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Antediluvian   Listen
Antediluvian

adjective
1.
Of or relating to the period before the biblical flood.  Synonym: antediluvial.
2.
So extremely old as seeming to belong to an earlier period.  Synonyms: antiquated, archaic.  "Antediluvian ideas" , "Archaic laws"






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Antediluvian" Quotes from Famous Books



... supreme! Not a shriek, not a scream, Scarcely even a howl or a groan, As the man they called "Ho!" told his story of woe. In an antediluvian tone. ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various

... a little. Really, his family remained hopelessly provincial, however much of London they might possess between them. In these go-ahead days their provincialism stared out even more than it used to. Why, old Nicholas was still a Free Trader, and a member of that antediluvian home of Liberalism, the Remove Club—though, to be sure, the members were pretty well all Conservatives now, or he himself could not have joined; and Timothy, they said, still wore a nightcap. Aunt Juley spoke again. Dear Soames ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... relation are very strong—and cleave to his wife—with whom it may be he has but a few weeks' acquaintance—and they two shall be one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together let no man put asunder." But if the cause had no existence, save in the brain of some antediluvian novel-writer, and God did not so unite them, the consequence is only a notion also, and any man may leave his wife ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson

... disturbing his brother, he rose, dressed himself, and took a survey of his chamber by daylight. It was a large, gloomy-looking room, unceiled and unpainted, and the rough beams and rafters looked like the ponderous ribs of some antediluvian monster, which might crumble in at any time, and bury all beneath them. The windows were large, but dingy and begrimed with the unmoved dust of years; and spiders' webs hung in profuse festoons from the dirty sashes. ...
— The Brother Clerks - A Tale of New-Orleans • Xariffa

... with a fuller repast than any other part of the day. No sooner has the Swallow disappeared, than the Whippoorwill and the Night-Jar come forth, to prey upon the larger kinds of aerial insects. The Bat, an animal of an antediluvian type, comes out at the same time, and assists in lessening these multitudinous swarms. The little Owls, though they pursue the larger beetles and moths, direct their efforts chiefly at the small quadrupeds that steal out in the early evening to nibble the tender herbs and grasses. Thus ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various

... you then make the grace of God a failure?" No, grace is not a failure but man is. The antediluvian world was a failure; the Jewish work was a failure; man has been a failure everywhere, when he has had his own way and ...
— That Gospel Sermon on the Blessed Hope • Dwight Lyman Moody

... be found to this day, and many there are on Oonamahgik, and their teeth are six inches across, and there are no such qwah-beet to-day. [Footnote: Both Mr. Rand and myself have been solemnly assured by Indians who had seen these antediluvian remains that they are the petrified relics of Glooskap's victims.] And these are the remains of the Beavers who built the dam at Cape Blomidon and forded the Annapolis Valley. Now Glooskap would have a hunt and do a deed which should equal the great whale-fishing ...
— The Algonquin Legends of New England • Charles Godfrey Leland

... mountain of snow. The whole surface of this gigantic drift showed again that "exfoliated" appearance which I have described. Strange to say, this very exfoliation gave it something of a quite peculiarly desolate aspect. It looked so harsh, so millennial-old, so antediluvian and pre-adamic! I still remember with particular distinctness the slight dizziness that overcame me, the sinking feeling in my heart, the awe, and the foreboding that I had challenged a force in Nature which might defy all tireless effort ...
— Over Prairie Trails • Frederick Philip Grove

... I was able to recall every word of this, which is branded into my mind; and I am prepared, Socrates, to rehearse to you the entire narrative. The imaginary State which you were describing may be identified with the reality of Solon, and our antediluvian ancestors may be your citizens. 'That is excellent, Critias, and very appropriate to a Panathenaic festival; the truth of the story is a great advantage.' Then now let me explain to you the order of our entertainment; ...
— Timaeus • Plato

... the history of our day. After coffee, Madame de Vinde sits down at a round table in the middle of the room, and out of a work-basket, which is just the shape of an antediluvian work-basket of mine, made of orange-paper and pasteboard, which lived long in the garret, she takes her tapestry work: a chair-cover of which she works the little blue flowers, and M. Morel de Vinde, pair de France, ancien Conseiller de Parlement, etc., ...
— The Life And Letters Of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 1 • Maria Edgeworth

... things worse, the small percentage of hydrogen in the atmosphere got sneaky sometimes. It could insinuate itself into places where neither the methane nor the ammonia could get. Someone once called hydrogen the "cockroach element," since, like that antediluvian insect, the molecules of H{2} can insidiously infiltrate themselves into places where they are not only unwelcome, but shouldn't even be able to go. At red heat, the little molecules can squeeze themselves through the crystalline ...
— Unwise Child • Gordon Randall Garrett

... in progress. Anarchy had had its day. A new order of things rose out of the confusion, new dynasties, new laws, new titles; and amidst them emerged the ancient religion. The Arabs have a fable that the Great Pyramid was built by antediluvian kings, and alone, of all the works of men, bore the weight of the flood. Such as this was the fate of the Papacy. It had been buried under the great inundation; but its deep foundations had remained unshaken; and when the waters abated, it appeared alone amidst ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... side of St. Peter's Port, where two halts had to be made, one at Madame Garnier's, the confectioners, the other at the library, to get fiction, which I never read. Then came a journey on the top of the antediluvian horse-tram, a sort of diligence on rails; and then a whole summer's afternoon among the prawns. Cobo is an expanse of shingle, dotted with seaweed and rocks; and Guernsey is a place where one can take off one's shoes and stockings on the slightest pretext. We waded ...
— Not George Washington - An Autobiographical Novel • P. G. Wodehouse

... German harmony and the music of Rossini; and if in 1824 he was known as an agreeable musician, a composer of various drawing-room melodies, judge if he was likely to be famous in 183l! In 1844, the year in which the single drama of this obscure life began, Sylvain Pons was of no more value than an antediluvian semiquaver; dealers in music had never heard of his name, though he was still composing, on scanty pay, for his own ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac

... thousand years ago the earth was washed with the regenerating waters of a terrible flood. Millions were suddenly cut off, with their handiwork and antediluvian civilisation. The swelling floods subsided, and the God-avenging waters retired to their appointed place. The earth again stood forth in virgin strength, lonely, bare, and citiless, but with a potency and promise inviting and grand. Across these ...
— The Lost Ten Tribes, and 1882 • Joseph Wild

... a part of a high railroad bridge. The gaunt trestle ran out past midstream, then stopped, all the portion toward the northern shore burned away. It stood against the intensely lit sky and stream like the skeleton of some antediluvian monster, then vanished into Stygian darkness. The thunder crashed at once, an ear-splitting clap followed by long reverberations. As these died, in the span of silence before should come the next flash and crash, Steve became conscious of another sound, ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston

... the offices of Tutt & Tutt and hanging his antediluvian stovepipe on the hat-tree in the corner, "I see by the morning paper that Payson Clifford has departed ...
— By Advice of Counsel • Arthur Train

... paint in my color-box called Burnt Sienna, and was now much interested to learn that it was made of the yellow clay on which the city of Siena stands; and when I discovered for myself that this clay, having formed the bed of some antediluvian ocean, was full of fossil shells, I thought that Siena was a place where I would do well to spend one of my lifetimes. The odd, parti-colored architecture of the town did not so much appeal to me, and certainly the streets and squares were less attractive ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne

... and other particulars seem probable enough, with the exception of the eye, which certainly must be an exaggeration; one such an eye would be large enough for any animal, were he as monstrous as the wonderful Mammoth of antediluvian days. Do not you think, madam, that the account is ...
— The World of Waters - A Peaceful Progress o'er the Unpathed Sea • Mrs. David Osborne

... base of Ararat. The father of all living men bows before the incense of sacrifice, streaming up and mingling with the rays of the rising sun. His noble family, and all flesh saved, are grouped round about him. There is Ham, at the foot of the green hillock, standing, in his antediluvian, rakish recklessness, near the long-necked giraffe, type of his Africa,—his magnificent wife, seated on the grass, her little feet nestling in the tame lion's mane, her long black hair flowing over crimson drapery ...
— Slavery Ordained of God • Rev. Fred. A. Ross, D.D.

