"Primitive" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... "It's something primitive. You must come over to Paris. If father likes you, he'll take you to one of the weekly lunches of the Anglo-American Press Circle. He always does that when he likes anyone. He's the Treasurer.... Haven't you got any millefeuille cakes?" ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... superficial glance at the written constitution of the Republic showed that its main object was to convert what had been a confederacy into an Incorporation; and that the very essence of its renewed political existence was an organic law laid down by a whole people in their primitive capacity in place of a league banding together a group of independent little corporations. The chief attributes of sovereignty—the rights of war and peace, of coinage, of holding armies and navies, of issuing bills of credit, of foreign relations, of regulating and taxing ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... has come into use in small, outboard-powered commercial fishing skiffs, but, unfortunately, these boats usually are modeled after the primitive flatiron skiff ...
— The Migrations of an American Boat Type • Howard I. Chapelle
... used to set traps all the Fall and Winter, and we, with the natural tendency of boys to imitate whatever is wild and primitive, used to set traps also. To tell the truth, however, the hares appeared to have a way of going into the negroes' traps, rather than into ours, and the former ...
— The Long Hillside - A Christmas Hare-Hunt In Old Virginia - 1908 • Thomas Nelson Page
... For it is a principle of universal law[o], that the natural-born subject of one prince cannot by any act of his own, no, not by swearing allegiance to another, put off or discharge his natural allegiance to the former: for this natural allegiance was intrinsic, and primitive, and antecedent to the other; and cannot be devested without the concurrent act of that prince to whom it was first due. Indeed the natural-born subject of one prince, to whom he owes allegiance, may be entangled by ...
— Commentaries on the Laws of England - Book the First • William Blackstone
... mixed up in. The side of it that impresses me, however, is the lapse of time as measured in conditions and institutions. That was barbarism; and it was Iowa! And it was in my lifetime. It was in a region now as completely developed as England, and it goes back to things as raw and primitive as King Arthur's time. I wonder if his knights were not in the main, pretty shabby rascals, as bad as Dick McGill—or Cow Vandemark? But Gertrude has not yet heard all ...
— Vandemark's Folly • Herbert Quick
... the spokesman of the party. It was organised plundering, and everybody winked at it. After they had gone I sat long and reflected. This was the retribution and the vengeance. We were all tarred with the same brush; we were returning to primitive methods. Yet, what could be done—what steps could be taken? It was rather a hopeless tangle, and once more I gave ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... geological features of the country. The sand-stone of which the first of the barrier ranges is composed, terminates a little beyond Mount York, and at Cox's River is succeeded by grey granite. The secondary ranges to the N.W. of Bathurst, are wholly of that primitive rock; for although there are partial changes of strata between Bathurst and Moulong Plains, granite is undoubtedly the rock upon which the whole are based: but at Moulong Plains, a military station intermediate between Bathurst and Wellington Valley, limestone ...
— Two Expeditions into the Interior of Southern Australia, Complete • Charles Sturt
... commandment, my dear, the eighth commandment, and other primitive axioms: suum cuique, and such odd sayings: 'Him as keeps what isn't hisn, soon or late shall go to prison,' with similar apothegms. Total: let us keep the British merchant and the Newgate thief as distinct as the times ...
— Love Me Little, Love Me Long • Charles Reade
... individuals, cannot now be maintained; since from the discovery of America, Europeans, Africans, and Indians have inhabited all regions of this vast continent, without undergoing the slightest characteristic change from the descendants of the original stock, who have remained in their primitive locations. The Power that induces the existence of plants and lower animals indigenous to the different sections of the earth, seems also to induce the existence of a race of men peculiar to the regions in ...
— A Ramble of Six Thousand Miles through the United States of America • S. A. Ferrall
... devise for future teams. Even your failure would be of infinite use to us." He lifted and dropped a shoulder. "I have no desire to undermine your belief in yourselves but—how are we to know?—perhaps there will be a score of failures before we find the ideal method of quickly bringing these primitive colonies ...
— Adaptation • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... enables these favored ones to bring out the hidden capabilities of things around them; and particularly to give a look of comfort and habitableness to any place which, for however brief a period, may happen to be their home. A wild hut of underbrush, tossed together by wayfarers through the primitive forest, would acquire the home aspect by one night's lodging of such a woman, and would retain it long after her quiet figure had disappeared into the surrounding shade. No less a portion of such homely ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... eminently dangerous to the austerer manners of their Greek visitors. The people, the women, the delicious wine, the balm of the subduing climate served to tempt the senses and relax the mind. Like all the Dorians, when freed from primitive restraint, the higher class, that is, the descendants of the colonists, were in themselves an agreeable, jovial race. They had that strong bias to humour, to jest, to satire, which in their ancestral Megara gave birth to the Grecian comedy, and which lurked even beneath the ...
— Pausanias, the Spartan - The Haunted and the Haunters, An Unfinished Historical Romance • Lord Lytton
... may be produced also, out of the simplest and most primitive phases of different epochs of culture of one and the same people, stories which answer to the imagination of children, and represent to them the characteristic features of the past of ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz
... made war on Zeus, and hoped to scale heaven by piling mountain on mountain, but were overpowered by the thunderbolts of Zeus, and consigned to a limbo below the lowest depths of Tartarus; they represent the primitive powers of nature, as with seeming reluctance submissive to the world-order established by Zeus, and symbolise the vain efforts of mere strength to subvert the ordinance of heaven; they are not to be confounded with the Giants, nor with their ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... unhealthy looking fowls; another, by the smell and noise that emanated therefrom, housed a number of pigs. Then there was a small grain storehouse. These were the buildings which comprised the ranch. They were just dotted about in the neighborhood of the house, at points most convenient for their primitive construction. ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... national policy in view of some new relation, and by general consent, or by warfare. "The revolution in England in 1688, was occasioned by the abdication of James II., the establishment of the House of Orange on the throne, and the restoring of the constitution to its primitive state." ...
— Government and Rebellion • E. E. Adams
... copper, iron and various ores, as well as lime-rock and grindstone formations. With these, and the knowledge of the Professor, they finally succeeded in making iron and copper tools and implements, built a water wheel, erected a sawmill, and eventually turned out a primitive pistol ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Exploring the Island • Roger Thompson Finlay
... for an hour. There was a mingled sweetness and dignity in his manner which had in it something of the primitive character we poetically ascribe to the pastors of the Church. Lady Vargrave seemed to vie with Evelyn which should love him the most. When he retired to his home, which was not many yards distant from the cottage, Evelyn, pleading a headache, sought her chamber, ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book I • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... moralized. A humor, delicate and genuine as the poetry of the stories, plays through them, and the milde macht of sympathy with everything human transfers to the pleasant pages the foresters and fishermen from their native woods and waters. Canada seems the home of primitive character; the seventeenth century survives there among the habitants, with their steadfast faith, their picturesque superstitions, their old world traditions and their new world customs. It is the land not only of the habitant, but of his oversoul, the good cure, and his overlord ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... under a deep conviction of the evil of it, and see the woful and miserable state that sin hath brought mankind into how they have lost the image of God and the favour of God; they then desire to be restored, and brought back again into their primitive state. You that know the truth of God, see how the work goes on in your hearts, see how the image of God is carrying on upon you. Consider, that the Lord is a holy God, of purer eyes than to behold iniquity with approbation: "There is no peace to the wicked," ...
