"Saurian" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the opossum. It is, however, the merest guess-work to attempt to confine its resemblances to any particular animal. Nevertheless recent writers have described this as the "alligator mound" without suggesting a word of doubt as to its want of positive resemblance to that saurian. ...
— Animal Carvings from Mounds of the Mississippi Valley • Henry W. Henshaw
... performances; his Novum Organum was able to take up the smallest conceivable atom of existence, whether animate or not, and make a study of it. He has no disrespect for caterpillars or any kind of worm or insect; but he is not a caterpillar himself, or an insect of any kind, or a Saurian, or an Icthyosaurian, but a man; and it was for the sake of building up from a new basis a practical doctrine of human life, that he invented that instrument, and put so much ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... the forest has become visible, the road brings the wayfarer within sight of a vast lonely structure heaving its huge long back against the low horizon, like some monster antidiluvian saurian, the fit denizen of this marsh world. It is the venerable Basilica of St. ...
— A Siren • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... had rather an amusing, and at the same time exciting, adventure with a large crocodile in a swamp close to the store. He noticed it fast asleep in the swamp, and so waded out to it through the mud, making no noise whatever. When within a few yards of the saurian, he threw a double charge of dynamite close up to it, and then turned to fly. He found he could not move, but was stuck firmly in the mud. His struggles and yells for help had meanwhile awoke the crocodile, which came for him with open jaws. It looked as if it was a case of either being blown to ...
— Wanderings Among South Sea Savages And in Borneo and the Philippines • H. Wilfrid Walker
... grow the less content am I scientifically: would that I had received a mathematical education. I was much interested with some quotations from Lyell's Elements in a late Calcutta Courier, especially about the Marine Saurian from the Gallepagos. What further proof can be wanted of the maritime and insular nature of the world during the reigns of the Saurian reptiles? What more conclusive can be expected about the appearance of new species? This point would at once be settled if ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith
... immense lives had they lived through the centuries! And yet this boy of only the other day was crawling round about their trunks unchallenged. I seemed to feel a presence, the moment I stepped into their shade, as of the solid coolness of some old-world saurian, and the checkered light and shade on the leafy mould seemed ...
— My Reminiscences • Rabindranath Tagore
... distance it would not have been very easy to make out the nature of the thing, and a newcomer to the scene, with no local knowledge of circumstantial evidence to guide him, would have hesitated between a buffalo or a hippopotamus and finally given a vote in favour of it being some slime-crawling saurian that we come across in pictures of antediluvian ...
— A Dweller in Mesopotamia - Being the Adventures of an Official Artist in the Garden of Eden • Donald Maxwell
... kept carnival, Tricked out in star and flower, And in cramp elf and saurian forms They ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... you are anti-Victorian And, scorning the coo of the dove, Hold the roar of the primitive Saurian The final expression of love, You may have, if you choose, an alternative shy At a tear in the throat and a lump ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, March 24, 1920. • Various
... cared for in literature was a 'society' journal, sent weekly from London. These publications are widely read in the better class of farmsteads now. Harry knew something of most things, even of geology. He could show you the huge vertebrae of some extinct saurian, found while draining was being done. He knew enough of archaeology to be able to tell any enthusiastic student who chanced to come along where to find the tumuli and the earthworks on the Downs. He had several Roman coins, and a fine bronze spearhead, which had been found upon ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies
... early margins chiefly served to note, cite, and illustrate the habits of crocodiles. Along the lower or "tail'' edge, the saurian, splendidly serrated as to his back, arose out of old Nile; up one side negroes, swart as sucked lead-pencil could limn them, let fall their nerveless spears; up the other, monkeys, gibbering with terror, ...
— Pagan Papers • Kenneth Grahame
... Extended lay her beauteous form, a hundred feet and more. The sun, with rays flammivomous, beat on the blue-black sand; And sportive little Saurians disported on the strand But oft the Iguanodon reproved them in their glee, And said, "Alas! this Saurian Age is not what ...
