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Tadpole   Listen
noun
Tadpole  n.  
1.
(Zool.) The young aquatic larva of any amphibian. In this stage it breathes by means of external or internal gills, is at first destitute of legs, and has a finlike tail. Called also polliwig, polliwog, porwiggle, or purwiggy.
2.
(Zool.) The hooded merganser. (Local, U. S.)
Tadpole fish. (Zool.) See Forkbeard (a).






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Tadpole" Quotes from Famous Books



... swimmer, having been used to the water from the time he was a tadpole. And now he swam so fast, with the help of the current, that he reached the river by the time the ...
— The Tale of Ferdinand Frog • Arthur Scott Bailey

... to her breast, the child fairly flew out of the room, leaving Straws a prey to conflicting emotions. He experienced in those moments of suspense all the doubts and fears of the nestling bard or the tadpole litterateur, awaiting the pleasure and sentence of the august editor or the puissant publisher. Tortier had been suddenly exalted to the judge's lofty pedestal. Would he forthwith be an imperial autocrat; turn tyrant or Thersites; or become critic, one of "those graminivorous animals which gain ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham

... rouse himself and take a book from under his pillow, and begin reading, leaning his head on his hand, and turning his back to the room. Soon, however, a noise of striving urchins arose, and muttered encouragements from the neighbouring boys of "Go it, Tadpole!" "Now, young Green!" "Haul away his blanket!" "Slipper him on the hands!" Young Green and little Hall, commonly called Tadpole, from his great black head and thin legs, slept side by side far away by the door, and were for ever playing ...
— Tom Brown's Schooldays • Thomas Hughes

... had been sitting up all night in neighbourly converse with an echo of elegant leisure, went out in the grey of the morning to obtain a cheap breakfast. Seeing a tadpole approach, ...
— Cobwebs From an Empty Skull • Ambrose Bierce (AKA: Dod Grile)

... he shall sing forever, without cease, to remind you of your rudeness to me." And no sooner had he ceased speaking when there came a great silence outside the window, broken only by one wee piping tadpole voice. "Ker-chog! Ker-r-kity-chog! Ker-chog!" he chanted his sad little solo. And all alone he had to sing and sing this same tune forever. I dare say one can hear him yet in the greeny pond outside that old ...
— The Book of Saints and Friendly Beasts • Abbie Farwell Brown

... meaning officially attached to the word "vivisection," the teacher would be debarred from showing the circulation in a frog's foot or in a tadpole's tail; he must not show an animalcule, uncomfortably fixed under the microscope, nor prick his own finger for the sake of obtaining a drop of living blood. The living particles which float in that liquid undoubtedly feel as much (or as little) as a frog under the influence ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley

... stood there, erect and challenging, this miserable human tadpole, usurping the throne of Lais and crowned with the worship of such devotees as Patterson ...
— Kimono • John Paris

... clear, they sent a snooper in first. It was a robot, looking slightly like a short-tailed tadpole, six feet long by three feet at the thickest. It transmitted a view of the tunnel as it went slowly in; the air, it found, was breathable, and there were no harmful radiations or other dangers. According to the plans, there should be a big room at the other end, slightly ...
— The Cosmic Computer • Henry Beam Piper

... manifest alteration. In its earliest form the young batrachian, living in the water, breathes as a fish does by gills, either free and projecting as in the water-newt, or partially covered by integument as in the tadpole. But the gills disappear as the lungs gradually become developed: the duration of the process being on an average one hundred days from the time the eggs were first deposited. After this important change, ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent

... portraits of the ordinary British legislator, or been more alive to the stupefying influences of a parliamentary career. We have gone through a peaceful revolution since Disraeli first sketched Rigby and Taper and Tadpole from the life; but the influences which they embodied are still as powerful, and a parliamentary atmosphere as little propitious to the pure intellect, as ever. Coningsby, if he still survives, must ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen

... young man did n't go him one better 'n' say as he believed in tadpoles himself. Luther Law was flat agin' tadpoles, but Rufus never let up till he got him to admit that if the Lord could make a man out of a monkey He could make him out of a tadpole, too. 'N' then, when he'd got him so far, what do you think, Mrs. Lathrop,—what do you think!—Mrs. Macy said as Mrs. Kitts said as Mrs. Grummel said if that young man did n't look right square into Luther's face 'n' say as to his order o' thinkin' ...
— Susan Clegg and Her Neighbors' Affairs • Anne Warner

... Division on the right. We along with the 7th H.L.I. were the leading battalions. As Queant and Pronville were found to be unoccupied the barrage was cancelled and these places were occupied without a fight and a section of the Hindenburg Line near Tadpole Copse was held. This line was held until the 7th when we were relieved and went into a bivouac area near St. Leger. The day we came out we got heavily shelled with gas and had a number of casualties. We had a ...
— The Fifth Battalion Highland Light Infantry in the War 1914-1918 • F.L. Morrison

... delight of my early childhood, is still a sight whereof my old eyes never tire. What animation in that verdant world! On the warm mud of the edges, the frog's little tadpole basks and frisks in its black legions; down in the water, the orange-bellied newt steers his way slowly with the broad rudder of his flat tail; among the reeds are stationed the flotillas of the caddis worms, half protruding from their tubes, which are ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre

... tumbler, and a spoon, and says he, "Now, boys, jest wait a minit till you git rested sorter, for it ain't good to take whiskey on a hot stomack. I've jest been readin' a piece in Grady's newspaper about a frog—the darndest frog that perhaps ever come from a tadpole. It was found up in Kanetucky, and is as big as a peck measure. Bill, do you take this paper and read it aloud to us. I'm a poor hand to read, and I want to hear it. I'll be hanged if it ain't the ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VII. (of X.) • Various

... for the other. Both are superior to the Serpents and Caecilians, for in them the head moves freely on the neck and they creep on short imperfect legs. But the Lizard is clothed with scales, while the body of the Salamander is naked, and the young of the former is complete when hatched, while the Tadpole born from the Salamander has a life of its own to live, with certain changes to pass through before it assumes its mature condition; during the early part of its life it is even destitute of legs, and has ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various