— A Sermon Preached at the Quaker's Meeting House, in Gracechurch-Street, London, Eighth Month 12th, 1694. • William Penn
... versatility, but indicate that with labor and concentration, so gifted a person might have taken a high place, whether on the library shelf or on the stage. In another point of view, they are less agreeable. Alas, for those primitive souls, who with a perverse constancy may still wish to fancy America a vast New-England of simple manners and superior morals! The society which Mrs. Mowatt describes—whether in 'Evelyn,' which begins with a wedding out of Fleecer's ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... never appeared on any map and were still unnamed. It was fine fun, too, cruising deep and magnificent fjords past lofty towering cliffs, and exploring new channels. And there were the Eskimos and their great wolfish dogs, and their primitive manner of living and dressing. It was ...
— The Story of Grenfell of the Labrador - A Boy's Life of Wilfred T. Grenfell • Dillon Wallace
... of the palace was of the most primitive description, consisting of a very roughly constructed bed, a low table, of equally rough manufacture, and an armchair decorated with rude but very elaborate carvings. There was also a chest—obviously an ...
— With Airship and Submarine - A Tale of Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... the product of a more cultivated age, these characteristics appear more strongly than in the primitive epic. The Homeric poems are still legendary narratives, though narratives unconsciously transmuted by the highest art. Tragedy, on the contrary, has no extraneous elements. It implies a conscious effort of the spirit, made for its own sake, to ...
— An Estimate of the Value and Influence of Works of Fiction in Modern Times • Thomas Hill Green
... clutched convulsively. Daddy Skinner—her Daddy—was standing before her, his blue-gray eyes piercing her very soul from under the long shaggy brows. She bounded toward him, and two creatures of primeval passion met in one long embrace. It was the passion of an aboriginal father for his child, of a primitive girl watching her loved one separate from her through the portals of death. Tess had lifted herself deftly to the bible-back, and lowered her head to the grizzled face, the man's large mouth covering the twitching lips of the girl. The shrouding red hair ...
— Tess of the Storm Country • Grace Miller White
... type the underlying theory of masculine activity is the military. Some outlet for energy was needed, and in war it was found. Even the ordinary necessities of primitive agriculture and of the chase were lacking. The Masai ate neither vegetable, grain, nor wild game. His whole young manhood, then, could be spent in no better occupation than the pursuit of warlike ...
— African Camp Fires • Stewart Edward White
... a great variety of curious facts are adduced, showing the original sagacity and advancement in all worldly knowledge and science, by which the family of Ham was distinguished. The testimony of a southern divine of such high eminence as Dr. Smyth, to the primitive equality in the intellectual faculties of the negro and European races, is not a little remarkable, and speaks well for his candor and breadth of comprehension. The discussion of the origin of the varieties ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 2, July, 1850. • Various
... the heavy glass across its perforated poles, and P the second Nicol.) Exciting the magnet, one half of the image becomes suddenly red, the other half green. Interrupting the current, the two colours fade away, and the primitive puce is restored. ...
— Six Lectures on Light - Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 • John Tyndall
... it, and at Dr. Staines' direction lifted Dick a little, while the bellows, duly cleansed, were gently applied to the aperture in the windpipe, and the action of the lungs delicately aided by this primitive but effectual means. ...
— A Simpleton • Charles Reade
... women who did not forget the motherless, fatherless lassie who had played with their own children. These people made Archie feel their antagonism. They would neither take his money, nor give him their votes, nor lift their bonnets to his greeting. And though such honest, primitive feelings were proper enough, they did not help Sophy. On the contrary, they strengthened Madame's continual assertion that her son's marriage had ruined his public career and political prospects. Still there is nothing more wonderful than the tugs and twists the marriage tie will bear. There ...
— A Knight of the Nets • Amelia E. Barr
... We see them in their squalid, loopholed hovels, amid dirt and ignorance, as degraded a race as any on the fringe of humanity: fierce as the tiger, but less cleanly; as dangerous, not so graceful. Those simple family virtues, which idealists usually ascribe to primitive peoples, are conspicuously absent. Their wives and their womenkind generally, have no position but that of animals. They are freely bought and sold, and are not infrequently bartered for rifles. Truth is unknown among them. A single typical incident displays the standpoint from ...
— The Story of the Malakand Field Force • Sir Winston S. Churchill
... De Thou, i. 539; Crespin, ubi supra, fols. 100, 101.—Historians have noticed the remarkable points of similarity this report presents to that made by the younger Pliny to the Emperor Trajan regarding the primitive Christians. Plinii ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... though not at all leste—and he expatiated on his wife's personal charms in a very quaint way; the good lady is now hard upon sixty and looks it fully; but he evidently is as fond of her as ever. As a curious trait of primitive manners, he told me of her piety and boundless hospitality; how when some friends came late one evening, unexpectedly, and there was only a bit of meat, she killed a sheep and cooked it for them with her own hands. And this is a Cairene ...
— Letters from Egypt • Lucie Duff Gordon
... imperious wishes of man. She, who possesses the bright but fleetly fading gift of beauty, has also that inestimable, indefinable accompaniment of it—modesty. Beauty is too sensitive a gem to be always exposed to the light of admiration; it must be ensheathed in modesty for its rays to retain their primitive lustre; it would perish from exposure to the natural changes of the atmosphere, but it would die much sooner from the incomprehensible, yet positive, effects of moral lassitude. To use a commonplace simile, gentle reader, woman's beauty ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 57, No. 352, February 1845 • Various
... is redolent with the spirit of the Odyssey, that glorious primitive epic, fresh with the dew of the morning of time. It is an unalloyed pleasure to read his recital of the adventures of the wily Odysseus. Howard Pyle's illustrations render the spirit of the Homeric age with ...
— Round-about Rambles in Lands of Fact and Fancy • Frank Richard Stockton
... I had forgotten that I held a rod. When the realization dawned on me that sooner or later I would feel the strike of one of these silver tigers a keen, tingling thrill of excitement quivered over me. The primitive man asserted himself; the instinctive lust to conquer and to kill seized me, and I leaned forward, tense and strained with suspended ...
— Tales of Fishes • Zane Grey
... nine sous for it, and on our giving half a franc and thinking ourselves exceedingly stingy for not giving a whole one, they shouted out "Voila les Anglais, voila la generosite des Anglais," with evident sincerity. I thought to myself that the less we English corrupted the primitive simplicity of these good folks the better; it was really refreshing to find several people protesting about one's generosity for having paid a halfpenny more for a bottle of wine than was expected; at Monetier we asked whether many English came there, ...
— Samuel Butler's Cambridge Pieces • Samuel Butler
... predatory warfare against the ships of all civilized nations, and cut every Christian throat among their prisoners; but (except for deeds of that character, which are the rule and habit of their life, and matter of religion and conscience with them) they are a gentle-natured people, of primitive innocence and integrity. ...