— Dot and the Kangaroo • Ethel C. Pedley
... at eventide, and, plunging rather too deeply into the water, had been seized by the muzzle by a crocodile, and was now, despite his frantic struggles, being slowly dragged into deep water, where of course he would presently be drowned and become the prey of the fierce saurian. Now the wild Cape buffalo is a distinctly vicious creature, easily angered, and ready to fight upon the slightest provocation; it is, indeed, with perhaps the exception of the rhinoceros—and many who know both intimately would not ...
— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood
... from the instincts of to-day. Does not the geologist make the erstwhile carcases live anew in our minds in the light of the world as we see it? With nothing but analogy to guide them, he describes how some saurian lived in the jurassic age; there are no fossil remains of habits, but nevertheless he can tell us plenty about them, things worthy of credence, because the present teaches him the past. Let us do a ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre
... The saurian huge and the lizard slow, Foul shapes of ruthless greed, And the stealthy snake of the sudden blow, All owl-like shrink from the Search-Light's glow, Or ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 101, September 5, 1891 • Various
... We read of geological excursions to Shotover with Lord Carew and Lord Kildare—one carrying the hammer and another the umbrella—and actual discoveries of saurian remains; and many a merry meeting at Dr. Buckland's, in which, at intervals of scientific talk, John romped with the youngsters of the family. After a while the Dean took the opportunity of a walk through Oxford to the Clarendon to warn him not to spend too much time on science. ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... extinct volcano—and at night, when the moon's rays fall obliquely upon its flanks, it presents a vague resemblance to the scales of an alligator. At the same time that this fancy is suggested, the huge saurian itself may be heard, plunging among the reeds at its foot, and causing their culms to rattle against the rhomboid protuberances ...
— The Tiger Hunter • Mayne Reid
... of the tree appeared to be surrounded by these formidable animals of the Saurian order. By the glare of the flames, they were immediately recognized by Paganel, as the ferocious species peculiar to America, called CAIMANS in the Spanish territories. About ten of them were there, lashing the water with their powerful tails, and attacking the OMBU ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... visible greenness on the slopes of Heavytree Hill; and the long, white track of the Wingdam road was lost in outlying pools and ponds a hundred rods from Monte Flat. The spent water-courses, whose white bones had been sinuously trailed over the flat, like the vertebrae of some forgotten saurian, were full again; the dry bones moved once more in the valley; and there was joy in the ditches, and a pardonable extravagance in the columns of "The Monte Flat Monitor." "Never before in the history of the county has the yield been so satisfactory. Our contemporary of 'The Hillside Beacon,' ...
— Tales of the Argonauts • Bret Harte
... instigated by an impulse for which he himself probably could not have accounted, leaped directly down on the creature's back, and digging the fingers of his left hand into its remaining eye, began so furiously to belabour it with a thick club he held in his right hand, that the astonished saurian dashed off through the water, madly lashing it into masses of foam with its huge tail. Under other circumstances I should have trembled for the gallant Tim's safety, but for the moment I could think of nothing but the fearful danger to which my dear young sister was exposed. I am very sure that it ...
— The Wanderers - Adventures in the Wilds of Trinidad and Orinoco • W.H.G. Kingston
... ill-matched, these two colossal protagonists of the Saurian and the Mammal. The advantage of bulk lay altogether with the Dinosaur, the three-horned King of all the Lizard kind. His armament, too, whether for offense or for defense, was distinctly the more formidable. ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts
... more humanoid than the Throgs. The upper limbs were not too unlike Shann's arms, though the hands had four digits of equal length instead of five. But the features were nonhuman, closer to saurian in contour. It had large eyes, blazing yellow in the dazzle of the flash, with vertical slits of green for pupils. A nose united with the jaw to make a snout, and above the domed forehead a sharp V-point of raised spiky growth extended back and down until behind the shoulder blades it ...
— Storm Over Warlock • Andre Norton
... simpler forms of insect life, or a clue to the common ancestor of insects, spiders, and shrimps, which naturalists would dearly like to discover. There is a baffling completeness about these creatures. When in the lias period, for instance, the vertebrates were huge saurian reptiles and flying lizards, and scarcely any of our existing classes of fish had come into existence, the beetles, cockroaches, crickets, and white ants were there, with all the distinguishing characteristics ...