... tongue returned with wonderful rapidity. The frog, when it is first hatched, has the constitution of a fish: it is purely aquatic; has a fish's heart, a fish's circulation, and a fish's gills. The tadpole swims as a fish does—by the movement, side-ways, of its tail. For the unassisted eye, and still more for the microscope, what spectacle can be more marvelous than the gradual process of change by which this tiny fish becomes a reptile? Legs bud; the fish-like gills dwindle ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various

... pity you were born curious, Venning, otherwise you would have made an excellent companion for a studious man. 'Why do I wish to understand Arabic?' Why do you stand on one leg watching a tadpole shed ...
— In Search of the Okapi - A Story of Adventure in Central Africa • Ernest Glanville

... to the edge of the pond to look at the pink and white lotus. One summer day, as a little frog, hardly out of his tadpole state, with a small fragment of tail still left, sat basking on a huge round leaf, one monk said to ...
— Japanese Fairy World - Stories from the Wonder-Lore of Japan • William Elliot Griffis

... tadpoles came wriggling along. 'I'll just try catching one of them for practice. Maybe they are good to eat,' thought Mr. Heron, and just as before darted his head and great bill downward and caught a tadpole. ...
— Mother West Wind "How" Stories • Thornton W. Burgess

... he is a tadpole, is sprinkled all over with very fine spots, which look like gold-dust, while the ...
— Friends and Helpers • Sarah J. Eddy

... a Tadpole and I was a Fish, In the Paleozoic time, And side by side on the ebbing tide, We sprawled through the ooze and slime, Or skittered with many a caudal flip Through the depths of the Cambrian fen— My heart was rife with the joy of life, For ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various

... may say that they made among other acquisitions the following: true ventral lungs, a three-chambered heart, a movable tongue, a drum to the ear, and lids to the eyes. It is very interesting to find that though the tongue of the tadpole has some muscle-fibres in it, they are not strong enough to effect movement, recalling the tongue of fishes, which has not any muscles at all. Gradually, as the tadpole becomes a frog, the muscle-fibres grow in strength, and make it possible for the full-grown creature to shoot ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson

... off the nursery. The world, rolling in her majestic seaway, heeled her gunwale slowly into the trough of space. Disked upon this bulwark, the sun rose, and promptly Gissing woke. The poplars flittered in a cool stir. Beyond the tadpole pond, through a notch in the landscape, he could see the far darkness of the hills. That fringe of woods was a railing that kept the sky ...
— Where the Blue Begins • Christopher Morley

... a civilised man. I keep thinking of old Albrecht and the Barbarossa.... I feel I want a wash and kind words and a quiet home. When I look at you, I KNOW I want a wash. Gott!"—he stifled a vehement yawn—"What a Cockney tadpole of a ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells

... have no doubt that you can remember "Tadpole" Phelps, who was in the fifth form when you were in the third. It is possible even that you may have heard that through my uncle's influence I obtained a good appointment at the Foreign Office, and that I was in a situation of trust and ...
— Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

... not without interest here on account of the remarkable capacity which they show to adapt themselves to different surroundings. There are frogs, like the tree-frog of Martinique, and others in regions where water is scarce, which never pass through the tadpole stage; or, to be quite accurate, they lose the gills and tail in the egg, as higher land-animals do. On the other hand, there is a modern Amphibian, the axolotl of Mexico, which retains the gills throughout life, and never lives on land. Dr. Gadow has shown ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe

... the 1st D.C. Vols., composed as it was of a cloud of independent companies—thirty-five, or thereabout, in all, I think—all made up of men from everywhere, largely in the tadpole stage of Unionism, and all sworn in for service in the District, not to go beyond the District. Early in May they were organized into eight battalions of four or five companies each, commanded by lieutenant-colonels, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 3, September 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... "'Twas a lesson we learned 'when you were a tadpole and I was a fish,' It is a bit of wisdom that lies deep in our hearts; but we shrink from it and refuse to heed it, ...
— The Silver Butterfly • Mrs. Wilson Woodrow

... effort carried on from generation to generation to inspire the air of heaven direct, they have slowly acquired the lung-function. In the young organism, true to the ancestral type, the gill still persists—as in the tadpole of the common frog. But as maturity approaches the true lung appears; the gill gradually transfers its task to the higher organ. It then becomes atrophied and disappears, and finally respiration in the adult is conducted by lungs alone.[80] We may ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond

... which egg becomes a tadpole; the tadpole, after more or fewer intermediate stages, ...
— Life and Habit • Samuel Butler

... point. "Under the microscope, the germ of, say, tetanus is a minute bar with spore at the end like the head of a tadpole. Of what is this ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland

... male principle, or spermatozoa, is exactly like a little tadpole, and you no doubt recall that a tadpole has a minute tail, the movement of which enables it to swim around. So has the spermatozoa, and by the incessant movement of this microscopic tail they all move upward as soon as discharged by the male. I told you that God ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol 2 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague

... engaged, is remarkable. Here are specimens of the tree frogs that can walk with their backs downwards on the most polished surfaces, and can slightly change their colour; the paradoxical frog from Surinam, which is larger as a tadpole than in its condition of maturity; the Brazilian horned toads; the American bull frogs; and the Brazilian pipa, the female of which deposits its eggs upon the back of the male, who carries them ...
— How to See the British Museum in Four Visits • W. Blanchard Jerrold

... the dowager, with the indifference of a woman who has never had a child, and cannot conceive why a little sprawling tadpole in long clothes should make such a difference. "Yes, I suppose that's a novelty," she said, "to be mother of a bit of a thing like that naturally turns a girl's head. It is inconceivable the airs they give themselves, as if there was nothing so wonderful in creation. ...
— Sir Tom • Mrs. Oliphant

... flowing. But if his shoulders were broad the rest of his body was not in the same proportion—for he narrowed as he descended, his hips being very small, and his legs as thin as those of a goat. His real name was Todpoole, but the people invariably called him Tadpole, and he certainly in appearance somewhat reminded you of one. He was a facetious little fellow, and, it was said, very ...
— Poor Jack • Frederick Marryat

... decorations are a trifle more complex. We may readily perceive that they represent tadpoles (Fig. 558, b b), dragonflies (Fig: 558, c c), with also the frog or toad (Fig. 558); all this is of easy interpretation. As the tadpole frequents the pools of spring time he has been adopted as the symbol of spring rains; the dragon-fly hovers over pools in summer, hence typifies the rains of summer; and the frog, maturing in them later, symbolizes the rains of the later seasons; for all these pools are due to rain fall. ...
— A Study of Pueblo Pottery as Illustrative of Zuni Culture Growth. • Frank Hamilton Cushing