— Our Old Home - A Series of English Sketches • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... spirit. So I traveled lightly, without the heavy baggage of the ponderous-minded scholar, and the reader who embarks with me on the "long cruise" need bring with him only an open mind and a love for the strange and picturesque. He will come back, I hope, as I did, with some glimpses into the primitive customs of the long-forgotten ancestors of the white race, a deeper wonder at the mysteries of the world, and a memory of sun-steeped days on white beaches, of palms and orchids and the childlike savage peoples who live in the bread-fruit ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien
... through the bamboo walls of the house. The giant frogs in the nearby creek awoke, and through the long night croaked their mournful plaint in a weird minor cadence that seemed to the awed Americans to voice to the shimmering moon the countless wrongs of the primitive Indians, who, centuries before, had roamed this marvelous land in happy freedom, until the Spaniard descended like a dark cloud and, with rack and stake, fastened his blighting ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... Declaration of Independence that the legislative powers of the people cannot be annihilated; that when the functionaries to whom they are entrusted become incapable of exercising them, they revert to the people, who have the right to exercise them in their primitive and original capacity." "When, therefore, the government of old Virginia capitulated to the Confederacy," said he, "the loyal people of Western Virginia acted in accordance with the directing principle of the ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... he could thus give his whole time to the gardening in question. There reigned among the younger friends of this couple a legend, almost too venerable for historical criticism, that the marriage itself, the happiest of its class, dated from the far twilight of the age, a primitive period when such things—such things as American girls accepted as "good enough"—had not begun to be;—so that the pleasant pair had been, as to the risk taken on either side, bold and original, honourably marked, for the evening of life, as discoverers of a kind of hymeneal Northwest Passage. Mrs. ...
— The Golden Bowl • Henry James
... the law, with all the dust of the Four Courts in his throat, was sipping his humble beverage of black tea beside four sturdy cattle-dealers from Ballinasloe, who were discussing hot whiskey punch and spoleaion (boiled beef) at the very primitive hour of eight in the morning. Amidst the clank of decanters, the crash of knives and plates, and the jingling of glasses, the laughter and voices of the guests were audibly increasing; and the various modes of "running a buck" (Anglice, substituting a vote), or hunting ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... question: metaphysical doubts fell upon me: and I began to fear that if, in addition to a new end, I were to put a new beginning and a new middle,—I should be accused of building a second English hoax upon the primitive German hoax. In general I have proceeded as one would in transplanting a foreign opera to our stage: where the author tells the story ill—take it out of his hands, and tell it better: retouch his recitative; bring out and develope his situations: ...
— Walladmor: - And Now Freely Translated from the German into English. - In Two Volumes. Vol. II. • Thomas De Quincey
... the Asiatic continent seems to grow weaker and weaker as it travels south, until it breaks hopelessly on Australia. Nor is it hard to find the reason. The savage, coming from islands where a rude cultivation of indigenous fruits, valuable in their nature, had induced primitive land laws, and consequently settled habitations and a defined code of laws concerning tribal rights and boundaries, found himself amongst a nomadic race, trusting to hunting and fishing solely for the means ...
— The History of Australian Exploration from 1788 to 1888 • Ernest Favenc
... its way also to the mansions of the masters, nay, even to the palace of the Caesars. The discoveries lately made on this subject are startling, and constitute a new chapter in the history of imperial Rome. We have been used to consider early Christian history and primitive Christian art as matters of secondary importance, and hardly worthy the attention of the classical student. Thus, none of the four or five hundred volumes on the topography of ancient Rome speaks of the basilicas raised ...
— Pagan and Christian Rome • Rodolfo Lanciani
... parish: and if I could give my son an estate of ten thousand a year, he should have my consent to lay it at her feet. If Mr Grieve had been as solicitious about getting money, as he has been in performing all the duties of a primitive Christian, he would not have hung so long upon his hands.' 'What is her name?' said I. 'Sixteen years ago (answered the vicar) I christened her by the names of Seraphina Melvilia.' 'Ha! what! how! (cried the count eagerly) sure, you said Seraphina Melvilia.' 'I did (said he); Mr Grieve told ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... indomitable force of will" to bear on the introduction of reforms; of how the Venetian Count Capo d'Istria, who was eventually assassinated, produced a local revolt by a well-intentioned attempt to amend the primitive ethics of the Mainote Greeks—a tale which is not without its warning if ever the time comes for dealing with a cognate question amongst the wild tribes of Albania; and of how, amidst the ever-shifting vicissitudes ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... the palaeozoic period to the present time.' But for such a foregone conclusion he would have recognised in this statement the expression of my conviction that the present state of scientific evidence, instead of sanctioning the idea that the descendants of the primitive type or types of Foraminifera can ever rise to any higher grade, justifies the ANTI-DARWINIAN influence, that however widely they diverge from each other and from their originals, THEY STILL REMAIN FORAMINIFERA.")...It will be some ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... takes a huge variety of men and things to make a good world. And ranches and CANONS, veldts and prairies, tropical forests and coral islands, and all that goes to make up the wild life in the face of Nature or among primitive races, far and free from the artificial conditions of an elaborate civilisation, form an element in the world, the loss of which would be bitterly felt by many a man who has never set foot outside his ...
— By Reef and Palm • Louis Becke
... manner Syrt, what ravening Scylla, what vasty Charybdis? Thou who for sweet life saved such meeds art lief of returning! If never willed thy breast with me to mate thee in marriage, Hating the savage law decreed by primitive parent, Still of your competence 'twas within your household to home me, 160 Where I might serve as slave in gladsome service familiar, Laving thy snow-white feet in clearest chrystalline waters Or with its purpling gear thy couch in company strewing. Yet for what cause ...
— The Carmina of Caius Valerius Catullus • Caius Valerius Catullus
... time—the change taking place by a kind of fatality. This explanation must be understood as having at bottom some moral bearing; although it is illustrated by an exactly parallel theory in the domain of physical science, which places the origin of the sun in a primitive streak of mist, formed one knows not how. Subsequently, by a series of moral errors, the world became gradually worse and worse—true of the physical orders as well—until it assumed the dismal aspect it wears to-day. Excellent! The Greeks looked upon the world and the gods ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Studies in Pessimism • Arthur Schopenhauer
... the sickly, yellowish-looking whites could be seen; a third, thick-lipped and bearded with kinky whiskers; and Gogoomy—she had never realized before how handsome Gogoomy was in his mutinous and obstinate wild-animal way. There was a primitive aristocraticness about him that his fellows lacked. The lines of his figure were more rounded than theirs, the skin smooth, well oiled, and free from disease. On his chest, suspended from a single string of porpoise-teeth around his throat, hung a big crescent carved out of opalescent pearl-shell. ...
— Adventure • Jack London
... had regained his health, they began to make a few necessary things, and hunt for the food which was necessary to preserve life. As they grew bolder, however, they fashioned crude implements, like bows and arrows, and primitive articles of utility. ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Adventures on Strange Islands • Roger Thompson Finlay
... the most important religious institution in the life of today. It ranks in influence before the church. It has always held this place. Even among primitive peoples, where family life was an uncertain quantity, the relations of parents, or of one of the parents, to the children afforded the opportunity most frequently used for their instruction in tribal religious ideals and customs. We cannot generalize as to the practices of savage man in regard to ...
