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More "Insect" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... are especially interesting, as regards not only their bionomic interdependence but also the analogies of their geographical distribution. It should be noted that butterflies are the chief agents in securing the continued existence of such alpine flowers as depend on insect fertilization, the other insect fertilizers being mostly wanting at great ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... if by magic. Beautiful whip-snakes were gleaming in the sun: they hold on by a few coils of the tail round a twig, the greater part of their body stretched out horizontally, occasionally retracting, and darting an unerring aim at some insect. The narrowness of the gorge, and the excessive steepness of the bounding hills, prevented any view, except of the opposite mountain face, which was one dense forest, in which the wild ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... Nerrinyeri. p. 2. "Every tribe, regarded by them as a family, has its ngaitge, or tutelary genius or tribal symbol, in the shape of some bird, beast, fish, reptile, insect, or substance. Between individuals of the same tribe no marriage can take place." Among the Narrinyeri kindred is reckoned (p. 10) on the father's side. See also (p. 46) ngaitge Samoan aitu. "No man or woman will kill their ngaitge," ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... I rose from my blankets this morning, after a sleepless night, I do not think there was an inch square of my body that did not exhibit the inflammation consequent upon a puncture by a flea, or some other equally rabid and poisonous insect. Small-pox, erysipelas, measles, and scarlet-fever combined, could not have imparted to my skin a more inflamed and sanguineous appearance. The multitudes of these insects, however, have been generated by Indian ...
— What I Saw in California • Edwin Bryant
... seen one, but we all have read about the Glow-worm, the remarkable insect which has the power of exhibiting a bright light in the dusk of evening. In England we have two species of insects that are called by this name, which properly belongs only to a kind of wingless beetle, found along the hedgerows and moist banks during the summer. The other insect ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... in brake or bosky avenue. Whate'er birds did or dreamed, this bird could say. Then down he shot, bounced airily along The sward, twitched in a grasshopper, made song Midflight, perched, prinked, and to his art again. Sweet Science, this large riddle read me plain: How may the death of that dull insect be The life of yon ...
— The Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... all that I had missed seeing at the various places where they had touched: they talked to me with provoking fluency of the culture of manioc; of the root of cassada, of which tapioca is made; of the shrub called the cactus, on which the cochineal insect swarms and feeds; and of the ipecacuanha-plant; all which they had seen at Rio Janeiro, besides eight paintings representing the manner in which the diamond and gold mines in the Brazils are worked. Indeed, upon cross-examination, ...
— Tales & Novels, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... the land while they sat there, and before them the great yellow equatorial moon rose slowly over the trees. With the darkness came a greater silence, for the myriad insect life was still. This great silence of Central Africa is wonderfully characteristic. The country is made for silence, the natives are created to steal, spirit-ridden, devil-haunted, through vast tracks of lifeless ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... raise and manage the silk-worm, they reaped nothing but their trouble for their pains. They tore up the mulberry-trees they had planted, and, in spite of De Serres, asserted that the northern climate was not adapted for the rearing of that tender insect. The great Sully, from his hatred of all objects of luxury, countenanced the popular clamour, and crushed the rising enterprise of De Serres. The monarch was wiser than the minister. The book had made sufficient noise to reach the ear of Henry IV.; who desired ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... things—organisms, as they are called—he cannot explain to you at all. When he meddles with them, he always ends like the man who killed his goose to get the golden eggs. He has to kill his goose, or his flower, or his insect, before he can analyse it; and then it is not a goose, but only the corpse of a goose; not a flower, but only the dead stuff of ...
— Madam How and Lady Why - or, First Lessons in Earth Lore for Children • Charles Kingsley
... from beholding vanity," says a good man, when he sees a display of graceful ornament. What, then, must he think of the Almighty Being, all whose useful work is so overlaid with ornament? There is not a fly's leg, nor an insect's wing, which is not polished and decorated to an extent that we should think positive extravagance in finishing up a child's dress. And can we suppose that this Being can take delight in dwellings and modes of life or forms of worship where every thing ...
— Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands V2 • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... the determination of a mechanical effect. (We do not pretend to know what Dr. Zimmermann means by this.) Lord John Murray undertook to shape some black wax into the appearance of a spider, with a view to observe whether the antipathy would take place at the simple figure of the insect. He then withdrew for a moment, and came in again with the wax in his hand, which he kept shut. Mr. Matthews, who in other respects was a very amiable and moderate man, immediately conceiving that his friend really had a spider ...
— Practical Education, Volume II • Maria Edgeworth
... might be fresh and sparkling for the coffee she was to make for the early breakfast. Above the eastern hills the sun was rising, coloring everything with a rosy tinge, and the air was full of the song which summer sings, of flowers and happy insect life, when she is at her best. But the woman neither heard the song nor saw the sunshine, her heart was so heavy with thoughts of the parting which was ...
— The Cromptons • Mary J. Holmes
... wove many kinds of cotton cloth, sometimes using as a dye the rich crimson of the cochineal insect. They made a more expensive fabric by interweaving the cotton with the fine hair of rabbits, and other animals; sometimes embroidering with pretty designs of flowers and birds, etc. The special art of the Aztec weaver was ...
— The Story of Extinct Civilizations of the West • Robert E. Anderson
... now against certain insect plagues which once afflicted him, and the brilliant professor laid his head on an old cork fender and slept like an infant. He did not return until next evening; he went without books, tobacco, alcohol, and conversation, and he never had an afterthought ...
— A Dream of the North Sea • James Runciman
... with minnows, crawfish, etc., they represent about ninety per cent of the trout's regular diet. Considering this fact, it is obvious that nymphs will take trout throughout the entire season. It will greatly surprise the novice to learn of the great amount of underwater insect life present in any stream. Next time you go fishing, hold your landing net close to the bottom, in a foot or so of fast water. Reach upstream and loosen the stones and gravel. Raise your landing net, and notice the numerous nymphs that have been washed from under the stones, and have attached ...
— How to Tie Flies • E. C. Gregg
... impassioned—attentiveness, an attentiveness which soon transcends all consciousness of yourself, as separate from and attending to the thing seen; this is the condition of success. As to the object of contemplation, it matters little. From Alp to insect, anything will do, provided that your attitude be right: for all things in this world towards which you are stretching out are linked together, and one truly apprehended will be ...
— Practical Mysticism - A Little Book for Normal People • Evelyn Underhill
... pore insect that's tryin to look like a hoss, but that ain't even got the skin of one, I reckon ye'll be good arter this," she finished, and threw a pack over the back of the now thoroughly subdued pack-mule. "Git started, ye folks, and don't say nothin' to me, for I'm li'ble to git mad arter ...
— Grace Harlowe's Overland Riders in the Great North Woods • Jessie Graham Flower
... he spoke, for the first time, a sudden misgiving, like the pinch of an insect, brushed Barron's consciousness. He had not, as a matter of fact, examined the Dawes letter very carefully, having been, as he now clearly remembered, in a state of considerable mental excitement during the whole time it was in his possession ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... will jump off on somebody else. When we came here we were flealess, but every person we have come near to seems to have contributed some fleas to us, until now we are loaded down with them, and we find in our room at the hotel a box of insect powder, which, is charged in with the candles. The king, who is a boy about three years older than I am, is full of fleas, too, and he jumps around from one place to another, like he was shaking himself to get rid of them. He gets ...
— Peck's Bad Boy Abroad • George W. Peck
... tells us that among the Amazulu, when cattle are lost, and the boys see the bird called Isi pungumangati sitting on a tree, "they ask it where the cattle are, and go in the direction in which it points with its head." The insect known as the mantis, or "praying insect," is used for a similar purpose (417. 339). In the Sollinger forest (Germany), on St. Matthew's day, February 24, the following practice is in vogue: A girl takes a girl friend upon her back and carries her to the nearest ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain
... at the mouth of the Amazon were perhaps the most remarkable, as well as the most bloodthirsty animals which abounded in that region. They were remarkable not only for size, but for voracity and numbers. This insect is a pest in every climate. I have found them troublesome on the bar of the Mississippi in the heat of summer; and at the same season exceedingly annoying while navigating the Dwina on the way to Archangel. In the low lands of ...
— Jack in the Forecastle • John Sherburne Sleeper
... him. Nature, in none of its phases, could appear insignificant to his fertile and mellow soul. When he could not soar in the high regions of contemplative philosophy, he stooped as low as the little child whose rosy cheek he patted, and who then became to him a teacher and a study. An insect crawling on a leaf,—a bit of grass bringing the joy of its short life around the stones of the pavement,—a cloud floating over the meadows,—a murmur of voices in the air,—the wings of a butterfly, or the thundering of the storm above the lake,—all and ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various
... All diligence of spirit.] "With the whole bent of my mind." A happy phraseology; in ridicule, at the same time that it was in conformity with the style of the airy, affected insect ...
— Hamlet • William Shakespeare
... Little, flitting, white-fire insect Little, dancing, white-fire creature, Light me with your little candle, Ere upon my bed I lay me, Ere in sleep I ...
— The Song Of Hiawatha • Henry W. Longfellow
... called. In tropical countries they grow to a large size, but nothing like these. They are filled, in the cup, with a sort of sticky, sweet mixture, and this attracts insects. When one enters the cup the top flap folds over, and the hapless insect is caught there. The plant actually devours it, nature providing a sort of vegetable digestive apparatus. These giant plants are the same, and they seem large enough to take in a man, to ...
— Five Thousand Miles Underground • Roy Rockwood
... be a great many of them," answered Arthur, "and it is supposed that new ones are constantly being formed by the labours of the coral insect. A bare ledge of coral first appears, just at the surface; it arrests floating substances, weeds, trees, etcetera; soon the sea-birds begin to resort there; by the decay of vegetable and animal matter a thin soil gradually covers the foundation of coral; a cocoa-nut ...
— The Island Home • Richard Archer
... the whip-poor-will complained over the tops of the woodland in near and far cadence through the warm moonlit air. Beside this and the throb of insect voices there was no sound. "I came out this evening," said Finney, "to tell you that last March in Ohio I saw her." His voice fell at the pronoun ...
— The Mormon Prophet • Lily Dougall
... some young birch saplings grew close by. One of these leaves suddenly rose up and began to move of itself, as it seemed; an ant had seized it, and holding it by the edge travelled on, so that as the insect was partly hidden under it, the leaf appeared to move alone, now over sticks and now under them. It reminded me of the sight which seemed so wonderful to the early navigators when they came to a country where, as they first thought, the leaves ...
— Nature Near London • Richard Jefferies
... three long, open windows subdued the sun-glare, yet the very odour of the cut flowers in the room seemed oppressive, while without could be heard the busy hum of insect life. ...
— The House of Whispers • William Le Queux
... discovery by one of their number of the active infectant in fever and ague. It has been found in the dust-like spores of a marsh plant—the Pamella. In Paris, at the same time, a woman of rank claims to have discovered the cause of cholera in a microscopic insect, developed in low and filthy localities. Her details were so minute, that the Academy of Science, which began by laughing at the introduction of the matter, has been compelled to listen, and the subject is ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... walks which furnished him with such a fund of accurate observation of the sights and sounds of the natural world. No man has a keener eye for a bird than he, nor a quicker ear to distinguish between their songs; and no unusual sound of insect life escapes his scrutiny,—he is keenly alert to know what is going on under his feet as well as over his head. The most modest flower does not escape his eye, nor any peculiarly marked leaf, nor any rich bed of leafy mould. He ...
— Home Life of Great Authors • Hattie Tyng Griswold
... sketch attractively and simply the wonders of reptile and insect existences, the changes of trees, rocks, rivers, clouds, and winds. This is done by a family of children writing letters, both playful and serious, which are addressed to all children whom the ...