... When Razzle-dazzle starts to think, give him a chance," said Happy Mather. "Who asked your opinion? You're nothing but a tadpole, anyhow." ...
— Skippy Bedelle - His Sentimental Progress From the Urchin to the Complete - Man of the World • Owen Johnson

... up his jaw again and goes to sleep. He is eccentric, even for a snake, and wears his teeth on his backbone, where they may break the egg-shell so that he may spit it away. When he first stretched his head round an egg, the viperine snakes in the same case hastily assumed him to be a very large tadpole; and since tadpoles are regarded with gastronomical affection by viperine snakes, they began an instant chase, each prepared to swallow the entire phenomenon, because a snake never hesitates to swallow anything merely on account of its ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 28, April 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various

... descended from the frog, and originally a creature of the water, the toad has long since adapted itself to live upon the dry ground. It still produces its young in the water as it did when a frog. Whereas the childhood of the frog, that is, its tadpole stage, is very long and it assumes its adult form comparatively late, just the reverse is the case of the toad. The young hasten through their tadpole stage within a few weeks, and assume the shape of the parent ...
— The Meaning of Evolution • Samuel Christian Schmucker

... is not Spanish. The more one studies the conception and the workmanship the more striking it grows in originality and daring. Mullgardt has succeeded in putting into architecture the spirit that inspired Langdon Smith's poem 'Evolution,' beginning 'When you were a tadpole and I was a fish.' In the chaotic feeling that the court gives there is a subtle suggestiveness. The whole evolution of man is intimated here from the time when he lived among the seaweed and the fish and the lobsters ...
— The City of Domes • John D. Barry

... vain for him to open his eyes and his ears; nothing is to be seen but one or two hideous bats, which flap their wings in his face, and frighten him in the midst of a reverie. Nothing is on the move; no newt or tadpole is playing in the water, and nothing can be descried there but the rays of the moon, as she moves slowly o'er its surface; nor is anything to be heard except the wind whistling through the trees, or an occasional shot from the rifle of a brother sportsman, who, more happy, more clever, ...
— Le Morvan, [A District of France,] Its Wild Sports, Vineyards and Forests; with Legends, Antiquities, Rural and Local Sketches • Henri de Crignelle

... remarkable for their ease and nature. The speeches of Rigby (who represents John Wilson Croker), of Lord Monmouth (who stands for Lord Hertford), of the Young Englanders themselves, of the laughable chorus of Taper and Tadpole, who never "despaired of the Commonwealth," are often extremely amusing. In Coningsby we have risen out of the rose-coloured mist of unreality which hung over books like The Young Duke and Henrietta Temple. The agitated ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse

... of the man's body below, and thought, at first, he was killed by the bursting of his rifle; but when his companion, who had leaped down to his assistance, helped him, reeking and muddy, from the dominions of the tadpole, and placed him, uninjured, though stunned, on his legs, we could not resist a burst of merriment at his countenance of unmitigated disgust, as the liquid filth oozed from the tips of his ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross

... The well-known hair worm, Gordius, is an insect parasite. The adult form is about the size of a slender knitting needle, and is seen in moist soil and in pools. It lays, according to Dr. Leidy, "millions of eggs connected together in long cords." The microscopical, tadpole-shaped young penetrate into the bodies of insects frequenting damp localities. Fairly ensconced within the body of their unsuspecting host, they luxuriate on its fatty tissues, and pass through their ...
— Our Common Insects - A Popular Account of the Insects of Our Fields, Forests, - Gardens and Houses • Alpheus Spring Packard

... and a retreat for all the owls of the neighborhood. It was full of pits and quagmires, partly covered with weeds and mosses, where the green surface often betrayed the traveller into a gulf of black, smothering mud; there were also dark and stagnant pools, the abodes of the tadpole, the bull-frog, and the water-snake, where the trunks of pines and hemlocks lay half-drowned, half-rotting, looking like alligators sleeping in ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various

... gas, grinned ghastly, inhuman, blackened faces, with staring goggle eyes. The Bishop was most frightful of all. His horse was prancing and swaying wildly, and the Bishop's transformed features were diabolic. His whole profile had altered, seemed black and shapeless as the face of a tadpole. The amazing truth burst upon Bleak. Chuff and his paraders were wearing gas-masks. These were what they had carried in their knapsacks. Indomitable ...
— In the Sweet Dry and Dry • Christopher Morley

... in a former letter.) to notice whether the eggs are already fecundated when they are in the earth, or whether they copulate later in the water, or whether the young are hatched on land, and what is their tadpole condition, etc. All this ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz

... was well and happy, and went on talking. "Did you know that I was once a tadpole just like those little creatures in ...
— Buttercup Gold and Other Stories • Ellen Robena Field

... several convents) the one dedicated to that saint. It is well that in this quarrelsome world we quarrel furiously about tastes; since agreeing too closely about the objects to be liked and appropriated would breed much more fighting than is bred by disagreeing. That little human tadpole, which the old toad of a father would not suffer to stay ten minutes in his house, proved as welcome at the nunnery of St. Sebastian as she was odious elsewhere. The superior of the convent was aunt, by the mother's side, to the new-born stranger. She, therefore, kissed and blessed ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey

... unseen hand of life ploughs another furrow across the egg, and we have now four cells. These divide into eight, sixteen, and so on far beyond human powers of numeration, until the beginnings of all the organs of the tadpole are formed. While we cannot, of course, follow this development, we can look at our egg every day and at last see the little wiggle heads or polliwogs (from pol and ...
— The Log of the Sun - A Chronicle of Nature's Year • William Beebe

... a Lizard; Ah niver see thim aboot here. It must a been a two-striped Spelerpes. A Spelerpes is nigh kin to a Frog—a kind of dry-land tadpole, while a Lizard is only a Snake ...
— Two Little Savages • Ernest Thompson Seton

... weighing two pounds. It is in the upper part of this enormous head, in great cavities divided by cartilages, that is to be found from six to eight hundred pounds of that precious oil called spermaceti. The cachalot is a disagreeable creature, more tadpole than fish, according to Fredol's description. It is badly formed, the whole of its left side being (if we may say it), a "failure," and being only able to see with its right eye. But the formidable ...
— Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea • Jules Verne