— Religious Education in the Family • Henry F. Cope
... quite young indeed, by which I mean that he had not often walked the Road in previous states of life, as for instance that Eastern woman had done who accosted me before the arrival of the Hare. So to speak his crude nature had scarcely outgrown the primitive human condition in which necessity as well as taste make it customary and pleasant to men to kill; that condition through which almost every boy passes on his way to manhood, I suppose by the working of some ...
— The Mahatma and the Hare • H. Rider Haggard
... news; he is bound to tell—the affair is too thrilling! Only he differs from most artists in this—that what most chiefly strikes him is the indefinable humanness of human nature, the large general manner of existing. Of course, he is the result of evolution from the primitive. And you can see primitive novelists to this day transmitting to acquaintances their fragmentary and crude visions of life in the cafe or the club, or on the kerbstone. They belong to the lowest circle of artists; but they are artists; and the form that ...
— The Author's Craft • Arnold Bennett
... the work of faith, indeed, when a man is content to do anything for God, and to say if imprisonment, loss of estate, liberty, life, come, I pass not, it moveth me nothing, so I may finish my course with comfort. Hence it was that the saints of God in those primitive times "took joyfully the spoiling of their goods." Methinks I see the saints there reaching after Christ with the arms of faith, and how, when anything lay in their way, they were content to lose all, to part with all, to have Christ. Therefore saith Saint Paul, "I am ready not to be bound only, ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Vol. 2 (of 10) • Grenville Kleiser
... hydropathy, Pasteur could not have inoculated for hydrophobia without danger of imprisonment, and the great American Medical Reformation, which abolished the lancet and mercurial practice, and which is now represented by seven colleges, would have been strangled at its birth, for its primitive origin was outside of college authority. There are other great ideas, great discoveries, great reforms, not yet strong enough to be embodied in colleges, which medical legislation is designed to suppress, to enforce a ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, May 1887 - Volume 1, Number 4 • Various
... are dragged in primitive fashion to the banks of the stream by elephants and buffaloes, and shipped in rafts. Arrived at Bangkok, they are hauled on rollers inch by inch, by men working with a rude windlass and levers, to the ...
— The English Governess At The Siamese Court • Anna Harriette Leonowens
... ashamed of yourselves!" Phoebe scolded half-heartedly; for she had lived long in the wild, and had seen much that was raw and primitive. "You must take into consideration that Vadnie isn't used to such things. Why, great grief! I don't suppose the child ever SAW a dead man before in her life—unless he was laid out in church with flower-anchors piled knee-deep all over him. And to see one shot right before her very eyes—and ...
— Good Indian • B. M. Bower
... set forth from his cave to kill an animal or two, then repaired to a secluded nook in the jungle, with other primitive men, to discuss the beginnings of politics. Primitive woman in the cave not only dressed his game, but she cooked the animal for food, made clothing of its skin, necklaces and bracelets of its teeth, passementerie of its claws, and needles of its sharper bones. What wonder that she had no time ...
— Threads of Grey and Gold • Myrtle Reed
... was quite as extraordinarily indebted to circumstantial evidence as the prosecution in no way detracted from the character of Lorne's personal triumph; rather, indeed, in the popular view and Rawlins's, enhanced it. There was in it the primitive joy of seeing a ruffian knocked down with his own illegitimate weapons, from the moment the dropped formula was proved to be an old superseded one, and unexpected indication was produced that Ormiston's room, as well as the bank vault, had been entered the night of the ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... adoration of idols and images was also borrowed direct from the heathen; for all such practises were absolutely forbidden by the Mosaic law and had no place in primitive Christianity. ...
— The Last Reformation • F. G. [Frederick George] Smith
... application of religious Principles to the problems of social life. He advocated incessantly two principal reforms—that members of the Society of Friends should separate utterly from the possession of slaves, and that they should return to their primitive simplicity and moderation in the use of worldly things. Like many economists before and after him, he saw in luxury, extravagance and ostentation, the true cause of all poverty and oppression; and a tract of his entitled ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... boys, were willing to admit when they were really baffled. I talked to telepaths who could tell me what I'd had for breakfast on the day I'd entered pre-school classes, and espers who could sense the color of the clothing I wore yesterday. I've a poor color-esper, primitive so to speak. These guys were good, but no matter how good they were, Catherine Lewis had vanished as neatly as ...
— Highways in Hiding • George Oliver Smith
... the very new and the very old, the bad and the good, of that which is passing away and which has passed away long ago, and that which has not yet come. Look a little deeper into him; you will find he has a pretty good primitive system of morality; it is a very primitive one, consisting mainly of loyalty to his friends. Treat him "square," as he says, and fairly, and then you may purr and curb him just as ...
— Parent and Child Vol. III., Child Study and Training • Mosiah Hall
... beds are impregnated with earth, and in places there occur thin layers of potash and magnesian salts. In this area salt quarrying was practised for an unknown period before the time of Akbar, and was continued in a primitive fashion until it came under the control of the British Government with the occupation of the Panjab in 1849. In 1872 systematic mining operations were planned, and the general line of work has been continued ever since, with an annual output of ...
— The Panjab, North-West Frontier Province, and Kashmir • Sir James McCrone Douie
... bewildered. If he had been what the world calls a civilized man, he would have known instantly and would have been capable of weighing, analyzing, and reflecting on his sensations at leisure. But he was not a civilized man; he had to bring to bear on his present situation only simple, primitive, uneducated instincts and impulses. If Ramona had been a maiden of his own people or race, he would have drawn near to her as quickly as iron to the magnet. But now, if he had gone so far as to even think of her in such a way, she would have been, to his view, as far ...
— Ramona • Helen Hunt Jackson
... world of our experience is composed is, in my belief, neither mind nor matter, but something more primitive than either. Both mind and matter seem to be composite, and the stuff of which they are compounded lies in a sense between the two, in a sense above them both, like a common ancestor. As regards matter, I have set forth my reasons for this view on former occasions,* and I shall not now repeat them. ...
— The Analysis of Mind • Bertrand Russell
... the powers of electricity to-day. And in all ages people have been found to regard numbers mystically as a link between God and earth, and a means of solving all physical and metaphysical problems. The Hebrew intellect, primitive as it was, tended particularly to the reverence of the numerical powers. Witness the Bible itself, which emphasizes certain numbers; and witness also the fifth chapter of the Pirke Abot, with its lists ...
— Philo-Judaeus of Alexandria • Norman Bentwich
... mention of which has by this time, it is to be feared, become one of the cuckoo-cries which are heard but not regarded. Rays of crimson, blue, and purple shone upon the twain from the east window behind them, wherein saints and angels vied with each other in primitive surroundings of landscape and sky, and threw upon the pavement at the sitters' feet a softer reproduction of the same translucent hues, amid which the shadows of the two living heads of Knight and Elfride were opaque and prominent blots. Presently the moon ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... of the stellar expanse into areas characterized by specified stars can be traced back to a very remote antiquity. It is believed that the ultimate origin of the constellation figures and names is to be found in the corresponding systems in vogue among the primitive civilizations of the Euphrates valley—the Sumerians, Accadians and Babylonians; that these were carried westward into ancient Greece by the Phoenicians, and to the lands of Asia Minor by the Hittites, and that Hellenic culture in its turn introduced them ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 7, Slice 2 - "Constantine Pavlovich" to "Convention" • Various
... is true enough," said Karloff. "God knows that it is true enough. But it rests with you to save him. Become my wife, and yonder fire shall swallow his dishonor—and mine. Refuse, and I shall expose him. After all, love is a primitive state, and with it we go back to the beginning; before it honor or dishonor is nothing. To-night there is nothing, nothing in the world save my love for you, and the chance that has given me the power to force you to be mine. What a fury and ...
