"Stone Age" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of these things filled me with the liveliest pleasure as I took them from Young and attentively examined them; for the delicate and perfect workmanship that they exhibited showed them to have been made by a people that had reached the highest development of the Stone Age. ...
— The Aztec Treasure-House • Thomas Allibone Janvier
... must obviously have existed somewhere. Still in spite of the indications of continuity, the civilisation of primitive man in Gaul presents one aspect that is without any analogues in the life of the palaeolithic men of the River Drift period, or in that of man of the New Stone Age. The feature in question is the remarkable artistic skill shown by the cave men of the Dordogne district. Some of the drawings and carvings of these men reveal a sense of form which would have done credit to men of a far later age. A feature such as this, whatever may have been its object, whether ...
— Celtic Religion - in Pre-Christian Times • Edward Anwyl
... "Non-Conformist" articles, Spencer put forth a daring statement concerning the evolution of the soldier, that straightway made him a few enemies, and gave his clerical uncle gooseflesh. His hypothesis was this: When man first evolved out of the Stone Age, and began to live in villages, the oldest and wisest individual was regarded as patriarch or chief. This chief appointed certain men to punish wrongdoers and keep order. But there were always a few who would not ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great Philosophers, Volume 8 • Elbert Hubbard
... evening together, and together we witnessed the mysterious snake dance which the natives of Walpi give every other year—a ceremony so incredibly primitive that it carried me back into the stone age, and three days later (leaving Browne and MacNeill to paint and sculpture the Hopi) we went to Zuni and Acoma and at last to the Grand Canon of the Colorado, a trip which laid upon my mind a thousand glorious impressions of the desert and its life. It was so beautiful, so marvelous ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... there is a most remarkable absence of copper implements. The sources of tin in Europe are practically restricted to Cornwall and Saxony. How then are we to explain on the one hand the apparent stride made by primitive man when from a Stone Age civilization he passed to a comparatively advanced metallurgical skill? On the other, how account for a comparatively synchronous commencement of bronze civilization when one at least of the metals needed for the alloy ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... barrows occupy conspicuous sites; but in general the external form is no index to the internal construction and gives no definite indication of the nature of the sepulchral usages. Thus, while the long barrow is characteristic of the Stone Age, it is impossible to tell without direct examination whether it may be chambered or unchambered, or whether the burials within it may be those of burnt or ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... the stone age," declared Coglan, warmly. "We are all brothers—Chinamen, Englishmen, Zulus, Patagonians and the people in the bend of the Kaw River. Some day all this petty pride in one's city or State or section or country will be wiped out, and we'll ...
— The Four Million • O. Henry
... successive terms of the series will be indefinitely more remote from each other than the life and thoughts of Lincoln or Washington from those of our most primitive Aryan ancestor or of the rudest savage of the Stone Age. The series must appear exceedingly disconnected. Systems of organs will apparently spring suddenly into existence, and we shall have no time to trace their origin or earlier development. Even ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... too handsome youngster—his grandmother had been a Basque—possessed the same quality of the fortune hunter as his grandfather, only he did not propose to do his prospecting in the mines of Nevada. Following the general tactics of a Stone Age man—a belief in muscle and great initiative—Steve found himself at twenty-four in the city of Hanover and in the employ of Mark Constantine, a hide-and-leather magnate who was said to be like all hard-boiled eggs—impossible to beat. After Steve advanced to the top notch of his ability he ...
— The Gorgeous Girl • Nalbro Bartley
... man of to-day, to the peasant of the great central plain of Ireland, who is "brute-tamer, plough-maker, earth-breaker," just as truly as it does to the breaker of horses who drove furrows with a tree-knee through primordial mould; and it carries us in imagination back to the man of the Stone Age by way of many other ploughmen, by way of the last man we saw between plough-handles who appealed to our imagination, a man limned against an April sky from which the sun had passed to leave all the west that gold-green that the greatest of Westmoreland dalesmen ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... Boyd Dawkins has shown that the Continental Celts were still in their stone age when they invaded Europe; whence we must conclude that the original Aryans were unacquainted ...