... of life in the pathetic old society was its real interest in the antediluvian and prehistoric. For the life that was dead it had a perfect passion, and it sometimes held conversaziones to gaze at it through microscopes. Occasionally it would waken up to literature with a paper on Akenside. ...
— The Romance of Zion Chapel [3d ed.] • Richard Le Gallienne

... figurative point of view, upon his legs. He is at his place in Lincolnshire; but the waters are out again on the low-lying grounds, and the cold and damp steal into Chesney Wold, though well defended, and eke into Sir Leicester's bones. The blazing fires of faggot and coal—Dedlock timber and antediluvian forest—that blaze upon the broad wide hearths and wink in the twilight on the frowning woods, sullen to see how trees are sacrificed, do not exclude the enemy. The hot-water pipes that trail themselves all over the house, the cushioned doors and windows, and the screens and ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens

... with its arch of snow- white cotton. Behind comes a "sauceman," driving a wagon full of new potatoes, green ears of corn, beets, carrots, turnips, and summer- squashes; and next, two wrinkled, withered, witch-looking old gossips, in an antediluvian chaise, drawn by a horse of former generations, and going to peddle out a lot of huckleberries. See there, a man trundling a wheelbarrow-load of lobsters. And now a milk-cart rattles briskly onward, covered with green canvas, and conveying the contributions ...
— The Toll Gatherer's Day (From "Twice Told Tales") • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... that went by that name, was furnished by two cowboys with banjos and an antediluvian gentleman with a fiddle. Nevertheless, it was music that could be danced to, and there was no ...
— The Rustlers of Pecos County • Zane Grey

... was fringed with tall bushes, or glided along sloping banks, so that nothing obstructed the view of the low range of hills which closed the eastern end of the valley. With their grotesque shapes, and their outlines lost in a deceptive haze, they brought to mind giant animals, worthy of antediluvian times. They might have been a herd of enormous whales, suddenly turned to stone. These disrupted masses proclaimed their essentially volcanic character. New Zealand is, in fact, a formation of recent plutonic origin. Its emergence from the sea is constantly increasing. Some points are known ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne

... if the purchaser had been let loose blindfold in a prehistoric material-founder's old iron yard, and having bought up the whole stock, had shipped it off. The feature of the entire antediluvian show is the liberal allowance of material devoted to destruction. Massive kibbles, such as were used in coal mines half a century ago, are arranged alongside a winding engine, built in the middle of the century, and evidently designed for hauling the kibbles from a depth ...
— Getting Gold • J. C. F. Johnson

... sort of House-Warming with one of you off scouring the country for more blisters and chilblains, and another huntin' antediluvian elephants." The Colonel spoke with uncommon irascibility. The great feast-day ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)

... were visible, streaked with foam, and pushed forcibly by the great puffs of wind that fell upon them from behind. For a short mile it was visible, pouring in and out among the islands, and then disappearing with a huge sweep into the willows, which closed about it like a herd of monstrous antediluvian creatures crowding down to drink. They made me think of gigantic sponge-like growths that sucked the river up into themselves. They caused it to vanish from sight. They herded there together ...
— Famous Modern Ghost Stories • Various

... "in the first place, it is quite beautiful to see the mind in adversity bearing up against the little antediluvian afflictions that will happen occasionally, and then how fine it is to remark the spark of generosity that kindles in the noble heart and rushes to the assistance of the destitute! I do assure you, sir, it is a most beautiful sight to see the gentlemen in defficulties waitin' ...
— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover

... suggested in its favour. 'Emulating,' says Professor Smyth, 'the enchanted tales of Bagdad,' the court poets of Al Mamoun (son of the far-famed Haroun al Raschid) 'drew gorgeous pictures of the contents of the pyramid's interior.... All the treasures of Sheddad Ben Ad the great Antediluvian king of the earth, with all his medicines and all his sciences, they declared were there, told over and over again. Others, though, were positive that the founder-king was no other than Saurid Ibn Salhouk, a far greater one than ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor

... calls me Miss Frances. Not by a word or look has she shown the least inclination to assume the position of mistress of the house, nor does she seem to think me at all in the way; but that she considers me quite an antediluvian I am certain, for, in speaking of something which happened in 1820, she asked if I remembered it! And I only three years older than Guy! But then she once called him a dear old grandfatherly man, and thought it a good joke that on their wedding tour she was mistaken ...
— Miss McDonald • Mary J. Holmes

... considered all, and I find every chance in my favour. The bride will arrive here on the day of our wedding: my servant will be one witness; some stupid old Welshman, as antediluvian as possible—I leave it to you to select him—shall be the other. My servant I shall dispose of, and the rest ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 1 • Edward Bulwer Lytton

... legends do not speak of an antediluvian race, nor of any family who escaped the waters. Michabo, the spirit of the dawn, their supreme deity, alone existed, and by his power formed and peopled it. Nor did their neighbors, the Dakotas, though firm in the belief that the globe had once ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton

... mind, at the commencement of his tale, to listen attentively to every point of the evidence in connection with the case which he recapitulated before her, and to follow the point, in order to try and arrive at a conclusion of her own, and overwhelm the antediluvian scarecrow ...
— The Old Man in the Corner • Baroness Orczy

... zone for wounded lay along this ridge, which rises like the vertebrae of some great antediluvian reptile—dropping sheer down on the Gulf of Saros side, and, in varying slopes, to the plains and the Salt Lake ...
— At Suvla Bay • John Hargrave

... except here and there, it is impossible to point to parts of the poem and say, "Here he ceased to believe," or "Here he gave up the effort to imagine." He both imagined and believed throughout; he projected himself, like a sleep-walker, into the mammoth caves of his antediluvian dreams, and lived among his own radiant and shadowy creations. We need not, therefore, be surprised to find that, in the first place, his daughters ran wild, and neither liked nor understood their father; and that, in the second place, for the rendering of his thought he invented a system of ...
— Milton • Sir Walter Alexander Raleigh

... you have no doubt heard that it has been rumoured that I have a depraved old man's fancy for you and that I have always hoped to marry you. That is as false as the other story I denied. I am not in love with you even in an antediluvian way. You would not marry me for your own sake. That goes without saying. But I will repeat what I said in the Wood when you told me you would believe me. There is Something—not you—not Donal—to be ...
— Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett

... 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 natural history. ...
— A Dweller in Mesopotamia - Being the Adventures of an Official Artist in the Garden of Eden • Donald Maxwell

