITELLA forgetting its high station and degenerating to the likeness of a worm. No doubt it is really a case of degeneration from the acquirement of fixed habits, just as when a lively young crustacean larva gives up its free independent life and glues its head to a stone—what happens? Why, he becomes a mere barnacle instead of a spritely shrimp as he might have been! Let mankind take ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield

... The Helgramite Nymph, larva of the Dobson Fly, is such an excellent bass and trout food, that the making of this nymph deserves special mention. As my personal way of making this particular nymph differs considerably from those ...
— How to Tie Flies • E. C. Gregg

... is a bird of considerable intelligence, and is, besides, extremely useful in destroying large quantities of worms and larvA| of destructive insects. It will, it is true, if not watched, pick out, after they are dibbled, both pease and beans from the holes with a precision truly astonishing: a very moderate degree of care is, however, sufficient to prevent this evil, which is greatly overbalanced ...
— The Dialect of the West of England Particularly Somersetshire • James Jennings

... word meaning a club and a Latin word meaning a head. It is a genus of Pyrenomycetous fungi of which a few grow upon other fungi, but by far the greater number are parasitic upon insects or their larva, as will ...
— The Mushroom, Edible and Otherwise - Its Habitat and its Time of Growth • M. E. Hard

... luxuriant forests of Ceylon the extensive family of Longicorns[1] and Passalidae live in destructive abundance. To the coco-nut planters the ravages committed by beetles are painfully familiar.[2] The larva of one species of Dynastida, the Oryctes rhinoceros, called by the Singhalese "Gascooroominiya," makes its way into the younger trees, descending from the top, and after perforating them in all directions, forms a cocoon of the gnawed wood and sawdust, ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent

... the active feeding larva changes to the still active but non-feeding pupa (Fig. 59). The head and thorax are closely united and a close inspection will reveal the head, antennae, wings and legs of the adult mosquito folded ...
— Insects and Diseases - A Popular Account of the Way in Which Insects may Spread - or Cause some of our Common Diseases • Rennie W. Doane

... found in certain other Diptera, the Hessian flies, that the larva gives rise to secondary larvae within it, which develop and burst the body of the primary larva. The secondary larvae give rise, similarly, to another set within them, and these again to ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart

... pool. If a fine silk net is drawn through the water and then emptied into a glass dish a whole new world of creatures will be revealed—jellyfishes, ctenophores, hydroids, eggs of fish, tiny copepods, the larvae or young of sea-urchins, starfishes, or oysters. If an old wharf is near by, examine the posts supporting it. The pilings seem to be coated with a shaggy mass of seaweed. Scrape some of this off and put in a dish of water. Sea-spiders, starfishes, ...
— Scouting For Girls, Official Handbook of the Girl Scouts • Girl Scouts

... light of the firefly or of its larvae, the glow-worm, but few persons realize that a vast number of insects and lower organisms are endowed with the superhuman ability of producing light by physiological processes. Apparently the chief function ...
— Artificial Light - Its Influence upon Civilization • M. Luckiesh

... drawing-room.'[28] Of all his faults, however, the worst is that jugglery, that inferior legerdemain, with the elements of the beautiful in verse: most obvious in "Sordello," in portions of "The Ring and the Book," and in so many of the later poems. These inexcusable violations are like the larvae within certain vegetable growths: soon or late they will destroy their environment before they perish themselves. Though possessive above all others of that science of the percipient in the allied arts of painting and music, wherein he found the unconventional ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp

... being then much worn on the sides from the animal rubbing itself against trees and stones. It becomes grayish and almost white before it is completely shed. The Indians form their robes of the skins procured in autumn when the hair is short. Towards the spring the larvae of the oestrus, attaining a large size, produce so many perforations in the skins that they are good for nothing. The cicatrices only of these holes are to be seen in August but a fresh set of ova have in the ...
— The Journey to the Polar Sea • John Franklin

... the rapid increase, in a geometrical ratio, of all the species of animals and plants. In the lower orders this increase is especially rapid, a single flesh-fly (Musca carnaria) producing 20,000 larvae, and these growing so quickly that they reach their full size in five days; hence the great Swedish naturalist, Linnaeus, asserted that a dead horse would be devoured by three of these flies as quickly as by a lion. Each of these ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace

... that part of America. The latter form large underground nests, and their work of destruction consists in gathering leaves, which they strip to form heaps of material, which become covered over with a delicate white fungus, on which the larvae of the ants are fed, so that literally they are a colony of mushroom growers. The special province of the little stinging ants, which live in the thorns of the acacia, is, therefore, to protect the leaves of the ...
— Scientific American, Volume 40, No. 13, March 29, 1879 • Various