— The Man on the Box • Harold MacGrath
... John of the Cross, at the instance of the Saint, was sent to Avila, with another father of the reformed Carmelites, to be confessor of the nuns of the Incarnation, who then disliked the observance of the primitive rule. ...
— The Life of St. Teresa of Jesus • Teresa of Avila
... of husbandry: the creaking carreta, with its block wheels; the primitive plough of the forking tree-branch, scarcely scoring the soil; the horn-yoked oxen; the goad; the clumsy hoe in the hands of the peon serf: these are all objects that are new and curious to our eyes, and that indicate the lowest order of ...
— The Scalp Hunters • Mayne Reid
... Living and the Dead.—The worship of the spirits of dead ancestors is so common a feature in most primitive religions that it may seem strange even to doubt whether it existed among the Romans, but, although the question is one of extreme difficulty, and the evidence very insufficient, I am inclined to believe that, though ...
— The Religion of Ancient Rome • Cyril Bailey
... than that of roses. In one corner stood the Virgin Mary, newly-painted and gilt; in the opposite one, Saint John the Baptist, whom the imager had made with such patent whites to his eyes, set in a bronzed complexion, that the effect was rather startling. A very small selection of primitive culinary utensils lay on a shelf close to the hearth. Much was not wanted, when the most sumptuous meal to be had was ...
— One Snowy Night - Long ago at Oxford • Emily Sarah Holt
... his way westward, and soon reached the outlying, unpaved, deep-rutted cross streets. He readily found the rector, a kindly, gentle-mannered widower he proved to be, whose sister had come to keep house for him, and never before had either of them lived in a community so utterly primitive, if not uncouth. It was plain to be seen that he was a Southerner, and in the joy of a few minutes' conversation with a young man whose language and manners bespoke the gentleman, Mr. Lambert speedily made known to him that his health ...
— A Wounded Name • Charles King
... men must either have proceeded from some interposition of the Deity; or from a co-operation of certain causes, which have an effect upon the human frame, and have the power of changing it more or less from its primitive appearance, as they happen to be more or less numerous or powerful than those, which acted upon the frame of man in the first seat of his habitation. If from the interposition of the Deity, then we must conclude that he, who ...
— An Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, Particularly the African • Thomas Clarkson
... gesticulations which followed our own gesture of friendliness I seemed to hear and see these wild fancies verified,—verified in a manner I had not supposed it possible to be observed in this age. And yet here were primitive savages apparently, not fifteen hundred miles in a direct course from our own enlightened city of Boston, where, as we honestly believe, we have the cream (some of it, at least) of the world's civilization. Reflect ...
— Left on Labrador - or, The cruise of the Schooner-yacht 'Curlew.' as Recorded by 'Wash.' • Charles Asbury Stephens
... ideal Christian equality, which we have been getting farther away from since the days of the Primitive Church, can prevent this subdivision of society into classes from taking place everywhere,—in the great centres of our republic as much as in old European monarchies. Only there position is more absolutely hereditary,—here it is ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... is guilty of a civil trespass; and I will now prove from the sacred record, that in opposing the civil laws of their country, they violate the laws of God, and consequently are guilty of a moral trespass. The primitive church of Christ was, under all circumstances, and at all times, subordinate to the civil authorities. They never stopped to inquire whether the laws were good or bad, just or unjust; their business was to obey the laws and not to ...
— A Review of Uncle Tom's Cabin - or, An Essay on Slavery • A. Woodward
... hardware works the windows seldom or never open: air is procured in all the rooms by the primitive method of breaking a pane here and a pane there; and the general effect is as unsightly as a human mouth where teeth and holes alternate. The incident therefore was nothing, if it had occurred in any other room; but it was not a thing to pass over in this room, secured by a Bramah lock, the key ...
— Put Yourself in His Place • Charles Reade
... ought to know that mastery is acquired by resolved limitation. And confusion ensues from the theory of Montesquieu and of his school, who, adapting the same term to things unlike, insist that freedom is the primitive condition of the race from which we are sprung.[8] If we are to account mind not matter, ideas not force, the spiritual property that gives dignity, and grace, and intellectual value to history, and its action on the ascending life of man, then we shall not be prone to explain the universal by ...
— A Lecture on the Study of History • Lord Acton
... a conventional young woman," says he. "She made that quite plain. It seems, Torchy, that your—er—that my method was somewhat crude and primitive. In fact, I believe she pointed out that the customs of the Stone Age were obsolete. I was given to understand that she was not to be won in any such manner. Perhaps you can imagine that I was not ...
— Torchy, Private Sec. • Sewell Ford
... plausible (if less scientific) to look on the beard as a penalty for some ancient offence of our race, than to say with Mr. Grant Allen, and perhaps other disciples of Mr. Darwin, that the beard is the survival of a very primitive decoration. According to this view man was originally very hairy. His hair wore off in patches as he acquired the habits of sleeping on his sides and of sitting with his back against a tree, or against the wall of his hut. The hair of dogs is not worn ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... he was treated quite as an invalid, to his great disgust. Then he fairly turned the corner, and things began to change for the better again. Lettice read to him, talked, played chess, found out his tastes in music and in art (tastes in some respects a little primitive, but singularly fine and true, in spite of their want of training), and played his favorite airs for him on the piano—some of Mendelssohn's plaintive Lieder, the quainter and statelier measures of Corelli and Scarlatti, ...
— Name and Fame - A Novel • Adeline Sergeant
... third man, routed his dossier and Sir Harold's order back into the automatic processing system, and returned to the film of primitive dancing girls he had been watching before this matter of decision had arrived at ...
— The Dueling Machine • Benjamin William Bova
... most reprobated crimes." The fact can not be denied, that the mere laborer is now, and always has been, everywhere that barbarism has ceased, enslaved. Among the innovations of modern times, following "the decay of villeinage," has been the creation of a new system of slavery. The primitive and patriarchal, which may also be called the sacred and natural system, in which the laborer is under the personal control of a fellow-being endowed with the sentiments and sympathies of humanity, exists among us. It has been almost everywhere else superseded by the modern artificial ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... cloud. And indeed the fancy is not without a symbolic suggestiveness. This is the land of eternal things; but we tend too much to forget that recurrent things are eternal things. We tend to forget that subtle tones and delicate hues, whether in the hills or the heavens, were to the primitive poets and sages as visible as they are to us; and the strong and simple words in which they describe them do not prove that they did not realise them. When Wordsworth speaks of "the clouds that gather round the setting ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... of a race of persons who lived before the division of labor had been carried to such a pitch of differentiation, and who followed the primitive economic maxim, "Every man his own horse." The best of the lot was Chiron, who to the wisdom and virtues of the horse added the fleetness of man. The scripture story of the head of John the Baptist on a charger shows that pagan myths have ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... to live in the past now instead of in the future?—Rachel, who had been told to be a great deal in the fresh air, passed her time quietly, peacefully, languidly, lying out of doors. They had deemed themselves fortunate in securing in the overcrowded town a somewhat primitive little pavilion belonging to one of the big hotels, of which the charm to Rachel was that it had a shady garden. Rendel, whose time even during the period in which he had had no regular occupation had always been ...