... seated many moments, and had scarcely pushed off the shore of silence into a new sea of talk, when we were interrupted by the invasion of half a dozen dogs. They were of all sorts down to no sort. Mr. Skymer called one of them Tadpole—I suppose because he had the hugest tail, while his legs were not visible without ...
— A Rough Shaking • George MacDonald

... made for swimming. What curious little feet and legs! Now, though the newt has four legs, it lays eggs; and to guard them from injury, wraps them up in the leaves of water plants, with its four paws. When the young newt is hatched, it is very like a tadpole. It is like a fish, for it breathes through gills; but as it increases in size the gills go away and the front legs appear, and then the hind ones. In a frog-tadpole the hind legs appear first, and then ...
— Ernest Bracebridge - School Days • William H. G. Kingston

... appearance. Only that I seemed quite fit to go to heaven, and Lorna. For in my sick distracted mind (stirred with many tossings), like the bead in the spread of frog-spawn carried by the current, hung the black and central essence of my future life. A life without Lorna; a tadpole life. All stupid head; ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore

... exception of Mavis the elder girls were not entirely in sympathy with the new movement. They considered the Pioneers exhibited signs of swollen head, and nicknamed their society the 'Tadpole Club,' declaring its members to be still in that elementary stage of their development. They made very merry at their expense, and poked fun at Merle for having ...
— Monitress Merle • Angela Brazil

... sitting back to back Fished from the bridge for a pike or a jack. The first caught a tiddler, the second caught a crab, The third caught a winkle, the fourth caught a dab, The fifth caught a tadpole, the sixth caught an eel, And the seventh one caught an ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, June 7, 1916 • Various

... larvae, sculling about in the dark by the aid of their caudal extremities, instead of standing on their legs, and breathing by gills, instead of taking the free air of heaven into the lungs made to receive it. Of course we never try to keep young souls in the tadpole state, for fear they should get a pair or two of legs by-and-by and jump out of the pool where they have been bred and fed! Never! ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various

... in the midst of our Museums and Scientific Schools, how little we yet know of the common things before our eyes. Our savans still confess their inability to discriminate with certainty the egg or tadpole of a frog from that of a toad; and it is strange that these hopping creatures, which seem so unlike, should coincide so nearly in their juvenile career, while the tritons and salamanders, which border so closely on each other in their maturer state as sometimes to be ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 • Various

... question of evolution altogether. For example, he quotes Gudernatsch as having proved that legs can be induced to grow in tadpoles at any time, even in very young specimens, by feeding them with thyroid gland. Loeb writes: 'The earlier writers explained the growth of the legs in the tadpole as a case of an adaptation to life on land. We know through Gudernatsch that the growth of the legs can be produced at any time by feeding the animal with the thyroid gland.' Obviously he thinks that these two propositions ...
— Hormones and Heredity • J. T. Cunningham

... shark. There are five species of shark-like rays, which have all the outward form and appearance and vagrant mode of life of their prototype, and four species of sharks that might pass as rays. One of them, with a big head, tadpole-like tail and generally frayed and sea-tattered appearance, is, in fact, accepted in some quarters as a ray, while the shovel-like skate is ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield

... of vivid sunshine, about six inches from a tangle of arrow-weed stems, a black tadpole lay basking. Light to him meant not only growth, but life. Whenever, with the slow wheeling of the sun, the shadow of a lily leaf moved over him, he wriggled impatiently aside, and settled down again on the brightest part of the mud. Most of the time he seemed to be asleep; ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts

... and the axolotl are members. The Zoological Society are fortunate enough to possess specimens of both the black and white axolotl. This creature, which is a native of Mexico, has a strange life-history not unlike that of the frog. It has a sort of tadpole stage of existence, in which it is furnished with a collar of gills and lives in the water. After a while it loses its gills, and its tail and legs grow much less fish-like. There is a kind of lizard look about its permanent form. In the first period of its history ...
— Little Folks (Septemeber 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various

... not be generally known that the tadpole acts the same part with fish that ants do with birds; and that through the agency of this little reptile, perfect skeletons, even of the smallest fishes may be obtained. To produce this, it is but necessary to suspend the fish by threads attached to the head and tail ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 19. Issue 539 - 24 Mar 1832 • Various

... Tarrypin, who once was ours for a short while. Gissing (the juvenile and too enthusiastic dog) has to be kept away from the pond by repeated sticks thrown as far as possible in another direction; otherwise he insists on joining the tadpole search, and, poking his snout under water, attempts to bark at the same time, with ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley

... What's the use of writing it all down any way? I am sitting on a very low chair at a very high table, consequently my left arm feels as though it was restraining an apparent tendency on the part of the table to set at nought the established laws of gravity. How is the old Tadpole, the wily banker, the impecunious toiler among heaps of gold? Tell him to prig a few thousand pound notes, and wrap himself up in them all but his head, that will do for the port light, and labelled "wrong side up, ...
— Canada for Gentlemen • James Seton Cockburn

... began to fish. In a moment a tadpole swallowed the hook. Pinkie Whiskers jerked him out of the water and put the ...
— Hazel Squirrel and Other Stories • Howard B. Famous

... or a dog-faced baboon, or some other yet stranger monster which has sensation, is the measure of all things; then he might have shown a magnificent contempt for our opinion of him by informing us at the outset that while we were reverencing him like a God for his wisdom, he was no better than a tadpole, not to speak of his fellow-men—would not this have produced an overpowering effect? For if truth is only sensation, and no man can discern another's feelings better than he, or has any superior right to determine ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry

... in the depth of his soul the firm and quiet conviction inherited from his forefathers, and common to all labourers on the land, that just as in the world of plants and animals nothing ceases to exist, but continually changes its form, the manure into grain, the grain into a food, the tadpole into a frog, the caterpillar into a butterfly, the acorn into an oak, so man also does not perish, but only undergoes a change. He believed in this, and therefore always looked death straight in the face, and bravely bore the sufferings that ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy

... I may advise. But, as I was going to say, that father of Grey's seemed to me such a tadpole of a man, rooting after tracks of lizards that crept ages ago, while the country is going to mash, and his own children next door to starvation, I thought a little plain talk would try if it was blood or water in his veins. So I went over ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... differentiating. In the process, the cell mass often goes through stages which stand out as individualities in themselves, that appear on the surface absolutely unrelated. So the caterpillar and the butterfly, to the naive child, seem as far apart as worm and bird. In the case of the frog, the tadpole as a first sketch seems completely an impossible and wild absurdity. Yet we know that there is an orderly progression of events, a propagation of cells, a forward going arrangement of chemical reactions, that ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.