— Rollo in Scotland • Jacob Abbott
... from the nearest point of land. There are several accounts of insects having been blown off the Patagonian shore. Captain Cook observed it, as did more lately Captain King of the Adventure. The cause probably is due to the want of shelter, both of trees and hills, so that an insect on the wing with an off-shore breeze, would be very apt to be blown out to sea. The most remarkable instance I have known of an insect being caught far from the land, was that of a large grasshopper (Acrydium), ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... guards, towards his prison. He had not gone many paces when his attention was attracted towards a man who, just as he came abreast of where he was lying, turned over and grabbed at the air with his hand as though to catch some flying insect. The fellow's action was so out of keeping with the laziness of his attitude that Helmar glanced more keenly at him, and was astonished to see him looking hard at him. Immediately it flashed across his mind that he had seen the man before, but where he could not say. However, the recognition ...
— Under the Rebel's Reign • Charles Neufeld
... of both ova and fry is the Dytiscus marginalis, whether this insect be in the larval or adult stage. I think that I should hardly be wrong in going even further and saying that D. marginalis is very dangerous to trout early in their yearling stage. The accompanying illustration shows a larva of Dytiscus which has caught a young trout. ...
— Amateur Fish Culture • Charles Edward Walker
... the Carnivores—"les animaux nuisibles"—the defects of Buffon's higgledy-piggledy plan are almost ludicrously evident, for flesh-eaters, fruit-eaters, insect-eaters, and gnawers rub shoulders with colossal indifference. Doubtless, however, this is to us all the more conspicuous, because use and wont have made readers of the present day acquainted with the advantages of classification, which it is but fair to ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... his head; and the real state of things now became so obviously apparent that he could no longer get away from the undeniable fact: Arsene Lupin was not dead! Arsene Lupin whom he had hurled into the bowels of the earth and crushed as surely as an insect is crushed with a hammer; Arsene ...
— The Teeth of the Tiger • Maurice Leblanc
... interest than an advertisement of the sale of second-hand furniture. Whether he killed Von Koren next day or left him alive, it would be just the same, equally useless and uninteresting. Better to shoot him in the leg or hand, wound him, then laugh at him, and let him, like an insect with a broken leg lost in the grass—let him be lost with his obscure sufferings in the crowd of ...
— The Duel and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... be like the Persian insect powder—it would be easier to buy it. But it has a handsome pink flower and you must surely ...
— Ethel Morton's Enterprise • Mabell S.C. Smith
... and insect life there runs what is recognized as the law of protective assimilation. It represents the necessity under which a creature lives to pretend to be something else as a condition of continuing to be itself. The rose-colored flamingo, ...
— The Mettle of the Pasture • James Lane Allen
... encountered them walking through the unfrequented by-paths of the Retiro, at a respectable distance from her mother, who lingered opportunely to examine the first opening buds of flowers or some curious insect. Mothers, at this critical period of courtship, are under an obligation to be admirers of the works of nature. The young pair of turtle-doves would pause when they caught sight of me and greet me blushingly. I cannot conceal from you that, ...
— First Love (Little Blue Book #1195) - And Other Fascinating Stories of Spanish Life • Various
... publishing in a dogmatic volume the improvised lecture by which you lent enchantment to one of those evenings which are rest after seeing Rome. You do not know, perhaps, that most of our professors live on Germany, on England, on the East, or on the North, as an insect lives on a tree; and, like the insect, become an integral part of it, borrowing their merit from that of what they feed on. Now, Italy hitherto has not yet been worked out in public lectures. No one will ever give me credit for my literary ...
— Cousin Betty • Honore de Balzac
... and, when a reader has assimilated from any given book his own proper nourishment and pleasure, the rest of the book is so much oyster shell. The end of true reading is the development of individuality. Like a certain water insect, the reader instinctively selects from the outspread world of books the building materials for the house of his soul. He chooses here and rejects there, and remembers or forgets according to the formative desire of his nature. Yet it often happens that he forgets ...
— The Guide to Reading - The Pocket University Volume XXIII • Edited by Dr. Lyman Abbott, Asa Don Dickenson, and Others
... autumn approaches. The songsters of the seed-time are silent at the reaping of the harvest. Other minstrels take up the strain. It is the heyday of insect life. The day is canopied with musical sound. All the songs of the spring and summer appear to be floating, softened and refined, in the upper air. The birds, in a new but less holiday suit, turn their faces southward. The swallows flock and go; the bobolinks flock and go; silently and unobserved, ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... plumage and discolours; others, more reserved and less frivolous, keep their glamour and prestige for a much longer time. For the rest, the latter seem to me to rejoice without being vain in their advantages. And at bottom, what should any insect gain by ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... There are now sundry claimants to the honour of having here fathered the modern industry. Some say that in 1823 a retired intendant introduced from Mexico the true terciopelo, or velvet-leaf, together with the Mexican cochineal, the coccus cacti hemipter, [Footnote: The male insect is winged for flight. The female never stirs from the spot where she begins to feed: she lays her eggs, which are innumerable and microscopic, and she leaves them in the membrane or hardened envelope which she has secreted.] ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... thing to get familiar with these diseases and see what you are up against, because all through the history of nut culture, and so forth, one of the basic defects has been the failure to appreciate the importance of insect and disease factors. And we are very much in need of more basic research along those lines, but I agree with Dr. Crane that at present we have a limited amount to show ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Incorporated 39th Annual Report - at Norris, Tenn. September 13-15 1948 • Various
... with impartial interest at this industrial cannibalism," returned Perry, sarcastically. "Eat or be eaten that's what enlightened self-interest has come to. After all, Ralph would say, it is nature, the insect world over again, the victim duped and crippled before he is devoured, and the lawyer—how shall I put it?—facilitating the processes of ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... spared himself nothing,—slurred over nothing; spurned himself, as it were, for the meanness, in which he had wallowed that night. How firm he had been! how kind! how masterful!—pluming himself on his man's strength, while he held her in his power as one might hold an insect, played with her shrinking woman's nature, and trampled it under his feet, coldly and quietly! She was in his way, and he had put her aside. How the fine subtile spirit had risen up out of its agony of shame, and ...
— Margret Howth, A Story of To-day • Rebecca Harding Davis
... machines he tore the plants bit from bit, until they were reduced to pulp, just as the insect reduced the leaves in the process ...
— The Great Round World and What Is Going On In It, Vol. 1, No. 35, July 8, 1897 - A Weekly Magazine for Boys and Girls • Various
... the locust, mainly from the desire to seek its subjugation and destruction, and, whilst much general biological information has been written upon the subject, there are things which we do not yet know about this insect or its habits. We do not know what precise influences cause their migration, nor do we know what is the exact length of life of the locust or its breeding power, or the precise locality in any country which may be defined as its permanent abode. Locusts are classified ...
— Argentina From A British Point Of View • Various
... gingerly did so. The Chemist held the insect by its wings over the sugar. "Will someone lend me ...
— The Girl in the Golden Atom • Raymond King Cummings
... some huge insect with a buzz of whirring wings, flew overhead, dropping multi-coloured stars from its tail. Then our ...
— "Contemptible" • "Casualty"
... Catholic mind; the very hay made upon the lawn, the fat and tallow of the beef and mutton allowed, must be paid for and accounted upon oath. It is true, this economy in miniature cannot sufficiently be commended, particularly at a time when only the insect defaulters of the Treasury, your Hunts and your Chinnerys, when only those "gilded bugs" can escape the microscopic eye of ministers. But when you come forward, session after session, as your paltry pittance is ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... take flight and find a mate across a county so as to perpetuate its race a hundred miles from home. Our volume closes with a sketch of the singular ties which thus bind together the fortunes of blossom and insect, so that at last the very form of a flower may be cast in the mould of its winged ally. A word is also spoken regarding the singular relations of late detected between the world of vegetation and minute ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - The Naturalist as Interpreter and Seer • Various
... high their flourish'd heads between, and wrought Mosaic, under foot the violet, Crocus, and hyacinth, with rich inlay Broider'd the ground, more colour'd than with stone Of costliest emblem other creature here, Beast, bird, insect, or worm, durst enter none, Such was their awe of man. In shadier bower More sacred and sequester'd, though but feign'd, Pan or Sylvanus never slept, nor nymph Nor Faunus haunted. Here, in close recess, With flowers, garlands, and sweet smelling herbs, Espoused Eve deck'd first her nuptial ...
— Flowers and Flower-Gardens • David Lester Richardson
... during the rainy season, draining as it does two extensive slopes. No sooner had we pitched our camp, built a boma of thorny acacia, and other tree branches, by stacking them round our camp, and driven our animals to grass; than we were made aware of the formidable number and variety of the insect tribe, which for a time was another source of anxiety, until a diligent examination of the several species ...
— How I Found Livingstone • Sir Henry M. Stanley
... shadowgraph closely, "has already been established by the well-known English scientist, Dr. Hall Edwards. He has been experimenting with the method of using X-rays recently discovered by a German scientist, by which radiographs of very thin substances, such as a sheet of paper, a leaf, an insect's body, may be obtained. These thin substances, through which the rays used formerly to pass without leaving an impression, can now ...
— The Gold of the Gods • Arthur B. Reeve
... weighing out prayers for me, Without hearing the plates of meat [17] Of a slop, who pinched him for "d. and d." [18] And disturbing a peaceful beat, And I smiled as I closed my two mince pies [19] In my insect promenade; For out of his nibs I had taken a rise, [20] And his stay on the spot ...
— Musa Pedestris - Three Centuries of Canting Songs - and Slang Rhymes [1536 - 1896] • John S. Farmer
... commiseration rather than of relief. Worthless clay that the man was, it seemed petty now to have been so disturbed over his living on, for such satisfactions as his poor fragment of life gave him. Like the insignificant insect which preyed on its own petty world, he had, maybe, his rights to his prey. At all events, now that he had ceased to trouble, it was foolish to have any feeling of disgust, of reproach, of hatred. God and life had made him so, as God and life had ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... hardens into rock; or the leaf that fixes its form and impress in the bed of coal; or like the bowlder that forms the pencil point of a mighty iceberg, scratching the rocks in its movement across a submerged plain, destined to be upheaved as a continent in some future convulsion; or like the coral insect, which, in forming his separate cell, unconsciously assists in laying the foundation of islands and vast regions of solid earth; we, the creatures of the hour, all unconscious of the record we are making, leave imperishable ...
— The Continental Monthly , Vol. 2 No. 5, November 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... and I study it alive; you turn it into an object of horror and pity, whereas I cause it to be loved; you labour in a torture-chamber and dissecting-room, I make my observations under the blue sky, to the song of the Cicadae (The Cicada Cigale, an insect akin to the Grasshopper and found more particularly in the south of France.—Translator's Note.); you subject cell and protoplasm to chemical tests, I study instinct in its loftiest manifestations; you pry into ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... looked, for the first time in his life, quite sane. 'We talk about ourselves,' he said, 'as though we were the end of creation. I get tired listening to myself sometimes. Pah!' he continued, 'for all we know the human race may die out utterly and another insect take our place, as possibly we pushed out and took the place of a former race of beings. I wonder if the ant tribe may not be the future inheritors of the earth. They understand combination, and already have an extra sense that we lack. If ...
— Sketches in Lavender, Blue and Green • Jerome K. Jerome
... all about, and I don't like that Hallam," she said. "He's an insect. A crawling one with slimy feet, and to pin a big diamond in front of one as he does is horrible taste. Give me the book, Nellie. It reads like our cypher. Oh, yes. 'Instructions to hand. No legal improvements ...