— The Arbiter - A Novel • Lady F. E. E. Bell
... reigned in the room was like the space cleared for a sparring-match. The old combative instinct of the primitive man arises in the most civilized, and makes him delight in a fight. Brady looked amused; Winifred a little apprehensive; Mr. Anstice preserved a dignified neutrality; and Miss Standish fumbled with her cameo brooch, and smoothed the folds of her skirt, as if to make sure that ...
— Flint - His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes • Maud Wilder Goodwin
... speak so loud. I don't jest as I did a little while ago. Look yonder! Agad, if he should hear the lion roar, he'd cudgel him into an ass, and his primitive braying. Don't you remember the story in AEsop's Fables, bully? Agad, there are good morals to be picked out of AEsop's Fables, let me tell you that, and ...
— The Comedies of William Congreve - Volume 1 [of 2] • William Congreve
... of coldness towards me on the part of Her Majesty for having gone so far as I had done. It was not until after the birth of the Duc de Normandie, her third child, in March, 1785, that her friendship resumed its primitive warmth. ...
— The Secret Memoirs of Louis XV./XVI, Complete • Madame du Hausset, an "Unknown English Girl" and the Princess Lamballe
... usual, at the primitive hour of one o'clock; and with Bob Trunnion—about whom I shall have more to say anon—I had turned out under the verandah to enjoy our post-prandial smoke, according to invariable usage. My sister Ada would not permit us the indulgence of that luxury indoors, and no conceivable disturbance of ...
— For Treasure Bound • Harry Collingwood
... everybody. Love and hate, gratitude and envy, hope and fear, pity and jealousy, repentance and sinfulness, and all the similar crude emotions have been sufficient for the construction of most scenarios. The more mature development of the photoplay will certainly overcome this primitive character, as, while such an effort to reduce human life to simple instincts is very convenient for the photoplay, it is not at all necessary. In any case where this tendency prevails it must help greatly to excite ...
— The Photoplay - A Psychological Study • Hugo Muensterberg
... and is still, doubtless, with a few modifications, the hamlet of St. Ignace, fair type of the primitive Lower Canadian settlement, dominated by the church, its twin spires recalling the towers of Notre Dame, its tin roof shining like silver, the abode of contented ignorance and pious conservatism, the home of those who are best described as a patient peasantry earning ...
— Ringfield - A Novel • Susie Frances Harrison
... industrial, and political development of the United States. There is a manifest difference, however, between the history of our civilization and that of Europe, though not in the least affecting the integrity of the law. The people of our nation were not derived directly from a rude and primitive condition, as were those of the Old World. The history of our civilization is, in its origin, coordinate with European civilization in the seventeenth century, after modern intellect had been fairly aroused, and the national organizations had been quite fully developed. The chaos ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3 No 2, February 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... a block of firwood, was turning merrily under a jet of water carefully conducted to it from a neighbouring fall. David went down on hands and knees to examine it. He made some little alteration in the primitive machinery of it, his fingers touching it lightly and neatly, and then, delighted with the success of it, he called ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the degradation of the more considerable part of the species, and the aggrandizement of a few insolent rulers.[**] These doctrines, so agreeable to the populace, and so conformable to the ideas of primitive equality which are engraven in the hearts of all men, were greedily received by the multitude, and scattered the sparks of that sedition which the present tax raised ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part B. - From Henry III. to Richard III. • David Hume
... the subject of Rosanna Spearman. His usual roundabout manner of going to work proved, on this occasion, to be more roundabout than ever. How he managed it is more than I could tell at the time, and more than I can tell now. But this is certain, he began with the Royal Family, the Primitive Methodists, and the price of fish; and he got from that (in his dismal, underground way) to the loss of the Moonstone, the spitefulness of our first house-maid, and the hard behaviour of the women-servants generally towards Rosanna Spearman. Having reached his subject in this fashion, ...
— The Moonstone • Wilkie Collins
... and primitive nations this holds good much less than among civilized people. Yet even among them, the faculties whose possession involves this loss have been ever exercised to repair it by artificial means. In the busy life of to-day how much more is this the case! Overworked ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various
... discussing their domestic differences in Hungarian, and Toby barking in the same uncouth tongue. The joy with which the public greeted each crack on the head administered by Herr Punch's stick showed me how hopeless it was to write literary plays. For the primitive emotions will always be the most captivating. A fight must ever beat the most subtle psychology; and indeed those writers for whom the drama is the art of manufacturing excitement and suspense must find it difficult to compete with a lottery ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... After their primitive life at the Discovery hut the interior space of the home at Cape Evans seemed palatial, and the comfort luxurious. 'It was very good to eat in civilized fashion, to enjoy the first bath for three months, and have contact with clean, dry [Page 277] clothing. Such fleeting ...
— The Voyages of Captain Scott - Retold from 'The Voyage of the "Discovery"' and 'Scott's - Last Expedition' • Charles Turley
... of the law: they are become industrious, exemplary, and useful citizens. The English government should purchase the most northern and barren of those islands; it should send over to us the honest, primitive Hebrideans, settle them here on good lands, as a reward for their virtue and ancient poverty; and replace them with a colony of her wicked sons. The severity of the climate, the inclemency of the seasons, the sterility of the ...
— Letters from an American Farmer • Hector St. John de Crevecoeur
... ago I rode out on Paddy and watched her. There was something Homeric about it, something Sorolla would have jumped at. She seemed so like her oxen. She moved like them, and her eyes were like theirs. She has the same strength and solemnity when she walks. She's so primitive and natural and instinctive in her actions. Yesterday, after dinner, she curled up on a pile of hay at one end of the corral and fell asleep for a few minutes, flat in the strong noonday light. I saw ...
— The Prairie Wife • Arthur Stringer
... became the primitive man. He was filled with those elemental emotions that make a man see in spatters of crimson. Gathering strength from passion out of an exhausted frame, he sprang forward at the tramp. He struck at him with his head, his shoulders, his knees, his manacled wrists, all at once. Not really hurt ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... The primitive instinct of the woman, in this hour of painful victory, would have dearly liked to disavow her own power. The thought of ruling her beloved was odious. Yet as they walked on hand in hand, the modern in Mary prevailed, and she must needs accept the equal rights of a love ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... days the Athenaeum Picture Gallery was a principal centre of attraction to young Boston people and their visitors. Many of us got our first ideas of art, to say nothing of our first lessons in the comparatively innocent flirtations of our city's primitive period, in that agreeable resort of ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... institutions, because such an idea offends a mass of prejudice associated with religious sanctions? They may be right or not, but if they are, it is not their fault. They are actuated by the same motives which were a bar to progress in primitive societies. The existence of people of this mentality, reared in an atmosphere of freedom, side by side with others who are always looking out for new ...