... Berg by name, who lived at the village of Leur, eight or ten miles from Breda, and who had long been in the habit of supplying the castle with turf. In the absence of woods and coal mines, the habitual fuel of the country was furnished by those vast relics of the antediluvian forests which abounded in the still partially submerged soil. The skipper represented that his vessel had passed so often into and out of the castle as to be hardly liable to search by the guard on its entrance. He ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... halls, we wandered through saloons of antediluvian animals, some set up in skeletons, others imprisoned in solid stone; also specimens of still extant animals, birds, reptiles, shells, minerals,— the whole circle of human knowledge and guess-work,—till I wished that the whole Past might be ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... the antediluvian world, the year consisted of three hundred and sixty days. Some even affirmed that this was the origin of the division of the circle into three hundred and sixty degrees. At the time of the Deluge, so many theologians declared, the motion of the sun was altered, and the ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper

... was inclined to think pretty things thrown away upon an antediluvian creature of forty, but if Ruth could have had a glimpse of herself as "others saw her" at that moment, she might have been more content. The subdued lamp-light dealt kindly with the old blue serge coat and skirt, the pink scarf at her neck matched the colour on her cheeks, ...
— The Fortunes of the Farrells • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey

... care a d——, for there, straight ahead of us, in lordly procession, like elephants walking through a pack of dogs, came the Lion, Queen Mary, Invincible, and New Zealand, our battle cruisers, great and grim and uncouth as some antediluvian monsters. How solid ...
— A Study of Poetry • Bliss Perry

... with its brass-helmeted heroes dashed round the corner, and pulled up with a crash, seeming to shoot the men off. These swarmed, for a few seconds, about the hose, water plug, and nozzles. At the same instant the great fire-escape came rushing on the scene, like some antediluvian monster, but by that time Giles had swept away the debris of the donkey-cart, with Mrs Twitter imbedded therein, and had stretched the blanket with five powerful volunteers to hold it. "Jump, sir, jump!" he cried. Samuel Twitter jumped—unavoidably, ...
— Dusty Diamonds Cut and Polished - A Tale of City Arab Life and Adventure • R.M. Ballantyne

... our actor? What a continuous stream of wheezes, unintelligible for the most part, of antediluvian puns, of pure nonsense at which he laughs so heartily that it is difficult not to laugh with him. He wanted to learn a few words of Chinese, and Pan-Chao having told him that "tching-tching" means thanks, he has been ...
— The Adventures of a Special Correspondent • Jules Verne

... Suffrage, composed during the process known as "wringing." And when there's a Woman's Rights Convention in that locality, she sits on the platform, and applauds all the Red-Hot Resolutions with that trenchant female weapon, the umbrella, in one hand, and an antediluvian reticule the other. In the words of the Hon. MICHAEL: "She is not only a leading Reformer, sir, but a great Platformer." And Mrs. LADLE will tell you that, as a washer, she is superb. She "does up things" in a manner ...
— Punchinello, Volume 2, No. 37, December 10, 1870 • Various

... Miss Seward in her letters, about the year 1760. I mentioned to you in a former letter the effect they produced upon me in public, but never shall I forget the first burst yesterday upon entering the drawing-room: to find the dear antediluvian darlings, attired for dinner in the same manified dress, with the Croix de St. Louis, and other orders, and myriads of large brooches, with stones large enough for snuff-boxes, stuck in their starched neckcloths! I have not room to describe their most fascinating ...
— The "Ladies of Llangollen" • John Hicklin

... sweetly contrasted and mingled with the various shades of autumnal yellow. Flocks of aquatic birds enlivened the rocky shores, and the whole country resounded with the wild notes of the feathered tribe.... The view of rude sceneries in the style of Rosa, of antediluvian forests which clothed the rock, and of numerous rills of water which everywhere rolled down the steep declivity, altogether conspired to complete ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese

... tell that the barge was moving. The ferrymen plied the oars with a slow measured stroke; Brains hung over the tiller with his stomach pressed against it and swung from side to side. In the dim light they looked like men sitting on some antediluvian animal with long limbs, swimming out to a ...
— The House with the Mezzanine and Other Stories • Anton Tchekoff

... to Seraphine's den—den as terrible, did one but know it, as that antediluvian hyena-cave at Torquay, where the threshold is worn by the bodies of beasts dragged across it, and the ground paved with their bones—that first visit was a serious business. Later interviews might be mere frivolities, half-an-hour wasted in looking at new fashions, an order given ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon

... solitariness into the same climate of sympathy with his audience. Tear away the old sofa, ragged and spring-broken, on which the pastors of forty years have been obliged to sit, and see whether there are any cats in your antediluvian pulpit. ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage

... says mine host, handing back our glass, "seeing as this here is the Blawing Stwun, his self," putting his hand on a square lump of stone, some three feet and a half high, perforated with two or three queer holes, like petrified antediluvian rat-holes, which lies there close under the oak, under our very nose. We are more than ever puzzled, and drink our second glass of ale, wondering what will come next. "Like to hear un, sir?" says mine host, setting down Toby Philpot on the tray, and resting both hands on the "Stwun." We are ...
— Tom Brown's Schooldays • Thomas Hughes

... conditions, a larger number of messages, tests, and visions seen are of this nature and character—the symbolism often being so elaborate that the original thought is not perceived. As Mr. Coates remarked: "When a 'psychometer' places a geological specimen to his forehead, and describes an 'antediluvian monster,' roaring and walking about, no one but a very shallow individual would imagine for a moment that the psychometer was actually seeing the original," but rather that he obtained a faint and dream-like impression of the world at that epoch, and his subconscious ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington

... here no thought of evolution; in later years, however, his researches upon fossil crocodilians led him to consider the possibility that the living species were descended from the antediluvian. For the factors of the transformation he refers to Lamarck's hypotheses.[98] In a memoir of 1828,[99] dealing with the possible genetic relation of living to fossil species, he still regards the question as more or less open. Although fossil species are mostly different from living species ...
— Form and Function - A Contribution to the History of Animal Morphology • E. S. (Edward Stuart) Russell

... you really wish it.' So he accompanied Mr Tigg to the retreat in question; on arriving at which place that gentleman took from his hat what seemed to be the fossil remains of an antediluvian pocket-handkerchief, and wiped ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens

... he exacted of the inhabitants as many as 90,000. He burned, or sacked, or razed to the ground, the cities of Astrachan, Carisme, Delhi, Ispahan, Bagdad, Aleppo, Damascus, Broussa, Smyrna, and a thousand others. We seem to be reading of some antediluvian giant, rather ...
— Historical Sketches, Volume I (of 3) • John Henry Newman

... extricate myself, and advanced with awful admiration through the vast avenues of the library. I perceived on every side innumerable volumes and repositories of ancient learning, and all the science of the Antediluvian world. Here I met with Hermes Trismegistus, and a parcel of old philosophers debating upon the politics and learning of their days. I gave them inexpressible delight in telling them, in a few words, all the discoveries of Newton, and the history of the world since their time. These gentry, on the ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen • Rudolph Erich Raspe

... adequately revealed. As Mr. Matthew Arnold said, many years ago, 'We do not know George Sand unless we feel the spirit which goes through her work as a whole.' With this spirit, however, M. Caro has no sympathy. Madame Sand's doctrines are antediluvian, he tells us, her philosophy is quite dead and her ideas of social regeneration are Utopian, incoherent and absurd. The best thing for us to do is to forget these silly dreams and to read Teverino and Le Secretaire Intime. Poor M. Caro! This ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde

... divided his cares between the strata and Dolores' kodak, how even his photography could not spoil Aunt Alda; how charming a group of sisters Dolores contrived to produce; how Adrian was the proud pioneer into a coach adorned with stalactites and antediluvian bones; how Anna collected milkwort and violets for Aunt Cherry; how a sly push sent little Joan in a headlong career down a slope that might have resulted in a terrible fall, but did only cause a tumble and ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge

... might this old Gentleman write of the Antediluvian world, and of all the weighty affairs, as well of state as of religion, which happen'd during the fifteen hundred years ...
— The History of the Devil - As Well Ancient as Modern: In Two Parts • Daniel Defoe

... me feel old, antique, antediluvian. I don't want to. I shan't let myself be pushed back and ignored. I'm going to give Amy and George a rousing big dinner before long; and when the fall term opens I shall entertain as never before. And if that young man from the South turns up here during the summer to see Hortense, I shall ...
— Bertram Cope's Year • Henry Blake Fuller

... she rejoined. "You and Mary are quite antediluvian in your idea. But that doesn't influence me. I am glad to say I am more up to date. If I can't stay here, I shall go to Udalkhand. There's a hotel there ...
— The Lamp in the Desert • Ethel M. Dell

... water. The mine, you must understand, declines from the foot of the shaft to the end of the main heading. The very lowest level of all is there, where I propose to put in a ventilating shaft, with a fan; all the water flows to that point, flooding it. Under the antediluvian methods in use in this mine, all this water must be pumped into leaky cars and hauled by mules to the bottom of the the sloping shaft, whence it is drawn up by the engine, spilling half of it before it reaches the surface. Now, when I sink that ventilating shaft out ...
— A Captain in the Ranks - A Romance of Affairs • George Cary Eggleston

... Reservation. We meant to arrive, shed the dust at our hotel, and then saunter forth for dress parade, but instead of that we had to see the great sight of the day sitting in our motors. The poor Hippopotamus did look antediluvian among all the smart cars and carriages assembled! But the rest of us weren't so bad, even after a day's run, and, anyhow, we had no time to think of ourselves, there was too much ...
— The Lightning Conductor Discovers America • C. N. (Charles Norris) Williamson and A. M. (Alice Muriel)

... termed a thing, though the laws of Slave States do call him "a chattel personal;" Man then, I assert never was put under the feet of man, by that first charter of human rights which was given by God, to the Fathers of the Antediluvian and Postdiluvian worlds, therefore this doctrine of equality is based on ...
— An Appeal to the Christian Women of the South • Angelina Emily Grimke

... walk than take my chances in an antediluvian rattle-trap like that," said the tall wayfarer, bending quite close to her ear. "It will fall ...
— Green Fancy • George Barr McCutcheon

... to the top of the being, or object, half out of the water, which served us for a refuge. I kicked it. It was evidently a hard, impenetrable body, and not the soft substance that forms the bodies of the great marine mammalia. But this hard body might be a bony covering, like that of the antediluvian animals; and I should be free to class this monster among amphibious reptiles, such ...
— Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea • Jules Verne

... Lamartine published his "La chute d'un age."[8] This is one of his poorest productions, though exhibiting vast powers of imagination and productive genius. The scene is laid in a chaotic antediluvian world, inhabited by Titans, and is, perhaps, descriptive of the author's mind, full of majestic imagery, but as yet undefined, vague, and without an object worthy of its efforts. Lamartine's time had not yet come, though he required but a few years to complete the fiftieth ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol XXXIII No. 1 July 1848 • Various

... hillside, and displacements of the red soil, resembling more the chaos of some primary elementary upheaval than the work of man; while, halfway down, a long flume straddled its narrow body and disproportionate legs over the chasm, like an enormous fossil of some forgotten antediluvian. At every step smaller ditches crossed the road, hiding in their shallow depths unlovely streams that crept away to a clandestine union with the great yellow torrent below. Here and there the ruins of some ...
— The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Tales • Bret Harte

... revealed and known from the beginning. They give no warrant to the common assumption that God revealed monotheism to Adam, Noah, and others before the Flood, and that the traces of monotheistic beliefs and tendencies in heathendom are derivable from the tradition of this primitive and antediluvian monotheism. The one true God is represented as making himself known by particular words and in particular ways to Adam, but is nowhere said to have taught him that He only was God." It is plain that Professor Flint is here dealing with a conception of monotheism ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood

... sailing of the "Britannic," the Cunard Line gives only a month's announcement of the sailing of the "Oregon;" but of the sailing of that ship that Noah commanded God gave one hundred and twenty years' announcement and warning. Patience antediluvian, patience postdiluvian, patience in times Adamic, Abrahamic, Mosaic, Davidic, Pauline, Lutheran, Whitefieldian. Patience with men and nations. Patience with barbarisms and civilizations. Six thousand years of patience! Overtopping ...
— New Tabernacle Sermons • Thomas De Witt Talmage

... was covered by a red figured table cloth. The "castors" at both ends and in the middle were the ugliest—Hiram was sure—to be found in all the city of Crawberry. The crockery was of the coarsest kind. The knives and forks were antediluvian. The napkins were as coarse as ...
— Hiram The Young Farmer • Burbank L. Todd

... antediluvian world, as a consequence of man's first transgression, fell lower and lower in the scale of good morals. They became so confirmed in wickedness, so totally depraved, that God destroyed them all, save one man and his family, whom He ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various

... antediluvian you are! No doubt he did like her,—after his fashion; though what he saw in her, I never could tell. I think Miss Morris would make a very nice wife for a country clergyman who didn't care how poor things were. But she has no style;—and as far as I can see, she has no beauty. ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope

... notice of one of my own discourses, which, from its superior tone and appearance of vast experience, I concluded to have been written by a man at least three hundred years of age, though I recollected no existing instance of such antediluvian longevity. Nevertheless, I afterwards discovered the author to be a young gentleman preparing for the ministry under the direction of one of my brethren in a neighbouring town, and whom I had once instinctively corrected in a Latin quantity. But ...
— The Biglow Papers • James Russell Lowell

... proceeds with a description of an antediluvian cave at Banwell, and a brief sketch of events since the deposit; but, as Mr. Bowles observes, poetry and geological inquiry do not very amicably travel together; we must, therefore, soon ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 350, January 3, 1829 • Various

... after sunset, when the adventurers returned. I looked down over the ship's high side as if looking down over the curb of a well, and dimly saw the damp boat, deep in the sea with some unwonted weight. Ropes were dropt over, and presently three huge antediluvian-looking tortoises, after much straining, were landed on deck. They seemed hardly of the seed of earth. We had been broad upon the waters for five long months, a period amply sufficient to make all things of the land wear a fabulous hue to the dreamy mind. Had three Spanish custom-house officers ...
— The Piazza Tales • Herman Melville

... all the antediluvian affairs I ever beheld, the old fellow now coming towards us is the queerest; he looks like a fossil edition of Methuselah, dug up and modernised some hundred years ago at the very least. Holloa! he's going mad I believe; I hope he ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley

... least one representative of the navy from passing that barrier. This was the Australian submarine, A2. It may not be generally known that Australia had two submarines at the outbreak of war. These would appear antediluvian alongside the latest underwater monster, but, nevertheless, one of these accomplished a feat such as no German submarine has ever approached. The first of our submarines met an unknown fate as it disappeared somewhere ...
— "Over There" with the Australians • R. Hugh Knyvett

... almost black above and shading off to a dirty whitish-grey beneath, with a long tail broad and flat at its extremity, and with four seal-like flippers instead of legs and feet, the monsters looked more like nightmare creatures, evolved by reading a book on antediluvian animals after a—. Of course, that was it, Escombe decided, as his thoughts took some such turn as above. He now distinctly remembered having read some years ago a most interesting illustrated magazine article upon extinct animals, ...
— Harry Escombe - A Tale of Adventure in Peru • Harry Collingwood