— Alton of Somasco • Harold Bindloss
... the surplus is and where it is. Will you decide what men shall live, what men shall die? It may be that in the sight of heaven, you are more worthless and less fit to live than millions like this poor man's child. Ah, God! to hear the insect on the leaf pronouncing on the too much life among his hungry ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN
... The Food insisted on escaping with the pertinacity of a thing alive. Flour treated with the stuff crumbled in dry weather almost as if by intention into an impalpable powder, and would lift and travel before the lightest breeze. Now it would be some fresh insect won its way to a temporary fatal new development, now some fresh outbreak from the sewers of rats and such-like vermin. For some days the village of Pangbourne in Berkshire fought with giant ants. Three men were bitten and died. There would ...
— The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth • H.G. Wells
... attributes emotions to plants and souls to bees, might wrap a drama of destiny about this insect. She would command a leading place in a cast which included the butterfly that gave silk to the world, the mosquito that helped to prove the germ theory of disease, and the caterpillar that loosed the apple which revealed the law of ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... of spring flowers, and so followed out the season. She made special pets of the birds, locating nest after nest, and immediately projecting herself into the daily life of the occupants. "No one," she says, "ever taught me more than that the birds were useful, a gift of God for our protection from insect pests on fruit and crops; and a gift of Grace in their beauty and music, things to be rigidly protected. From this cue I evolved the idea myself that I must be extremely careful, for had not my father tied a 'kerchief over my mouth when he lifted me for a peep ...
— At the Foot of the Rainbow • Gene Stratton-Porter
... him? No, Let him go, Never hurt an insect so; But no doubt He flies out Just to gad about. Now you see his wings of silk Drabbled in the baby's milk; Fie, oh fie, Foolish fly! How ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... far as he could gather from the descriptions she gave him from time to time, was going to be rather difficult to find. He feared also that it would be a very insect-ridden place, and that their calm pursuits would often be interrupted by things like earwigs. It was to be ancient, and much thatched and latticed and rose-overgrown. It was, too, to be very small; the ...
— The Princess Priscilla's Fortnight • Elizabeth von Arnim
... this, that the slightest act of charity, even in the lowest class of persons, such as saving the life of an insect out of pity, that this act ... shall bring to the doer of it ...
— The Essence of Buddhism • Various
... those rocks, may lie there till the ravens pick your bones; the anxious glance round the lake to see if the fish are moving; the still more anxious glance through your book to guess what they will choose to take; what extravagant bundle of red, blue, and yellow feathers, like no insect save perhaps some jewelled monster from Amboyna or Brazil—may tempt those sulkiest and most capricious of trout to cease for once their life-long business of picking leeches from among those Syenite cubes which will ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... plant or animal, save from the germ or seed of some previous plant or animal of the same species. Nor has a single instance of the transmutation of species ever been proved. Every beast, bird, fish, insect and plant brings forth after its kind, and has done so since its creation. No law of Natural Philosophy is more firmly established than this, That there is no spontaneous generation, nor transmutation of species. It is true there is a regular gradation of the various ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... Providence we are permitted to bustle about in our immediate little circle like the ant, running hither and thither with all the sublime conceit of that insect. We pick up, as he does, a burden which on close inspection will be found to be absolutely valueless, something that somebody else has thrown away. We hoist it over obstructions while there is usually a short way round; we fret and sweat and fume. Then ...
— Barlasch of the Guard • H. S. Merriman
... Gemma moved restlessly. "Orazio, per carita! Your hand is so hot and sticky! I shall change places with Carmela," she said. She released her fingers from the young man's grasp with the air of one crushing a forward insect or removing a bramble from the path, and she actually beckoned ...
— Olive in Italy • Moray Dalton
... of strange plants. There were countless reptiles and insects. The latter were thicker built than those of Earth—consequently still more disgusting, and some of them were of enormous size. One monstrous insect, as large as a horse, stood right in the centre of their path without budging. It was armour-plated, had jaws like scimitars, and underneath its body was a forest of legs. Tydomin gave one malignant look at it, and sent it crashing ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... white elephant, having red eyes, which glare like a flame of fire. In this country there is a certain species of small vermin, which attaches itself to the trunks of the elephants, to suck their blood, by which many elephants die. The skull of this insect[24] is so hard as to be impenetrable to a musket shot. They have on their livers the figures of men and women, which the natives call Toketa, resembling a mandrake; and it is affirmed, that whoever has one of these about him cannot ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. II • Robert Kerr
... of those bird-men out of sight I come back to earth with an odd feeling of being merely a crawling insect. Anne," he said, turning to his wife, "do you remember the first time I took you for a buggy ride in Avonlea—that night we went to the Carmody concert, the first fall you taught in Avonlea? I had out little black mare with the white star on her forehead, ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... such news as he was bringing to the Sovereigns might not be lost. It seemed to him that the strong desire he felt to bring such great news, and to show that all he had said and offered to discover had turned out true, suggested the fear that he would not be able to do so, and that each stinging insect would be able to thwart and impede the work. He attributes this fear to his little faith, and to his want of confidence in ...
— The Northmen, Columbus and Cabot, 985-1503 • Various
... raw, but never had eggs, boiled, fried, or poached, tasted so nice before! He had just finished his meal, and was wishing that a third egg had remained in the ruined nest, when a slight sound like the buzzing of an insect made him look round, and there, within a few feet of him, was the big black weasel once more, looking strangely bold and savage-tempered. It kept staring fixedly at Martin out of its small, wicked, beady black eyes, and snarling so as to show its white sharp teeth; ...
— A Little Boy Lost • Hudson, W. H.
... vicious slap and flew straight for Sary's red head. She unceremoniously ducked and ran. But the insect buzzed after her with evil intent, so Sary ran for her sanctuary, slamming the screen door safely between herself and her pursuer. The audience watching beside the table ...
— Polly of Pebbly Pit • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... expected of him; his food must be roots and fruit, his clothing of bark fibres; he must spend his time in reading the Vedas; he is to practise austerities by exposing himself to heat and cold; he is to beg food but once a day; he must be careful not to destroy the life of the smallest insect; he must not taste intoxicating liquors. A Brahman who has thus mortified his body by these modes is exalted into the divine essence. This was the early creed of the Brahman before corruption set in. And in these things ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume I • John Lord
... his room and had little heart for study. It was a cosey room now. His landlady had hung rude pictures on the wall and given him a rag carpet. On the table were pieces of clear quartz and tourmaline and, about each window-frame, odd nests of bird or insect—souvenirs of wood-life and his travel with the drove. There, too, on the table were mementos of that first day of his teaching,—the mirror spectacles with which he had seen at once every corner of the schoolroom, the sling-shot and bar ...
— Darrel of the Blessed Isles • Irving Bacheller
... perish. His predecessor in office had already decided the question in favor of national dismemberment, by denying to it the right of self-defense and self-preservation—a right which belongs to the meanest insect. ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... observed to bend in a watchful manner over the grass, and, gradually assuming the position of a quadruped, fall plump upon his hands and knees. Having achieved this feat, he would rise with a grasshopper between his finger and thumb; a tin box being then held open by the other, the unlucky insect was carefully introduced to the interior, and the lid closed sharply—some such remark attending each capture as that "That one was safe," or, "There went another;" and the mystery of the whole proceeding being explained by the fact that these same incarcerated grasshoppers were intended to ...
— Hudson Bay • R.M. Ballantyne
... is unjustified, and only irritates the sufferer, rouses his antagonism, and undermines his confidence in the judgment of his adviser. He knows that the sensations are there. To call them imaginary is like telling one who inspects an insect through a microscope that the claws do not look enormous; they do look enormous—through the microscope—but this does not make them so. The worrier must learn to realize that he is looking at his sensations, as he does everything else, through ...
— Why Worry? • George Lincoln Walton, M.D.
... little coral insect, obeying the blind instinct of its nature, adds particle to particle, and builds a house for itself at the same time that it helps to construct a continent; so we, obeying the voice of God, in every little duty, performed not ...
— The Elements of Character • Mary G. Chandler
... rifle, took the position assigned to her, and there was no more conversation for the next two hours, no sound other than that from the insect life and the occasional whinney of a pony. The minds of the Overlanders, however, were active. They were pondering over these persistent attacks on them, and Grace, for one, became finally convinced that Lieutenant Wingate was not overstating ...
— Grace Harlowe's Overland Riders Among the Kentucky Mountaineers • Jessie Graham Flower
... Nayland Smith were stealthily retracing their steps, the former keeping the light directed upon the hideous insect, which now began running about with that horrible, febrile activity characteristic of the species. Suddenly came a sharp, staccato report.... Sir Lionel had scored a hit with ...
— The Hand Of Fu-Manchu - Being a New Phase in the Activities of Fu-Manchu, the Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... chasms which when the world was young had felt the surge of the restless seas. No form of life winged its way through the darkness and called to its mate. No beast of prey rent the air with its challenge. No insect chirped. No slimy shape crawled over the rocks. Dark and solemn, mysterious and still, the earth sped ...
— Omega, the Man • Lowell Howard Morrow
... coupled with the very unusual character of the details at the outer extremities of the figures, leads to the surmise that each part of the design is a conventional representation of some life form, a bird, an insect, or perhaps ...
— A Study Of The Textile Art In Its Relation To The Development Of Form And Ornament • William H. Holmes
... mountain wooded to the peak, the lawns And winding glades high up like ways to Heaven, The slender coco's drooping crown of plumes, The lightning flash of insect and of bird, The lustre of the long convolvuluses That coil'd around the stately stems, and ran Ev'n to the limit of the land, the glows And glories of the broad belt of the world, All these he saw; but what he fain had seen He could not see, the kindly human face, Nor ever hear a kindly voice, ...
— English Critical Essays - Nineteenth Century • Various
... in the downs, awaiting a fair wind to carry her into the port of London. This collier (a schooner) was named the "Butterfly," perhaps because the owner had a hazy idea that there was some resemblance between an insect flitting about from flower to flower and a vessel sailing from port to port! Black as a chimney from keelson to truck, she was as like to a butterfly as a lady's hand is to ...
— The Lifeboat • R.M. Ballantyne
... The loveliness which makes that special person the veritable Rose of the World to us exists but in our imagination. It is no rose that we adore—only at the best a bedeguar, of which the origin is a disagreeable little insect. We believe in the exquisite harmony of those atoms which have arranged themselves to form the thing we love. And we marry our human ideal, expecting the unbroken continuance of that harmony. But the discord comes; colours clash; the jarring note ...
— The Idler, Volume III., Issue XIII., February 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly. Edited By Jerome K. Jerome & Robert Barr • Various
... years before his marriage, in a broker's office, with no other means than the meagre salary of a clerk. But he was a man to whom misfortune had early taught the truths of life, and he followed the strait path with the tenacity of an insect making for its nest; he was one of those dogged young men who feign death before an obstacle and wear out everybody's patience with their own beetle-like perseverance. Thus, young as he was, he had all the republican virtue of poor peoples; he was sober, saving of his time, an enemy to pleasure. ...
— Ferragus • Honore de Balzac
... is the name of a sort, kind, or class, of beings or things; as, Beast, bird, fish, insect,—creatures, ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... made the same guess as the pale-face youth, but with a more profound belief in the prodigious capacity of the Shawanoe, he fixed upon a point further down stream and closer to the other bank for his reappearance; but the seconds lengthened into minutes and nothing was seen. The wing of the flitting insect, had it glanced against the surface, would have caused a crinkle or two which the watchful eyes of the Sauk would have detected, but as it was, his vision, roaming back and forth, and here and there over the calm surface, saw ...