— The Naturalist on the Thames • C. J. Cornish
... eyes?" said Vansittart Smith to himself. "There is something saurian about them, something reptilian. There's the membrana nictitans of the snakes," he mused, bethinking himself of his zoological studies. "It gives a shiny effect. But there was something more here. There was a sense of power, of wisdom—so ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the crocodile was sure to win in the race, he fired one shot and the saurian disappeared beneath the surface of the water, shot through the eye. Pat turned back to the Manhattan, but Ned directed him to go on to the shore, find the boys, and return as ...
— Boy Scouts in the Philippines - Or, The Key to the Treaty Box • G. Harvey Ralphson
... "From a saurian interior, Christian friends, I now address you"— (And "Oh heaven!" or its correlative, groaned shuddering we)— "While there yet remains a scrap of my identity, for, bless you, This ungodly alligator's ...
— Successful Recitations • Various
... admittedly of higher rank than common fishes. They dominated until reptiles appeared, when they mostly gave place to (or, as the derivationists will insist, were resolved by divergent variation and natural selection into) common fishes, destitute of reptilian characters, and saurian reptiles—the intermediate grades, which, according to a familiar piscine saying, are "neither fish, flesh, nor good red-herring," being eliminated and extinguished by natural consequence of the struggle for existence which Darwin so aptly portrays. And so, perhaps, ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... showed an interest in matters. Sitting up, he drew his revolver from the belt around his waist, aimed quickly and fired. The bullet darted into the nearer eye and ripped through what little brain the saurian possessed. With a snort, it whirled, darted several rods out into the stream, and then spun round and round, as if caught in the vortex of a whirlpool. Slight in one sense as was the wound, it was mortal and quickly drew the attention of other ...
— Up the Forked River - Or, Adventures in South America • Edward Sylvester Ellis
... there must be many such as that one, in the wilds of the swamps and bayous," said Alice in a low voice, as she pointed her parasol at a huge saurian. ...
— The Moving Picture Girls Under the Palms - Or Lost in the Wilds of Florida • Laura Lee Hope
... skins were slate-gray and rubbery, speckled with pinhead-sized bits of quartz that had been formed from perspiration, since their body-tissues were silicone instead of carbon-hydrogen. Their narrow heads were unpleasantly saurian; they had small, double-lidded red eyes, and slit-like nostrils, and wide mouths filled with opalescent teeth. Being cold-blooded, they needed no clothing, beyond their belts and equipment, and the emblem of the Chartered Ullr Company painted on their chests and ...
— Ullr Uprising • Henry Beam Piper
... ibis flies— Silver wings in silver skies; In the sun the Saurian lies: Comes the mockingbird and prates To the boatman at the ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss
... grinning his saurian grin, "why you all assume that Neergard is such a social outcast. I played cards with him last week and he lost like ...
— The Younger Set • Robert W. Chambers
... of any fish of our days. To his great delight, when the first living specimen of the gar-pike, or modern Lepidosteus, was brought to him, it moved its head to the right and left and upward, as a Saurian does and as no other ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... as he gazed excitedly into the clear water at the plainly defined shape of the little saurian, for it was not ...
— Mother Carey's Chicken - Her Voyage to the Unknown Isle • George Manville Fenn
... the third ripe century stands complete, As once again the sons of Harvard meet, Rejoicing, numerous as the seashore sands, Drawn from all quarters,—farthest distant lands, Where through the reeds the scaly saurian steals, Where cold Alaska feeds her floundering seals, Where Plymouth, glorying, wears her iron crown, Where Sacramento sees the suns go down; Nay, from the cloisters whence the refluent tide Wafts their pale students to our Mother's side,— Mid all the ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... Mr. Barnum," said Shem. "The whole Saurian tribe was a fearful nuisance. About four hundred years before the flood I had a pet Creosaurus that I kept in our barn. He was a cunning little devil—full of tricks, and all that; but we never could keep a cow or a horse on ...
— A House-Boat on the Styx • John Kendrick Bangs
... the geographical range of the alligator but here the great Saurian is seldom seen. He prefers the more sluggish bayous, or the streams whose shores are still wild. In the rapid current of the Mississippi, and along its well-cultivated banks, he is but rarely observed by ...