— Early Britain - Anglo-Saxon Britain • Grant Allen
... in "Don Quixote," because it is to be found everywhere in life, and Cervantes drew from life. It is difficult to imagine a community in which the never-ceasing game of cross-purposes between Sancho Panza and Don Quixote would not be recognized as true to nature. In the stone age, among the lake dwellers, among the cave men, there were Don Quixotes and Sancho Panzas; there must have been the troglodyte who never could see the facts before his eyes, and the troglodyte who could see nothing else. But to suppose Cervantes deliberately setting himself to expound any ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... except on the hypothesis of continuous land communication between the two continents, seeing that it is certain that the horse existed in a wild state in Europe and Asia before his domestication by man, which may be traced back almost to the stone age. Cattle and sheep as we now know them have an equally remote ancestry. Darwin finds domesticated cattle in Europe in the earliest part of the stone age, having long before developed out of wild forms akin ...
— The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria • W. Scott-Elliot
... the old camping grounds the plough share still turns up relics that carry us back to the "stone age." A careful study of these relics will tell us something about the habits and customs of the aborigines before the coming of the whites. And we have another source of information in the quaint tales and legends that drift to us out of the dim shadows of the past, which will ...
— Glimpses of the Past - History of the River St. John, A.D. 1604-1784 • W. O. Raymond
... rifle in my hand and the revolvers at my belt; one does not readily synchronize his thoughts with the stone age and the twentieth ...
— Pellucidar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... of the early days of the Pyramids or of ancient Babylon than we do of our own. The Stone age, the dragons of the prime, are not more remote from us than is our earliest childhood. It is not so long ago for any of us; and yet, our memories of it are but veiled spectres wandering in the mazes ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... the other side of the canal. On the front of the building were some quaint carvings, which gave it a picturesque appearance. Joseph seemed to be in his element at this museum. He spoke glibly and learnedly of "the stone age," "the bronze age," and "the iron age," each designated by the material of which the implements used for domestic purposes, in war and agriculture, were composed. Numberless utensils of all kinds are contained in the cabinets, classified with rare skill, and arranged with excellent ...
— Up The Baltic - Young America in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark • Oliver Optic
... Lang has remarked, following Dr. Tylor, that in this taboo the fairy mistress is "the representative of the stone age." This is so; and the reason is, because she belongs to the realm of the supernatural. When the use of metals was discovered, stone implements were discarded in ordinary life; but for ages afterwards knives of stone were used for religious purposes. There is evidence, ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... procession of moving tableaux. A huge float comes along, depicting the stone age and the primitive man, every detail carefully studied from the museums. Another represents the last day of Babylon. One sees a nude captive, her golden hair and white flesh in contrast with the black velvet litter on which ...
— The Real Latin Quarter • F. Berkeley Smith
... origin of which is poetically recounted in the story of the dancing of Uzume before the cave in which the Sun-goddess had hid herself,[12] were of continental origin. Evidently these men of the god-way had passed the "stone age," and, probably without going through the intermediate bronze age, were artificers of iron and skilled in its use. Most of the names of metals and of many other substances, and the terms used in the arts and sciences, betray by their tell-tale etymology their Chinese ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... But then, just as the strange soothing feeling was putting him back to sleep, the hairs changed their soft caress and a dozen of them plunged into his spinal cord and upward into that small old-brain where all the bogies of the stone age ...
— Hunters Out of Space • Joseph Everidge Kelleam
... the facts of history tell us of the progress and development of man through various steps and ages, known by various names. We learn of the stone age, the bronze, and the iron age. We can see the different steps in the growth of the forms of government; how anarchy was put down by the strong arm of the despot, of the growth of aristocracy, of limited monarchies and ...
— Have faith in Massachusetts; 2d ed. - A Collection of Speeches and Messages • Calvin Coolidge
... only weapon and tool was a stone axe or hammer, must have regarded it as a symbol of force, then of supernatural force, hence of divinity. It is represented on remains of the Stone Age, and the axe was a divine symbol to the Mycenaeans, a hieroglyph of Neter to the Egyptians, and a worshipful object to Polynesians and Chaldeans. The cult of axe or hammer may have been widespread, and to the Celts, as to many other ...