— Footprints in the Forest • Edward Sylvester Ellis
... agricultural operations and could not be placated until a shrine was built in its honour; that in the time of the Emperor Kogyoku, the people of the eastern provinces devoted themselves to the worship of an insect resembling a silkworm, which they regarded as a manifestation of the Kami of the Moon; that the Emperor Keiko (A.D. 71-130) declared a huge tree to be sacred; that in the days of the Empress Suiko (A.D. 593-628), religious rites were performed before cutting down a tree supposed ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... Barotse valley, rains had fallen and the woods had put on their gayest hue. Flowers of great beauty grew everywhere. "The ground begins to swarm with insect life, and in the cool, pleasant mornings the place rings with ...
— A Book of Discovery - The History of the World's Exploration, From the Earliest - Times to the Finding of the South Pole • Margaret Bertha (M. B.) Synge
... perform, tho' you, it woulde seeme, have none. I must away to make Honey.' Then the Childe, abasht, went to the Ant. He sayd, 'Will you play with me, Ant?' The Ant replied, 'Nay, I must provide against the Winter.' In shorte, he found that everie Bird, Beaste, and Insect he accosted, had a closer Eye to the Purpose of their Creation than himselfe. Then he sayd, 'I will then back, and con my Task.'—Moral. The Moral of the foregoing Fable, my deare Aunt, is this—We must love Work better ...
— Mary Powell & Deborah's Diary • Anne Manning
... Creation kreitajxo. Creator kreinto. Creature estajxo. Credence kredo. Credible kredebla. Credit kredito. Creditor kreditoro. Credulity kredemo. Creed kredo. Creep rampi. Creole Kreolo. Crest tufo. Crevice fendo—ajxo. Crew maristaro. Cricket (insect) grilo. Crime krimo. Criminal krimulo. Criminally kriminale. Crimson rugxega. Cripple kripligi. Cripple kriplulo. Crippled kripla. Crisis krizo. Crisp friza. Critic kritikisto. Criticism kritiko. Croak bleki. Crockery fajenco. Crocodile ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... animals are at rest it is possible to observe some kind of motion in them. Trees and stones never move unless acted upon by external force, while the infant and the tiniest insect can execute a great variety of movements. Even in the deepest sleep the beating of the heart and the motion of the chest never cease. In fact, the power to execute spontaneous movement is the most ...
— A Practical Physiology • Albert F. Blaisdell
... bore, what a responsibility he had assumed. At home there was one who knew,—for he was betrothed. A large, long-legged spider was crawling over the floor and drew near his foot; he was in the habit of treading on this loathsome insect, but to-day he tenderly raised his foot that it might go in peace whither it would. His voice was as gentle as a collect, his eyes said incessantly that all men were good, his hands made a humble movement out of his pockets up to his hair to stroke ...
— A Happy Boy • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... indigestible food even for a bear's stomach. Anyhow, it was following with mighty strides in the track of the fugitives. It caught sight of me and stopped, astonished, as if it were thinking, 'What sort of insect can that be?' I went on to within easy range; it stood still, looking hard at me. At last it turned its head a little, and I gave it a ball in the neck. Without moving a limb, it sank slowly to the ice. I now let loose some of ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen
... larva is transformed into the pupa or nymph, which is distinguishable principally by the shortness of its antennae and the presence of wing pads. After a brief existence the pupa emerges from the ground, and, holding on to a plant stem by means of its powerful front legs, sets free the perfect insect through a slit along the median dorsal line of the thorax. In some cases the pupa upon emerging constructs a chimney of soil, the use of which is not known. In one of the best-known species, Cicada septemdecim, from North America, the lifecycle ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... to mark the greater breaks in sentences, when the lesser breaks are marked by semicolons. "You have called yourself an atom in the universe; you have said that you are but an insect in the solar blaze: is your present pride consistent with these professions?" "A clause is either independent or dependent: independent, if it forms an assertion by itself; dependent, if it enters into some ...
— The Verbalist • Thomas Embly Osmun, (AKA Alfred Ayres)
... insect Aristotle gives a copious account. He describes two separate species, which we still recognize easily; a larger one and the better singer, the other smaller and the first to come and last to go with the summer season. ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... said Henry, extending his brawny arm: "I will have no more close hugs—no more bodkin work, like last night. I care little for a wasp's sting, yet I will not allow the insect to come near me if I ...
— The Fair Maid of Perth • Sir Walter Scott
... far off above the pale wattlings of a fold: but as he wound on—and on into the Plain there was no sign of man in all the hot landscape, and no motion but the bicker of the stream over its stony bed, and the hum of insect life busy on its millions of dark and tiny vibrant wings. Not a breath of wind stirred among these grassy valleys, and Lawrence, feeling warm, had sat down by a pool under a sapling birchtree, when he heard a step on the path. ...
— Nightfall • Anthony Pryde
... in the form of an insect, to make artistic webs until the end of her life," the slave, now sufficiently well informed, added importantly. "Since that transformation, as you know, the spider has been called by the Greeks Arachne. Perhaps—I always thought so—Hermon ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... for the cricket, but the little black insect hopped to one side, and then, all of a sudden he began to laugh. ...
— Uncle Wiggily's Travels • Howard R. Garis
... neglect of soil and shrubbery into which the place had lapsed. It was idle, however, to imagine that an airy guest from Monument Mountain, Bald Summit, and old Graylock, shaggy with primeval forests, could see anything to admire in my poor little hillside, with its growth of frail and insect-eaten locust trees. Eustace very frankly called the view from my hill top tame; and so, no doubt, it was, after rough, broken, rugged, headlong Berkshire, and especially the northern parts of the county, with which his college residence had made him familiar. But to me there is a peculiar, ...
— Tanglewood Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... faintest sound startled me! A falling leaf; a blade of grass moved by an insect; a snake or a lizard gliding out of my path; the squeal of a monkey; the fluttering of a bird's wings as it flew up to its perch, all subjected me to ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... home. Not to be beaten, however, we secured reinforcements and more ammunition, in the shape of old rags, brooms and so forth, and returned to the charge, and although we were driven back several times we stayed until we won out, and the last insect lay a quivering mass on the ground. There was not one among us, not wounded in some manner, as for myself I had enough of it. My nose looked like a dutch slipper, and it was several days before my eyes were able to perform ...
— The Life and Adventures of Nat Love - Better Known in the Cattle Country as "Deadwood Dick" • Nat Love
... the snail, reduced to a powder, and mixed up with water dropped from the shell of the butternut, through the ochre of war. The wise master of the spell had drawn from field, and forest, earth, air, and water, from beast and bird, and fish and reptile, and insect and tree, and flower and fruit, all the various properties which have an agency in subduing things to the will of him, to whom those properties have been taught. From these he had compounded a medicine, ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 2 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... the little house, tiny as an insect before the great bulk of the mountains, dwarfed by the gigantic tree, ridiculous, despicable in the face of Nature, like the human life it sheltered. From its every window poured a flood of yellow light that was drunk up in a twinkling by the ...
— The Brimming Cup • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... lightened by the clergy, professionally gloating over approaching doom, nor by the speculations of the scientists, who were now predicting an insect and aquatic world. Man, they said, could not adapt himself to the Grass—this was proved to the hilt by the tragedy of the Russian armies in the Last War—but insects had, fishes didnt need to, and birds, especially those who nested above the snowline, might possibly be able to. ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... be a purely vegetable production when found in the combs, for after being collected by the insect by means of its proboscis, it is transmitted into what is called the honey bag, where it is elaborated, and, hurrying homewards with its precious load, the bee regurgitates it into the cell of the honey comb. It takes a great many drops to fill a cell, as the honey ...
— A Description of the Bar-and-Frame-Hive • W. Augustus Munn
... was wrinkled, her chin long and pointed. She was an excellent woman, a true la Bertelliere. L'abbe Cruchot found occasional opportunity to tell her that she had not done ill; and she believed him. Angelic sweetness, the resignation of an insect tortured by children, a rare piety, a good heart, an unalterable equanimity of soul, made her universally pitied and respected. Her husband never gave her more than six francs at a time for her personal ...
— Eugenie Grandet • Honore de Balzac
... made some years ago by sending a malarial mosquito by mail from Italy to England, where an enthusiast allowed himself to be bitten by the insect. He had had no trace of malaria before, but a week after the mosquito's bite he came down with the disease. It has also been noted that in such parts of the country as Greenland and Alaska, where mosquitoes are as thick as in the far-famed New Jersey marshes, ...
— Rural Hygiene • Henry N. Ogden
... was not in Assuncion, but some twenty miles out in the "campo." He rarely visited the capital, except on matters of business. For a business he had; this of somewhat unusual character. It consisted chiefly in the produce of his gun and insect-net. Many a rare specimen of bird and quadruped, butterfly and beetle, captured and preserved by Ludwig Halberger, at this day adorns the public museums of Prussia and other European countries. But for the dispatch and shipment of these he would never ...
— Gaspar the Gaucho - A Story of the Gran Chaco • Mayne Reid
... remain at home, I entered into an arrangement with her that she was to supply me with board and lodgings for three pounds a week, and henceforth resisting all Curzon Street temptations, I trudged home to eat a chop. I studied the servant as one might an insect under a microscope. "What an admirable book she would make, but what will the end be? if ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... was, five years before his marriage, in a broker's office, with no other means than the meagre salary of a clerk. But he was a man to whom misfortune had early taught the truths of life, and he followed the strait path with the tenacity of an insect making for its nest; he was one of those dogged young men who feign death before an obstacle and wear out everybody's patience with their own beetle-like perseverance. Thus, young as he was, he had all the republican virtue of poor peoples; he was sober, ...
— Ferragus • Honore de Balzac
... time of great awakenings," and upon the ominous text, Their foot shall slide in due time. "The God that holds you over the pit of hell" runs an oft-quoted passage from this powerful denunciation of the wrath to come, "much as one holds a spider or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked.... You are ten thousand times more abominable in his eyes than the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours.... You hang by a slender thread, with the flames ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... lonely solitudes, the Eden of nature, without meeting with the slightest trace of a human being. Evening was approaching, still, calm, and bright. The most singular and even oppressive silence prevailed, for neither voice of bird nor insect was to be heard. Crockett began to feel very uneasy. The fact that he was lost himself did not trouble him much, but he felt anxious for his simple-minded, good-natured friend, the juggler, who was left entirely alone and quite unable ...
— David Crockett: His Life and Adventures • John S. C. Abbott
... spoke, for the first time, a sudden misgiving, like the pinch of an insect, brushed Barron's consciousness. He had not, as a matter of fact, examined the Dawes letter very carefully, having been, as he now clearly remembered, in a state of considerable mental excitement during the whole time it was in his possession ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... going," the detective said, strutting across the room, with his little round belly protruding like that of an insect. "You can always find me at the hotel down here, if I'm in this part of the country. Just ask for me ask for me and I'll ...
— Boy Scouts in the Coal Caverns • Major Archibald Lee Fletcher
... answer nor to catechize Kirkwood. They found seats on the forward deck and rested there in grim silence, both fretting under the enforced restraint, while the boat darted, like some illuminated and exceptionally active water insect, ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... wound—weary and hopeless is the king. Through the Wound-motive comes the sweet woodland music and the breath of the blessed morning, fragrant with flowers and fresh with dew. It is one of those incomparable bursts of woodland notes, full of bird-song and the happy hum of insect life and rustling of netted branches and waving of long tasseled grass. I know of nothing like it save the forest ...
— Parsifal - Story and Analysis of Wagner's Great Opera • H. R. Haweis
... little entomologist chased scarlet-winged dragon-flies and descanted on the myriad forms of insect-life with premature accomplishment. "Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings" we heard revelations not unmixed with the ...
— In the Footprints of the Padres • Charles Warren Stoddard
... remarked that, when I say that a man passes from a lesser to a greater perfection, or vice versa, I do not mean that he is changed from one essence or reality to another; for instance, a horse would be as completely destroyed by being changed into a man, as by being changed into an insect. What I mean is, that we conceive the thing's power of action, in so far as this is understood by its nature, to be increased or diminished. Lastly, by perfection in general I shall, as I have said, mean reality—in other words, each thing's essence, in so far as it exists, ...