— The Quadroon - Adventures in the Far West • Mayne Reid
... Darwinian theory. Certainly his remote ancestors must have been of the falcon family. He revels in birds; though, when he cannot obtain those, he can put up with lizards, which he usually prefers manufactured, and of a length not less than from sixty to one hundred feet. This reminds us that a saurian of a hundred feet should not ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 2, No. 36, December 3, 1870 • Various
... inertly under its marble slab. Of course, before a grown-up the crocodile would pretend to be dead and stuffed, but ... the little boy knew better. It occurred gleefully to him, too, that the plump French damsel might prove more satisfactory as a repast to a hungry saurian than a skinny little boy with thin legs. In the cheerful nursery, with its fragrant peat fire (we called it "turf"), the terrors of the evening were quickly forgotten, only to be renewed with tenfold activity next evening, as the moment ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... head lazily when Hayden opened the door, and Robert in his indignation felt a faint chill of apprehension as he met that glance. Penfield's eyes had lost their usual saurian impassiveness. They were almost alive, with that expression of interest which only the lapses and moral divagations of ...
— The Silver Butterfly • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow
... sojourning at the Court of Hoel, Duke of Armorica, and, having freed his own land of dragons and other monsters, was engaged in hunting down the great beasts with which Armorica abounded. But the monster which infested the Lieue de Greve was no ordinary dragon. Indeed, he was the most cunning saurian in Europe, and was wont to retire backward into the great cavern in which he lived so that when traced to it those who tracked him would believe that he had just ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... mist and a planet, A crystal and a cell, A jelly-fish and a saurian, And caves where cavemen dwell; Then a sense of law and beauty, And a face turned from the clod; Some call it evolution And others ...
— Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy • Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury
... and most undignified amusement of the young Inca, and the mortal terror of his faithful subjects. Then, as all hands scrambled to their feet again and instinctively regained possession of their weapons, the hooked saurian started to "run", in the vain hope, possibly, of breaking away from the restraining influence which had so suddenly and unaccountably seized upon it. The yacht was whirled violently round—almost capsizing in the process—and dragged, with her bows nearly buried in the ...
— Harry Escombe - A Tale of Adventure in Peru • Harry Collingwood
... horse-power, and are running off the coal at the rate of one tenth of one per cent per annum, the simple and inevitable consequence will be that the wood will be growing enough faster to keep good the general stock of fuel. Doubtless the forests are now limited in their growth and stunted from their ante-Saurian stature, not so much for want of soil, moisture, or sunshine as for want of carbonic acid in the air, to be decomposed by the foliage, the great deposition of coal in the primitive periods having exhausted the supply. Our present ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... functionary relaxed, from the ineffable dignity and self-containment of a dozing saurian, into an expression of open interest as Armitage ranged alongside, with the remark that it was cooler ...
— Prince or Chauffeur? - A Story of Newport • Lawrence Perry
... face were suffused with a glow of admiration. He was so unpleasant-looking that she would have resented his homage had not his odd physiognomy called up some vaguely agreeable association of ideas. Where had she seen before this grotesque saurian head, with eye-lids as thick as lips and lips as thick as ear-lobes? It fled before her down a perspective of innumerable newspaper portraits, all, like the original before her, tightly coated, with a huge pearl transfixing ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... have created them. The Dragoeiro with its boa-like bole, its silvery, light-glancing skin, and its scars stained with red blood, growing in a wild garden of glowing red-yellow oranges, would easily become the fiery saurian guarding the golden apples ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... Phene, F.G.S., F.R.G.S., in Scotland. Mr. Phene has just investigated a curious earthen mound in Glen Feechan, Argyleshire, referred to by him, at the late meeting of the British Association in Edinburgh, as being in the form of a serpent or saurian. The mound, says the Scotsman, is a most perfect one. The head is a large cairn, and the body of the earthen reptile 300 feet long; and in the centre of the head there were evidences, when Mr. Phene first visited it, of an altar having been ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... though angry skies pour fast The flowing torrents, river-like and vast. From their eight pinnacles the gorgons bay, And scattered monsters, in their stony way, Are growling heard; the rampart lions gnaw The misty air and slush with granite maw, The sleet upon the griffins spits, and all The Saurian monsters, answering to the squall, Flap wings; while through the broken ceiling fall Torrents of rain upon the forms beneath, Dragons and snak'd Medusas gnashing teeth In the dismantled rooms. Like armored knight The granite Castle fights ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo
... for the present was to hint and tease. "It's the Inevitable!" he said, and asked himself why he should seek to arrest it. He had no faith in the System. Heavy Benson had. Benson of the slow thick-lidded antediluvian eye and loose-crumpled skin; Benson, the Saurian, the woman-hater; Benson was wide awake. A sort of rivalry existed between the wise youth and heavy Benson. The fidelity of the latter dependant had moved the baronet to commit to him a portion of the management of the Raynham estate, and this Adrian did ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... was still strong in him. The next he was grovelling on the floor. No saurian ever swung a tail so scaly and so curly as his. Clubland was a thousand years away. With horrific pants he emitted ...