— The Religion of the Ancient Celts • J. A. MacCulloch
... [Spitefully]. You scoff, you, you who have behaved like a man of the stone age! And you are allowed to live in the ...
— Plays: Comrades; Facing Death; Pariah; Easter • August Strindberg
... remains of prehistoric man give no indication of social life. Fire-places, workshops, caves, etc., enter the story in a later phase. Some authorities on prehistoric man hold very strongly that during the greater part of the Old Stone Age (two-thirds, at least, of the human period) man wandered only in the company of his mate and ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... of his smitten enemy rolling on the ground at his feet, the primitive man, the half-brute of the stone age, leaped to life in Wilbur's breast—he felt his muscles thrilling with a strength they had not known before. His nerves, stretched tense as harp-strings, were vibrating to a new tune. His blood spun ...
— Moran of the Lady Letty • Frank Norris
... its front played a crowd of skirmishers—all houses mixed—flying, reforming, shrieking insults. On its tortured flanks marched the Hoplites, seniors hurling jests one after another—simple and primitive jests of the Stone Age. To these the three added themselves, dispassionately, with an air of aloofness, ...
— Stalky & Co. • Rudyard Kipling
... lack of some insignificant thing—some item so common as to be taken for granted in all terrestrial shops, but impossible of fabrication with the means at his disposal. At such times he would set his grim jaw a trifle harder, go back one step farther toward the Stone Age, and begin all over again—to find the necessary raw material or a possible substitute, and then to build the apparatus and machinery necessary to produce the part he required. Thus the heart-breaking task progressed, and Nadia watched ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith
... one had a picture of ancient civilization before one. The wreaths of flowers, these swaggering figures with their trophies of war, this gay crowd, distributing food and drink, these young girls with their crowns, is it not all exactly the manner in which the people of the Stone Age or the savages of to-day would feast their heroes? Cannot one understand in this that at the beginning of civilization war was the highest object in state and society, an opportunity of enrichment by booty, and a festival ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... the remarkable adventures of an Indian boy who lived in the Stone Age, many years ago, when the world ...
— The Little Colonel: Maid of Honor • Annie Fellows Johnston
... and they fetched out the can of beef they had opened yesterday, some biscuits, and a water breaker, and sitting at the cave mouth they ate just as the men of the Stone Age ate, with the palms of their hands for plates and their fingers for forks. They spoke scarcely at all. The ill-humor of La Touche seemed like a contagious disease, even ...
— The Beach of Dreams • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... man's mental development, as indicated in the work of his hands, are well and clearly marked. At the lowest level we find tools and weapons of the palaeolithic or old stone age, made of roughly chipped stone, rude in form, and never ground or polished. These present some evidence of gradual improvement, but we must go to a higher level to find implements of a decidedly higher order, the neatly shaped and ...
— Man And His Ancestor - A Study In Evolution • Charles Morris
... palpably to the geologic ages, ere man had appeared on our planet. There had been found in the locality, only a few years previous to this time, a considerable number of stone arrow-heads—some of them only partially finished, and some of them marred in the making, as if some fletcher of the stone age had carried on his work on the spot; and all these memorials of a time long anterior to the first beginnings of history in the island were restricted to ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... existence of those metals, and had to content themselves with sharpened flints and other hard stones for cutting purposes. Many of these weapons were fashioned with considerable skill, and give evidence that even in the dark days of the Stone Age men had a good idea of form and the adaptation of the roughest materials to suit the particular purpose they ...
— Broad-Sword and Single-Stick • R. G. Allanson-Winn
... and peoples, and to trace the occupancy of countries to periods far anterior to that of which history takes cognizance. The general fact seems to be settled that, in prehistoric times, Europe passed through four distinct eras. These were the Rude Stone Age, when man was the contemporary in Europe of the extinct hairy elephant and the cave bear; the Polished Stone Age; the Bronze Age, when bronze was used for arms and utensils; and the Iron Age, in which iron superseded bronze in the making of ...
