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Procreation   /prˈoʊkriˈeɪʃən/   Listen
Procreation

noun
1.
The sexual activity of conceiving and bearing offspring.  Synonyms: breeding, facts of life, reproduction.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Procreation" Quotes from Famous Books



... to be allowed (without the imputation of pedantry) one quotation from Virgil, who is supposed to have well understood the laws of nature. In his description of the choice of animals for procreation, in the third chapter of his Georgic's, and the 49th verse, you will find it ...
— A Dissertation on Horses • William Osmer

... the great artist with Tolstoy the almost venomous reformer. It is difficult to believe that a man who draws in such noble outlines the dignity of the daily life of humanity regards as evil that divine act of procreation by which that dignity is renewed from age to age. It is difficult to believe that a man who has painted with so frightful an honesty the heartrending emptiness of the life of the poor can really grudge them every one of their pitiful pleasures, from courtship ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton

... didst from the beginning create male and female," the priest read after the exchange of rings, "from Thee woman was given to man to be a helpmeet to him, and for the procreation of children. O Lord, our God, who hast poured down the blessings of Thy Truth according to Thy Holy Covenant upon Thy chosen servants, our fathers, from generation to generation, bless Thy servants Konstantin and Ekaterina, ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy

... to the whole realm. And in consideration thereof, your said subjects, calling further to their remembrance, that the good unity, peace, and wealth of the realm, specially and principally, above all worldly things, consisteth in the surety and certainty of the procreation and posterity of your Highness, in whose most Royal person at this time is no manner of doubt, do therefore most humbly beseech your Highness that it may be enacted, with the consent of the Lords Spiritual and Temporal and the Commons ...
— History of England from the Fall of Wolsey to the Death of Elizabeth. Vol. II. • James Anthony Froude

... his countenance was so fresh, that those who knew him not, imagined him not to exceed 50. And in Campania, where the air is clear and temperate, men of 80 marry young virgins, and have children by them; which shows that age in them does not hinder procreation, unless they be exhausted in their youths and ...
— The Works of Aristotle the Famous Philosopher • Anonymous

... never has an aphorism received a more striking confirmation. Here was a creature decapitated, amputated as far as the middle of the thorax; a corpse which still struggled to give life. It would not relax its hold until the abdomen itself, the seat of the organs of procreation, was attacked. ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre

... with most of us a sort of secondary heredity, interweaving with, and sometimes almost indistinguishable from, the real unalterable primary heredity, a moral shaping by suggestion, example, and influence, that is a sort of spiritual parallel to physical procreation. ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells

... slaves; towards the close of the republic, from the repugnance to marriage, which resisted alike the dread of legal punishment and the offer of legal immunity and privilege; and from the depravity of manners, which interfered with the procreation, the birth, and the rearing of children. The arguments and the authorities of Zumpt are equally conclusive as to the decline of population in Greece. Still the details, which he himself adduces as to the prosperity and populousness of Asia Minor, and the whole ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 1 • Edward Gibbon

... little children. She would have supposed that naturally it thoroughly satisfied Anna and Harold and Flora and the others; and the point of interest rests here, that Rosalie's mother also believed that this explanation of marriage and procreation completely satisfied Anna at sixteen and Harold in the Bank at eighteen. She never gave them any other explanation of the phenomenon of birth; and it is to be supposed that, just as she instructed them that God sent the dear little children, so she believed that God, at the right time, in some ...
— This Freedom • A. S. M. Hutchinson

... does it say? It says that God produced man in the first place on this earth, in a different way from that by which man is now multiplied. Reason says, there was a necessity for this; but it does not say that the means of procreation now do not answer even a better purpose than to have man multiplied by the same means by which he came first to exist. The same reason will contend that in the establishment of the gospel ministry in the world, different means were necessary ...
— A Series of Letters In Defence of Divine Revelation • Hosea Ballou

... Review for May, 1890, Mr. Romanes writes: "Professor Weismann has shown that there is throughout the metazoa a general correlation between the natural lifetime of individuals composing any given species, and the age at which they reach maturity or first become capable of procreation." This, I believe, has been the conclusion generally arrived at by biologists for ...
— The Humour of Homer and Other Essays • Samuel Butler