— The Ethics • Benedict de Spinoza
... the insect wore a dark-blue swallowtail coat with a yellow silk lining and a flower in the button-hole; a vest of white ...
— The Marvelous Land of Oz • L. Frank Baum
... white and fine like cambric, but of a looser texture. The fibres of this natural cloth are strong and flexible, but harsher to the feel than those made from flax. This province produces great abundance of the opuntia, a species of the cactus, which nourishes the cochineal insect; but the natives are in use to string these insects on a thread by means of a needle, by which they acquire a blackish tint. The fruit of this plant is woolly, about the size of a peach, its internal ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 5 • Robert Kerr
... against this evil are enumerated in our books on husbandry. The best preventative, however, appears to be the putting manure on the ground in a moist state and sowing the seeds with it, in order to excite the young plant to grow rapidly; for the insect does not hurt it when the rough leaf is once grown. I have this season seen a fine field of Turnips, sown mixt with dung out of a cart and ploughed in ridges. The seeds which were not too deeply buried grew and escaped ...
— The Botanist's Companion, Vol. II • William Salisbury
... the wood's insect-hum Invites ye; expand there, like buds in the sun; Leave schools and their studies for days that will come, And let thy first lessons from nature be won! Teachings hath nature most sage and most sweet— The music that swells in the tree-linnet's psalms; ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 455 - Volume 18, New Series, September 18, 1852 • Various
... consist of parts which remain, under some circumstances, invisible. When he approaches an object from a distance, he sees parts which he could not see before; and what appears to the naked eye a mere speck without perceptible parts is found under the microscope to be an insect with its full complement of members. Moreover, he has often observed that objects which appear continuous when seen from a distance are evidently far from continuous when seen close at hand. As we walk toward a tree we can see the indefinite ...
— An Introduction to Philosophy • George Stuart Fullerton
... House-fly walks gently in. The web rocks like a cradle in the breeze. The house-fly feels honored to be the guest of such a big spider. We all have regard for big bugs. "But what is this?" cries the fly, pointing to a broken wing, "and this fragment of an insect's foot. There must have been a murder here! Let me go back!" "Ha! ha!" says the spider, "the gate is locked, the drawbridge is up. I only contracted to bring you in. I cannot afford to let you out. Take a drop of this poison, and it ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage
... Zimmermann means by this.) Lord John Murray undertook to shape some black wax into the appearance of a spider, with a view to observe whether the antipathy would take place at the simple figure of the insect. He then withdrew for a moment, and came in again with the wax in his hand, which he kept shut. Mr. Matthews, who in other respects was a very amiable and moderate man, immediately conceiving that his friend really had a spider in his hand, clapped his ...
— Practical Education, Volume II • Maria Edgeworth
... and, instead of admiring them, I should try to annihilate them. He who is to be a welcome tool for me, must either have a stain by which I may catch him at the slightest symptom of disobedience, like an insect tied to a string, and draw him back to me, or he must be so narrow-minded and ignorant as not to understand me fully, and to be unable to divine and penetrate my hidden thoughts and intentions." [Footnote: Thugut's own words.—Vide Hormayer, "Lebensbilder aus dein Befreiungskrieg," ...
— LOUISA OF PRUSSIA AND HER TIMES • Louise Muhlbach
... birds were calling, mate to mate. A proud redbreast danced across the lawn, pausing to capture a fated insect, then flew up into one of the trees to feed its mate ...
— Frank Merriwell's Son - A Chip Off the Old Block • Burt L. Standish
... one of several interesting and important communications sent to the Royal Society during his lifetime. One of these was a report on what he calls "Pneumatical Experiments." "Upon including in a vacuum an insect resembling a beetle, but somewhat larger," he says, "when it seemed to be dead, the air was readmitted, and soon after it revived; putting it again in the vacuum, and leaving it for an hour, after which the air was readmitted, it was observed that the insect required a longer time to recover; ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... Agriculture, which seeks the remotest regions of the earth for crops suitable to the areas reclaimed by the government, maps and analyzes the soils, fosters the improvement of seeds and animals, tells the farmer when and how and what to plant, and makes war upon diseases of plants and animals and insect pests. The recent legislation for pure food and meat inspection, and the whole mass of regulative law under the Interstate Commerce clause of the constitution, further ...
— The Frontier in American History • Frederick Jackson Turner
... face of nature! What pleasure I take as I commence my journey at this hour, to witness the rising of the mist in the autumn from the low grounds, and its pausing on the hill-tops, as if regretting the scene it was about to leave! And how I admire the little insect webs, that are spangled over the field at that time; and the partridge warming itself in the first gleam of sunshine it can discover on the road! The alder, as I descend into the glen, gives me notice ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... of them, and defends them from their many enemies by hiding them out of sight in the singular manner I have just told you. This love of offspring, my dear child, has been wisely given to all mothers, from the human mother down to the very lowest of the insect tribe. The fiercest beast of prey loves its young, and provides food and shelter for them; forgetting its savage nature to play with and caress them. Even the spider, which is a disagreeable insect, fierce and unloving to its fellows, displays the tenderest ...
— Lady Mary and her Nurse • Catharine Parr Traill
... at noon, we found the good people annoyed by a visitation which had not yet reached St. John's, namely, myriads of a winged insect called the shad-fly; these covered and crowded every building, filled the water and the air; they lodged on your clothes, rendered sight difficult, and speaking impracticable, except with closed teeth. Luckily, these flies ...
— Impressions of America - During The Years 1833, 1834, and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Tyrone Power
... and jurists constantly developed new theories as to the modes of diabolic entrance into the "possessed." One such theory was that Satan could be taken into the mouth with one's food—perhaps in the form of an insect swallowed on a leaf of salad, and this was sanctioned, as we have seen, by no less infallible an authority than Gregory the Great, Pope and Saint—Another theory was that Satan entered the body when the mouth was opened to breathe, and there are well-authenticated cases ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... healing. She had bidden him share her belief; and he never had felt altogether alone. Sustained by that inner conviction, he had somehow adapted himself to the strangeness of a life empty of her physical presence. The human being, in a world of pain, like the insect in a world of danger, lives mainly by that same ceaseless, unconscious miracle of adaptation. Dearly though he craved a sight of his father and Christine, he had not asked for leave home. There were bad moments when he wondered if he could ...
— Far to Seek - A Romance of England and India • Maud Diver
... green, low, wooded shore on her larboard bow was a large island: an island of swamp and jungle, ancient fastness of an Indian prophet, hiddenly swarming with all the ravening and venomous brute, reptile, and insect life possible to the region. Prophet's Island, it was, yet no senator, bishop, general, judge, or squire was ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable
... upon your bitter Osher smile, why shut your eyes to the palpable analogy suggested? Naturalists assert that the Solanum, or apple of Sodom, contains in its normal state neither dust nor ashes, unless it is punctured by an insect (the Tenthredo), which converts the whole of the inside into dust, leaving nothing but the rind entire, without any loss of color. Human life is as fair and tempting as the fruit of 'Ain Jidy,' till stung and poisoned ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... is the following: "Though they come stealing to your bedside in the silent watches of the night, drive not away, but rather cherish these—the fragrance of flowers, the sound of distant bells, the insect humming of a frosty night." And again, "Though they may wound your feelings, these three you have only to forgive, the breeze that scatters your flowers, the cloud that hides your moon, and the man who tries to pick quarrels ...
— Bushido, the Soul of Japan • Inazo Nitobe
... a lost boat over a cataract down into a whirlpool of white roads far below, I saw afar a black dot crawling like an insect. I looked again: I could hardly believe it. There was the slow old woman, with her slow old donkey, still toiling along the main road. I asked my friend to slacken, but when he said of the car, "She's wanting to go," I knew it was ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... of vision which could not see at a glance that fly and insect were one and the same, is, as you say, enough to account for its being the writer's only sonnet (there is one more however which I ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine
... one's dress in the way grasshoppers do. Jakie was in his cage, but he noticed the stranger instantly, and I opened the door for him. He went at once to look at the grasshopper, and when it hopped he was so startled that he hopped too. Then he picked the insect up, but he did not know what to do with it, so he dropped it again. Again the grasshopper jumped directly up, and again the jay did the same. This they did over and over, till every one was tired laughing ...
— Good Stories For Great Holidays - Arranged for Story-Telling and Reading Aloud and for the - Children's Own Reading • Frances Jenkins Olcott
... 'Muddpenah' or drinker of honey. There are innumerable butterflies of graceful shape and gorgeous colours; what few birds there are have beautiful plumage; there is a faint rustle of leaves, a faint, far hum of insect life; but it feels so silent, so unlike the woods at home. You are oppressed by the solemn stillness, and feel almost nervous as you push warily along, for at any moment a leopard, wolf, or hyena may get up before you, or you may disturb ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... tree-tops, he will probably be rewarded with a wonderful display, as many jungle trees are glorified with crowns of gorgeous colours. There will he also discover the honey-suckers, moths, butterflies, the beetles, and all the other insect brood which he had also vainly looked for before. The fruits are likewise borne aloft, and therefore at the proper time these tree-tops will be the haunt of the monkeys, the parrots, the bats, the toucans, ...
— Ranching, Sport and Travel • Thomas Carson
... in a panic of fear—ridiculous, puerile fear, I forcibly withdrew my gaze and concentrated it abstractedly on the ground at my feet. I then listened, and in the rustling of a leaf, the humming of some night insect, the whizzing of a bat, the whispering of the wind as it moaned softly past me, I fancied—nay, I felt sure I detected something that was not ordinary. I blew my nose, and had barely ceased marvelling at the ...
— Scottish Ghost Stories • Elliott O'Donnell
... one of these about noon of a remarkably fine day, Harold could not help remarking on the strange stillness which pervaded the air. No sound was heard from beast, bird, or insect; no village was near, no rippling stream murmured, or zephyr stirred the leaves; in short, it was a scene which, from its solitude and profound ...
— Black Ivory • R.M. Ballantyne
... which must fall ere the family may venture into the land of swamps and agues. He looks out upon the flower-beds, glowing with life and quivering in the sunshine, and listens to the incessant shrill-voiced cicada piping from the tree-tops, while the insect-drone, in the heated, languid air, seems to speak of an unending summer; but as "all things come to him who waits," so at length come the ...
— Plantation Sketches • Margaret Devereux
... like that made by ants in decayed wood, rubs its eyes and examines its antennæ, as bees always do before leaving their hive, then takes flight. At the same instant several bees come by us loaded with our honey and settle home with that peculiar low, complacent buzz of the well- filled insect. Here then, is our idyl, our bit of Virgil and Theocritus, in a decayed stump of a hemlock-tree. We could tear it open with our hands, and a bear would find it an easy prize, and a rich one, too, for we take from it fifty pounds of excellent honey. The ...
— The Writings of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... uncertain and obscure existence did the moths lead for many years in Liberty Forest. There were no insect folk in the whole country that were so scarce, and they would have remained quite harmless and powerless had they not, most ...
— The Wonderful Adventures of Nils • Selma Lagerlof
... the perfect stillness of the pool near the opposite shore. A fish had leaped at some unseasonable insect on the surface, or one of the overhanging trees had dropped a dead twig upon it, and in the lazy doubt which it might be, I lay and watched the ever-widening circle fade out into fainter and fainter ripples toward the shore, till it weakened to nothing ...