— The Nation in a Nutshell • George Makepeace Towle
... stone age, the bronze age and the iron age, we have heard of; likewise of the Dark Ages, and other self-marking eras in human history. As for the present, it might with fitness be known as the age of engineering, ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... it if everyone else does not drop the subject there. "God has hidden it from us," we declare, "and what He has hidden from us it is presumption for us to pry into." It is useless to urge the fact that this way of reasoning would have kept us still in the Stone Age; we are not to ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King
... that these early savages belonged to that great family of which the Finns and Laps, and possibly the Basques, are scattered members. Their skulls, also, are analogous in form to those of the Finnish race. This age the archaeologists have denominated the "Stone Age" of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 62, December, 1862 • Various
... originating Mind, but of natural selection, of environment or circumstance, of the survival of the fittest. And what is the fittest, if not the rational, the Platonic "Good," that is, the Logos? Why, then, turn back to the stone age of human thinking, why again turn nature into wood, when for thousands of years Greek philosophers and Christian thinkers have recognised her as something spiritual, as a world of eternal ideas? How would such men as Herder, Schelling, and Hegel have smiled at such a view of the world! Yes, ...
— The Silesian Horseherd - Questions of the Hour • Friedrich Max Mueller
... two men struck and kicked, all to no purpose; the dogs turned upon them snarling and snapping. They, too, demanded to live; they, too, wanted to be fed. It was a hideous business. There in that half-night of the polar circle, lost and forgotten on a primordial shore, back into the stone age once more, men and animals fought one another for the privilege of ...
— A Man's Woman • Frank Norris
... on the wing did not, of course, begin with the invention of the balloon. Perhaps the dream of flying man came first to some primitive poet of the Stone Age, as he watched, fearfully, the gyrations of the winged creatures of the air; even as in a later age it came to Langley and Maxim, who studied the wing motions of birds and insects, not in fear but in the light and confidence ...
— The Age of Invention - A Chronicle of Mechanical Conquest, Book, 37 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Holland Thompson
... more than twenty years as a practical tanner, furrier and taxidermist in the introduction says: "Probably one of the oldest human industries is Home Dressing and Manufacturing of Furs and Skins, as this method of clothing the body has persisted from the early days (even back to the stone age) to the present time. As a happy combination of dress and ornament furs will always continue to lead. At the present time the manufacture of furs has been highly developed, with the aid of machinery and specialized workmen it ...
— Home Taxidermy for Pleasure and Profit • Albert B. Farnham
... men of the modern type have been found in many places, e.g. Combe Capelle in Dordogne, Galley Hill in Kent, Cro-Magnon in Perigord, Mentone on the Riviera; and they are often referred to as "Cave-men" or "men of the Early Stone Age." They had large skulls, high foreheads, well-marked chins, and other features such as modern man possesses. They were true men at last—that is to say, like ourselves! The spirited pictures they ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... which it is neatly and scientifically planted in the middle of one's back. The coarsest and bluntest knife which ever broke a pencil into pieces instead of sharpening it is a good thing in so far as it is a knife. It would have appeared a miracle in the Stone Age. What we call a bad knife is a good knife not good enough for us; what we call a bad hat is a good hat not good enough for us; what we call bad cookery is good cookery not good enough for us; what we call a bad civilization is a good ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... its north portion. The rest of us ... but we haven't many years, anyway. Ragnarok is for the young—and if they have to migrate back and forth like animals just to stay alive they will never have time to accomplish anything or be more than stone age nomads." ...
— Space Prison • Tom Godwin
... touch a man; the Invisible King in us all would find himself and know himself a little in this and a little in that, and at last a day would come, when fair things and fine things would rule the world and such squalor as this about them would be as impossible any more for men as a Stone Age Corroboree.... ...