— The Golden Age • Kenneth Grahame
... his eyes rested on the body of the huge saurian, full twenty feet in length, with its head over a yard long, and jaws nearly the same, the upper one surmounted by a long knob-like protuberance, that distinguishes it from all ...
— The Castaways • Captain Mayne Reid
... art, Thy dreams of tenderest bud; Gaze on the heart Of its fetidity, This wreck of me, And sing. O God, what death, in eyes so bound, They see Life's beauty in her draining wound! Lay thou the blind thing down With saurian tusk and bone, With dust of sworded maw And peril's fossil claw, Lest sexton Earth even Man inter, nor trover Of after-law untomb for ...
— Path Flower and Other Verses • Olive T. Dargan
... lightning and frost, With rifts and chasms and storm-bleached jags, That wait and growl for a ship to be lost; No island, but rather the skeleton Of a wrecked and vengeance-smitten one, Where, aeons ago, with half-shut eye, The sluggish saurian crawled to die, Gasping under titanic ferns; Ribs of rock that seaward jut, 10 Granite shoulders and boulders and snags, Round which, though the winds in heaven be shut, The nightmared ocean murmurs and yearns, Welters, and swashes, and tosses, ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... and a planet, A crystal and a cell, A jellyfish and a saurian, And caves where the cavemen dwell; Then a sense of law and beauty, And a face turned from the clod,— Some call it Evolution, And others ...
— Poems Teachers Ask For • Various
... goes," cried Jack, for just then the great heavy saurian, which had crawled out at daybreak to have a nap in the warm sun, divined danger, shut its jaws with a loud snap, and rushed clumsily into the water, giving its tail a flourish as it disappeared ...
— Jack at Sea - All Work and no Play made him a Dull Boy • George Manville Fenn
... ages it may be that there will arise upon the earth a race of beings of unforetold majesty, who shall disinter the remnant bones and ponder the wrecked monuments of forgotten man as we do those of the disgusting reptiles of the Saurian epoch. But this is a mere conceit of possibility; and, so far as the data for forming an opinion are in our hands, it is altogether incredible. So far as appears, the adaptation between man and the earth is exhaustive. He is able to subdue all her forces, reign over all her ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... from the Pacific Ocean, and at the foot of a mountain called by the Shoshones the Dwelling of the Monster, were found the remains of an immense lizard belonging to an extinct family of the saurian species. Within a few inches of the surface, and buried in a bed of shells and petrified fish, our old missionary, Padre Antonio, digged up fifty-one vertebrae quite whole and well preserved. They were mostly from twelve ...
— Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet • Captain Marryat
... courses across the blue canopy of sky, in full effulgence, her beams falling bright upon the bosom of the river. At intervals the boat, keeping the deeper channel, is forced close to either bank. Then, as the surging eddies set the floating but stationary logs in motion, the huge saurian asleep on them can be heard giving a grunt of anger for the rude arousing, and pitching over into the current with ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... powers of the lowest animals, which might well suggest an explanation of that rush of life which seems to be indicated in the slate and Silurian rocks. With regard to the so-called early occurrence of fishes partaking of the saurian character, I would say that their occurrence a full formation after the earliest and simplest fishes, is, considering how little we know of the space of time represented by a formation, not early: their being later in any degree is the fact ...
— An Expository Outline of the "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation" • Anonymous |