... Church as set forth in Resolution 68 of the Lambeth Conference seems to imply condemnation of sex love as such, and to imply sanction of sex love only as a means to an end—namely, procreation, though it must be admitted it lacks that clearness of direction which in so vital a matter one would have expected. It almost reminds me of one of those diplomatic formulae which is not intended to be too clear. Allow me ...
— Love—Marriage—Birth Control - Being a Speech delivered at the Church Congress at - Birmingham, October, 1921 • Bertrand Dawson

... of fertile wombs, have borne for them No babies in the house) are also found Concordant natures so that they at last Can bulwark their old age with goodly sons. A matter of great moment 'tis in truth, That seeds may mingle readily with seeds Suited for procreation, and that thick Should mix with fluid seeds, with thick the fluid. And in this business 'tis of some import Upon what diet life is nourished: For some foods thicken seeds within our members, And others thin ...
— Of The Nature of Things • [Titus Lucretius Carus] Lucretius

... species to another, —and I have always found marked specific differences between them. In a few weeks I will send you a paper which I have just printed on this subject, where it seems to me this view is very satisfactorily proved. The idea of a procreation of new species by preceding ones is a gratuitous supposition opposed to all sound physiological notions. And yet it is true that, taken as a whole, there is a gradation in the organized beings of successive geological formations, and that the ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz

... after oviposition, and careful and repeated observation has shown me that they are not connected with procreation or alimentation. I have witnessed many other instances of true psychical amusement in the lower animals, but do not think it is necessary to detail them here. Suffice it to say that I believe that almost every living creature, at some period ...
— The Dawn of Reason - or, Mental Traits in the Lower Animals • James Weir

... collected for the life of man, and are separated from their marriage to the earth, and are sown again when Winter approaches, this they would have to be the death of Osiris: but when the fruits, by the genial fostering of the earth, begin again to be generated by a new procreation, this is ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike

... introduction, continued my father, or an introductory preface (for I am not determined which name to give it) upon political or civil government; the foundation of which being laid in the first conjunction betwixt male and female, for procreation of the species—I was insensibly led into it.—'Twas ...
— The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman • Laurence Sterne

... alarming wave threatens us: Community of wives and children. "You must prove both the possibility and desirability of that." Men and women must be trained together and live together, but not in licentiousness. They must be mated with the utmost care for procreation, the best being paired at due seasons, nominally by lot, and for the occasion. The offspring of the selected will have a common nursery; the mothers will not know which were their own children. Parentage will be permissible ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various

... of acquiring culture, and their need of it. Every one wants if possible to recline in the shade of the tree planted by genius, and to escape the dreadful necessity of working for him, so that his procreation may be made possible. What? Are you too proud to be a teacher? Do you despise the thronging multitude of learners? Do you speak contemptuously of the teacher's calling? And, aping my mode of life, would you fain live in solitary seclusion, hostilely isolated from that ...
— On the Future of our Educational Institutions • Friedrich Nietzsche

... former times, who, it seems, like some of our modern visionaries, was an enemy to superabundant population, and would have restricted the procreation of children to those only who could maintain them; was applied to for alms by a poor woman, with no less than five little famishing urchins in her train. The haughty dame not only refused to relieve the unfortunate mendicant, but poured upon her a torrent of abuse, adding ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan

... drawing-room celebrity. Steinbock, emulating these emasculated but charming men, grew every day more averse to hard work. As soon as he began a thing, he was conscious of all its difficulties, and the discouragement that came over him enervated his will. Inspiration, the frenzy of intellectual procreation, flew swiftly away at the sight of this ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac

... to actions in themselves, and in not being disturbed by the fact that their results are impermanent. It is, in fact, the theoretical side of the will to live, which can find expression in a treatise on metaphysics as well as in an act of procreation. An Englishman according to his capacity and mental culture is satisfied with some such rule of existence as having a good time, or playing the game, or doing his duty, or working for some cause. The majority of intelligent men are ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot

... practised of a character similar to the mysteries of the Nile, and presided over by Young and Kimball, two Vermont Yankees, with all the solemnity of priests of Isis and Osiris. In these rites, which are symbolical of the mystery of procreation, both sexes participate, clad in loose flowing robes of white linen, with cleansed bodies and anointed hair. Since the revelation of the processes of the Endowment, which was first fully made by a young apostate named John Hyde, other dissenters, real ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various

... reproductive element in man is not so well developed as to be really fit for the reproduction of the species before the age of twenty-four or twenty-five. After the age of forty-five or fifty, the reproductive elements deteriorate in quality, and become again unfitted for vigorous procreation. ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg

... farther his work progressed the higher rose his admiration for his model. He felt as if intoxicated with noble wine as he worked to reproduce this incarnation of the ideal of umblemished youthful and manly beauty. The passion of artistic procreation fired his blood, and threw every thing else—even the history of Selene's fall into the sea, and her subsequent rescue—into the region of commonplace. Still he had not been inattentive, and what he heard must have had ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers

... says, 'Ils font encor cacher & retirer les parties viriles, et puis les font ressortir quand il leur plait. Ils empeschent aussi tantost la copulation charnelle de l'ho[m]e & de la femme, en retirant les nerfs, & ostant la roideur du membre; et tantost la procreation en destournant ou bouchant les conduicts de la semence, pour empescher qu'elle ne descende aux vases de la generation.'[675] Scot, who quotes generally without any acknowledgement and often inaccurately, translates this statement, 'They also affirme that the vertue of generation is impeached ...
— The Witch-cult in Western Europe - A Study in Anthropology • Margaret Alice Murray

... deliberate frustration of a natural act which might have issued in a new life, it is an unnatural crime, and is stigmatised by theologians as a sin akin to murder. To this charge birth controllers further reply that millions of the elements of procreation are destroyed by Nature herself, and that "to add one more to these millions sacrificed by Nature is surely no crime." This attempt at argument is pathetic. If these people knew even the A.B.C. ...
— Birth Control • Halliday G. Sutherland

... is oddly told by Plutarch. It was not a mere case of lending the woman for the purpose of procreation, for the child of Hortensius could not be his legal child, unless Marcia became his legal wife. Cato must accordingly have divorced his wife, which was done at Rome without any trouble. The only thing then that is peculiar in the affair is, that Cato did not ...
— Plutarch's Lives Volume III. • Plutarch

... been convenient and consistent, in support of the doctrine of man's depravity, to exploit this dark view so as to make him a fit subject for redemption. Somehow, the traditional "Fall" and procreation have been so associated in religious thinking that it has been practically impossible for the religious mind to entertain any favorable consideration of the physical conditions of human genesis. Very naturally that ...
— The Minister and the Boy • Allan Hoben

... explanation, as I say, seduced me for the time being. But a more attentive examination of the bands who infest the valley of the Nile enables me to aver that all these good English ladies are of an age notoriously canonical; and the catastrophe of procreation therefore, supposing that such an accident could ever have happened to them, must date back to a time long anterior to their enrolment. ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti

... that breeders of animals and growers of plants, having at their disposal a large number of varieties, always diverging somewhat from each other, choose individuals possessing characteristics which they desired to strengthen, and use only these for procreation. In this manner the desired characteristic is gradually made more prominent, and the breeder appears to have obtained a new species. Similar conditions are supposed to prevail in Nature, only that there is lacking the selecting hand of the breeder. Here the so-called principle ...
— At the Deathbed of Darwinism - A Series of Papers • Eberhard Dennert

... i, pp. 1184 and 1185, of Migne's edit.; for his idea as to the word of God being the active producing principle, see ibid., i, Quaest. lxxi, art. i; for his remarks on species, see ibid, i, Quaest. lxxii, art. i; for his ideas on the necessity of the procreation of man, see ibid, i, Quaest. lxxii, art. i; for the origin of animals from putrefaction, see ibid, i, Quaest. lxxix, art. i, 3; for Cornelius a Lapide on the derivative creation of animals, see his ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White