— The Research Magnificent • H. G. Wells
... fixed and used their stone knives and hatchets, when we see how the Polynesian fixes and uses his stone knives and hatchets now; how, in short, matters sped in respect to household economy, dress, work, and war, in this old Caledonia of ours, during even the so-called Stone Age, when we reflect upon and study the modes in which matters are conducted in that new Caledonia in the Pacific—the inhabitants of which knew nothing of metals till they came in contact with Europeans, not ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... say nothing of the hostile Indian and the white settler; some of flint, now and then one of white quartz, and others of variously colored jasper. The Indians must have lived here for many generations, and it must have been a kind of factory village of the stone age,—which lasted up to near the present time, if we may judge from the fact that many of these relics are met with close to ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... was to be noticed even then, in the prehistoric, in the age that formed the great legends. Adam was asleep, when Eve as a vital force leaped away from him. If it wasn't for Eve's vitality the human race would still be in the Stone Age." ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... Hunters and their Modern Representatives (best popular account). Subject difficult without special knowledge, to be derived from, e.g. Sir J. Evans (Stone Implements); J. Geikie (Geology of Ice Age), etc. See also Brit. Mus. Guides to Stone Age, Bronze Age, ...
— Anthropology • Robert Marett
... had finished, he felt as a Stone Age man might feel in the presence of a brilliant scientist of the thirty-fourth century. If any sign of interest had shown on the peak of the metallic lord, Phobar failed to see it. But he sensed an intolerant sneer of ridicule in Garboreggg, ...
— Raiders of the Universes • Donald Wandrei
... observation satellite blinked on and off, moving slowly. Venus had long since set, with hard-to-see Mercury preceding it. Jupiter glowed in the south. Mars looked as remote and changeless as it must have looked in the Stone Age. The asteroids were never even visible here without ...
— The Planet Strappers • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... find insuperable difficulties in running before the north-east winds to New Zealand from Rarotonga, Savaii or Tahiti. The discovery in the new land of the jade or greenstone—far above rubies in the eyes of men of the Stone Age—would at once give the country all the attractiveness that a ...
— The Long White Cloud • William Pember Reeves
... couldn't bear it, so avoided him, or instantly tacked myself on to Emily or someone. I think Emily approves of my running to her, whenever threatened by man's society, because she thinks the instinctive desire to be protected from anything male is pretty and maidenly. She certainly belongs to the Stone Age in some of her ideas; though her maxims are of a later period. Many of them she draws (and quarters) from the Scriptures; at least, she attributes them to the Scriptures, but I know some of them to be in Shakespeare. Lots of people seem to make ...
— Set in Silver • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... as a beacon light in an ocean of literature worthy of the Stone Age, was a small pamphlet issued by the Michigan Agricultural College on luncheons in rural schools. Sound doctrine was preached on the need of the children for substantial and warm noon meals, and the comparative ease and economy with which such luncheons could be provided ...
— Mobilizing Woman-Power • Harriot Stanton Blatch
... "Their duns and drabs, their russets and tawny tones of red and orange, are of their environment, the proper skins for their bodies; but to think of that girl brightening the eyes of a hundred louts by virtue of those fine feathers! Dream of her in the Stone Age, clad in a petticoat torn from a wolf, with her straw-colored hair to her waist and a necklace of shells or wild beasts' teeth between her breasts! And the man—her father, I suppose—what a picture his cursed broadcloth and ...
— Lying Prophets • Eden Phillpotts
... often been commented on as a matter of wonder that a people living in the stone age, or at the best possessing a few simple tools of metal, should have been able to move and place in position such enormous blocks of stone. With modern cranes and traction engines all would be simple, but it might have been thought that in the stone age such building would be ...
— Rough Stone Monuments and Their Builders • T. Eric Peet
... stone, of bronze and of iron. These are the measures, from an artistic source, of the advancement of human culture; and they certainly bear a distinct relation to all man's other conditions at the time. A tribe which had never progressed beyond the stone age—which had no better material for its weapons and implements than stone—could never proceed beyond a very limited point of civilization. Bronze or any metal which can be moulded, hammered and sharpened of course gives a nation vast ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 1178, June 25, 1898 • Various
... well-aimed bullet of a breech-loading rifle. His assailant, approaching, hacks him to death with the ferocity of a South-Sea Islander. The weapons of the nineteenth century are in the hands of the savages of the Stone Age. ...