... page 180 of "Descent of Man" (Hurst & Company, Edition 1874), Darwin says: "Our most ancient progenitors in the kingdom of the Vertebrata, at which we are able to obtain an obscure glance, apparently consisted of a group of marine animals, resembling the larvae of the existing Ascidians." Then he suggests a line of descent leading to the monkey. And he does not even permit us to indulge in a patriotic pride of ancestry; instead of letting us descend from American monkeys, he connects us with the European ...
— In His Image • William Jennings Bryan

... temperature, or unable to withstand strong currents. Thus most of the allies of the fresh-water crayfish, which live in the sea, lay eggs from which there are soon hatched minute, almost transparent larvae, exceedingly unlike the adult. In the comparatively equable temperature of sea-water, and in the usual absence of strong currents, these small larvae, as Huxley shewed later in his volume on the Crayfish, live a free life, obtaining their own food, ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell

... general fact that the phases of development of all living animals correspond to the order of succession of their extinct representatives in past geological times. The above statements are quoted almost word for word from Professor Agassiz's "Essay on Classification." The larvae of barnacles and other more degraded parasitic crustacea are almost exactly like those of Crustacea in general. The embryos of birds have a long tail containing almost or quite as many vertebrae as that of archaeopteryx. But most ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler

... More than once have I satisfied my hunger with it during these disastrous days when the briars have turned into rose-colored crystals, and when the agile wagtail utters its shrill cry toward the larvae which its beak can no longer reach beneath the ice along the banks. I shall continue to gnaw these barks. For, Oh Francis, I do not wish to die with these gentle friends who are in their agony, but rather ...
— Romance of the Rabbit • Francis Jammes

... worms, which are the first stage of cockchafers. These destructive pests are fond of the bark of trees; they get between the bark and the sap-wood and eat their way round. If the tree is large enough for the insect to pass into its second state (of larvae, in which it remains dormant until its second metamorphose) before it has gone round the trunk, the tree lives, because so long as even a small bit of the sap-wood remains covered by the bark, the tree ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac

... horses, together with fish, water-fowls, birds, acorns, berries, pine nuts, esculent herbage and the tuberous roots of certain plants, all of which were easily obtained, even with their simple and limited means of securing them. Mushrooms, fungi, grasshoppers, worms and the larvae of ants and other insects, were also eaten, and some of these articles were considered ...
— Indians of the Yosemite Valley and Vicinity - Their History, Customs and Traditions • Galen Clark

... woodpecker, aided by its wedge-shaped beak, could, in case of need, rip up the bark under which its prey was to be found; that his tongue, covered with spines bending backward, is well adapted to seize the larvae; and, lastly, that the stiff and elastic feathers of its tail afford it a very useful support in the exercise of ...
— Adventures of a Young Naturalist • Lucien Biart

... enemies, even though they inhabit the same streams, that they must be kept separate anyway. To put them in the same aquarium would be like caging up two game roosters. If we were studying the development of mosquitoes, for instance, from the larvae or eggs to the fully developed insect, we should not get very far in our nature study if we put them in an aquarium with fish. A fish will soon make short work of a hundred mosquito wigglers just as a large frog will eat the fish, a snake will eat the frog ...
— Outdoor Sports and Games • Claude H. Miller

... fairy music, "like a little musical box," that came out of nodding flowers. There was a great open place where fairies rode and raced on "things," but what Mr. Skelmersdale meant by "these here things they rode," there is no telling. Larvae, perhaps, or crickets, or the little beetles that elude us so abundantly. There was a place where water splashed and gigantic king-cups grew, and there in the hotter times the fairies bathed together. There were games being ...
— Twelve Stories and a Dream • H. G. Wells

... beautiful of the beetle race, and all of them are remarkable for enormous developments of the thorax and head. They are all large bodied and stout limbed, and by their great strength abundantly justify their generic name, Dynastes, which is from the Greek and signifies powerful. The larvae of these beetles inhabit and feed upon decaying trees and other rotting vegetable matter, and correspond in size with the mature insects. Most of them inhabit tropical regions, where they perform ...
— Scientific American, Volume XLIII., No. 25, December 18, 1880 • Various

... colony by the name of Bushmen are now entirely destitute of flocks or herds, and subsist partly by the chase, partly on the wild roots of the wilderness, and in times of scarcity on reptiles, grasshoppers, and the larvae of ants, or by plundering their hereditary foes and oppressors, the frontier Boers. In seasons when every green herb is devoured by swarms of locusts, and when the wild game in consequence desert the pastures of the wilderness, the Bushman finds a resource in the very calamity ...
— The Illustrated London Reading Book • Various