... seated there. These little creatures adhered strongly to any substance that they were laid on, and caused an irritating feeling to the skin if placed on it; they swam with great rapidity when put into seawater, and in their movements in swimming much resembled a tadpole; their tails were merely long ...
— Journals Of Two Expeditions Of Discovery In North-West And Western Australia, Vol. 2 (of 2) • George Grey

... cells. They go on multiplying, take up water, and nourish themselves on the granular nutritive matter present from the first in the egg-cell. The little mass elongates, increases in size, and gradually assumes the form of a young tadpole. ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester

... saloons, a group of lumberjacks would remember meeting each other in the camps of Paul Bunyan. With painful accuracy they established the exact time and place, "on the Big Onion the winter of the blue snow" or "at Shot Gunderson's camp on the Tadpole the year of the sourdough drive." They elaborated on the old themes and new stories were born in lying contests where the heights of extemporaneous ...
— The Marvelous Exploits of Paul Bunyan • W.B. Laughead

... or so, a tadpole comes out of the egg. There are swarms of them wriggling about the water, with heads and bodies and tails, but no legs. In about six weeks more the legs begin to grow, and gradually the tadpole changes into a frog. See ...
— Woodside - or, Look, Listen, and Learn. • Caroline Hadley

... aback the stranger laughed. It was as though a curious little tadpole which he held under his glass should suddenly lift its tail ...
— The Story of an African Farm • (AKA Ralph Iron) Olive Schreiner

... in another. Looking up as they passed under a horizontal bough they sometimes saw objects like large tadpoles lodged diametrically across it, which Giles explained to be pheasants there at roost; and they sometimes heard the report of a gun, which reminded him that others knew what those tadpole shapes ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy

... matter of course. Sometimes a procession of tiny, but perfectly formed "Charley Frogs," as the village boys call them, just emerged from their tadpole state, may be seen making their way ...
— John Keble's Parishes • Charlotte M Yonge

... "Three!" in they all went head first. My such a splash as they did make! They upset old Grandfather Frog so that he fell off his lily pad. They frightened Mr. and Mrs. Trout so that they jumped right out of the water. Tiny Tadpole had such a scare that he hid way, way down in the mud with only the tip of his funny ...
— Old Mother West Wind • Thornton W. Burgess

... best readin' an' it don't seem fittin' that she should be shut up in this little place where only a few of us have the right kind of spectacles to see her through. Most of the folks just allow it's Mis' Everidge's way, and would as soon think of tryin' to imitate her as a tadpole would ...
— A Beautiful Possibility • Edith Ferguson Black

... like a peacock's plumage, into the form of a comet—that is, a globe, and a bearded tail to it, diminishing gradually to a point. This beautiful constellation seemed very sportive and delightful. It was much in the form of a tadpole! and, without ceasing, went, full of playful giddiness, up and down, all over the heaven on the concave surface of the nutshell. One time it would be at that part of the heavens under my feet, and in the next minute would be over my head. It was never at rest, but for ever going east, ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen • Rudolph Erich Raspe

... out of the ground by the women, or caught in the marshes, and used in every stage from the tadpole upwards. ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre

... that question by another. Is it likely that a race-meeting of any pretensions can possibly do without one whom even his enemies acknowledge to be the only accurate and high-minded sporting writer in the world? Those who care (and I devoutly hope that Mr. J., whose brains equal those of a newly-born tadpole, will not be amongst the number) can see me at any moment on pronouncing the password, "mealy-mouth," in my old place, close to the space devoted to Royalty. Yes, I shall be there. In the meantime, I propose to treat of the horses as only I can treat of them. I have nothing ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99., August 2, 1890. • Various

... on white paper a very black spot about half an inch in diameter, with a tail about an inch in length, so as to resemble a tadpole, as in Plate II.; look steadfastly for a minute on the center of this spot, and, on moving the eye a little, the figure of the tadpole will be seen on the white part of the paper; which figure of the tadpole will appear more luminous than the other part of the white paper; which can only be explained ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin

... planted, and do de bes yo knows; Be de sunflower or de daisy, de melon or de rose. Don't be what yo ain't, jess yo be what yo is, If yo am not what yo are den yo is not what you is, If yo're jess a little tadpole, don't yo try to be de frog; If yo are de tail, don't yo try to wag de dawg. Pass de plate if yo can't exhawt and preach; If yo're jess a little pebble, don't yo try to be de beach; When a man is what he isn't, den he isn't what he is, An' as sure as I'm ...
— It Can Be Done - Poems of Inspiration • Joseph Morris

... reached the floor. He tried to fall on his knees before me, but the rope was so short that he was able to go only part of the way down, and presented a most ludicrous appearance, with his toes scraping the icy floor and his arms thrown out as if he were paddling like a tadpole. "Oh, have mercy upon me, sir," he said, "and help me get out of this dreadful place. If you go to the hole and call up it's you, they will pull me up; but if they get you out first they will never think of me. I am a poor pauper, sir, but I never did nothin' to be packed in ...
— My Terminal Moraine - 1892 • Frank E. Stockton

... inhabitants packed up and moved away, as the summer waned and fall approached. Town lots were no longer salable, traffic ceased, a deadly lethargy fell upon the place once more, the "Weekly Telegraph" faded into an early grave, the wary tadpole returned from exile, the bullfrog resumed his ancient song, the tranquil turtle sunned his back upon bank and log and drowsed his grateful life away as in the ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 4. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner

... each. In the top part of this enormous head, inside big cavities separated by cartilage, you'll find 300 to 400 kilograms of that valuable oil called "spermaceti." The sperm whale is an awkward animal, more tadpole than fish, as Professor Frdol has noted. It's poorly constructed, being "defective," so to speak, over the whole left side of its frame, with good eyesight ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne

... very interesting in the spring to watch the gradual development of a frog from the egg, through the tadpole stage of its existence, till at last it assumes ...
— Golden Days for Boys and Girls - Volume VIII, No 25: May 21, 1887 • Various