— The Story of the Malakand Field Force • Sir Winston S. Churchill
... a great people in Caspak; but they were pitifully inefficient in even the simpler forms of military tactics. I was surprised that even a man of the Stone Age should be so lacking in military perspicacity. Du-seen dropped far below par in my estimation as I saw the slovenly formation of his troop as it passed through an enemy country and entered the domain of the chief against whom he had risen in revolt; but Du-seen must have known Jor ...
— The People that Time Forgot • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... agriculture, in the whole life of present society; it would be ignoring to what extent all individual work is the result of the past and the present labour of society as a whole. It would mean believing ourselves to be living in the Stone Age, whereas we are living in an ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin
... Storri's fault that it was not three hundred years since his forebears wore sheepskins, carried clubs, and made a fire by judiciously rubbing one stick against another. None the less, this nearness to a stone age left him barbarous in his heart; and the layer of civilization that was upon him was not a layer, but a polish—a sheen, and neither so thick nor so tangible as moonshine on a lake. The savageries of Richard ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... the influences of all physical surroundings on the life of man; the other, as in the single instance of the Moulin Quignon skull, serving to create a whole new science of prehistoric archaeology and to bring us back to a time when man was coeval with the stone age, the mammoth and the woolly rhinoceros. But, except these, we have added no new canon or method to the science of historical criticism. Across the drear waste of a thousand years the Greek and the ...
— Miscellanies • Oscar Wilde
... respects the Seris are the most interesting tribe of savages in North America. They are decidedly more primitive in their way than any other Indians, having scarcely any arts worth mentioning. In fact, they have not yet advanced as far as the stone age. The only stone implement in common use among them is a rude hammer of that material, which they employ for beating clay to make a fragile and peculiar kind of pottery. When one of the squaws wishes to make meal of mesquite beans, and she has no utensil for the purpose, she looks ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... broad hatchet-like knife. On reaching a plant, the woman places the sharp end of the stick at its base and by a blow with a stone severs the root and pries it up. Nothing could be more primitive. The women of the Stone Age who gathered mescal on the same ground, and perhaps used the same pit, thus far must have ...
— The North American Indian • Edward S. Curtis
... day and fulfilled their destiny ages upon ages ago, leaving as history etchings on ivory of the mammoth and the bone of the reindeer. Implements similar to those which are relics of a remote past elsewhere are here of everyday use and application. The Stone Age still exists. ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... not need to deal with the dim ages which ethnology just reveals to us—with the stone age, and the flint implements, and the refuse-heaps. The time to which I would go back is only that just before the dawn of history—coeval with the dawn, perhaps, it would be right to say—for the first historians saw such a state ...
— Physics and Politics, or, Thoughts on the application of the principles of "natural selection" and "inheritance" to political society • Walter Bagehot
... 18, 1871. I have now reached a depth of 33 feet. During these operations I was for a time deceived by the enormous mass of stone implements which were dug up, and by the absence of any trace of metal, and supposed that I had come upon the Stone Age. But since the sixth of this month there have appeared many nails, knives, lances, and battle-axes of copper of such elegant workmanship that they can have been made only by a civilised people. I cannot even admit that I have ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol XI. • Edited by Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton
... motion; and they are trying to identify human will with this arcane energy, and let the forces of Nature have freer play in humanity. We begin to catch glimpses of civilizations as far exceeding ours as ours surpasses society in the Stone Age. In all our democratic movements, in these efforts towards the harmonious fusion of human forces, humanity is obscurely intent on mightier collective exploits than anything conceived of before. The nature of these energies ...
— National Being - Some Thoughts on an Irish Polity • (A.E.)George William Russell
... simple; it had, first, the one great merit, that it could easily be put on or taken off. It was sustained with but a single knot, a bow-knot—they had learned to make a bow-knot and other knots in the stone age, for, because of the manual requirements for living, they were cleverer fumblers with their fingers than we are now—and the lady here described had tied her knot in a manner not to be excelled by any other woman in ...
— The Story of Ab - A Tale of the Time of the Cave Man • Stanley Waterloo
... what a noble woman she was, and beg her to consider her health, and not overwork herself in doing good; but instead of that he simply showed her that she was a moral Cave-Dweller, and that she was living in a Stone Age of social brutalities; and of course ...