... come to listen to a debate, for which the entertainment committee had provided, between the venerable patriarch Noah and the late eminent showman P. T. Barnum. The question to be debated was upon the resolution passed by the committee, that "The Animals of the Antediluvian Period were Far More Attractive for Show Purposes than those of Modern Make," and, singular to relate, the affirmative was placed in the hands of Mr. Barnum, while to Noah had fallen the task of upholding the virtues ...
— A House-Boat on the Styx • John Kendrick Bangs

... you?" he asked a lady in an antediluvian mantle, whose back view was extremely suggestive of ...
— The Horse-Stealers and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov

... THE BLACKBIRD Antediluvian pastimes! not nearly such good fun as my nice new wooden trapeze. Oh, my cage, let us sign a joyful three-six-nine years' lease! I live like a Duke, I have filtered drinking-water—[At PATOU'S significant start and growl, ...
— Chantecler - Play in Four Acts • Edmond Rostand

... of the concern. If it fails you get the blame. And should the anvil chorus become so persistent that there is danger of discord taking the place of harmony, stand by your new man, even tho it is necessary to give the blue envelope to every antediluvian. Precedence in business is a matter of power, and years in one position may mean that the man has been there so long that he needs a change. Let the zephyrs of natural law play freely ...
— Love, Life & Work • Elbert Hubbard

... to have a style of formations peculiar to itself, though of infinite variety. Days might be spent in these superb grottoes, without becoming familiar with half their hidden glories. One could imagine that some antediluvian giant had here imprisoned some fair daughter of earth, and then in pity for her loneliness, had employed fairies to deck her bowers with all the splendor of earth and ocean. Like poor Amy Robsart, in the solitary halls of Cumnor. Bengal Lights, kindled ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various

... Advertiser, retailed all the great matters relating to himself, and all the little matters he collected in his rounds relating to others. Among other personalities, he indulged his satirical fluency on the scientific collectors. The Antiquarian Society were twitted as medal-scrapers and antediluvian knife-grinders; conchologists were turned into cockleshell merchants; and the naturalists were made to record pompous histories of stickle-hacks and cockchafers. Cautioned by Martin Folkes, President of the Royal Society,[284] not to attempt his election, our enraged comic philosopher, ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli

... the loge and wandered out to the entrance. Rain had begun to fall, that would make it harder to find a taxi. It would happen, now of all times! Ten minutes passed, then up the street chug-chugged a somewhat battered motor-vehicle with the apache hanging on the step. Yes, it was a taxi, an antediluvian one, but she must not be critical. If a chariot offered one a lift out of hell, one would not stop to inquire its horse-power. The apache helped her in and closed the door. She turned grateful eyes on him ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell

... Human lifetimes, as now measured, are not intended to witness both the seed-times and the harvests of forests,—both the planting of the sapling, and the felling of the huge tree into which it has grown; and so the incident impressed me strongly. It reminded me of the sage Shalum in Addison's antediluvian tale, who became wealthy by the sale of his great trees, two centuries after he had planted them. I pursued my walk, to revisit another little patch of water which I had found so very entertaining a volume three-and-twenty years previous, that I could still recall many of its lessons; but the ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller

... you see, a bower of dreams. In the heart of Venice could I have erected a better? You behold around you, it is true, a medley of architectural embellishments. The chastity of Ionia is offended by antediluvian devices, and the sphynxes of Egypt are outstretched upon carpets of gold. Yet the effect is incongruous to the timid alone. Proprieties of place, and especially of time, are the bugbears which terrify mankind from the contemplation of the magnificent. ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe

... "you are a large landowner, an eligible citizen and a Carlist; you fast on Fridays, go to mass in your parish, and occasionally kill cows for bucks; I esteem and respect you; but allow me to say that you have just uttered an old, antediluvian platitude." ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet

... no human life. Not only that, but there was no trace of lower animals; there was not even a lizard, much less a bird. And even the most ancient-looking of the sculptures showed no creatures of the air; only huge, antediluvian monsters were ...
— The Lord of Death and the Queen of Life • Homer Eon Flint

... curios and cheap millinery. At each corner is a dismal sailors' bar, smelling of absinthe. Then we come to an empty, decayed square, where a crippled, noseless "Gallia" stands on a fountain; some half-drunk coachmen lounge dreaming on antediluvian cabs, and a few old convicts sprawl ...
— Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific • Felix Speiser

... "Look here, young fellow," he said, "everybody knows that he (pointing to me) is an antediluvian; but you've gone a bit off the ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, December 23, 1914 • Various

... incidentally they necessitate a revision of current views with regard to the cradle of Babylonian civilization. The most remarkable of the new documents is one which relates in poetical narrative an account of the Creation, of Antediluvian history, and of the Deluge. It thus exhibits a close resemblance in structure to the corresponding Hebrew traditions, a resemblance that is not shared by the Semitic-Babylonian Versions at present known. But ...
— Legends Of Babylon And Egypt - In Relation To Hebrew Tradition • Leonard W. King

... ancient of all the sciences. The Chaldeans, the Egyptians, the Chinese, the Hindoos, Gauls, and Peruvians, each regarded themselves as the inventors of astronomy, an honour which Josephus deprives them of by ascribing it to the antediluvian patriarchs. From the few facts to be gleaned out of the vague accounts by ancient authors regarding the Chaldeans, it may be inferred that their boasted knowledge of this science was confined to observations of the simplest kind, unassisted by any instruments ...
— Lectures on Popular and Scientific Subjects • John Sutherland Sinclair, Earl of Caithness

... bewitching but deceptive light of the moon, the whole place lends itself supremely well to every man's individual fancy, and even my unimaginative mind could easily have brought itself to see here a once majestic antediluvian city with its palaces and temples, but now wrecked and ruined by manifold upheavals of nature, and worn into rarest mockeries of its ancient splendours by the wild ...
— With the Guards' Brigade from Bloemfontein to Koomati Poort and Back • Edward P. Lowry

... you might as well attempt to pass a turkey upon M. Audubon for a giraffe, as endeavor to impose a Papist upon him for a true follower of King William. He could have given you more generic distinctions to guide you in the decision than ever did Cuvier to designate an antediluvian mammoth; so that no sooner had he seated himself upon the coach than he buttoned up his great-coat, stuck his hands firmly in his side-pockets, pursed up his lips, and looked altogether like a man that, feeling himself out of his element, resolves to "bide his time" ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever

... anchored to one spot of the geographical distribution like a barnacle to a ship during the whole of his mortal belligerency?" he one day asked his wife. "We hear nothing, see nothing, become nothing, and our system becomes fossilized, antediluvian. Why not see everything, know everything? Life is hardly worth while, but since we are here we may as well feed from the choicest fruits, and try for ...
— Skookum Chuck Fables - Bits of History, Through the Microscope • Skookum Chuck (pseud for R.D. Cumming)

... de-formative. And this distinction between the creatures who, blessing, are blessed, and evermore benedicti, and the creatures who, cursing, are cursed, and evermore maledicti, is one going through all humanity; antediluvian in Cain and Abel, diluvian in Ham and Shem. And the question for the public of any given period is not whether they are a constitutional or unconstitutional vulgus, but whether they are a benignant or malignant vulgus. ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin

... peaks and ridges, as well as the deepest valleys and ravines, were covered with the embowering forest; but here and there a huge boss of granite or porphyry reared its bare scalp out of the verdure like the head and shoulders of some antediluvian monster. The gigantic palms and foliage trees, all tufted with air-plants or strangled with climbers, were literally buried in flowers of every hue, and the crown of the forest rolled under us like a sea of blossoms. Every moment one enchanting prospect after another ...
— A Trip to Venus • John Munro

... obeyed the will of God, and who succeeded in identifying himself with the celestial intelligences, possessed the philosopher's stone—he could cure all diseases, and prolong life to as many centuries as he pleased; it being by the very same means that Adam and the antediluvian patriarchs prolonged theirs. Life was an emanation from the stars—the sun governed the heart, and the moon the brain. Jupiter governed the liver, Saturn the gall, Mercury the lungs, Mars the bile, and Venus the loins. In the stomach of every human being ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay

... with many injunctions to ascertain that two old-fashioned hirsute trunks containing her wardrobe were really put into the steamer at Quebec. Bluebell had treated herself to a smart little portmanteau for the cabin, being rather ashamed of her antediluvian luggage. She had ten sovereigns in her purse, that had been scraped together among them as a provision for any emergency. The Rolleston children had sent her a travelling-bag; but not even a message ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston

... greatest we have in history. See Bianchini's curious and important observations on this Vesuvius, and its seven several great eruptions, with their remains vitrified, and still existing, in so many different strata under ground, till the diggers came to the antediluvian waters, with their proportionable interstices, implying the deluge to have been above two thousand five hundred years before the Christian era, according to ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus

... of the strata that nourish gold; and at length the moon, now in all her pomp of light, mid-heaven among her subject stars, gleamed through the fissures of the cave, on whose floor lay the relics of antediluvian races, and rested in one flood of silvery splendor upon the hollows of the extinct volcano, with tufts of dank herbage, and wide spaces of paler sward, covering the gold below—gold, the dumb symbol of organized Matter's great mystery, storing in itself, ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.

... If the antediluvian sinners were any thing like the modern ones, Noah must have been richer than the Rothschilds, or he never could have obtained their services; which he must have done, or it could never be truthfully said, "according to all that God commanded him, ...
— The Deluge in the Light of Modern Science - A Discourse • William Denton

... was silence supreme! Not a shriek, not a scream, Scarcely even a howl or a groan, As the man they called "Ho!" told his story of woe In an antediluvian tone. ...
— The Hunting of the Snark - an Agony, in Eight Fits • Lewis Carroll

... if a Court is held at all, it should be conducted by the representative of Antediluvian custom, the most ancient and learned creatures, such as the Iguana, the Snake, and Ornithorhyncus Paradoxus. That it would prefer to associate with the meanest Troglodite, rather than appear amongst the present company. I understood it to say," continued the Kangaroo Rat, "that ...
— Dot and the Kangaroo • Ethel C. Pedley

... spring gave life to the queer antediluvian vegetation—calabash and cactus, palmyra, bombax, and fern. An admirable mirage lifted the canoes which preceded us clean out of the river, and looking down stream the water seemed to flow up hill, as it does, ...
— Two Trips to Gorilla Land and the Cataracts of the Congo Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton

... could not get near enough to see what it contained, but I may say here, that when, two days later, circumstances compelled him to have a close look at it, he saw that it consisted of about a dozen fine coprolites, deposited by some antediluvian creature or creatures, which, whatever else they may have been, were ...
— Erewhon Revisited • Samuel Butler

... conceive to be the sense of the holy scriptures on this subject. For in the first place, they consider it as a position, deducible from the expressions of Moses[33], that the spirit of God had striven with those of the antediluvian world. They believe, therefore, that it was this spirit (and because the means were adequate, and none more satisfactory to them can be assigned) which informed Cain, before any written law existed, and this even before the murder of his brother, ...
— A Portraiture of Quakerism, Volume II (of 3) • Thomas Clarkson

... understand—darkly, indeed, but with as much certainty as we can be entitled to require—that the mixture between the two species of created beings was sinful on the part of both, and displeasing to the Almighty. It is probable, also, that the extreme longevity of the antediluvian mortals prevented their feeling sufficiently that they had brought themselves under the banner of Azrael, the angel of death, and removed to too great a distance the period between their crime and its ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott

... staircases, I was confronted with a pale, thin man, of calm, gentlemanly bearing, with the unmistakable stamp of culture upon his brow. He shook my hand with grave politeness, and pointing to a huge arm-chair of antediluvian make, invited me to be seated. The large, low-ceiled room was filled with furniture of the most fantastic styles;—tables and chairs with twisted legs and scrolls of tarnished gilt; a solid-looking, elaborately carved chiffonier, exhibiting Adam and Eve in airy dishabille, sowing the seeds ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen

... the German poet, who was Berlioz's friend, called him a "colossal nightingale, a lark of eagle-size, such as they tell us existed in the primeval world." The poet goes on to say: "Berlioz's music, in general, has in it something primeval if not antediluvian to my mind; it makes me think of gigantic species of extinct animals, of fabulous empires full of fabulous sins, of heaped-up impossibilities; his magical accents call to our minds Babylon, the hanging ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris

... the relic of a by-gone generation. His queue, carefully powdered and plaited, stood out stiff from the back of his head, as if in perpetual protest against any new-fangled notions of hair-dressing; his livery, scrupulously neat and well brushed, was threadbare and of an antediluvian cut, and his whole appearance was that of highly respectable antediluvianism. As he stood there with his antique and venerable figure his whole face fairly beamed with delight at seeing his ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille

... 'Passon' himself. Buggins wore a very ill-fitting black suit on Sundays, which made him look like a cross between a waiter and an undertaker; and he also supported on his cranium a very tall top-hat with an extra wide brim, suggesting in its antediluvian shape a former close acquaintance ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli

... the Roman, the subordination of the person to the cultivated mind is decidedly marked. It is the delineation of man further off from his ruder state, showing in aspect, and even in bodily movements, the mental cultivation. The one school is of an Antediluvian, the other of a Christian race. Hence, in the latter, under the prerogative of love, grace and a nicer beauty are assumed; and a delicacy and purity arising from minds educated to bear, to forbear, chastened by trial, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various

... diving down and disappearing altogether in the umbrageous foliage of a dell; anon reappearing on the other side and scrambling up the bank on all-fours, he and the canoe together looking like some frightful yellow reptile of antediluvian proportions; and then speeding rapidly forward over a level plain until he reached a sheet of still water above the rapids. Here he deposited his burden on the grass, and halting only for a few seconds to carry a few ...
— The Young Fur Traders • R.M. Ballantyne

... and struck terror in gentle bosoms. "Oh, gracious!" cried Fanny, "one ought to drink nothing but champagne." Uxmoor looked grave. Vizard affected to doubt their authenticity. He said, "You may not know it, but I am a zoologist, and these are antediluvian eccentricities that have long ceased to embellish the world we live in. Fie! Miss Gale. Down ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade

... Bath, was as antediluvian a hundred and fifty years ago as the lanes and coombes of Devonshire. Larks' Hall, Foxholes, Bearwood, the Vicarage of Mosely, and their outlying acquaintances, their yeomen and their labourers, lived as old-fashioned and hearty a life as if ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler

... soon as did Munson. Under the sea, just off the coast, the mother-subs had touched their blunt nose against the upward shelving of the sea bottom—had touched bottom, and were slowly but surely following the underwater curve of the land, up toward the surface, like unbelievable antediluvian ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science April 1930 • Various