— A History of Freedom of Thought • John Bagnell Bury
... that Washington expired, December 14, 1799. Two days previously he was exposed in the saddle, for several hours, to cold and snow, and contracted acute laryngitis for which he was ineffectually treated in the primitive manner of the period. A short time before ceasing to breathe, he said: "I die hard; but I am not afraid to go. I believed from my first attack that I should not survive it. My breath cannot last long." A little later he murmured: ...
— The Life of George Washington, Vol. 5 (of 5) • John Marshall
... stages in the evolution of love. In vivid and fascinating pictures he unfolds the erotic life of our primitive ancestors, basing his statements on accepted authorities. The sexual impulse in those remote days, unconscious of its nature and far-reaching consequences, was entirely undifferentiated from any other powerful instinct. Every woman of the tribe belonged ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... an indefinable charm about her that defied definition or analysis—a rapt, exquisite look that lifted her up—up to his primitive ideal. ...
— Penny of Top Hill Trail • Belle Kanaris Maniates
... rise and progress of the fine arts in this country, as they present most curious and important specimens of early drawing, painting, and poetry. The old English plate was a square piece of wood, which indeed is not quite obsolete at the present hour. The improvement upon this primitive plate was a circular platter, with a raised edge; but there were also thin, circular, flat plates of beech-wood in use for the dessert or confection, and they were gilt and painted upon one side, and inscribed with pious, or instructive, or amorous mottoes, suited ...
— A Walk from London to Fulham • Thomas Crofton Croker
... has given but a single paragraph to it and others have been equally brief. Defoe has given us a journal of the plague, but it is not written in a true scientific spirit; and Caius, in 1562, gave us a primitive treatise on the sweating sickness. It is due to the translation of Hecker's "Epidemics of the Middle Ages" by Babbington, made possible through the good offices of the Sydenham Society, that a major part of the knowledge on this subject of the English-reading ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... the primitive Church there was a godly discipline, that, at the beginning of Lent, such persons as stood convicted of notorious sin were put to open penance, and punished in this world, that their souls might be saved in the day of the Lord; and that others, ...
— The Book of Common Prayer - and The Scottish Liturgy • Church of England
... of Soscol, claiming to own it by virtue of the grant from the Mexican nation, which has recently (December term, 1861) been declared invalid by the Supreme Court of the United States. His occupancy was the usual one of the country and in accordance with the primitive habits of the people. He possessed the land by herding stock upon it. General Vallejo, as military commandante of his district, consisting of all Alta California lying north of the bay of San Francisco, was necessarily the leading personage of the country. His influence among the ...
— Personal Reminiscences of Early Days in California with Other Sketches; To Which Is Added the Story of His Attempted Assassination by a Former Associate on the Supreme Bench of the State • Stephen Field; George C. Gorham
... romances, we cannot fail to observe how the primitive inventions have been used, again and again, by successive generations of fabulists. The Siren of Ulysses is the prototype of the Siren of Orlando, and the character of Circe reappears in Alcina. The fountains of Love ...
— Bulfinch's Mythology • Thomas Bulfinch
... Lacustrine age, "gran' maman archi-centennaire" of her of the present day. This is how she was. "Large, thick, and short, with a vigorous figure, shaking out coarse and matted hair, the feet bare, the arms bare, the breast half bare and unrestrained under her species of primitive corset. The body is that of a handsome and robust decent human animal, a tanned skin, somewhat hairy. The feet are large and powerful, like the hands, with cutting nails, square and hard. The visage, high in color, with features that are simple and elementary, is lit up by ...
— Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day; Volume 1 • William Walton
... primitive language of the human race, they spoke and wrote in symbols. The hieroglyphic writings of the aborigines of Central America, of the ancient Peruvians, of the Mongolians, and of the ancient Copts and Hebrews all point to the universal use ...
— Second Sight - A study of Natural and Induced Clairvoyance • Sepharial
... ever more putrid and more swollen," D'Annunzio retired to Francovilla-al-Mare, a few miles from his birthplace. There he lives in seclusion, esteemed by the simple-minded, honest, and somewhat fanatical peasantry, to whose quaint and primitive manners his books owe much ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... made than the brooches. The most interesting of all, because simpler and more characteristic, were the flat silver charms, ornamented with a primitive design. ...
— An Explorer's Adventures in Tibet • A. Henry Savage Landor
... could look across fields now green in the freshness of early summer, across the racecourse and park, to where Grey Town climbed irregularly towards St. Mary's Church. There it lay, a town whose streets were only partly made; where sanitation had halted in its most primitive stages; where little attempt had been made to assist the beauties of nature. Yet Grey Town was, in the distance, a pretty spot, embowered in green trees, the blue smoke resting over it, and in the distance ...
— Grey Town - An Australian Story • Gerald Baldwin
... meant. With the other community, the newest and therefore most advanced individual ruled. In this more primitive society, the strongest held sway until a stronger displaced him. The giant called Ling was by no means the most human-seeming creature there, but he was plainly the ruler and plainly meant so to continue. Parr was no coward, but he was no fool. As the six-foot bludgeon whirled upward between ...
— The Devil's Asteroid • Manly Wade Wellman
... their episcopal ordination in England as conferring on them any spiritual authority in a church newly gathered in America. They found rather in the free choice of the brotherhood the sign of a divine call to spiritual functions in the church, and were inducted into office by the primitive form of the ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon
... is greater cohesion, more unity, higher division of functions. But the functions themselves, like those of your priests and judges and soldiers, may be as barbaric and cruel, or as irrational and unintelligent, as any that exist among the most primitive peoples. Advance in civilisation doesn't necessarily involve either advance in real knowledge of one's relations to the universe, or advance in moral goodness and personal culture. Some highly civilised nations of historic times have ...
— The British Barbarians • Grant Allen
... cannot at all explain, I suddenly took off my overcoat, and, drawing aside the screen which ran across the corner of the room at my right hand, forming a primitive sort of wardrobe, I hung it on one of the hooks. I had to feel with my fingers for the hook, because I kept my gaze ...
— The Ghost - A Modern Fantasy • Arnold Bennett
... alien," Gibson said positively. "Their architecture is Terran, and so is their ship. The ship is incredibly primitive, though; those batteries of tubes at ...
— Control Group • Roger Dee
... that he remembered hearing it stated as an old tradition when he was a boy, that Westminster Abbey was built on a spot where once existed a deep morass; and he thought it likely that the lapse of time would reduce the ground on which it now stands to its primitive state of a swamp, without leaving a trace of the Abbey. He added, that his actual observations confirmed the probability of this event. He also repeated to Captain HARDY several times during the last two years of his life: "Should I be killed, HARDY, and my Country ...
— The Death of Lord Nelson • William Beatty
... the guests behaved like a herd of hungry wolves, rushing upon a feast rarely offered to them. On the contrary, the Clan Quhele conducted themselves with that species of courteous reserve and attention to the wants of others which is often found in primitive nations, especially such as are always in arms, because a general observance of the rules of courtesy is necessary to prevent quarrels, bloodshed, and death. The guests took the places assigned them by Torquil of the Oak, who, acting as marischal taeh, ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... a sort of primitive hut in Canadian architecture, and is nothing more than a shed built of logs, the chinks between the round edges of the timbers being filled with mud, moss, and bits of wood; the roof is frequently composed of logs split and hollowed ...