— Annie Kilburn - A Novel • W. D. Howells
... the expression of one passing through the Stone Age to a somewhat more mobile period. "I really think," she said, "I should have been made aware of that. To have had a young relative presented without one's knowledge seems too extraordinary. No," she continued, turning to poppa, "the only thing I heard of this young ...
— A Voyage of Consolation - (being in the nature of a sequel to the experiences of 'An - American girl in London') • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... In the polished stone age, the county had been self-supporting, because of its possession of flint. In the bronze age it was dependent upon other places, through its non-possession of copper or tin. During the former period it may have exported weapons from Cissbury; during the latter, ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... That idea was the basis of every pagan religion, and it is the basis of the Christian religion, simply because it is the foundation of human nature. That foundation is just as firm and unshaken today as it was in the Stone Age. It will always remain, and upon it will always be built some kind of a religious superstructure. 'Intelligent men,' as you call them, really have very little influence, even when they all pull one way. ...
— The Damnation of Theron Ware • Harold Frederic
... a thing; a convenient word denoting the sense of personality, of individual identity. In its ghostly signification he discovers an artificial dogma which could hardly belong to the brutal savages of the Stone Age. He finds it in the funereal books of ancient Egypt, whence probably it passed to the Zendavesta and the Vedas. In the Hebrew Pentateuch, of which part is still attributed to Moses, it is unknown, or, rather, it ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... diminishing physical prowess placed them at a disadvantage in the competition with stronger animals. Smoother and more efficient weapons were made by the hordes of their more advanced descendants, some of whom remained in the mental and cultural condition of the stone age like the Fuegian, until the white travelers of recent centuries brought them newer ideas and implements. In Europe and elsewhere the period of stone gave place to the bronze and iron ages, and throughout the changing years human inventiveness improved the missile and weapon to become ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... in the bronze, and still more, of course, in the stone age, was an uncomfortable and difficult process. The backward and barbarous Thracians were therefore trimmed in the roughest way, like Aeschines, with ...
— Theocritus, Bion and Moschus rendered into English Prose • Andrew Lang
... man neither priest nor layman moved him at all. This young man with the Bonaparte face and the brown eyes was something far sterner than a puritan—a pagan. He was a simple slayer from the morning of the earth; a man of the stone age—a man ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... volcanic outbursts, and the protecting care of desolation, for the knowledge we have of times long past, than to any intentional legacies of art or learning left us by the men of those times. The lost and abandoned tools, weapons, and ornaments of the stone age are all that we have to tell us of the childhood of humanity. Had no fiery disasters ever overtaken the pile-dwellers of the Swiss lakes, we should probably have never heard of ...
— Scientific American, Volume XXXVI., No. 8, February 24, 1877 • Various
... to his feet.) Yes; let us come and reason together. Be rational. Sit down and talk it over like civilized humans. This is not the stone age. Be reassured, Mr. Knox. I won't brain ...
— Theft - A Play In Four Acts • Jack London
... Sudan because it has been supplanted by the reign of law and of justice. I ask you to read the accounts of the Catholic missionary priests, the Austrian priests who suffered under Mahdism, to read in their words what they have suffered under conditions that have gone back to the stone age in the middle of the nineteenth century. Then you will realize that the Sirdar and his troops were fighting the battle of righteousness as truly as ever it was fought by your ancestors and mine two or three or four ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... primitive humanity it seems probable that man was as untouched by warfare as his animal ancestors, and it is satisfactory to think that war had no part in the first birth of man into the world. Even the long Early Stone Age has left no distinguishable sign of the existence of warfare.[3] It was not until the transition to the Late Stone Age, the age of polished flint implements, that we discern evidences of the homicidal attacks of man on man. Even then we are concerned more with quarrels than with battles, ...
— Essays in War-Time - Further Studies In The Task Of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... of that mysterious law of generation denominated atavism or reversionary heredity, and bore the impression, in not only the bodily form, but the instincts, passions, manners, and habits of the "cave-dwellers" of the rough-stone age, there appeared to be a fitness and adaptation in the new locality and its surroundings to the man, which was at once appreciated and approved by all persons familiar with him, and his conduct and behavior, both ...