... part played by the womb in detumescence can no longer be questioned, it need not too hastily be assumed that the belief in the active movements of the spermatozoa must therefore be denied. The vigorous motility of the tadpole-like organisms is obvious to anyone who has ever seen fresh semen under the microscope; and if it is correct, as Clifton Edgar states, that the spermatozoa may retain their full activity in the female organs for at least seventeen days, they have ample time to exert ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis

... they could leap out onto the banks and away to other climes, they continued to swim in monotonous circles until they died. In other words, the failure is a man who dwells in muddy atmosphere all his days, who is content to remain a tadpole and who never attempts to take advantage of any opportunity. He becomes unclean, so to speak. And that is what we mean by this chapter heading "Cleanliness of Body and Mind." It was not intended to point out the proper way to keep our faces and hands clean, or as a sermon, ...
— Laugh and Live • Douglas Fairbanks

... between a mermaid and a tadpole?" asked another in a loud voice, and without a pause continued, "Why, one drops its tail and the other holds onto it. Ha, ha! Ho, ...
— The Sea Fairies • L. Frank Baum

... began to weep and wail, For little Tommy Tadpole had lost his little tail; And his mother didn't know him as he wept upon a log, For he wasn't Tommy Tadpole, but ...
— A Book for Kids • C. J. (Clarence Michael James) Dennis

... Ta-yue's exploit, which certainly throws the labours of Hercules completely into the shade. On the opposite side of the river stands a pillar, inscribed in antique hieroglyphics, which professes to record this great achievement. It is a copy of one which stands on Mount Hang; and the characters, in the tadpole style, are so ancient that doubts as to their actual meaning exist among scholars of the present day. Each letter is accordingly accompanied by its equivalent in modern Chinese. The stone purports to ...
— The Awakening of China • W.A.P. Martin

... the Surinam toad in her nursery arrangements. Of course you know the Surinam toad—whom not to know argues yourself unknown—that curious creature that carries her eggs in little pits on her back, where the young hatch out and pass through their tadpole stage in a slimy fluid, emerging at last from the cells of this living honeycomb only when they have attained the full amphibian honours of four-legged maturity. Well, Aspredo among cat-fish manages her brood in much the same fashion; ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen

... the water. In due course a new little frog develops from each of these eggs. But the object that develops from them is altogether different from the adult frog. This object is the familiar fish-like tadpole. It finally loses its tail, develops legs, and becomes a frog. Doctor Boelsche discusses the matter ...
— Socialism: Positive and Negative • Robert Rives La Monte

... Leuciscus, Aspius, and Perca. The remains of frogs also, of extinct species, have been discovered in the paper-coal; and a complete series may be seen in the museum at Bonn, from the most imperfect state of the tadpole to that of the full-grown animal. With these a salamander, scarcely distinguishable from the recent species, has been found, and the remains of ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell

... cannot suppose that they are larvae. There is, I believe, in Nature no instance of a transition by this species of metamorphosis from a more perfect to a less perfect animal. The tadpole has a resemblance to a fish before it becomes a frog; the caterpillar and the maggot gain not only more perfect powers of motion on the earth in their new state, but acquire organs by which they inhabit a new element. This animal, ...
— Consolations in Travel - or, the Last Days of a Philosopher • Humphrey Davy

... little black buds grow out on each side of the head, and these soon become branched. They are the future gills. At this time you will notice slight movements within this glassy cradle; and soon after this the young frog, or tadpole, as we must call him now, escapes; that is to say, as soon as he leaves his cradle he becomes a tadpole. At first he does nothing but hang on to bits of weed, or the broken remains of the covering of the egg, by a sticky substance formed by a special pair of suckers placed just behind the mouth, ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various

... of the high nobility; a daughter of the present Duke of Fitz-Aquitaine; the son of that duke who was the father-in-law of Lord de Mowbray, and whom Lady Firebrace, the present Lady Bardolf, and Tadpole, had dexterously converted to conservatism by persuading him that he was to be Sir Robert's Irish viceroy. Lady Bertie and Bellair, therefore, was first-cousin to Lady Joan Mountchesney, and her ...
— Tancred - Or, The New Crusade • Benjamin Disraeli

... panting little fiend, in the form of a tadpole with hairy arms and legs like a monkey's, as he ran up with four bundles of faggots, "we are doing the very best we can for your discomfort. But you damned have no consideration for us, and do not remember that we are on our feet day and night, waiting upon you," said the ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell

... general he was dull and silent, and no one could have guessed that he often read poetry and cried himself to sleep in the garret where he lodged. Physically he was a great, overgrown creature, not, in truth, much younger than David. But while David was already the man, John was altogether in the tadpole-stage—a being of large, ungainly frame, at war with his own hands and feet, his small eyes lost in his pink, spreading cheeks, his speech shy and scanty. Yet, such as he was, David found a use for him. Temperaments of the fermenting, expansive ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... the case of comparative anatomy almost any form will disclose the meaning of development, for animate nature is uniform and consistent in its methods of operation throughout its wide range. We shall begin with the familiar frog which every one knows is a product of a tadpole; passing on to the chick we will learn more facts that will enable us to formulate the main principle of comparative embryology in definite terms; we will then be prepared to extend our survey so as to include somewhat less familiar facts ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton

... the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul." Nay—thunders Science—put away such childish superstition, smite such traditionary idols; man was first made after the similitude of a marine ascidian, and once swam as a tadpole in primeval seas. ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson

... grubbing up anything," said Jacko, "but here are a lot of black creatures, lively enough when you stir them up; I suppose they must be tadpoles." Tadpoles, Jack, unquestionably, but are they the young of the toad or the frog? Let me see. Well, it is not easy to say which in their present stage, a tadpole is so like a tadpole, whether the young of frog or toad. If you had found the eggs, which you might have done earlier in the year, there would have been no difficulty in saying whether they belonged to a toad or a frog; for the toad lays ...
— Country Walks of a Naturalist with His Children • W. Houghton

... [25] The passage was still fresh when Byron, in the letter to Disraeli already quoted[26] (March 15th, 1820), held it up to scorn as the opinion of "a young person learning to write poetry and beginning by teaching the art. . . . The writer of this is a tadpole of the Lakes, a young disciple of the six or seven new schools, in which he has learned to write such lines and such sentiments as the above. He says 'easy were the task' of imitating Pope, or it may be of equalling him, I presume. I recommend him to try before he is so positive on the ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers

... speculative. His resemblance to the full moon increased. He seemed to gaze at remote things. "It may very well be that man is no more capable of living out of that atmosphere of assurance than a tadpole is of living out of water. His mental existence may be conditional on that. Deprived of it he may become incapable of sustained social life. He may become frantically self-seeking—incoherent... a stampede.... ...
— The Secret Places of the Heart • H. G. Wells

... Sputter, Sir Spigot Sputter, was an old man, with a red face and perpetual grin, whose white hair was cropped close; but in compensation for this he wore powder and a queue, so that his head, except in vivacity of motion, might not inappropriately be compared to an overgrown tadpole struggling to get free from his shoulders, and escape to the nearest marsh. He also wore a false eye, which gave him a perennial blink that was sadly at variance with magisterial dignity. Indeed the consequences of it were sometimes ludicrous enough. When, for instance, one of those syrens who perambulate ...
— The Black Baronet; or, The Chronicles Of Ballytrain - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton

... was a young tadpole, some pond or ditch was his home, for he was an aquatic animal; but now that he is full-grown he has passed into another way of living: he breathes, or rather swallows air, and must, as he swims about with his beautifully webbed feet, come ...
— Twilight And Dawn • Caroline Pridham

... habits, movements, and structures, including adaptive features of aquatic animals, as crayfish, mussel, tadpole, etc. ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Nature Study • Ontario Ministry of Education

... tub, pulled some dead grass out of it, plunged the frog in, and began to scrub it—began to scrub the frog in the oozy contents of that tub, when the poor amphibian had been soaking in spring-water ever since it was a tadpole! ...
— Roof and Meadow • Dallas Lore Sharp

... the second quarry now is, as you pass from Rydal to Grasmere, there was formerly a length of smooth rock that sloped towards the road on the right hand. I used to call it tadpole slope, from having frequently observed there the water bubbles gliding under the ice, exactly in the shape of ...
— The Prose Works of William Wordsworth • William Wordsworth

... 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; virgin; hoyden. Adj. infantine^, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... rose the hill, and entered the spacious wide-extending flat of Newmarket Heath. The races were going forward on one of the distant courses, and a slight, insignificant, black streak, swelling into a sort of oblong (for all the world like an overgrown tadpole), was all that denoted the spot, or interrupted the verdant aspect of the quiet extensive plain. Jorrocks was horrified, having through life pictured Epsom as a mere drop in the ocean compared with the countless multitude of Newmarket, while the Baron, who was wholly indifferent ...
— Jorrocks' Jaunts and Jollities • Robert Smith Surtees

... the professor, in a sonorous tone that was easily heard for several feet, "this is a specimen of the creature known to us as the human tadpole. You will kindly observe his long legs. They were doubtless given to him for the purpose of protection. Being possessed of a most mischievous and reckless spirit, the species is always getting into difficulties, and would ...
— The Ontario Readers - Third Book • Ontario Ministry of Education

... he intrusts the investigation of that remarkable batrachian, the Aaeolotel, the mode of development of which is still unknown, but which remains in its adult state in a condition similar to that of the tadpole of the frog during the earlier period of its life. Latreille describes the insects, and Valenciennes the shells and the fishes; but yet to show that he might have done the work himself, he publishes a memoir on the anatomical structure of the organs of breathing in the animals he has preserved, ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various

... to something new, it will lead to self-activity and initiative, to ingenuity and aggressiveness. If tadpoles are reared in jars of different sizes, the growth and size of each will vary with the size of the vessel, the smallest jar growing the smallest tadpole, and the largest jar the largest tadpole. It is fighting against the laws of fate to attempt to rear strong personalities in a "flat" or even in a fifty-foot lot. They need the range of the prairies, the ...
— Rural Life and the Rural School • Joseph Kennedy

... more than a month from the time the eggs are laid. During this change a pair of lungs is developed, so that the toads breathe air as human beings do. The eggs of toads and frogs may be collected in the spring in ponds, and this remarkable change from the egg through the tadpole stage to the adult form may be observed in a simple home aquarium. Toads' eggs may be distinguished from those of frogs by the fact that toads' eggs are laid in strings, while frogs' eggs ...
— Scouting For Girls, Official Handbook of the Girl Scouts • Girl Scouts

... of the poor mocking-bird. "Daddy Longlegs," the Shanghai rooster, crowed louder than ever, with one eye on the poor jaded bird, and said: "What a contemptible little thing you are, to be sure!" Gander White, Esq., the portly barn-yard alderman, hissed at him, and even Duck Waddler, the tadpole catcher, called him ...
— Queer Stories for Boys and Girls • Edward Eggleston

... part of Roland, who was somewhat averse to plunging with Edith up to the saddle-girths in mire, drew from him a very unmannerly, though not the less hearty execration on the delicacy of "them thar persons who," as he expressed it, "stumped at a mud-hole as skearily as if every tadpole in it war a ...
— Nick of the Woods • Robert M. Bird

... great shock to her. She paddled along shore quite near them for a while, trying to be resigned to it. And then she waddled out on the grassy bank, and fed them with some newts, and a tadpole, and a few blue-bottle flies, and a snail, and several other delicacies, which they seemed to enjoy quite as much as if they had been young ducks. And then Quackalina, seeing them quite happy, struck out for the very middle of ...
— Solomon Crow's Christmas Pockets and Other Tales • Ruth McEnery Stuart

... somehow got fast to the point of the knife, and in its struggles to free itself it attracted the attention of a creeper—the larva of one of the aquatic flies called drakes (Ephemerae)—which pounced upon it as fiercely as the water staphylinus does on the luckless tadpole, but, fortunately for the Minnow, either the glittering of the knife-blade or the motion of my hand, scared it ...
— Essays in Natural History and Agriculture • Thomas Garnett

... class of the animal kingdom contributes members to this strange population. The young forms of many fish, as for instance of conger, flying gurnards, and some flatfish, are pelagic and have colourless blood, and pale, transparent, gelatinous or cartilaginous skeletons. The tadpole-like stages of the sea-squirts, which in adult life are to be found attached to rocks like weeds, drift about in the surface waters until their time comes for settling down in life. Many other Ascidians pass their ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley; A Sketch Of His Life And Work • P. Chalmers Mitchell