... citizens of a great community, that we find writers like Karl Pearson, in his Ethic of Free Thought,[1] consistently excepting from the operation of the free-love gospel those unions which have resulted in the procreation of children. Mr. Pearson being of the school of those who deride marriage as "the tomb of love," "the source of the stupidity and ugliness of the human race," his admissions as to the necessity of maintaining some element of permanence in the contract, if only ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan

... people distinguished. Some were famous for the beauty of one single part of their form; as Demetrius Phalereus, for his beautiful eyebrows, was called Charito- blepharos. It seems even to have been thought that the procreation of beautiful children might be promoted by prizes. This is shown by the existence of contests for beauty, which in ancient times were established by Cypselus, King of Arcadia, by the river Alpheus; and, at the feast of Apollo of Philae, a prize was offered to the youths for the deftest kiss. ...
— The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater

... till the fifth century, when the degraded condition of woman became to some extent matters of some concern and recognition. Before this woman was regarded simply as an instrument of procreation, or a mistress of the household, to gratify ...
— Searchlights on Health - The Science of Eugenics • B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols

... as I have told you before, I often wish myself a monk at Cambridge. Writers on government condemn, very properly, a recluse life, as contrary to Nature's interest, who loves procreation; but as Nature seems not very desirous that we should procreate to threescore years and ten, I think convents very suitable retreats for those whom our Alma Mater does not emphatically call to her ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole

... our organs of taste as at other periods! And, O king, women then become mothers of numerous progeny, endued with low statures, and destitute of good behaviour and good manners. And they also make their very mouths serve the purposes of the organ of procreation. And famine ravages the habitations of men, and the highways are infested by women of ill fame, while females in general, O king, become at such periods hostile to their lords and destitute of modesty! And, O king, the very kine at such periods ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 2 • Translated by Kisari Mohan Ganguli

... of it, or the Contrivance of Oaths and Swearing, could never have enter'd into the the Heads of Politician, if the Fear of an invisible Cause had not pre-existed and been supposed to be universal, any more than they would have contrived matrimony, if the Desire of Procreation had not been planted in Human Nature and visible in both Sexes. Passions don't affect us, but when they are provoked: The Fear of Death is a Reality in our Nature: But the greatest Cowards may, and often do, live Forty Years and longer, without being disturb'd by it. ...
— An Enquiry into the Origin of Honour, and the Usefulness of Christianity in War • Bernard Mandeville

... may fall out. The bones may ulcerate and rot. The organs of procreation usually participate in the degenerative process. Virility is destroyed, and impotence is quite common after ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol 2 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague

... seen that the gradual process of social reform during the first three quarters of the nineteenth century, by successive stages of movement towards the sources of life, finally reached the moment of conception. The first result of reform at this point was that procreation became a deliberate act. Up till then the method of propagating the race was the same as that which savages have carried on during thousands of years, the chief difference being that whereas savages ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis

... vigorous stock from which we hope to obtain still stronger and more productive varieties, we may go to work several ways. We may plant our choice varieties in close proximity, and let the bees and summer gales do the hybridizing. It will be remembered that the organs of procreation in the perfect strawberry blossom are the pistils on the convex receptacle and the encircling stamens. The anthers of the latter produce a golden powder, so light that it will float on a summer breeze, and so fine ...
— Success With Small Fruits • E. P. Roe

... the words of one who cries loud enough to those which have ears, that he takes not away generation, but procreation from nothing; nor corruption, but total destruction that is, reduction to nothing. For to him who would not so savagely and foolishly but more gently calumniate, the following verses might give a colorable occasion of ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch

... austerities and wild debauch, but the sentimentality of some Krishnaite sects is alien to him. He is a magician, the lord of troops of spirits, and thus draws into his circle all the old animistic worship. But he is also identified with Time (Mahakala) and Death (Mrityu) and as presiding over procreation he is Ardhanaresvara, half man, half woman. Stories are invented or adapted to account for his various attributes, and he is provided with a divine family. He dwells on Mount Kailasa: he has three eyes: above the central one ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot



Words linked to "Procreation" :   sex, generation, interbreeding, sexual practice, crossbreeding, sex activity, breeding, procreate, miscegenation, sexual activity, propagation, multiplication



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