— 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
... be more "graminivorous" than any other people I know, and with respect to this their taste appears to me to give the anthropologist a hint of certain traits of the mode of life of the people of the Stone Age which have been completely overlooked. To judge from the Chukches our primitive ancestors by no means so much resembled beasts of prey as they are commonly imagined to have done, and it may, perhaps, have been the case that "bellum omnium inter omnes" ...
— The Voyage of the Vega round Asia and Europe, Volume I and Volume II • A.E. Nordenskieold
... Amazon near the mouth of the latter river. The upper course of the Xingu is auriferous and fed by numerous branches. Its source was first discovered in 1884 by the German explorer von den Steinen, after a difficult and dangerous expedition through a region inhabited by tribes still in the Stone Age of culture.'" ...
— Xingu - 1916 • Edith Wharton
... talk! Jack repeated all the old inaccuracies which lovers have called up since the Stone Age, the burden of which was that the memory of her face had been his light in the darkest mine; the memory of her voice had been the music for which his soul had been listening ...
— The Wedge of Gold • C. C. Goodwin
... course. The red line started at Fort Ridgeway, in what had once been Arizona It angled east by a little north, to Colony Three, in northern Arkansas; then sharply northeast to St. Louis and its lifeless ruins; then Chicago and Gary, where little bands of Stone Age reversions stalked and fought and ate each other; Detroit, where things that had completely forgotten that they were human emerged from their burrows only at night; Cleveland, where a couple of cobalt bombs must have landed in the lake and drenched everything with radioactivity that still ...
— The Return • H. Beam Piper and John J. McGuire
... among the first of the European peoples to attain to any high degree of civilization. Their story runs back almost to the dawn of recorded history. As early as 3500 B.C. they were in an advanced stone age, and by 2500 B.C. had reached the age of bronze. The destruction of Homer's Troy dates back to 1200 B.C., and the Homeric poems to 1100 B.C., while an earlier Troy (Schliemann's second city) goes back to 2400 B.C. This history concerns the mainland of Asia Minor. ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... of the Far West] This was a more absolute Indian domain than was the region between the Alleghenies and the Mississippi at the end of the seventeenth century—an empire of mountains and prairies, where the men of the Stone Age watched with alarm the first crawling waves of that tide of civilization that was to sweep them away. The savage population of the far west has already been described in an earlier volume of this series.[Footnote: Farrand, ...
— Rise of the New West, 1819-1829 - Volume 14 in the series American Nation: A History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... judge and Ruth Chester, I was glad they were sitting beside each other, for I could avoid that side of the table with my eyes until I had steadied myself a few seconds at least. The surprise made the others I had been dining seem statues from the stone age, and only Mr. Graves' fork failed to hang fire. His appetite is as strong as his nerves and Delia Hawes looked at his composure with the relief plain in her eyes. Henrietta's smile in the judge's direction was ...
— The Melting of Molly • Maria Thompson Daviess
... toy lambs in the world would not have pleased him better than those things, the toys of the Troglodyte children—the children of the Stone Age. To clap two oyster shells together and make a noise—what, after all, could a baby ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... his horse, jumped on, gathered up the bridle reins, and used his spurs. There was a swish and a clang, a scrunch and a clock-clock and rattle of wheels, and a surprised human sound; then a bump and a shout—for there was no underground drainage, and the gutters belonged to the Stone Age. There was a swift clocking and rattle, more shouts, another bump, and a yell. And so on down the longish main street. The stable-boy, who had left the horses in his excitement, burst into the bar, shouting, "The Hypnertism's on, the Mesmerism's on! Ole Mae's van's runnin' away with him without ...
— The Rising of the Court • Henry Lawson
... title, I s'pose it's my lead.' I throwed him into a carriage. 'You'd best put on your nighty, and have the maid turn down your light. Sweet dreams, Gussie!' I was plumb sore on him. History don't record no divorce suits in the Stone Age, when a domestic inclined man allus toted a white-oak billy, studded with wire nails, according to the pictures, and didn't scruple to use it, both at home and abroad. Women was hairy, them days, and harder ...
— Pardners • Rex Beach |