— A Pair of Patient Lovers • William Dean Howells
... smell of sprouting grass! In a blur the violets pass. Whispering from the wildwood come Mayflower's breath and insect's hum. Roses carpeting the ground; Thrushes, orioles, warbling sound: Swing me low, and swing me high, To the warm ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V2 • Charles H. Sylvester
... a truth, and in a regular bee-line, or as straight as an arrow. Of all that crowd, the bee-hunter and Margery alone saw the insect in its flight. Most of those present lost sight of it, while circling around the stand; but the instant it darted away, to the remainder it seemed to vanish into air. Not so with le Bourdon and Margery, however. The former saw ...
— Oak Openings • James Fenimore Cooper
... and eternal, for they are the hidden springs of existence and life. Can one resist the melancholy, the sense of tears in things when we reflect that, like our own bodily frame, the whole visible world is hastening to dissolution? From the infinitesimal insect whose earthly career is rounded off in a few moments, hardly come before gone, to the longest-lived of living beings, to the oaks that stand beyond a thousand years, to the hills that seemed so enduring that the Hebrew poet called them "everlasting," ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... is in the Brazils a popular superstition to this effect. There is a tree called Japecarga, which is said to grow out of the body of the insect called Cigara. This is a very large tree, and the Cigara is an insect which makes an incessant chirping on the tree, and, as the saying goes, chirps till it bursts. When the insect dies, the tree is said to grow out of it, the roots growing ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 70, March 1, 1851 • Various
... full information on all branches of Nature study," broke in the bookagent, with a tired note sounding in his voice for the first time; "forestry, insect life, bird migration, reclamation of waste lands. As I was saying, no man who has to deal with the varied interests ...
— The Toys of Peace • Saki
... and followed the doctor as he pressed on for some distance farther, till the valley opened out a little and there was ample room to walk on the same level as the river, here gliding gently in the full sunshine, with its banks beautiful with flower, insect, ...
— King o' the Beach - A Tropic Tale • George Manville Fenn
... priori impossible, nor is the theory that the moon is hollow, that the "Selenites" live below the surface, or that evolution has produced on our satellite an intelligent form which, anatomically, is more nearly allied to the insect than to the vertebrate type as we know it. The exposition of lunar social conditions cannot be taken very seriously. Specialisation is the key-note; the production by education and training, of minds, and, as far as possible, bodies, ...
— H. G. Wells • J. D. Beresford
... life, are described in the Laws of Menu, ii. 191 to 218, 242, 8. "By censuring his preceptor, though justly, he will be born an ass; by falsely defaming him, a dog; by using his goods without leave, a small worm; by envying his merit, a larger insect or reptile." As the Roman law did not contemplate the possibility of parricide, that of Menu has no provision against the crime in ...
— Nala and Damayanti and Other Poems • Henry Hart Milman
... all achievements 'tis the least To perpetuate the species; it is done By the insect and the serpent, and the beast. But the man who keeps his body, and his thought, WORTH bestowing on an offspring love-begot, Then the highest earthly glory he has won, When in pride a grown-up daughter or a ...
— Poems of Experience • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... trotting. Flowers. Armadillo. Fire-flies. Singular Fandango. Epiphytes. The Junta. Indian Life. Decorative Art. Horses. Jalapa. Anglo-Mexicans. Insect-life. Monte. Fate of Antonio. Scorpion. White Negress. Cattle. Artificial lighting. Vera Cruz. Further Journey. St. Thomas's. Voyage to England. Future destinies ...
— Anahuac • Edward Burnett Tylor
... imperfection of an intellectual colossus, it complacently smooths its wings and explains, with a patronizing air, that the big 'un isn't half bad; but sagely adds that had it been consulted, his too visible imperfections would have been eradicated. We dislike to see an insect leave its periods and semi-colons on the immortal marble; but it were idle to grow angry with a Gosse. This must be the English literary exquisite whom Americans have hitherto incidentally heard bellowing before the tent of this or ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... come, my love, The swallow skims the lake, As o'er its glassy bosom clear The insect cloudlets shake. The heart of nature throbs with joy At love and beauty's sway; The meanest creeping thing of earth Shares in ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... forgot all about Artemisia, as they brooded, wide-eyed, over the activities of the dwellers in the waste. At such moments they realized the magic of life, as they had never realized it in the turmoil of London. The insect with its wings that caught the sun, the intent and preoccupied little traveler whose course could be deflected by a twig, revealed the wonder that is lost and forgotten in the crowded ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens
... which had been displayed in the workmanship, I rapidly arrived at the conclusion that it was the most uncomfortable carpet I had ever seen. I wagged my finger at the repeated portrayals of the— to me!—unspeakable insect. ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... the forest and the river, like millions of nothings flowing and flowing on. No birds here, no creatures hopping about, but if I turn up a stone, I may find some insect under it. ...
— Wanderers • Knut Hamsun
... you will find the grass growing fresh and green where the stone lay—the ground-bird builds her nest where the beetle had his hole—the dandelion and the buttercup are growing there, and the broad fans of insect-angels open and shut over their golden disks as the rhythmic waves of blissful consciousness pulsate through ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... is set in the sling. Four soldiers on each side of the engine wind the arm down until it is almost level with the ground. When the arm is set free, it springs up and hurls the stone forth from its sling." In early times the weapon was called a "scorpion," for like this dreaded insect ...
— Artillery Through the Ages - A Short Illustrated History of Cannon, Emphasizing Types Used in America • Albert Manucy
... and nodding her head over the dying embers of her hearth. Her husband was induced by the traveller to bring up from the cherished corner of his cellar a bottle of the old wine of Tursac, made from the patriarchal vines before the pestilential insect drew the life out of them. The hillsides above the Vezere are growing green again with vineyards, and again the juice of the grape is beginning to flow abundantly; but years must pass before it will be worthy of being put into ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... garb," and "Melancholy, silent maid" attend the footsteps of Adversity;[24] and to Contemplation's sober eye, the race of man resembles the insect race: ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... creatures that she loved. She was a great walker, spending all her leisure on the moors. She loved the freedom there, the large air. She loved the creatures, too. Never was a soul with a more passionate love of Mother Earth, of every weed and flower, of every bird, beast, and insect that lived. She would have peopled the house with pets had not Miss Branwell kept her niece's love of animals in due subjection. Only one dog was allowed, who was admitted into the parlour at stated hours, but out of doors Emily made friends with all the beasts and birds. She would ...
— Emily Bront • A. Mary F. (Agnes Mary Frances) Robinson
... growth became quite hardy; but undue moisture would then cause a shedding of the bolls, and the first frost of autumn would stop the further fruiting. The plants, furthermore, were liable to many diseases and insect ravages. In infancy cut-worms might sever the stalks at the base, and lice might sap the vitality; in the full flush of blooming luxuriance, wilt and rust, the latter particularly on older lands, might blight the leaves, or caterpillars in huge armies reduce them to skeletons ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... sharp shears, in insect guise Behold us at your revel! That we may tender, filial-wise, Our homage ...
— Faust Part 1 • Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
... sanctioned with the name of parliament, and which can have no object but to do us injury, by spreading a groundless alarm in those countries of Europe where our wheat is constantly and kindly received. It is a mere assassination. If the insect they pretend to fear, be the Hessian fly, it never existed in the grain. If it be the weevil, our grain always had that; and the experience of a century has proved, that either the climate of England is not warm enough to hatch the egg and ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... talked unconcernedly, for their speech began below the lowest end of the scale that untrained human beings can hear. [The other end is bounded by the high squeak of Mang, the Bat, which very many people cannot catch at all. From that note all the bird and bat and insect talk ...
— The Second Jungle Book • Rudyard Kipling
... important because of its indication of the health of the insect in winter and of the efficiency of the sweet-producing hive in summer, was recently measured by Prof. G. H. Vansell of the University of California. To do this he conducted the air coming from the hive trough a tube into bulbs containing ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various
... metal. KCN is employed to kill insects for cabinet specimens. In a wide-mouthed bottle is placed a little KCN, which is covered with cotton, and over this a perforated paper. The bottle is inverted over the insect, and the fumes destroy life without injuring the delicate parts. HCN is made from KCN ...
— An Introduction to Chemical Science • R.P. Williams
... voice of solitude, the death-stillness, throbbing silence, reigned once more. Not an animal, not an insect, not a tree, struck the eye. The arid and level floor was again clean of movement. The sun glared, revealing here and there out of the drifts a bleached skeleton, in this speechless thing mutely proclaiming its own sway. Beneath the sun the horizon, an immense girdle, swept round in unbroken line, ...
— Bred of the Desert - A Horse and a Romance • Marcus Horton
... most beautiful books from the American press is Episodes of Insect Life, by ACHETA DOMESTICA, just reprinted by J. S. Redfield. The natural history and habits of insects of every class are delineated by a close observer with remarkable minuteness, and in a style of unusual felicity; and the peculiar illustrations of the book are more spirited and highly ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... Ramdass said; "none of the three princes would hesitate to put to death anyone who stood in his way, and it seems strange to me that even the Brahmins, who would not take the life even of a troublesome insect, yet support the men who have killed scores of other people. But it is no use grumbling; the thing has always been, and I suppose always will be. It is not only so in the Deccan, but in the Nizam's dominions, in Mysore and, so far as I know, in Oude ...
— At the Point of the Bayonet - A Tale of the Mahratta War • G. A. Henty
... every branch of floriculture, the price of success is constant vigilance. If you do not get the start of insect enemies, and keep them under control, they will almost invariably ruin your crop of flowers, and often the bushes themselves. Therefore be thorough and persistent in the warfare waged against the common enemy, and do not relax your efforts until he ...
— Amateur Gardencraft - A Book for the Home-Maker and Garden Lover • Eben E. Rexford
... Egyptian god. For example, the lice covered everything and were miserably polluting. All Egyptian worship was compelled to cease, since none of the priests could perform their religious service so long as any such insect had touched them since they went through a process of purification. In smiting the cattle with murrain, the sacred bull of Memphis was humiliated whether stricken himself or because of his inability to protect the ...
— The Bible Period by Period - A Manual for the Study of the Bible by Periods • Josiah Blake Tidwell
... still unable to provide the necessary letters of reference. I hadn't succeeded in making any tracks into which, on being pushed to the bottom again, I could stick my toes, and mount the way a second time more easily. Lying awake there, flat on my back, I was reminded of a little insect I once watched climbing the slippery surface of a window-pane. It was a stormy day, and he was on the outside of the window, buffeted by winds. I saw that little creature successfully cover more than half his journey four successive times, only to fall wriggling on his back ...
— The Fifth Wheel - A Novel • Olive Higgins Prouty
... on a Time Margaret Benson To a Mouse Robert Burns The Grasshopper Abraham Cowley On the Grasshopper and Cricket John Keats To the Grasshopper and the Cricket Leigh Hunt The Cricket William Cowper To a Cricket William Cox Bennett To an Insect Oliver Wendell Holmes The Snail William Cowper The Housekeeper Charles Lamb The Humble-Bee Ralph Waldo Emerson To a Butterfly William Wordsworth Ode to a Butterfly Thomas Wentworth Higginson The Butterfly Alice Freeman Palmer Fireflies Edgar Fawcett ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various
... from the King of Kings Are found in animal and insect life, And birds and fishes, beauteous flowers and trees, Are with such lessons eloquently rife; So are the gracious, light-dispensing heavens, Grand ocean's depths and mountain heights sublime, Day's regent ...
— Home Lyrics • Hannah. S. Battersby
... scarce from his mould Behemoth, biggest born of earth, upheaved His vastness; fleeced the flocks and bleating rose As plants; ambiguous between sea and land, The river-horse and scaly crocodile. At once came forth whatever creeps the ground, Insect or worm." ...
— The Making of Arguments • J. H. Gardiner
... with a short laugh, "what about it? You don't think Kerns fell in love with an insect of that genus, ...
