"Spiny" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the severest trials of heat and cold. The Chub, a common tenant of our ponds, is also a good subject for domestication. The Tench and Loach are very interesting, but also very delicate. Among the spiny-finned fishes, the Sticklebacks are the prettiest, but so savage that they often occasion much mischief. For a vessel containing twelve gallons the following selection of live stock is among those recommended: ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... like the wind even before the car had started. During the last three miles the ground had been changing rapidly, and we soon reached a stony plain where there was imminent danger of smashing a front wheel. The wolf was heading directly toward a rocky slope which lay against the sky like the spiny back of some ...
— Across Mongolian Plains - A Naturalist's Account of China's 'Great Northwest' • Roy Chapman Andrews
... and paid him back in kind. "Yes, and the funk you were in for fear Spiny Tatlow 'ud see us, and ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... echidna have had to put up perforce with the lower places in the hierarchy of nature. The first is a burrowing and aquatic creature, specialised in a thousand minute ways for his amphibious life and queer subterranean habits; the second is a spiny hedgehog-like nocturnal prowler, who buries himself in the earth during the day, and lives by night on insects which he licks up greedily with his long ribbon-like tongue. Apart from the specialisations brought about ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... 200 nm territorial sea: 12 nm International disputes: none Climate: tropical; marine; moderated by trade winds; sunny and relatively dry Terrain: low, flat limestone; extensive marshes and mangrove swamps Natural resources: spiny lobster, conch Land use: arable land: 2% permanent crops: 0% meadows and pastures: 0% forest and woodland: 0% other: 98% Irrigated land: NA km2 Environment: 30 islands (eight ...
— The 1993 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... 'tooth within tooth' of a French tracery —may be necessary, to bite its glass. But the cusp, cuspis, spiny or spearlike point of a thirteenth century illumination, is not in the least necessary to transfix the parchment. Yet do you suppose that the structural convenience of the redent entirely effaces from the mind of the designer ...
— Val d'Arno • John Ruskin
... diverge just over and in front of the eye has suggested the more probable idea, that they serve to guard these organs from thorns and spines while hunting for fallen fruits among the tangled thickets of rattans and other spiny plants. Even this, however, is not satisfactory, for the female, who must seek her food in the same way, does not possess them. I should be inclined to believe rather that these tusks were once useful, and were then worn down as fast as they grew, but that changed conditions of life ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 1 - "Austria, Lower" to "Bacon" • Various
... Cactuses would answer to our present ideas of beauty with respect to the plants we cultivate. Nevertheless, the stems of many of them (see Frontispiece, Fig. 1) are peculiarly attractive on account of their strange, even fantastic, forms, their spiny clothing, the absence of leaves, except in very few cases, and their singular manner of growth. To the few who care for Cactuses there is a great deal of beauty, even in these characters, although perhaps the eye has to be ...
— Cactus Culture For Amateurs • W. Watson
... some species even seven or eight times. After each moult some changes in detail may be observable, for example in the proportions of the body-segments or their outgrowths, in the colour or the closeness of the hairy or spiny armature. But in all main features the caterpillar retains throughout its life the characteristic form in which it left the egg. From the tiny, newly-hatched larva to the full-fed caterpillar, possibly several inches in length, there ...
— The Life-Story of Insects • Geo. H. Carpenter
... and soon in the slimy bottom, yards below, huge fat salamanders, long-lost and forgotten tadpoles as large as rats, gigantic toads, enormous flat beetles, all kinds of hairy, scaly, spiny, blear-eyed, bulbous, shapeless monsters without name, mud-colored offspring of the mire that had been sleeping there for hundreds of years, woke up, and crawled in and out, and wallowed and interwriggled, and devoured each other, like the great saurians and batrachians in my Manuel de Geologie ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... years. Mr. Crawfurd says there are four varieties of this palm; the cultivated, the wild, one distinguished by long spines on the branches, and a fourth destitute of these spines, and called by the natives female sago. This and the cultivated species afford the best farina; the spiny variety, which has a slender trunk, and the wild tree, yield but an inferior quality of sago. The farinaceous matter afforded by each plant is very considerable, 500 lbs. being a frequent quantity, while 300 lbs. may be taken as the common ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds |
