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Bovine   /bˈoʊvˌaɪn/   Listen
Bovine

adjective
1.
Of or relating to or belonging to the genus Bos (cattle).  Synonym: bovid.
2.
Dull and slow-moving and stolid; like an ox.



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"Bovine" Quotes from Famous Books



... there another city in the world where certain of the vulgar verities of life press themselves more prominently into view than in the Eternal City? Can one anywhere have a more forcible conviction that greasy cookery is bile-provoking, and that it is because the sylvan bovine ruminates so long upon the melancholy Campagna that one's dinners become such a heavy and sorrowful matter in Rome? Is there any city in the universe where fleas dwarf more colossally and fiendishly Blake's famous "ghosts" of their kind? Does one anywhere come oftener ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 26, July 1880. • Various

... looking out on streets and courts which to know is to be unknown, and where to exist is not to live, according to any true definition of living. Therefore complain I not of modern degeneracy, when, even from the open window of the small unlovely farm-house, tenanted by the hard-handed man of bovine flavors and the flat-patterned woman of broken-down countenance, issue the same familiar sounds. For who knows that Almira, but for these keys, which throb away her wild impulses in harmless discords, would not have ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, No. 38, December, 1860 • Various

... it I felt as if it had gone down, or been broken into a hundred pieces. Billows of rocks and logs, and chasms of creeks and spring runs, kept it rearing and pitching in the most frightful manner. The steers went at a spanking pace; indeed, it was a regular bovine gale; but their driver clung to their side amid the brush and boulders with desperate tenacity, and seemed to manage them by signs and nudges, for he hardly uttered his orders aloud. But we got through without ...
— Birds and Bees, Sharp Eyes and, Other Papers • John Burroughs

... cocked his tail straight in the air and charged. The buck waited until he was within three feet; then he shot sideways, and shot back again, his antlers beating with a drum-stick sound on the bull's ribs. "Baw-aw!" said the bull. Probably that hurt. Again bull faced buck. This time the bovine eye wore a look of troubled wonderment, while one could mark an evil grin beneath the twitching nose of his antagonist; and his bleat had changed to a tone which recalled the pointing finger and unwritable "H'nh-ha!" that greets misfortune in childhood. "I told you so!" it ...
— Red Saunders' Pets and Other Critters • Henry Wallace Phillips

... silk and crimson satin and gold brocade and purple velvet and silvery fur enshrine many a blend of villainies and brutal stupidities. What is more cruelly realistic than the leer of the satyr clothed as Francis, King of France; than the bovine dullness of Charles V and the lizard-like dullness of his son; or than that strange combination of wolfish cunning and swinish bestiality with human thought and self-command that fascinates in Raphael's portrait of Leo X and his two ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith

... business of the day. No sooner was she liberated from the bondage of the pasture than she made a bold charge upon Brownie, who promptly took to cover behind his mistress, barking the while in a manner both rasping and aggravating to one of Sarah Maria's irritable nervous system. The bovine's attention being now drawn to Nannie, it behooved the latter to clear the path, and in short order, and Steve, who came running to the scene, attracted by the din of battle, beheld with horror-stricken sight a confused medley consisting ...
— The Gentle Art of Cooking Wives • Elizabeth Strong Worthington

... of the drug, and made it a sort of ally. The reader sees from this how much depends upon predispositions as to the effect of opium. De Quincey himself says that the man whose daily talk is of oxen will pursue his bovine speculations into dreams. Opium originates nothing; but, given activity of a certain type and moving in a certain direction, and there will be perhaps through opium a multiplication of energies and velocities. What was De Quincey without ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... see her on the morrow, she was grazing peacefully; and she ate the salt he brought her with heart-whole bovine relish—putting out her soft white pad of a tongue, licking it deliberately from his hand, savouring it tranquilly, and crunching the bigger grains with ruminative enjoyment between her teeth. So soon consoled! They were companions in misery no longer. "I 'm afraid ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland

... later the Candidate was introducing me to a roomful of heavy looking Committee men. Committee men in politics, I notice, have always a heavy bovine look. They are generally in a sort of daze, or doped from ...
— The Hohenzollerns in America - With the Bolsheviks in Berlin and other impossibilities • Stephen Leacock

... by a half-worn and almost imperceptible path leading through the long rough grass, and, turning round a half- demolished shrine, which exhibited the remains of Apis, the bovine deity, he came immediately in front of the philosopher, Agelastes, who, sitting among the ruins, reposed his ...
— Waverley Volume XII • Sir Walter Scott

... forth a torrent of sarcastic contempt on the young clod-hoppers, who, having just come from herding their fathers' cows, could express their feelings in no more suitable language than that of the bovine animals which had been their principal and fit associates. As he sat down, his eyes rested with withering scorn upon Alec Forbes, who instantly started to his feet amidst a confusion of plaudits and hisses, but, finding it absolutely impossible ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald

... his feet from side to side and tapping his chin nervously with the long parchment roll which he held in his hand. The Abbot, from his point of vantage, looked down on the two long lines of faces, placid and sun-browned for the most part, with the large bovine eyes and unlined features which told of their easy, unchanging existence. Then he turned his eager fiery gaze upon the pale-faced ...
— The White Company • Arthur Conan Doyle

... Jason, even the bovine William, who was reputed the stupidest man in the dale, noticed the change in her, noticed the touch of colour that was so quick to mount to the ivory cheek, the novel brightness and tenderness in the deep grey eyes, the new note, the low, sweet tone of happiness ...
— At Love's Cost • Charles Garvice

... affectionate manner, and the next moment savagely gore her. Hate and cruelty for the most part rule in the animal world. A few of the higher animals are monogamous, but by far the greater number of species are polygamous or promiscuous. There is no mating or pairing in the great bovine tribe, and none among the rodents that I know of, or among the bear family, or the cat family, or among the seals. When we come to the birds, we find mating, and occasional pairing for life, as with the ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs

... he is dead. The pang's not there, Nor in the City's many-coloured bloom Of swift black-lettered posters, which the throng Passes with bovine stare, To say He is dead and Is it going to rain? Or hum stray snatches of a rag-time song. Nor is it in that falsest shibboleth (Which orators toss to the dumb scorn of death) That all the world stands weeping at his tomb. London is dining, dancing, ...
— The Lord of Misrule - And Other Poems • Alfred Noyes

... indecision they recognized an enemy. With a startled rush the herd drove through the meadow and poured across the unfenced road up to the hill pasture which they had left, whose scanty grasses had doubtless turned slow bovine thoughts to the coolness of the meadow grass, and the pleasure of standing ruminant knee-deep in the river, with wavy tail nicking the flies in ...
— The Lilac Sunbonnet • S.R. Crockett

... alphabet. When these men are men of family, and one expects to find their wives sitting with clinched hands and set teeth, simply enduring life and praying for death, one is often surprised to see that they are generally stout women, who wear many diamonds and a bovine expression in their eyes. Evidently there is no nervous tension in their house, and the dense man is quite capable of comprehending the a b c of human nature and of keeping his family ...
— From a Girl's Point of View • Lilian Bell

... with a slow bovine gaze, without giving her any answer, for some seconds. Then he turned away and walked towards the door of the hovel, but it was not till he got there that he stood still, and, turning his shoulder half-round towards ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot

... glass of vodka as his indulgence for Sundays and feast days only. Marrying early he is astonishingly fecund. Transfer him to town life and he soon shows a weakening in physical fibre. The streets sap away his field-bred health. A more elaborate diet attacks the soundness of his almost bovine digestion. There is no greater contrast between the Bulgarian peasant on the land, physically the healthiest type one could imagine, and the Bulgarian town resident, who has not yet learned to adapt himself to the conditions of ...
— Bulgaria • Frank Fox

... and "Bovine continuation," meaning cow's tail, are more amusing than offensive, but they illustrate the theory of ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post

... was registered as her master, albeit, under a gentlemen's agreement, with Scraggs he was not to claim the title of captain and was known to the world as the Maggie's first mate, second mate, third mate, quartermaster, purser, and freight clerk. One Neils Halvorsen, a solemn Swede with a placid, bovine disposition, constituted the fo'castle hands, while Bart McGuffey, a wastrel of the Gibney type but slower-witted, reigned supreme in the engine room. Also his case resembled that of Mr. Gibney in that McGuffey's job on the Maggie was the first he had had in six months ...
— Captain Scraggs - or, The Green-Pea Pirates • Peter B. Kyne

... "living-out girl" could not err in taking it in. I was willing to train her in the duties of her station. I set forth, and would have specified what these were, but for a second interruption that was evidently not intentionally disrespectful, and was uttered with the bovine stolidity that never ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland

... venture to guess at the mental operations of that patriarch, I should say that he was growling to himself, "Is that you again, you galloping, spitfiring, two-legged, yelling monsters?" or some such bovine expression. ...
— The Big Otter • R.M. Ballantyne

... He was a lineman for a telegraph company, healthy and strong, used to open-air life and hard work. He had steady employment and good wages. Can't you see the man, content with a good digestion, unailing body, and mild pleasures, and enjoying life with bovine placidity? But pretty Louisa Naveret entered his life. The "abysmal fecundity" was stirred and life clamoured to be created. Peacefulness and content vanished. All the forces of his existence impelled him to seize ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London

... with myself. I was mismanaging this thing in the most idiotic way. Instead of this bovine silence, gay small-talk, the easy eloquence, in fact, of the brisk man of affairs should have been my policy. No wonder Smooth Sam Fisher treated me as a child. My whole bearing was that of ...
— The Little Nugget • P.G. Wodehouse

... impression of the world which he was studying so earnestly,—what a transformation he could have brought upon this light-hearted and joyous scene! The scales had so nearly balanced; at the bottom of his heart he was conscious of a certain faint contempt for the almost bovine self-satisfaction of a nation without eyes. Literature and painting, art in all its far-flung branches, even science, were suffering in these days from a general and paralysing inertia. Life which demanded no sacrifice of anybody was destructive of everything in the nature of aspiration. ...
— The Great Prince Shan • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... of food. But its fibers were tough. It was composed of stringy filaments saturated with water, like the berries, and devoid of nourishment. He threw off his pack and went into the rush-grass on hands and knees, crunching and munching, like some bovine creature. ...
— Love of Life - and Other Stories • Jack London

... bovine Hodges went his way. Events supplied him with an excitement which lasted him for life; and the younger Hodges who has succeeded to his father's cows and remembrances, will not willingly let die the story of his progenitor's ...
— An Old Meerschaum - From Coals Of Fire And Other Stories, Volume II. (of III.) • David Christie Murray

... since thought of that sublime culinary conception of Blas the barbarian. There must have been a spark of wild Oriental genius in his bovine brains. ...
— The Purple Land • W. H. Hudson

... of age. Of his personal appearance at this time we have no description. The portrait of him prefixed to the original edition of his works belongs to a much later moment. Whether or not the bovine features in Marshall's engraving are a libel on the poet, it is to be regretted that oblivion has not laid its erasing finger on that singularly unpleasant counterfeit presentment. It is interesting to note that this same Marshall engraved ...
— Ponkapog Papers • Thomas Bailey Aldrich

... day. And this quiet dreariness had lasted for months past, and seemed likely to last as far into the future that young Ellington faced his prospect with a sort of pained confusion of mind, and began by slow degrees to understand the bovine apathy of the ploughmen. Old Mr. Ellington was a magnate who would have been commended by Mr. John Ruskin. The fashions of other country people did not influence him to imitation, and he steadfastly performed that feat of "living on the land" ...
— The Romance of the Coast • James Runciman

... commonly have a far keener aesthetic sense than men. Beauty is more important to them; they give more thought to it; they crave more of it in their immediate surroundings. The average man, at least in England and America, takes a sort of bovine pride in his anaesthesia to the arts; he can think of them only as sources of tawdry and somewhat discreditable amusement; one seldom hears of him showing half the enthusiasm for any beautiful thing that his wife displays in the presence, ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken

... neighbour's cattle, that he may thereby have enough carrion to eat. For the carcases of the dead cattle of the village are the perquisite of the Pariah; and it is upon finding such that he enjoys his only feasts of plenty. But to the ordinary Hindu all bovine kind are divine, and the flesh of the same ...
— India, Its Life and Thought • John P. Jones

... as the forenoon had been, but the party found little to interest them. The next day the tourists made an excursion up the Yang-tsze-Chiang, and enjoyed it very much. They saw a little of the farming operations, as a man ploughing with a buffalo, which looked more like a deer than a bovine; others carrying bundles of grain, one at each end of a pole on their shoulders; another threshing by beating a bunch of the stalks on a frame like a ladder or clothes-horse; but what pleased them most were the fishermen. One had a net several feet square, suspended at the end of a pole. ...
— Four Young Explorers - Sight-Seeing in the Tropics • Oliver Optic

... suggested in the next pair by a thick-clustered group of peasants with hands outstretched where a thin column of smoke rises straight. Autumn skies and foliage tell of chill in the air. The colors burn in dying leaves, in the sky, in fruit and grapes. A man is bringing a burden of fagots. Men of bovine anatomy crouch before the fire, their backs arched, their cheeks bulging, as they blow it into flame. These folk are all primitive, candid in their animalism, Samsons in limb and muscle. Brangwyn's mastery of anatomy is notable, ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber

... It had but the stump of a tail, and foreseeing that there might be a requisition by the owner, who passed for a Union sympathizer, they disguised the creature by attaching a long switch from a dead bovine. Sure enough the man came to headquarters, and from his patriotic plea of having lost much by adhering to the old cause, his demand was accorded. If he could find his lost animal, he was entitled to it and the offenders would be punished. It had not been obtained by the regular forage, that ...
— The Lincoln Story Book • Henry L. Williams

... bovine, their outlook crude and rare; They abandon vital matters to be tickled with a straw; But the straw that they were tickled with—the chaff that they were fed with— They convert into a weaver's beam to ...
— Actions and Reactions • Rudyard Kipling

... bad sanitation on a farm a mile away may cause sickness in his own family. American farmers have been educated on the nature and spread of disease by their experience with animal diseases, such as bovine tuberculosis, hog cholera, and Texas fever. If they can be interested to utilize this knowledge in the care of the health of their own families, and if they will provide health facilities for their own families equal to those which they ...
— The Farmer and His Community • Dwight Sanderson

... figure resolved itself into that of a middle-aged man of the laboring class, slow, heavy, and obese. In his rather bovine countenance hardly any spark of intelligence shone. He did not appear to have seen the others as he approached, but evinced neither surprise nor interest ...
— The Pit Prop Syndicate • Freeman Wills Crofts

... certain extent, is as beneficial to some plants as to animals; and every intelligent farmer knows that if salt be withheld from the bovine genus for any considerable length of time, the general health droops and parasites are sure to abound. The object of nature in bringing into existence the large family of mildews, each member of which is a perfect plant in its way, and as capable of performing its functions as the oak ...
— The $100 Prize Essay on the Cultivation of the Potato; and How to Cook the Potato • D. H. Compton and Pierre Blot

... mouth with grass. For more than thirty-six hours, since the night when they had supped on horseflesh and he had contracted a terrible dysentery in consequence, he had been without food, for he was so little able to look out for himself that, notwithstanding his bovine strength, whenever he joined the others in a marauding raid he never got his share of the booty. He would have been willing to give his blood for a pound ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola

... had sufficient perception to commend Las Casas for the zeal with which he pestered him day and night, remarking on one occasion with a dull smile: Commendamus in Domino, domine Bartholomeo, vestram diligentiam. Two such ill-assorted characters as this bovine dean and the fiery Las Casas only succeeded in tormenting one another to no purpose, though, as the latter observes, in this case "it did not kill the ...
— Bartholomew de Las Casas; his life, apostolate, and writings • Francis Augustus MacNutt

... Bull" then been written, and had Dr. Mangan been acquainted with it (which seems unlikely) he might have again proved his culture by remembering the injunction to pity "this fallen chief," as he saw the impotent wrath in Father Tim's bovine countenance. ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross

... Meagher's message; that is the purport of all his Polish Majesty's Eleven Letters to Friedrich, which precede or follow,— reiterating with a certain bovine obstinacy, insensible to time or change, That such is Polish Majesty's fixed notion: "Strict neutrality, friendship even; and leave me unmolested here." [In OEuvres de Frederic, iv. 235-260 ("29th August-10th September-18th September," 1756), are collected ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XVII. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—The Seven-Years War: First Campaign—1756-1757. • Thomas Carlyle

... to write a line to W. F. with my own hand, which, as you will gather, was not very badly wounded; it was simply this third finger that was split and in splints; and next morning the doctor packed me off on a bovine beast that would have done for an ambulance. Half the team came up to see me start; the rest were rather sick with me for not stopping to see the match out, as if I could help them to win by watching them. They little knew ...
— The Amateur Cracksman • E. W. Hornung

... to derive some comfort and amusement from the thought of certain operations of mine that Mr. Lawler had not discovered, that would have been matters of peculiar interest to his innocent public: certain extra-legal operations at the time when the Bovine corporation was being formed, for instance. And how they would have licked their chops had they learned of that manoeuvre by which I had managed to have one of Mr. Scherer's subsidiary companies ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... forming on some part of the small intestine from the portion of the bowel becoming twisted on itself, or from one part of the bowel slipping into another, which is termed invagination. This form of enteritis occurs occasionally in animals of the bovine species. ...
— Special Report on Diseases of Cattle • U.S. Department of Agriculture

... the Gaur have more of the form of the deer than any other of the bovine genus. This is particularly observable in the acuteness of the angle formed by the tibia and tarsus, and in the slenderness of the lower part of the legs. They give the idea, however, of great strength ...
— Delineations of the Ox Tribe • George Vasey

... passing train. Five races met upon that railroad platform, and together illustrated the history of the country. First, in respect to time, was the poor Indian, slovenly, painted and degraded, yet characterized by a kind of bovine melancholy on the faces of the men, and a trace of animal beauty in the forms of the young squaws. Teasing and jesting with the latter were the negro porters of the train, who, though their ancestors were as little civilized as those of the Indians, have risen to a level only ...
— John L. Stoddard's Lectures, Vol. 10 (of 10) - Southern California; Grand Canon of the Colorado River; Yellowstone National Park • John L. Stoddard

... say how you would like to be the chief of such an army. He is always getting out of line, pressing forward unduly, or hanging back too much, and the loud voice of the keeper makes the woods resound with remonstrance, entreaty, and blame, hurled at his bovine head. After lunch, it is true, the beater wakes up for a little. Then shall you hear WILLIAM exchanging confidences from one end of the line to the other with JARGE, while the startled pheasant rises too soon and goes back, to the despair of the keeper and the guns. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 104, January 21, 1893 • Various

... love, and also friendship, jealousy, courage, self-sacrifice, hate—these cannot be avoided. We must experience them. So do the animals, who gain from their experiences blind, instinctive repulsions or unreasoning likes and distrusts. There are many ways of escaping from such a bovine acquiescence, content to have felt, not desirous to grasp and know and relate. Poetry, which clears and intensifies like a glass held upon a distant snowpeak, is one of ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby

... the convenshun up tew Lenox is a go in tew 'bolish the lawyers an the courts," said a stalwart fellow of bovine countenance, named Laban Jones, one of the ...
— The Duke of Stockbridge • Edward Bellamy

... a very remarkable bovine characteristic. Suppose a herd of cattle, say 2000 steers, to be quietly and peacefully lying down under night-guard. The air is calm and clear. It may be bright moonlight, or it may be quite dark; nothing else ...
— Ranching, Sport and Travel • Thomas Carson

... This doctrine holds that each word yields its meaning only as being generally related to other factors or only as a part of an injunctive sentence, thus the word gam accusative case of go (cow) means that it is intended that something is to be done with the cow or the bovine genus, and it appears only as connected with a specific kind of action, viz. bringing in the sentence gam anaya—bring the cow. Kumarila however thinks that words independently express separate meanings which are subsequently ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta

... of light, wherein he saw that the girl's spirit was not with him. He would have stopped the farmer at once, but he had not the heart to do it, even had he felt in himself strength to attract an intelligent response from that strange, grave, bovine fixity of look, over which the human misery sat as a thing not yet taken into the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... estimation of cows and women, we might infer that in matrimonial arrangements bovine interests were much more regarded than any possible sentimental considerations; and this we find to be the case. Barrow (149) tells ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck

... seemed to be haranguing them. He stopped as we came along and after being introduced went on with: "As I was saying, Miss Sanborn, I regard women as greatly our inferiors; in fact, essentially unemotional,—really bovine. Do you really not agree to that?" I almost choked with surprise and wrath, but managed to retort: "I am sorry to suppose your mother was a cow, but she must have been to raise a calf like you." And I walked away to the tune of great applause. It seems someone ...
— Memories and Anecdotes • Kate Sanborn

... chicken-houses had for years been threatening to collapse unless supplied with some stimulant; so numerous false-works had been erected, outside and in, to retain them within their confines. The harness, which had originally been made of leather, betrayed very little trace of this bovine enveloper, but was composed chiefly of baling-rope and wire which had been picked up at random on the ranch as the occasion demanded. The various sections of the wheels of his wagons remained in intimate association ...
— Skookum Chuck Fables - Bits of History, Through the Microscope • Skookum Chuck (pseud for R.D. Cumming)

... regarded it as a busy man regards the intrusion of the housemaid—just a harmless necessary nuisance, and no more. The cattle took the little automatic shells in much the same spirit, but with an addition of wonder—staring at them and snuffing with bovine astonishment. The Kaffir herdsmen first ran yelling in every direction, and then rushed back to dig the shell up, amid inextinguishable laughter. The Hindoo grass-cutter neither ran nor laughed, but awaited destiny with resignation. By the way, there is a Hindoo servant in the 19th ...
— Ladysmith - The Diary of a Siege • H. W. Nevinson

... Prophet's brain began to swim. Sparks seemed to float before his eyes, and amid these sparks, nebulous and fragmentary visions appeared, visions of his beloved grandmother companioned by scorpions and serpents, in close touch with camelopards and bovine monsters, and, in the last stress of terror and dismay, left entirely dependent upon crustaceans for that help and comfort which hitherto her devoted grandson had ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens

... the Vose-Mern offices when he was not out on duty; there was no knowing when he might be able to turn a trick for the good of the concern by being on hand, he told himself, and for one of his bovine nature all waiting around was easy and all ...
— Joan of Arc of the North Woods • Holman Day

... hanging, and betwixt them they bore a formless clay-coloured bundle. He might have been a clod of the earth that he tilled, so passive, so silent, still brown, for death itself could not have taken the burn from his skin, but with patient, bovine eyes looking out heavily from under half-closed lids. He breathed jerkily, but he neither cried out nor groaned. There was something almost brutal and inhuman in his absolute stolidity. He asked no sympathy, for his life had been without it. It was ...
— The Last Galley Impressions and Tales - Impressions and Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle

... repulsive speedily became natural and ordinary to me. I suppose everything in existence takes its colour from the average hue of our surroundings. Montgomery and Moreau were too peculiar and individual to keep my general impressions of humanity well defined. I would see one of the clumsy bovine-creatures who worked the launch treading heavily through the undergrowth, and find myself asking, trying hard to recall, how he differed from some really human yokel trudging home from his mechanical labours; or I would meet the Fox-bear woman's vulpine, shifty face, strangely human in ...
— The Island of Doctor Moreau • H. G. Wells

... without firing a gun. The brave and sonorous language with which our commander set forth his plan of assault captured our imaginations, and we all longed for the moment when the word of command should permit us to swarm up the sides and over the rail of the old bovine. ...
— The Busted Ex-Texan and Other Stories • W. H. H. Murray

... at the end of July, a bovine-eyed Swiss boy, dripping with rain, appeared at the hygienic hotel, where Lassalle sat brooding with his feet on the mantelpiece, to tell him that a magnificent lady wanted to see him. She was with a party that had taken refuge in a mountain-side ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill

... states of our Union require the passing of the tuberculin test as a requisite to the admission within their borders of cattle intended for breeding purposes. So that, while the problem is still an enormous one, it is now confidently believed that complete eradication of bovine tuberculosis is only a ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson

... a knot of servants were gossiping in frightened whispers with a couple of large, rather bovine country constables who, bareheaded, without their helmets, which they held under their ...
— The Yellow Streak • Williams, Valentine

... granted fiefs after the conquest of the country. Others, however, had for their first ancestor a local deity long worshipped in the family's home country, such as the ancient agrarian god Huang Ti, or the bovine god Shen Nung. Here the "scholars" stepped in, turning the local deities into human beings and "emperors". This suddenly gave the noble family concerned an imperial origin. Finally, order was brought into this collection ...
— A history of China., [3d ed. rev. and enl.] • Wolfram Eberhard

... breeds of either cattle or sheep in this country. The only animals of the bovine race found here when this continent was discovered were the buffalo and the musk ox. The 'natives' are a heterogenous mixture of various breeds, introduced from time to time for different purposes, and allowed to cross and recross, breed in-and-in, and mingle ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... the horns of the Bovine and Ovine Ruminants is, in my view, the result of a different mode of fighting. If we suppose that the fighting was slower and less fierce in the Bovidae, so that the skin over the exostosis was subject to friction ...
— Hormones and Heredity • J. T. Cunningham

... napping; and so, whether they were working in the mine or went hunting—as they did more frequently when the buffalo came northwards later on, led from the southern plains, which form their more common habitat throughout the year, by the rich blue grass, and other prairie delicacies which these bovine beasts loved, that flourished among the valleys of the Black Hills; or whether they were digging in the kitchen garden that Josh and Jasper had improvised at the back of the little hut where they all lived—every ...
— Picked up at Sea - The Gold Miners of Minturne Creek • J.C. Hutcheson

... after group of astonished animals became aware of the attack and joined in the mad flight the thunder on the plains swelled louder and louder, until it became one continuous roar—like the sound of a rushing cataract—a bovine Niagara! At first the buffaloes and the horses seemed well matched, but by degrees the superiority of the latter became obvious, as the savages drew nearer and nearer to the flying mass. Soon a puff or two of smoke, a whistling bullet and a whizzing arrow told that the ...
— The Prairie Chief • R.M. Ballantyne

... texture. There are the bones of the eleven thousand virgins,—the remains of ancient virtue, and loveliness, and faith. Though, if all the stories of travelled anatomists be true, there must have been some virgin heifers among them; for many of them are certainly of bovine, and not ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various

... were driving in a hansom cab westward through Cockspur Street. One, a large individual of a bovine placidity, wore the Queen's uniform, and carried himself with a solid dignity faintly suggestive of a lighthouse. The other, a narrower man, with a keen, fair face and eyes that had an habitual smile, wore another uniform—that of society. He was well dressed, and, what is rarer ...
— Roden's Corner • Henry Seton Merriman

... glory and excitement. As it was, the dulness and monotony of the jingling of the cow-bell made even his stupid childish mind dismal. All the pleasant exhilaration of youth seemed to have deserted the boy, and life to him became as inane and bovine as to the original ringer of that bell grazing all the season in her own shadow ...
— Pembroke - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

... ribbon round its neck and gave it a saucer of milk. According to them, a course of consistent kindness to Nero would have turned him into something only faintly represented by Alfred the Great. In fact, the policy recommended by this school for dealing with the bovine stupidity and bovine fury of this world is accurately summed up in the celebrated verse of ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton

... strapping young fellows, clad in the best blue cloth to be got in Stornoway, but elderly men, gray, wrinkled, weather-beaten and hard of face, who sat stolidly in the boat and listened with a sort of bovine gaze to the old hunchback's wicked stories and jokes. John was in a mischievous mood, but Lavender, in a confidential whisper, informed Sheila that her father would speedily be avenged on ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - April, 1873, Vol. XI, No. 25. • Various

... the bed- rock of society, where the family merely, and not the community, is all- important. The average Oriental cannot be brought to look beyond his clan. His life, too, is more complete and self-sufficing, and less sordid and low- thoughted than you might imagine. It is bovine and slow in some respects, but it is never empty. You and I are inclined to put the cart before the horse, and to forget that it is the man that is elemental, not the book. 'The corn and the cattle are all my care, And the rest is the will ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling

... he replied, "perhaps after all it is better as I have ordered it. For its little hour the picture should reign with its sovereignty unquestioned, while if you were near by—" he broke off meaningly, and Miss Long rewarded his compliment with a bovine glance of rapture, while Miss Heatherton looked modestly down at the teapot. Even to an unaesthetic person the arrangement seemed very good indeed, but rather for the more practical reason that the proximity of food and drink would very likely have distracted the ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble

... to correct him by remarking: "My son, you should say 'horsey.' You would thereby avoid confounding the noble animals before you with the no less useful, but undeniably less attractive—in an aesthetic point of view—animals which belong to the bovine race." ...
— Punchinello, Vol. II., No. 35, November 26, 1870 • Various

... woven by the Dernburgs, Bernstorffs and Von Papens, accredited creatures of the Kaiser, who with Machiavellian smiles had professed friendship for those whom their hands itched to slay and strangle. Gradually the camouflage of bovine geniality was lifted from the face of Germany and the dripping fangs of the Blonde Beast were displayed—the Minotaur countenance of one glutted with human flesh, weary with rape and rapine, but still tragically insatiable and ...
— Out To Win - The Story of America in France • Coningsby Dawson

... rights of property. If not descended from the celebrated Grace O'Malley, Queen of Connaught, she has at least equally autocratic ideas with that celebrated ruler of the West. For years past Miss Gardiner has been famous as a raiser of stock, equine and bovine, but unfortunately she has been most frequently before the public as the strong assertor of territorial rights. She dwells far beyond Killala, near the village of Kilcun, at a house called Farmhill. From Westport to Farmhill the country is as picturesque as ...
— Disturbed Ireland - Being the Letters Written During the Winter of 1880-81. • Bernard H. Becker

... this: Keep the mind active. There's nothing that will make a stolid, bovine face like a brain that isn't made to get up and hustle. Don't sit around and read lovey-dovey novels or spend your time chatting with that stupid woman next door. Don't forget that life is short and there's not a moment ...
— The Woman Beautiful - or, The Art of Beauty Culture • Helen Follett Stevans

... rapturous vision, Oh, purple, impalpable Cow, Do you browse in a Dream Field Elysian, Are you purpling pleasantly now? By the side of wan waves do you languish? Or in the lithe lush of the grove? While vainly I search in my anguish, O Bovine of mauve! ...
— The Re-echo Club • Carolyn Wells

... The sight of a cow placidly chewing her cud in a meadow, the patient creature standing knee-deep amid the buttercups, was a picture they all admired, Mollie carried a little camera, and insisted on snapping the bovine, though the other girls urged her to save some films with which to take their ...
— The Outdoor Girls of Deepdale • Laura Lee Hope

... which it finally defeats its bovine foes. Now, if you have watched the progress of a particular shrub, you will see that it is no longer a simple pyramid or cone, but that out of its apex there rises a sprig or two, growing more lustily perchance than an orchard-tree, since the plant now devotes the whole of its repressed ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 61, November, 1862 • Various

... Thirst Bloat, Easement Bowel Trouble Bloody Milk Barren Heifers Blind Teat Bovine Rheumatism Bleeding for Blackleg Chronic Indigestion Castration of Colt Chronic Cough Cowpox Calf Dysentery Cleft Hoof Cocked Ankles Cleanse Cows Caked Bag Cow Chewing Bones Depraved Appetite Dentist Needed Dehorning Forage Poisoning Fungus Poisoning Fly Repellants ...
— One Thousand Questions in California Agriculture Answered • E.J. Wickson

... hearing men talk about their little places, but always felt a temperamental exile from their dahlias and gladioli and wistaria. I knew what would happen to me if I went again to the country to live, for I judged by the former adventure. Work would stop; all mental activity would sink into a bovine rumination. ...
— Child and Country - A Book of the Younger Generation • Will Levington Comfort

... sound. A glorious bull-fight was taking place when we got within shooting-distance, the cows and calves forming a noisy circle about the combatants, each shaggy brown brute bawling with all the strength of bovine lungs; in that pandemonium of bellowing and trampling I doubt if the report of Mac's carbine could have been heard two hundred yards away. The shot served to break up the fight and scatter the herd, however, and we returned to the cottonwoods with the hind-quarter ...
— Raw Gold - A Novel • Bertrand W. Sinclair

... up an almost forgotten phase of bovine psychology. The order in which the cows drank as well as that in which they entered the stable was carefully determined and rigidly observed. There was always one old dowager who took precedence, all the others gave way before her. Then came ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland

... Again a bugle-call, and the sliding doors leading from the corral are opened, and a bull, bounding forward therefrom, stops short a moment and eyes the assembled multitude and the men on horseback with wrathful yet inquiring eye. A moment only. Sniffing the air and lashing his tail, the noble bovine rushes forward and engages the picadores; the little pennants of the national colours, which, attached to a barbed point, have been jabbed into his back by an unseen hand as he passed the barrier, fluttering in the wind created ...
— Mexico • Charles Reginald Enock

... pay my respects to numerous specimens of the bovine race, all more or less prostrate under the burden of superabundant flesh, all seeming to cry aloud for the treatment of some ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon

... six berths placed across and above each other like the shelves of the reed manchons we build for our silk-worms at home. I wouldn't sleep in one of them, billah! even though they bribe me. This bovine fragrance, the sight of these fine horses, the rioting of the wind above us, should make us forget the brutality of the stewards. Indeed, I am as content, as comfortable here, as are their Excellencies in what is called the Salon. Surely, ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani

... Lebuffle was serving soup, aided by a tired-looking servant. The name under which Sillery had designated the proprietor of the table d'hote might have been a nickname, for this stout person in his shirt-sleeves recommended himself to one's attentions by his bovine face and his gloomy, wandering eyes. To Amedee's amazement, Pere Lebuffle called the greater part of his clients "thou," and as soon as the newcomers were seated at table, Amedee asked Sillery, in a low voice, the cause of ...
— A Romance of Youth, Complete • Francois Coppee

... encamped both in the Avenue de la Grande Armee and on the Champ de Mars. Field-guns and caissons filled the Tuileries garden, whilst in the grounds of the Luxembourg Palace one again found cattle and sheep; yet other members of the bovine and ovine species being installed, singularly enough, almost cheek by jowl with the hungry wild beasts of the Jardin des Plantes, whose mouths fairly watered at the sight of their natural prey. If you followed the quays of the Seine you there found sightseers ...
— My Days of Adventure - The Fall of France, 1870-71 • Ernest Alfred Vizetelly

... a Central Office man, and had been long enough at Headquarters to lose the heavy bovine set of the man who pounds the pavement. A strapping big fellow, with graying hair and a pair of round bullet eyes that searched you with needle points, his very appearance was sufficient corroboration of all the thrilling stories the newspapers ...
— Officer 666 • Barton W. Currie

... unsuspecting pig. Our soldiers have rendered animal life almost extinct in this part of the Old Dominion. Indeed, wherever the army goes, there can be heard on every side the piercing wail of expiring pork, the plaintive lowing of a stricken bovine, or suppressed ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol IV, Issue VI, December 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various

... the near sea-breath. Thick somehow to the imagination as some full-bodied sweetness of syrup is thick to the palate the atmosphere of that region—thick with the sense of history and the very taste of time; as if the haunt and home (which indeed it is) of some great fair bovine aristocracy attended and guarded by halberdiers in the form of the mounted and long-lanced herdsmen, admirably congruous with the whole picture at every point, and never more so than in their manner of gaily taking up, as with bell-voices of golden ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James

... few words appropriate to the occasion of starting up, he flung out his bullwhip in a flourish of aerial penmanship and drove home the aforesaid remarks with a startling report. Again the bovine procession got under way. ...
— The Wrong Woman • Charles D. Stewart

... however, was that of marriage to an heiress, one of those very material and bovine daughters of the new rich in the West end, and to this end he was bending all his artistic thought, writing, dressing, dreaming the thing he wished. I myself had a marked tendency in this direction, although from another point ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser

... population of the Archipelago even approximately. Probably, it did not then exceed from two to three hundred souls, mostly English, with some Indians, Portuguese, Spaniards, Gauche from the Argentine Pampas, and natives from Tier Del Fuel. On the other hand, the representatives of the ovine and bovine races were to be counted by tens of thousands. More than five hundred thousand sheep yield over four hundred thousand dollars' worth of wool yearly. There are also horned cattle bred on the islands; these seem to have increased in size, while the other quadrupeds, for instance, horses, ...
— An Antarctic Mystery • Jules Verne