— The Tracer of Lost Persons • Robert W. Chambers
... arises from insects and vermin. These animated foes appear chiefly in the form of book-worms, cockroaches, and mice. The first-named is rare in American libraries, though its ravages have extended far and wide among the old European ones. This minute little insect, whose scientific name is the anobium paniceum, bores through the leaves of old volumes, making sometimes holes which deface and mutilate the text. All our public libraries, doubtless, have on ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... sunset slowly faded out of the western sky. And the hush of the night was over all. The feeling of an awful solitude, which comes to those whose business is to pass the night on the open prairie, is enhanced rather than reduced by the buzz of insect life upon the night air. The steady hum of the mosquito—the night song of the grasshoppers and frogs—the ticking, spasmodic call of the invisible beetles—all these things help to intensify the loneliness and magnitude of the wild surroundings. Nor does the smoldering camp-fire ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum
... many birds have been cited in support of the various flying theories that the house fly, as an example has been disregarded. We are prone to overlook the small insect, but it is, nevertheless, a sample which is just as potent to show the efficiency of wing surface as ...
— Aeroplanes • J. S. Zerbe***
... Some have asserted that it spits the spiders and other insects for the purpose of attracting nearer the small birds upon which it preys; but this cannot be true, for it preys mostly upon birds that are not insect-eaters, as the finches: besides, it is itself as fond of eating grasshoppers as anything else, and consumes large quantities ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... at these persistently, and sweated profusely over his work. He might as well have attempted to deface the moon. They regarded him serenely with the stately smile they had worn so long, and which seemed to say, "Peck away, poor insect; we were not made to fear such as you; in ten-score dragging ages we have seen more of your kind than there are sands at your feet: have they left ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... individually and collectively considered. A knowledge of trees and forests adds vastly to the pleasures of outdoor life. The more we study trees and the more intimate our knowledge of the forest as a unit of vegetation in which each tree, each flower, each animal and insect has its part to play in the complete structure, the greater will be our admiration of the wonderful beauty and variety exhibited in the ...
— Studies of Trees • Jacob Joshua Levison
... her modesty would only suffer her to admit his eager kisses, her violent love made her more than passive in his embraces; and she often pulled him to her breast with a soft pressure, which though perhaps it would not have squeezed an insect to death, caused more emotion in the heart of Joseph than the closest Cornish hug could ...
— Joseph Andrews Vol. 1 • Henry Fielding
... slightly, and she could not restrain a laugh. That was all the Harvester hoped for and more. He went beyond the edge of the rug and sat on the leaves under a tree. She bent over her work and only bird and insect notes and occasionally Belshazzar's excited bark broke the silence. The Harvester stretched on the ground, his eyes feasting on the Girl. Intensely he watched every movement. If a squirrel barked she gave a nervous start, so precipitate it seemed as if it must hurt. If ...
— The Harvester • Gene Stratton Porter
... put it in the sun, keep the insect enemies away, and then enjoy it for itself. Give the child everything that is consistent with its best growth, but neither force the growth nor limit it; and stand far enough off to see the individuality, to enjoy it and profit by it. ...
— As a Matter of Course • Annie Payson Call
... more highly developed in the one than in the other, it is, as far as I can discover, almost invariably the male which retains such organs, or has them most developed; and this shews that the male is the more active member in the courtship of the sexes. (19. One parasitic Hymenopterous insect (Westwood, 'Modern Class. of Insects,' vol. ii. p. 160) forms an exception to the rule, as the male has rudimentary wings, and never quits the cell in which it is born, whilst the female has well-developed wings. Audouin believes that ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... This insect looked at Jurgen, and its pincers rose erect in horror. The bug cried to the three judges, "Now, by St. Anthony! this Jurgen must forthwith be relegated to limbo, for he is offensive and lewd and ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... breath was easy and regular and his steps were long and swift. His guide was before him. Whatever his pace, whether fast or slow, the distance between them never seemed to change. The bird would dart aside, perhaps to catch an insect, but it always returned ...
— The Lords of the Wild - A Story of the Old New York Border • Joseph A. Altsheler
... not only stoop but crawl through the gate. It is fortunate there are no lusty people here, all being bony and wiry like the Arabs. Not being dependant on rain, the gardens only suffer from the locusts, and now and then a blighting wind. In the Spring of this year these insect marauders passed over the oasis and made a pillage of the date blossoms for thirty days, besides doing much damage to the barley. I encountered a flight of the same horde, which emerged from The Desert and then took to sea, and were scattered ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson
... an iron spade, an ice-staff, an axe, some tent-pegs, and a canvas tent were too indigestible food even for a bear's stomach. Anyhow, it was following with mighty strides in the track of the fugitives. It caught sight of me and stopped, astonished, as if it were thinking, 'What sort of insect can that be?' I went on to within easy range; it stood still, looking hard at me. At last it turned its head a little, and I gave it a ball in the neck. Without moving a limb, it sank slowly to the ice. I now ...
— Farthest North - Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 • Fridtjof Nansen
... and the words of the Rishi, the king, with his ministers, felt the desire of eating those fruits. The particular fruit, within which Takshaka had entered, was taken by the king himself for eating. And when he was eating it, there appeared, O Saunaka, an ugly insect out of it, of shape scarcely discernible, of eyes black, and of coppery colour. And that foremost of kings, taking that insect, addressed his councillors, saying, 'The sun is setting; today I have no more tear from poison. Therefore, let this ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... bobolinks grow intimate, just as Southern fashionables from different States may meet and sing duets at Saratoga? There sounds the sweet, low, long-continued trill of the little hair-bird, or chipping-sparrow, a suggestion of insect sounds in sultry summer, and produced, like them, by a slight fluttering of the wings against the sides: by-and-by we shall sometimes hear that same delicate rhythm burst the silence of the June midnights, and then, ceasing, make stillness more still. Now watch that woodpecker, roving in ceaseless ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 • Various
... heroically refraining from rubbing the affected parts. After a short interval of staring at the glowing heavens, as if the sight fairly fascinated him, Perk again spoke, this time finding something of more importance than insect bites ...
— Eagles of the Sky - With Jack Ralston Along the Air Lanes • Ambrose Newcomb
... and that the pollen was not good. (629/1. "Shorter stamens" seems to be a slip of the pen for "longer,"—unless the observations were made on some genus in which the structure is unusual.) The mature pollen is incoherent, and must be [word illegible] against the visiting insect's body. I remembered this, and I find it said in my EARLY notes that bees would never visit the flowers for pollen. This made me afterwards write to the late Dr. Cruger in the West Indies, and he observed for me the flowers, and saw ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin
... well, and Prof. determined to remain till the next day. Our camp was on the left in a thick grove of cottonwoods, and box-elders or ash-leaved maples, at the end of the point. As the sun sank away bats flew about and an insect orchestra began a demoniacal concert that shrilled through the night and made us feel like slaughtering the myriads if we could. The noises ceased with the day, or most of them, though some seemed to intensify with the light. We helped Beaman get his dark box and other paraphernalia ...
— A Canyon Voyage • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... daylight. I do not need to open a book; I take the whole of its contents into my mind at a single glance, through the cover; and in a million years I could not forget a single word of it, or its place in the volume. Nothing goes on in the skull of man, bird, fish, insect, or other creature which can be hidden from me. I pierce the learned man's brain with a single glance, and the treasures which cost him threescore years to accumulate are mine; he can forget, and he ...
— The Mysterious Stranger and Other Stories • Mark Twain
... was sitting near her mother, had picked up a book, but put it down when Walters came in, and Lucy felt a curious tremor of repugnance as she glanced at him. It was a shrinking she sometimes experienced at the sight of a noxious insect. Yet there was nothing about Walters to excite aversion. He was rather a handsome man, and stood in a careless ...
— Carmen's Messenger • Harold Bindloss
... designed to sketch attractively and simply the wonders of reptile and insect existences, the changes of trees, rocks, rivers, clouds, and winds. This is done by a family of children writing letters, both playful and serious, which are addressed to all children ...
— Rollo in Naples • Jacob Abbott
... parasitic germ in her heart that was eating her life-blood away. To her, alone, in all that party, the warm arms of the sun brandished javelins, and the calm riches of the landscape concealed jibes. The meanest field labourer seemed happier than she, the commonest insect more wanton ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... but one huge wall of never-ending insects filling nostrils, ears, and eyes. Where they came from I cannot tell; the prairie seemed too small to hold them; the air too limited to yield them space. I had seen many vast accumulations of insect life in lands old and new, but never any thing that approached to this mountain of mosquitoes on the prairies of Dakota. To say that they covered the coat of the horse I rode would be to give but a faint idea of their ...
— The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler
... place their greatest hope of salvation in abstaining from killing any creature whatever, and even use no light at night, lest any moth should fly into the flame; and always carry a broom to sweep the ground they tread on, that they may not trample any worm or insect to death. The third race consists of the Resbuti or Rajputs, who are good soldiers, and to whom formerly the kingdom belonged. These people acknowledge one God in three persons, and worship the blessed Virgin, ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume VI - Early English Voyages Of Discovery To America • Robert Kerr
... insects, though numerous, are not so troublesome or so venomous as in many parts of the torrid zone. The white ant is perhaps as destructive as any other insect, and the greatest precaution hardly preserves ...
— Lives of the Three Mrs. Judsons • Arabella W. Stuart
... and apprehensive of an early change for the worse. When the worst comes he positively beams over it. Difficult to say whether he enjoys himself more in an over-wet season, or in one of drought. His special and ever-recurring joy is the discovery of some insect breaking out in a fresh place. He is always on the look-out for the Mottled Amber Moth, or the Frit-fly, or the Currant Scale, or the Apple-bark Beetle, or the Mustard Beetle,—"Black Jack," as he familiarly calls ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99, November 15, 1890 • Various
... are three species of the mangosteen tree, but of only one, the Garania mangostina, is the fruit edible. The others are valuable for timber, and the bark for the manufacture of a dye that resists the attacks of every sort of insect. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... was an awful one. No sound was heard save an occasional ejaculation between a sigh and a smothered groan from the wretched felon. The candle burned dimly; and as I turned I saw, though I scarcely noticed it at the moment, a dim insect of the moth species, fluttering hurriedly round it, the sound of whose wings mournfully filled up the pauses of myself and my companion. When the nerves are strained to their uttermost, by such trifling ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13, No. 374 • Various
... "Your pencil," he reminded the artist Mueller, "will delineate the features of my face. These are visible: but my inner man is hidden. I must tell you that I have shed rivers of blood. I tremble, but I love my neighbour. In my whole life I have made no one unhappy; not an insect hath perished by my hand. I was little; I was big. In fortune's ebb and flow, relying on God, I stood immovable—even as now." (Suvoroff, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... 1869.—I extracted twenty Funyes, an insect like a maggot, whose eggs had been inserted on my having been put into an old house infested by them; as they enlarge they stir about and impart a stinging sensation; if disturbed, the head is drawn in a little. When a poultice is put on they ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume II (of 2), 1869-1873 • David Livingstone
... trios, whence spring three side branches, surrounding the upright and central one. The habit of the whole specimen is very rigid, with the exception of the flowers, which are slightly nodding; the tallest growths need no stakes, and the species enjoys a happy immunity from insect pests, probably by reason of its hispid character. As already stated, as a garden subject this is one of the most useful; it shows grandly in front of evergreens, and associates well with lilies. In borders of tall perennials, or in conspicuous but distant situations, such as are visible from ...
— Hardy Perennials and Old Fashioned Flowers - Describing the Most Desirable Plants, for Borders, - Rockeries, and Shrubberies. • John Wood
... 'Descriptive Sociology' the religion of the Bushmen is thus disposed of. 'Pray to an insect of the caterpillar kind for success in the chase.' That is rather meagre. They make arrow-poison out of caterpillars,[2] though Dr. Bleek, perhaps correctly, identifies Cagn with i-kaggen, ...