... was singing this song? Why, a little tadpole named Taddylegs. And it made Uncle Bullfrog quite cross, for he didn't like tadpoles anyway, and Taddylegs wasn't very ...
— Billy Bunny and Uncle Bull Frog • David Magie Cory

... of jelly transparency, was invisible against his sombre surroundings. His sucker had taken the semblance of a mouth, his gills were longer and more feathery, the curves of his tail were more shapely, but still he was, as yet, the merest apology for a tadpole, and so he remained until his limbs grew. They came in front at first—froggy's come behind, he wants them to swim with—the most curious spindle-shanks of arms that can be imagined, with elbows always flexed, ...
— "Wee Tim'rous Beasties" - Studies of Animal life and Character • Douglas English

... what I thought last night, now, going home. Says I, 'Tis just like the look of a tadpole: if I saw A tadpole silver as a dace that swam Upside-down towards me through black water, I'ld see the plain spit of that star ...
— Georgian Poetry 1913-15 • Edited by E. M. (Sir Edward Howard Marsh)

... say so?" said the wagtail, who had not the least idea what a tadpole was, unless it was the pole the gardener used to pull the weeds out of the pond ...
— Featherland - How the Birds lived at Greenlawn • George Manville Fenn

... said Bill, furiously. "Here we've had all the worry and trouble of fightin' puddin'-thieves night and day, and, on top of it all, here's this Tooralooral tadpole of a Mayor shovin' his nose into the business and arrestin' our ...
— The Magic Pudding • Norman Lindsay

... of life's unfolding powers constitutes a religious program. For even those primitive instincts which pass and perish often stir into consciousness and operation other more noble functions or are transmuted into recognized virtues. Popularly speaking, the tadpole's tail becomes his legs. Success in suppressing the precivilized qualities of the boy results in a "zestless automaton" that is something less than a man. Everything that characterizes the boy, however bothersome and unpromising it may seem, is to be ...
— The Minister and the Boy • Allan Hoben

... the preposterous M. Paul, Lucy Snowe's lover, that this lover was the husband of Madame Heger, and father of the family of children to whom Lucy was at first bonne d'enfants, and that possibly the daughter she has described as the thieving, vicious Desiree—"that tadpole, Desiree Beck"—was this very lady now so politely entertaining us. To all this add the significant fact that "Villette" is an autobiographical novel, which "records the most vivid passages in Miss Bronte's own ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December, 1885 • Various

... disc? or does the eye disclose a bright light from within, where his soul sits and enjoys bright day? Is he a point of admiration whose head is too heavy, or a quaver or crotchet that has lost his neighbors, and fallen out of the scale? Is he an aspiring Tadpole in search of an idea? What have been and what will be the fortunes of this our small Nigel (Nigellus)? Think of "Elia" having him sent up from the Goblin Valley, packed in wool, and finding him lively! ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown

... their family, genus, and species; and he proved, at the same time, that no developmental stage of a higher animal is precisely similar to the adult condition of any lower animal. It is quite correct to say that a frog passes through the condition of a fish, inasmuch as at one period of its life the tadpole has all the characters of a fish, and if it went no further, would have to be grouped among fishes. But it is equally true that a tadpole is very different from any ...
— Note on the Resemblances and Differences in the Structure and the Development of Brain in Man and the Apes • Thomas Henry Huxley

... Blockhead, sluggard, dullard, dreamer, Shirker, shuffler, crawler, creeper, Sniffler, snuffler, wailer, weeper, Earthworm, maggot, tadpole, weevil! Set upon thy course of evil, Lest the King of Spectre-land Set on thee ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan

... conciliating the favour of the king. The entire revolution which much of his policy underwent in order to effect this object bears too close a resemblance to the sudden and inexplicable changes of front habitual to placemen of the Tadpole stamp to be altogether pleasant to contemplate in a politician of pure aims and lofty ambition. Humiliating is not too strong a term to apply to a letter in which he expresses his desire to "efface the past by ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various

... washing its face with one of its forepaws, to the great admiration of the two children, who were sitting on the floor beside it. It was an artful-looking kitten, all black, with a very large head and a very small body. It reminded Owen of a tadpole. ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell

... him to disincarnate his vertebral outward phase into chlorophyll or lifeless stone. To muse upon his courtship or emotions was impossible. His life had a feeling of sphinx-like duration—Gawain as a tadpole was unthinkable. He seemed ageless, unreal, wonderfully beautiful, ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe

... his impression of the Battle of Mons, seen from a height of 5,000 feet. British shells were bursting like little bits of cotton wool over the German batteries. A German attack developed, and the airman likens the enemy's advance formation to a "large human tadpole"—a long dense column with the ...
— Tommy Atkins at War - As Told in His Own Letters • James Alexander Kilpatrick

... snatching a bridle and running up the orchard, where old Tadpole had been left in case of emergency. I clapped a side-saddle on his back, a hat on my head, jumped on just as I was, and galloped for my life in the direction of Bimbalong, seven miles distant. I eased my horse a little going up Flea ...
— My Brilliant Career • Miles Franklin

... know'd him make believe to eat, and leave the vittles on his plate when he didn't seem to fancy 'em; but he was very careful never to hurt my feelin's, and I don't belief he'd have spoke, if he had found a tadpole in a dish of chowder. But nothin' could hurry him when he was about his vittles. Many's the time I've seen that gentleman keepin' two or three of 'em settin' round the breakfast-table after the rest had swallered their meal, and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II., November, 1858., No. XIII. • Various

... little fellows grow! no longer a slim little fish, but quite a portly tadpole with rounded body and long tail, but still with no expression in his blunt-nosed face, and only two black-looking pits where the eyes are ...
— The Stories Mother Nature Told Her Children • Jane Andrews

... characters" did not last very long, though it is thought that traces of it are to be seen in the habit of writing several characters, especially those for certain plants and animals, indifferently with or without their radicals. Thus [Ch][Ch] "a tadpole" is frequently written [Ch][Ch], without the part ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various



Words linked to "Tadpole" :   tadpole-shaped, tadpole shrimp, larva, amphibia, ascidian tadpole, polliwog, class Amphibia, pollywog



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