... the other direction. You will find it difficult (page 14 of your letter) to make a marked line of separation between fertile and infertile crosses. I do not see how the apparently sudden change (for the suddenness of change in a chrysalis is of course largely only apparent) in larvae during their development throws any light ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin

... knew the several inmates of the hive, though like others of his day (save, perhaps, only Xenophon), and like Shakespeare too, he took the queen-bee for a king. He describes the building of the comb, the laying of the eggs, the provision of the larvae with food. He discusses the various qualities of honey and the flowers from which these are drawn. He is learned in the diseases and the enemies of bees. He tells us many curious things about the economy of the ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various

... the angle of the wall for the purpose of fishing out of the dirty fluid which lay there, crusted with soot and alive with insects, to be renewed only three times in the seven days, some of the great larvae and kicking monsters which made up a large item in my list of wonders: all of a sudden the horror of the place came over me; those grim prison-walls above, with their canopy of lurid smoke; the dreary, sloppy, broken ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al

... larvae of pollution, with dubious items of equipment pricking up, or bits of bone. Farther on, a corpse has been brought in in such a state that they have been obliged—so as not to lose it on the way—to pile it on a lattice of wire which was then fastened to the two ends of a stake. Thus was it ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse

... does, since in many cases it is hundreds of years, and in a few instances thousands of years, old. Every broken limb or root, or deep wound from fire, insects, or falling timber, may afford an entrance for decay, which, once started, may penetrate to all parts of the trunk. The larvae of many insects bore into the trees and their tunnels remain indefinitely as sources of weakness. Whatever advantages, however, that sapwood may have in this connection are due solely to its relative age ...
— The Mechanical Properties of Wood • Samuel J. Record

... garden, and the croft and the orchard, or at any rate one journey round them; and I think for another of your voyages I will do the log of the Adela on the canal, for with water-plants, and shells, and larvae, and beasts that live in the banks, it would be splendid. Do you know, one might give a whole book up easily to a list of nothing but willows and osiers, and the different kinds of birds and insects that live in them. But the number of kinds there are of some things is quite wonderful. What do you ...
— We and the World, Part II. (of II.) - A Book for Boys • Juliana Horatia Ewing

... be seen in the evening twilight with match, gunpowder, &c., and green boughs for self-defence, busy in storming the paper-built castles of wasps, the larvae of which furnish anglers with store of excellent baits. Spring-flowers have given place to a very different class. Climbing plants mantle and festoon every hedge. The wild hop, the brione, the clematis ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, Issue 262, July 7, 1827 • Various

... Tritons, and other Nymphs; every River, and Fountayn, with a Ghost of his name, and with Nymphs; every house, with it Lares, or Familiars; every man, with his Genius; Hell, with Ghosts, and spirituall Officers, as Charon, Cerberus, and the Furies; and in the night time, all places with Larvae, Lemures, Ghosts of men deceased, and a whole kingdome of Fayries, and Bugbears. They have also ascribed Divinity, and built Temples to meer Accidents, and Qualities; such as are Time, Night, Day, Peace, Concord, Love, ...
— Leviathan • Thomas Hobbes

... tangled mass of weed. Here are more larvae of water-flies. Some have the sides fringed with what look like paddles, but are gills. Of these one part have whisks at the tail, and swim freely. They will change into ephemerae, cock-winged 'duns,' with long whisked tails. ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley

... to those who have discussed the subject previously. He considers the matter from the point of view of development, and after indicating the probability that hormones are given off by all the tissues of the body, gives instances of organs being formed in regeneration (eye of shrimp) or larvae (common sea-urchin) as the result of the presence of neighbouring organs, an influence which he thinks can only be due to a hormone given off by the organ already present. He then states that Professor Langley had pointed out to him ...
— Hormones and Heredity • J. T. Cunningham

... germinative power of seeds and retards the growth of certain forms of life, such as larvae, so that they do not pass into the chrysalis and insect stages of development, but remain in ...
— Marvels of Modern Science • Paul Severing

... moral characteristics which demand specific treatment. So great and sudden are some of these changes that they are sometimes likened to a metamorphosis, indicating an analogy with certain insects as a change from the larvae and pupae stages to that ...
— Parent and Child Vol. III., Child Study and Training • Mosiah Hall

... loses a crack or a crevice, mind you, or a joint in a tavern bedstead, but she always has one of her flat- pattern five timekeepers to slide into it;) black, glossy crickets, with their long filaments sticking out like the whips of four-horse stage-coaches; motionless, slug-like creatures, young larvae, perhaps more horrible in their pulpy stillness than even in the infernal wriggle of maturity! But no sooner is the stone turned and the wholesome light of day let upon this compressed and blinded community of creeping things, than all of them which enjoy the luxury of legs—and some of them ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes

... stood this morning before its great doors and watched the nervous, hurrying messengers endlessly streaming in and out as they loaded a row of trucks with France's money bags. The bearers looked for all the world like a stream of ants carrying their larvae to safety when an ant-hill is ...
— The Note-Book of an Attache - Seven Months in the War Zone • Eric Fisher Wood

... all grain-eating birds, the pheasant is no doubt capable of inflicting appreciable damage on cultivated land, it seems to be established beyond all question that it also feeds greedily on the even more destructive larva of the crane-fly, in which case it may more than pay its footing in the fields. The foodstuff most fatal to itself is the yew leaf, for which, often with fatal results, it seems to have an unconquerable craving. The worst disease, however, from which the pheasant suffers is "gapes," caused by an ...
— Birds in the Calendar • Frederick G. Aflalo

... don't know! Perhaps a larva or a chrysalis, out of whose trance-like life a man one day will be created. She seems a child, but isn't one; she is a sort of child, and yet not like one. Drags downward, when the man pulls up. Drags upward, when the man ...
— The Road to Damascus - A Trilogy • August Strindberg

... to make them. There are enough, thank Heaven, without me. We are literary cannibals, and our writers live on each other and each other's productions to a fearful extent. What the mulberry leaf is to the silk-worm, the author's book, treatise, essay, poem, is to the critical larva; that feed upon it. It furnishes them with food and clothing. The process may not be agreeable to the mulberry leaf or to the printed page; but without it the leaf would not have become the silk that covers ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... it first leaves the egg, is termed grub, maggot, worm, or larva; from this state it changes to the shape of the perfect bee, which is said to be three days after finishing the cocoon; from the time of this change, till it is ready to leave the cell, the terms nymph, pupa, and chrysalis, are applied. The lid ...
— Mysteries of Bee-keeping Explained • M. Quinby

... a large handsome grasshopper (Zoniopoda tarsata), the habits of which in its larva and imago stages are in strange contrast, like those in certain lepidoptera, in which the caterpillars form societies and act in concert. The adult has a greenish protective colouring, brown and green banded thighs, bright red hind wings, seen only during flight. ...
— The Naturalist in La Plata • W. H. Hudson

... which I wish to bring before the members of the Association. It is that of controlling the butternut curculio. This insect is very bad on butternut, heartnut and Persian walnuts, with us it does not attack black walnuts or hickories. I fear that it is going to prove hard to control, as the larva is of the boring type, being found inside the green nuts, inside the new growth of the terminals and in the fleshy part of the leaf stems. In these places it cannot be reached by poisons. It appears that we will have to work entirely on the ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Thirty-Seventh Annual Report • Various

... honey-bags. In fact, the entire social economy of the hive was disrupted and disarranged, and this confusion lasted for hours. After about twenty-four hours of mourning for the dead queen the bees recovered their equanimity, and began the work of rearing another queen from a worker larva. ...
— The Dawn of Reason - or, Mental Traits in the Lower Animals • James Weir

... somewhat indignant at the treatment he was receiving, felt as yet no impulse to interfere, for success was doubtful. But, indeed, he was not very easily roused to action of any kind; for he was as yet mostly in the larva-condition of character, when everything is transacted inside. But the fun grew more furious, and spot after spot of ink gloomed upon Shargar's white face. Still Robert took no notice, for they did not seem to be hurting him much. But when he saw the tears stealing down his patient cheeks, ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald

... were adults, but somewhat less likely if they were larvae of a much larger animal. The form of the stapes, tabular and otic notch suggest a functional tympanic membrane, which could not have occurred in a gill-breathing larva. On the other hand, an adult animal of pigmy size might be expected to have large orbits, large otic capsules ...
— A New Order of Fishlike Amphibia From the Pennsylvanian of Kansas • Theodore H. Eaton

... lineage of great earls and swift race-horses. We like to know that the discovery of the law of gravitation was born of the fall of an apple in an English garden on a summer afternoon. Essays written after this fashion are racy of the soil in which they grow, as you taste the larva in the vines grown on the slopes of Etna, they say. There is a healthy Gascon flavour in Montaigne's Essays; and Charles Lamb's are scented with the ...
— Dreamthorp - A Book of Essays Written in the Country • Alexander Smith



Words linked to "Larva" :   doodlebug, jointworm, caseworm, larval, aphis lion, creature, wriggler, aphid lion, brute, ascidian tadpole, fauna, cercaria, polliwog, wiggler, nymph, strawworm, tadpole, animate being, animal, caterpillar



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