... developed from the mineral, and as the animal kingdom supervened upon the vegetable, "so now, in the last few ages, an entirely new kingdom has sprung up of which we as yet have only seen what will one day be considered the antediluvian types of the race." He then speaks of the minute members which compose the beautiful and intelligent little animal which we call the watch, and of how it has gradually been evolved from the clumsy brass clocks of ...
— The Humour of Homer and Other Essays • Samuel Butler

... when stones were thrown, were extremely interesting to the naturalist, and gave rise to numerous observations and suggestions in later works. The huge tortoises slowly carrying their great bodies about, appeared like strange antediluvian animals. The hideous large water-lizard (Amblyrhynchus), swimming with perfect ease, and capable of an hour's immersion in sea-water; and the land lizard of the same genus, so numerous that at James Island it was hardly ...
— Life of Charles Darwin • G. T. (George Thomas) Bettany

... arrived within a cast of the mill, he took a coil of the anchor-rope in his right hand; a hook was fastened to its end. The rudderless mass came quickly nearer, like some drifting antediluvian monster—blind chance guided it; its paddle-wheel turned swiftly with the motion of the water, and under the empty out-shoot the mill-stone revolved over the flour-bin as if it ...
— Timar's Two Worlds • Mr Jkai

... most curious pitcher-plants. They took the form of half-climbing shrubs, their pitchers, of various sizes and forms, hanging in numbers from their leaves. Every ridge was now crowned with gigantic ferns, which reminded us of the descriptions of the antediluvian world, when ferns appear to have been the chief vegetation which covered the surface of the globe.—I will not ...
— In the Eastern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston

... when the birds are on one leg, when even the little armadillo is quiet, and the monkeys have ceased their chatter, he — I mean the hippopotamus — and the elephant, and the long-necked giraffe, perhaps may lay their heads together and have a colloquy about the great silent antediluvian world which they remember, where mighty monsters floundered through the ooze, crocodiles basked on the banks, and dragons darted out of the caves and waters before men were made to slay them. We who lived before railways are antediluvians — we ...
— Some Roundabout Papers • W. M. Thackeray

... or any of your learned correspondents inform me of any work likely to assist me in my researches into the antediluvian history of our race? The curious treatise of Reimmanus, and the erudite essay of J. Joachimus Maderus, I have now before me; but it occurs to me that, besides these and the more patent sources of information, such as Bruckerus and Josephus, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 78, April 26, 1851 • Various

... are plenty of people who knew all about it; but such stories get packed away like old letters. They interest me. I like to know the manners of my time—contemporary gossip, not antediluvian. These Dryasdust fellows get a reputation by raking up some small scandal about Semiramis or Nitocris, and then we have a thousand and one poems written upon it by all the warblers big and little. But I don't care a straw about the faux pas of the mummies. You do, though. You are one of ...
— Daniel Deronda • George Eliot

... play in the waters of the pool, like a beam of golden light which gleams through the chinks of a shutter into a room in Spain, that has been carefully darkened for a siesta. When the sun rose above the old crater that some antediluvian revolution had filled with water, its rocky sides took warmer tones, the extinct volcano glowed again, and its sudden heat quickened the sprouting seeds and vegetation, gave color to the flowers, and ripened the fruits of this forgotten corner ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac

... into the town now and then by very bad news from abroad, one should be quite stupefied. There is nobody left but two or three solitary regents; and they are always whisking backwards and forwards to their villas; and about a dozen antediluvian dowagers, whose carcasses have miraculously resisted the wet, and who every Saturday compose a very reverend catacomb at my old Lady Strafford's. She does not take money at the door for showing them, but 'you pay twelvepence apiece under the denomination of card-money. Wit ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole

... different from that of England, and when in imagination I carried him along with me into the dells and dark ravines, and described to him the chase and death-struggle of the ferocious wolf, or the odd characters and antediluvian customs of the primitive people amongst whom I passed the days of my happy boyhood, astonished, he could hardly believe that such sports and such singular personages existed within so short a distance of ...
— Le Morvan, [A District of France,] Its Wild Sports, Vineyards and Forests; with Legends, Antiquities, Rural and Local Sketches • Henri de Crignelle

... Nile when we discovered its source—and dried it in the sun, and then baked it under a bonfire, like in Foul Play. And most of the things were such queer shapes that they should have done for almost anything—Roman or Greek, or even Egyptian or antediluvian, or household milk-jugs of the cavemen, Albert's uncle said. The pots were, fortunately, quite ready and dirty, because we had already buried them in mixed sand and river mud to improve the colour, and not remembered to wash ...
— The Wouldbegoods • E. Nesbit

... seen before, being fashioned apparently from a strip of solid silver, with a bar placed across to serve as a handle, and leaving some nicks cut in the edge of the bar. It was more like a model of an antediluvian railway key than ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard

... Cuvier, was able to reconstruct the whole anatomy of an animal merely through examining the structure of a tooth or the fragment of a bone. Applying to the German historian the method which Cuvier applied to the antediluvian mastodon, we can reduce the whole complex political philosophy of Treitschke from a few fundamental principles which he follows with a single mind, and which the Prussian State has applied with an equally ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea

... Goodchild and the Innkeeper in front, and the rain in spouts and splashes everywhere, made the best of its way back to the little inn; the broken moor country looking like miles upon miles of Pre-Adamite sop, or the ruins of some enormous jorum of antediluvian toast-and-water. The trees dripped; the eaves of the scattered cottages dripped; the barren stone walls dividing the land, dripped; the yelping dogs dripped; carts and waggons under ill-roofed penthouses, dripped; ...
— The Lazy Tour of Two Idle Apprentices • Charles Dickens

... who sent her no diamonds, and not even any flowers. But he was young and good-looking, and stood so retiringly, and so evidently in love, at the small side door of the Opera House every night, when she got out of her antediluvian rickety fly, and also when she got into it again after the performance, that she could not help noticing him. Soon, he began to follow her wherever she went, and once he summoned up courage to speak to her, when she had been to see a friend ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant

... journey from Thomar to Lisbon, by Abrantes, at which place I saw an old gentleman in an antediluvian uniform, wearing his sword transversely like a powdered marquis in a play, advance towards me, and throw himself on his knees, embracing mine, and exclaiming, "Let me embrace the man who brought back Napoleon!" (Le conducteur de Napoleon), an allusion to my St. Helena ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville

... the party, were successively asked their opinions. One of the young ladies guessed it to be the petrifaction of an antediluvian mussel. Lord Curryfin said petrifactions were often siliceous, but never pure silex; which this purported to be. It gave him the idea of an ass's head; which, however, could not by any process have ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock

... carried by fifteen men; each of the ladies by half-a-dozen. We who walk, make the best use of our staves; and so the whole party begin to labor upward over the snow—as if they were toiling to the summit of an antediluvian Twelfth-cake. ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII - Italy and Greece, Part Two • Various

... pedantic trifles; all we thought so trite and childish, the grand momentous business of life! If you found a little schoolboy on his half-holiday fishing for minnows with a crooked pin, and you began to tell him of all the wonders of the deep, the laws of the tides, and the antediluvian relies of iguanodon and ichthyosaurus; nay, if you spoke but of pearl fisheries and coral-banks, or water-kelpies and naiads,—would not the little boy cry out peevishly, 'Don't tease me with all that nonsense; let me fish in peace for my minnows!' I think the little ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... anything, seems to have been an antediluvian conception; for we find primitive men thinking that almost everything is significant and can exert influence of some sort. The search for the more definite influences seems to have started in the question: "Who, or what, ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James