— The Backwoods of Canada • Catharine Parr Traill
... goddess of that island—the genius of that charming clime of fruits, and verdure, and crystal streams, and flowers. The majesty of her beauty was softened, and thus enhanced, by the wonderful simplicity of her attire; the dazzling brilliancy of her charms was subdued by the chaste, the innocent, the primitive aspect with which those fantastically woven flowers invested her. Even the extraordinary luster of her fine dark eyes was moderated by the gaudy yet elegant assemblage of hues formed by those flowers which she wore. Was it not strange ...
— Wagner, the Wehr-Wolf • George W. M. Reynolds
... is not to say that the epic is the oldest form of literary expression, but it is the expression of the oldest literary ideas, for, even when the epic is not at all primitive in form, it deals essentially with elemental moods and ideals. Epical poetry is poetic not because it is metrical and conformative to rhythmical standards,—though it usually is both,—but it is poetry because of the high sweep of its emotional outlook, the bigness of its thought, the untamed passion ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber
... Joseph Milner's Church History, and was nothing short of enamoured of the long extracts from St. Augustine, St. Ambrose, and the other Fathers which I found there. I read them as being the religion of the primitive Christians: but simultaneously with Milner I read Newton on the Prophecies, and in consequence became most firmly convinced that the Pope was the Antichrist predicted by Daniel, St. Paul, and St. John. My imagination was stained by the effects of this doctrine ...
— Apologia Pro Vita Sua • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... accomplished the work enjoined upon her. For in this monastery, as in the first, she established the discipline of the regular life, and indeed, she taught there also, justice, piety, chastity, and other virtues, but especially the guarding of peace and charity; so that, after the example of the primitive church, no one there was rich and none poor, all things were common to all and no one had property. So great was her prudence, moreover, that not only ordinary persons in their necessity, but even kings and princes sought and received counsel of her. ...
— Early Double Monasteries - A Paper read before the Heretics' Society on December 6th, 1914 • Constance Stoney
... their ennui on the long voyage of seventy days, of their amusements and their devotions, for twice daily were prayers read on deck. They sailed into Newport on the 11th of July and the inhabitants of that still primitive spot illuminated their houses as best they could. Then the army settled down at Newport and there it remained for many weary months. Reinforcements never came, partly through mismanagement in France, partly through the vigilance of the British fleet, which was on guard before Brest. The French ...
— Washington and his Comrades in Arms - A Chronicle of the War of Independence • George Wrong
... is a third requisite of production, capital (see page 58). Since the limitation to only two requisites applies solely to a primitive condition of existence, so soon as the element of time enters into production, then a store of capital becomes necessary; that is, so soon as production requires such a term that during the operation the laborer can not at the same time provide ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill
... the Dioscuri, themselves also, in old heroic time, resident in this venerable place: Amyclaei fratres, fraternal leaders of the Lacedaemonian people. Their statues at this date were numerous in Laconia, or the docana, primitive symbols of them, those two upright beams of wood, carried to battle before the two kings, until it happened that through their secret enmity a certain battle was lost, after which one king only proceeded to the field, and one part only of that token of fraternity, the ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... Terceira. Every square foot of the island seems to be under the most elaborate cultivation; the little fields divided by hedgerows of what appeared to be sugar-cane. The white one-storied houses are dotted thickly among all this cultivation, giving evidence of great populousness in this primitive paradise—so far removed away from the world, and so little resorted to by commerce. Wind inclined to haul to the S.E., which will open us to the sea again, and I am, of course, quite anxious. Received a letter ...
— The Cruise of the Alabama and the Sumter • Raphael Semmes
... animal then unknown. Frere adds that the number of chips of flint was so great that the workmen, ignorant of their scientific value, used them in road-making. Every thing pointed to the conclusion that Hoxne was the place where this primitive people manufactured the weapons and implements they used, so that as early as the end of last century a member of the Royal Society formulated the propositions,[10] now fully accepted, that at a very remote epoch men used nothing but stone weapons and implements, ...
— Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples • The Marquis de Nadaillac
... are terribly argumentative. Fielding's remark (through Parson Adams), that some things in Steele's comedies are almost as good as a sermon, applies to a much wider range of literature. One is tempted by way of explanation to ascribe this to a primitive and ultimate instinct of the race. Englishmen—including of course Scotsmen—have a passion for sermons, even when they are half ashamed of it; and the British Essay, which flourished so long, was in fact a lay sermon. We must briefly notice that ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... was made of wooden rails down to 1807, and went to the shipping-place for coals on the Tyne. Each chaldron-waggon was originally drawn by a horse with a man in charge, only making two journeys in the one day and three on the following, the man being allowed sevenpence for each journey. This primitive railway passed before the cottage where George Stephenson was born, and was consequently one of the first sights his infant eyes beheld; and little did his parents think what their child was destined to work out in his day for the advancement of railways. Mr. Blackett took up the wood ...
— Lectures on Popular and Scientific Subjects • John Sutherland Sinclair, Earl of Caithness
... to them both, this primitive place, and to be all alone ordering their first meal together, and Sasha Roumovski exerted himself to charm and please her. He had recovered complete mastery of himself, it would seem, and his manner, while tenderly devoted, had an air of proprietorship ...
— The Point of View • Elinor Glyn
... his feet now and he was smiling icily. "One or the other of us will be ruined, and then perhaps we can resort to those methods which both of us would enjoy using. Of the two, I believe I am the more primitive, for the mere act of killing does not satisfy me. I've come a long way to sink my teeth into you. Now that they're in, they'll stay. So long as you're willing to fight ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... send you back in a few years a real man. And then you'll step smartly among the pretty officers of the King, and when one speaks of New France you'll lift your brows and say: 'New France? Ah, yes. That is in America. I was there once. Rather a primitive life—no court, no army.' Ah, ha, my boy—no, never mind. Come up to my quarters and have a sip of ...
— The Road to Frontenac • Samuel Merwin
... among the homes I continually see something new which shows me how great are the needs of the people here. The primitive ways and simplicity of the mountain people strike me and I sometimes imagine that I am in a country a century behind the times. Last week I made a call at the home of one of my pupils whose mother was sick. As I entered the room I could not distinguish ...
— American Missionary, Volume 43, No. 1, January, 1889 • Various
... the two fighting lines of men swayed back and forth. Here artillery played not so important a part. Both Bulgars and Serbs, primitive, rugged fighters, threw military science to the winds and plunged into the battle face to face and breast to breast, thrusting each other with cold steel. In some of the struggles the men lost their guns; they picked up the bowlders ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume IV (of 8) • Francis J. (Francis Joseph) Reynolds, Allen L. (Allen Leon)
... but a tiny round globule of jelly, but soon a dent or depression appears on one side, which becomes deeper and deeper until it extends to the centre of the egg-mass. It is as if we should take a round ball of putty and gradually press our finger into it. This pressed-in sac is a kind of primitive stomach and the entrance is used as a mouth. After this follows a marvellous succession of changes, form giving place to form, differing more in appearance and structure from the five-armed starfish than a ...
— The Log of the Sun - A Chronicle of Nature's Year • William Beebe |