... a nail and as he was when he turned himself loose for a happy day in the country. In the stable he was as mild as milk. I could have almost imagined him purring like a cat. He chewed the cud and made homely sloppy noises with his tongue, and regarded me with a calm, bovine gaze, which was as gentle as that of any pet cow's. I could have fallen asleep beside him. It is reported that my predecessor Jack, on one occasion, came home much the worse for liquor and was found reclining on El Toro. There was not a soul on the ranch who dared ...
— A Tramp's Notebook • Morley Roberts

... back to town, he marvelled that he should ever have desired this clod of a woman; but he was grateful to her for the bovine calm with which she accepted things. He would visit her once in a while. He felt pretty sure that he could count on her ...
— The Blood of the Conquerors • Harvey Fergusson

... of his origin, Pavonius Nasor never ran the risk of telling it. He kept his sinecure by mastering his tongue, preserving almost bovine speechlessness. When he and Commodus met face to face he never seemed to see the joke of the resemblance, never laughed at Commodus' obscenely vivid jibes at his expense, nor once complained of his anomalous position. He appeared to be a man of no ambition other than to get through life as easily ...
— Caesar Dies • Talbot Mundy

... were a moon-faced Bengali babu, a dark Italian with flashing eyes and teeth, and a stout person of bovine Teutonic cast—the type that is sage, shrewd, easy-going when unopposed, but capable under provocation of exhibiting the ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance

... the serious business of his life. And how picturesque the hunting scenes; the greyhound, like the mare, of purest blood; the falcon cast at francolin and coney; the gazelle standing at gaze; the desert ass scudding over the ground-waves; the wild cows or bovine antelopes browsing with their calves and the ostrich-chickens flocking round the parent bird! The Musamarah or night-talk round the camp-fire was enlivened by the lute-girl and the glee-man, whom the austere Prophet described as "roving distraught in every vale" and whose motto in Horatian ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton

... through, and each time, as they passed him, Horrocks noticed that their pace was decreased, until by the sixth time they passed their gait had become a simple mouche, and they leisurely nipped up the grass as they went, with bovine unconcern. It was a masterly display of how cattle can be handled, and Horrocks forgot for a while his other troubles in ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum

... Baron by Napoleon I, and was a Senator under Napoleon III. "With his vast bulk, his bovine face, his elephantine movements, he boasted a delightful rascality; he sold himself majestically, and committed the greatest infamies in the name of duty ...
— A Zola Dictionary • J. G. Patterson

... the Bovine Species in General. An entirely new translation of the last edition of this popular and instructive book. By Thos. J. Hand, Secretary of the American Jersey Cattle Club. With over 100 Illustrations, especially engraved for this work. ...
— Mushrooms: how to grow them - a practical treatise on mushroom culture for profit and pleasure • William Falconer

... corrals from where she stood. She could hear the bellowing of the restless cattle as they pushed and horned each other in their forceful, bovine desire to get out to the succulent grass of their beloved pastures. All the men were astir, preparing for their lawless expedition. The saddle-horses, ready for the trail, were hitched to the corral fences. Through the open ...
— The Twins of Suffering Creek • Ridgwell Cullum

... souls overtaken by demons—hideous blood-red demons, with feet like lions, with faces half human, half bovine, the physiognomy of minotaurs in fury. One is rending a soul asunder. Another demon is forcing souls to reincarnate themselves in bodies of horses, of dogs, of swine. And as they are thus reincarnated they flee away ...
— Glimpses of an Unfamiliar Japan - First Series • Lafcadio Hearn

... forms of the intestines of the human species, of apes and such like. Then, in what way the leonine species differ, and then the bovine, and finally birds; and arrange this description after the ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci

... that neglect of the ancient languages, which is now-a-days on the increase and is doing away with all general education in the humanities—for a mere smattering of Latin and Greek is of no use—we shall come to have men of learning who outside their own subject display an ignorance truly bovine. ...
— The Art of Literature • Arthur Schopenhauer

... was a cattle-dealer, and taught her to handle fearlessly the animals he delighted in. She learned to tell at a glance the finest points of live-stock, and to doctor bovine and equine ailments with the utmost skill. With all this, she became a proficient in Italian and French, and a terse and rapid writer. A few years ago, after her father's death, she traveled in Italy with an invalid sister, having an eye to her pet passion—the horse. While there she met Prince ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various

... Krakatoa took place only a few weeks after Mr. and Mrs. Forbes sailed for home. This widespread destruction seemed to the inhabitants the culmination of a series of calamitous years of drought, wet, blight, bovine pestilence, and fever. It was Mr. Forbes's fortune to be in Java during these bad seasons, which, from combined causes, made it impossible for flowers to perfect themselves and fructify. This circumstance was, however, useful to the naturalist, offering him an opportunity for ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, August, 1885 • Various

... Finally his bovine majesty came lazily over the top of the bank, with a heavy, slow motion; grunting and puffing, as if he were almost too heavy for his legs. When he got to the bottom of the bank and was about to drink, Captain John whispered our agreed signal: ...
— Crossing the Plains, Days of '57 - A Narrative of Early Emigrant Tavel to California by the Ox-team Method • William Audley Maxwell



Words linked to "Bovine" :   brahmin, Bos, dull, genus Bos, kine, ox, cattle, Bos indicus, oxen, cows, wild ox, Bos taurus, brahman, Brahma



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