... eminent naturalists have actually believed, that, like the sloths, to which they are intimately related, they subsisted by climbing back downwards on trees, and feeding on the leaves. It was a bold, not to say preposterous, idea to conceive even antediluvian trees, with branches strong enough to bear animals as large as elephants. Professor Owen, with far more probability, believes that, instead of climbing on the trees, they pulled the branches down to them, and tore up the smaller ones by the roots, and so fed on the leaves. The colossal breadth and ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin

... learn farming and gardening. It is all experimenting, and let us be glad we have got to that, if we do blunder once and again. The laboratory study, the bug business, we shall get rid of, and we shall get rid of some antediluvian ways that hamper our educational development yet. We shall find a way to make the schools centres of distribution in our library system as its projectors have hoped. Just now it cannot be done, because it takes about a year for a book to pass the ten or twelve different ...
— The Battle with the Slum • Jacob A. Riis

... convenience, we have treated as if each were the product of a single pen, represent in reality movements which extended over decades and even centuries. The Jehovist, e.g., who traces the descent of shepherds, musicians, and workers in metal to antediluvian times (Gen. iv. 19-22), cannot be the Jehovist who told the story of the Flood, which interrupted the continuity of human life. These distinctions are known to criticism as Jl, J2, etc.; but, though they stand for undoubted literary facts, it is altogether ...
— Introduction to the Old Testament • John Edgar McFadyen

... this welcome discovery was a kind-hearted fisherman, who carried a blazing splinter of antediluvian firewood dug from the neighbouring bog; a useful ...
— Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 (of 2) • John Roby

... however, had the words left his lips than a turn of the road brought them within sight of a great volume of black smoke rushing slowly but surely towards them; whilst a horrible roaring and howling, as of an antediluvian monster in its wrath, filled the silence of the summer afternoon with a ...
— Vera Nevill - Poor Wisdom's Chance • Mrs. H. Lovett Cameron

... by those singular steps, or ridges, formerly banks or shores oL antediluvian oceans, till it reaches the vicinity of the Holland river, a tortuous, sluggish, marshy, natural canal, flowing or lazily creeping into Lake Simcoe, at an elevation of upwards of seven-hundred and fifty feet above Lake Ontario, and emptying itself into Lake Huron by a series of rapids, called ...
— Canada and the Canadians - Volume I • Sir Richard Henry Bonnycastle

... it would throw some light on the subject that absorbed her. But she shut up the volume in a rage when she found that it had nothing but excuses to offer for the fall of a married woman. After that, and guided only by chance, she read a number of other novels, most of which were of antediluvian date, thus accounting, she supposed, for their sentiments, which she found old fashioned. We should be wrong, however, if we supposed that Jacqueline's crude judgment of these books had nothing in common with true criticism. ...
— Jacqueline, Complete • (Mme. Blanc) Th. Bentzon

... Instead of telling us by what means truth is to be attained, his few perfunctory remarks on logic are lost in an historical narrative given with infinite zest, of the earliest recorded blunders. The period of history in which he most delighted was the antediluvian—probably because it afforded the widest field for speculation. His books are full of references to the early days of the world. He takes a keen personal interest in our first parents. He discusses the unfortunate lapse ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen

... veritable history; on the contrary, being of a sceptical turn of mind, he has courage enough to stem the national prejudice, and throw doubt on the narrative. He even rises up into something like eloquent scorn when he discusses the manner in which some antediluvian annals were ...
— The Book-Hunter - A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author • John Hill Burton

... sight is this venerable dame, bearing an exalted title, as she mopes and mouths over her varying luck, missing her stake twice out of three times, when she fain would push it with her rake into some particular section of the table! She is very intimate with one or two antediluvian diplomatists and warriors, who are here striving to bolster themselves up for another year with the waters, and may be heard crowing out lamentations over her fatal passion for play, interspersed with bits of moss-grown scandal, disinterred from the social ruins of an ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz

... like the domes of churches; at another, Gothic turrets rose before us; and the next opening brought in view sharp needle-pointed peaks, shooting upward into the blue sky. We saw columnar forms supporting others that lay horizontally: vast boulders of trap-rock, suggesting the idea of some antediluvian ruin, some temple of ...
— The Scalp Hunters • Mayne Reid

... court; acquaint him hastily with the curiosities of the Precincts, the "dark entry," the rich heraldries of the blackened and mouldering cloister, the ruined overgrown spaces where the old monastery stood, the stones of which furnished material for the rambling prebends houses, now "antediluvian" in their turn; are ready also to climb the scaffold-poles always to be found somewhere about the great church, or dive along the odd, secret passages of the old builders, with quite learned explanations (being proud of, and therefore painstaking about, the place) of architectural periods, ...
— Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater

... part, I entertain to them a sentiment very like respect, resulting from my belief that they belong to antediluvian races. The great convulsion which doomed our ancestors, in the eighteenth century of the world, to fish was a season of joy, triumph ...
— The Physiology of Taste • Brillat Savarin

... science who spend whole months in gnawing at the bone of an antediluvian monster, in calculating the laws of nature, when there is an opportunity to peer into her secrets, the Grecians and Latinists who dine on a thought of Tacitus, sup on a phrase of Thucydides, spend their life in brushing ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part I. • Honore de Balzac

... and domestic, and those of a quasi-religious Friendly Society, resembling something between their 'Band of Hope' and their 'Antediluvian Buffaloes.' The English have a passion for this kind of child's play, and are absurdly impatient of official surveillance. Their incorrigible sentimentality is soothed by such movements as those of the Canadian preachers and The Citizens; but even the rudiments of ...
— The Message • Alec John Dawson

... possible form of caricature, the theatres burlesqued their pretensions, songs and epigrams contributed to their discomfiture, and all the ingenuity of a witty and laughter-loving people was unmercifully poured out upon this resurrection of antediluvian remains. Their royal patrons came in for a full share of the general derision, but they seemed entirely unmindful that there was such a thing as popular opinion, or any other will than their own. There were objects ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various

... steamer Iwate, which had been lying off the coast of Panama. Grinding his teeth with rage, Dayton had to look on while a Colombian officer in ragged uniform, plentifully supplied with gilt, who was in the habit of commanding his tiny antediluvian gunboat from the door of a harbor saloon, came on board the Barry and ordered the breeches of the guns and the engine-valves to be removed, at the same time depriving the crew of their arms. The Japanese waiting outside the harbor had categorically demanded ...
— Banzai! • Ferdinand Heinrich Grautoff

... is when the son finds the father in famine, as Joseph found Jacob in famine, the young people make it very hard for the old man. They are so surprised he eats with a knife instead of a fork. They are chagrined at his antediluvian habits. They are provoked because he cannot hear as well as he used to, and when he asks it over again, and the son has to repeat it, he bawls in the old man's ear: "I hope you hear that!" How long he must wear the old coat or the old hat before they get him a new one! How chagrined ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage

... grievances afflict this vast mass of buildings, buried under the Palais de Justice and the quay, like some antediluvian creature in the soil of Montmartre; but the worst affliction is that it is the Conciergerie. This epigram is intelligible. In the early days of the monarchy, noble criminals—for the villeins (a word signifying the peasantry in French ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac



Words linked to "Antediluvian" :   senior citizen, old, patriarch, old person, diluvial, golden ager, oldster



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