— The Making of Religion • Andrew Lang
... commerce is the fibre spun by the larvae or caterpillars of a moth, Bombyx mori, as they enter the chrysalis stage of existence. The silk-growing industry includes the care and feeding of the insect in all its stages. The leaves of the white mulberry-tree (morus alba) are the natural food of the insect, and silk-growing cannot be carried on in regions where this tree does not thrive. Not all areas that produce the mulberry-tree, however, will also ...
— Commercial Geography - A Book for High Schools, Commercial Courses, and Business Colleges • Jacques W. Redway
... nature and revelation affirms; and if we be referred to the whole of mankind, as that wherein harmony will reveal itself, then our whole actions and endeavours are but as the labours of the coral-insect: mankind becomes but a monument of greatness to the Creator: he would then only have raised His glory, not shown His greatest love. ...
— Pictures of Sweden • Hans Christian Andersen
... The most forcible arguments, the most pathetic eloquence from the pulpit, will not affect so powerfully the mind of man, as the investigation of a blade of grass, or the mechanism of the almost imperceptible insect. If, then, such is the effect upon mankind in general, how strong must be the impressions of those who occupy their business in the great waters! These men "see the works of the Lord, and his wonders in the deep." They behold him in all ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat
... revelation then? a list, An inventory just Of that poor insect's goods, so late Call'd out of ...
— The Poetical Works of Edward Young, Volume 2 • Edward Young
... however, disappeared shortly afterwards, when a number of large beetles, called elaters, took their place, displaying both red and green lights. The red glare, like that of a lamp, alternately flashed and vanished, as the insect turned its body in flight; and now and then a green light was displayed. The mingling of the two colours, red and green, in the evolutions of flight totally surpasses my power of description. We caught several, and had we possessed an uncoloured glass bottle we might have made a lantern which would ...
— The Wanderers - Adventures in the Wilds of Trinidad and Orinoco • W.H.G. Kingston
... fruits, which they had found by hundreds on the broiling ledges of the low tufa-cliffs; and then all, sitting on the sandy turf, defiant of galliwasps and jackspaniards, and all the weapons of the insect host, partook of the equal banquet, while old blue land-crabs sat in their house-doors and brandished their fists in defiance at the invaders, and solemn cranes stood in the water on the shoals with their heads on one ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... insect breeze Is but a mungrel prince of bees, That falls before a storm on cows, And stings the founders of his house; From whose corrupted flesh that breed 5 Of vermin did at first proceed. So e're the storm of war broke out, Religion ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler
... their love-festival by the most poetical of nature's inventions, and crushed under the foot of a passer-by. But there is another danger! When they meet with the form that answers to their soul, and which not unfrequently is that of a baker's wife, they do as Raphael did, as the beautiful insect does, they ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... All petals, no prickles, Delicious as trickles Of wine poured at mass-time, And choose One indulgent To redness and sweetness; Or if with experience of man and of spider, She use my June lightning, the strong insect-ridder To stop the fresh ...
— Obiter Dicta • Augustine Birrell
... The bubbles were slightly viscid, and in nearly every case there was a small fly pressed into the front end of the balloon, apparently as food for the Empis. In all cases they were dead. The balloon appears to be made while the insect is flying in the air. Those flying highest had the smallest balloons. The bubbles are probably produced by some modification of the anal organs. It is possible that the captured fly serves as a ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... them! Mosquitoes—myriads of them—buzzed busily about, seeking whom they might devour! The mosquito of the Philippines is well entitled to be called an insect of prey. He is a big fellow, tireless, always hungry and a valiant fighter. The men who lay on the ground carefully wrapped themselves in their blankets, with their hands tucked in. Their heads ...
— Uncle Sam's Boys in the Philippines - or, Following the Flag against the Moros • H. Irving Hancock
... horror and pity, whereas I cause it to be loved; you labour in a torture-chamber and dissecting-room, I make my observations under the blue sky, to the song of the Cicadae (The Cicada Cigale, an insect akin to the Grasshopper and found more particularly in the south of France.—Translator's Note.); you subject cell and protoplasm to chemical tests, I study instinct in its loftiest manifestations; you pry into death, ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... first," said the Goblin, pointing to a large, round insect that went flying by, humming like a top. Ribsy snapped at it, and swallowed it, and the next instant disappeared with a tremendous explosion in a ...
— Davy and The Goblin - What Followed Reading 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland' • Charles E. Carryl
... The pretty insect more generally called the Lady-bird, or May-bug. It is one of those highly favoured among God's harmless creatures which superstition protects from wanton injury. Some obscurity seems to hang over this popular name {132} of it. It has certainly no more relation ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 9, Saturday, December 29, 1849 • Various
... Sweetheart Abbey, if he had not changed later on. But he did change. There was a little piano in the sitting-room they gave us, and Mrs. James began drumming out a few Scotch airs, warbling the words in a high, thin voice rather like that of an intelligent insect. There was one tune I knew, and I couldn't resist joining in. At the end ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... someplace you don't care about any more because you're dead. All frozen up in space ... preserved like a piece of meat in a cold storage locker. And then maybe in a million years or so some lousy insect man from Jupiter comes along and finds you and takes you ...
— To Each His Star • Bryce Walton
... and at last went all around the Giant's lodge. He seized an insect and said to it, "Oh, insect! You shall go and bite the Giant ...
— Myths and Legends of the Great Plains • Unknown
... example of my hardness of heart, what do I care for their approval, or the praise of short-sighted men! I do my duty, and am answerable only to God and myself. Trenck intends to murder me—I must preserve myself for my people. My mission is not yet accomplished; and if a poisonous insect crosses my path, ...
— Frederick The Great and His Family • L. Muhlbach
... allowance of nerve and sinew to men of every size, and that nature spun the stock out thinner or stronger, according to the extent of surface which they were to cover. Hence, the least creatures are oftentimes the strongest. Place a beetle under a tall candlestick, and the insect will move it by its efforts to get out; which is, in point of comparative strength, as if one of us should shake his Majesty's prison of Newgate by similar struggles. Cats also, and weasels, are creatures of greater exertion ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott
... enormous thumbnail; but no flea will ever be so foolish as to preach that in slaying fleas Man is applying a method of Natural Selection which will finally evolve a flea so swift that no man can catch him, and so hardy of constitution that Insect Powder will have no more effect on him than ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... desire to ask who had removed him, while Mrs. Wilmot murmured, "How interesting!" As she minced away Mrs. Crawley said meditatively, "The Rocking Horse Fly," and with a squeal of delight I realized that that was what she had always vaguely reminded me of. You remember the insect, don't you, in Through the Looking-Glass? It lived on sawdust. One lesson one has every opportunity of learning on board ship is to suffer fools, if not gladly, at least with patience. The curious people who stray across one's path! One woman ...
— Olivia in India • O. Douglas
... mornings from seven to nine, attired in a wadded, brown cashmere dressing-gown, a broad-brimmed hat, a black cravat, patent-leather shoes, and black gaiters. As he talked, he held his magnifying-glass in his hand, ready to examine any insect or blade of grass that might come ...
— France in the Nineteenth Century • Elizabeth Latimer
... monkeys and even of leopards darted among the trees. But the country—whether forest, mud-flat, or prairie—was always damp and feverish: a wet land steaming under a burning sun and humming with mosquitoes and all kinds of insect life. ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill
... Mr. J. A. Lintner, to the effect that the Persian insect powder would probably prove unavailing as a remedy against the ravages of the new carpet beetle (Anthrenus), W. L. Carpenter, of the U.S.A., was led to institute some experiments with this well known insecticide, the results of which he communicates ...
— Scientific American, Volume 40, No. 13, March 29, 1879 • Various
... mind on the great and splendid thing you would like to do; and then, as the days go gliding by, you will find yourself unconsciously seizing upon the opportunities that are required for the fulfilment of your desire, just as the coral-insect takes from the running tide the elements that it needs. Picture in your mind the able, earnest, useful person you desire to be, and the thought you hold is hourly transforming you into that particular ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... his eye and pinion, trained For mateship with the sun, twitched at a sting. Amazed to find a "cootie" on his wing, And that the insect dreamed, it was ordained By race heredity to serve the King— He shook ...
— Freedom, Truth and Beauty • Edward Doyle
... could never see any living creature in distress without feeling a strong desire to relieve its sufferings. She knew that Arthur was in the habit of torturing every little insect and bird that came in his way, and had often drawn his persecutions upon herself by interfering in behalf of the poor victim; and now the thought instantly flashed upon her that this was some of his work, and that he would return ere long ...
— Elsie Dinsmore • Martha Finley
... In the Insect room the child's attention is naturally drawn to the brilliantly-colored butterflies and moths, the curious beetles from tropical countries, and the "Strange insects, centipedes and scorpions." There is an extremely interesting silk-worm exhibit, and the children who visited ...
— Library Work with Children • Alice I. Hazeltine
... slipped away from him, and, with a despairing gesture, made sign that they were not alone. And her blushes grew deeper as her eyes fell upon her bare arms. She shuddered when her loose hanging hair stirred against her neck and shoulders. The slightest touch of a waving bough or a passing insect, the softest breath of air, now made her tremble as if some invisible hand were grasping ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... broad masses of rich grey-brown shadow—they agreed that it was incomparably more beautiful when viewed by the full light of day and in all the glory of brilliant sunshine. A thousand gorgeous colours on leaf and blossom, on gaily-plumaged bird and bright-winged insect, charmed their eyes and enriched the foreground of the picture; while the dense masses of foliage, with their subtle gradations of colour, light, and shade, as they gradually receded into the background, and finally melted into the rich purply grey ...
— The Pirate Island - A Story of the South Pacific • Harry Collingwood
... sting of an insect or the thorn of a plant. It is the sting or thorn which here is considered in prison and exhorted ...
— A Little Book of Filipino Riddles • Various
... a lord and I will show you a man whom you couldn't tell from a journeyman shoemaker if he were stripped, and who, in all that is worth being, is the shoemaker's inferior; and in the shoemaker I will show you a dull animal, a poor-spirited insect; for there are enough of him to rise and chuck the lords and royalties into the sea where they belong, and he ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... the bird we have just seen is conscious of his cruelty to the insect. The natural food of cats consists in rats, mice, birds, and such small animals as they can seize by violence or catch by craft. It was impossible she should know the value you set upon your bird, and therefore she had no more ...
— The History of Sandford and Merton • Thomas Day
... leathery substance, so that no portion of his actual body appeared, but of this, of course, we were entirely ignorant. He presented himself, therefore, as a compact, bristling creature, having much of the quality of a complicated insect, with whip-like tentacles and a clanging arm projecting from his shining cylindrical body case. The form of his head was hidden by his enormous many-spiked helmet—we discovered afterwards that he used ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... Forrester, and Miss Matty, and Miss Pole appear on that memorable Tuesday evening. I counted seven brooches myself on Miss Pole's dress. Two were fixed negligently in her cap (one was a butterfly made of Scotch pebbles, which a vivid imagination might believe to be the real insect); one fastened her net neckerchief; one her collar; one ornamented the front of her gown, midway between her throat and waist; and another adorned the point of her stomacher. Where the seventh was I have forgotten, but it was somewhere ...
— Cranford • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... part of the survivors. Ragon says, that the ancients substituted the acacia for all other plants because they believed it to be incorruptible, and not liable to injury from the attacks of any kind of insect or other animal—thus symbolizing the incorruptible nature of ...
— The Symbolism of Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... were plenty: the lads gathered the fair-cheeked fox-mushrooms, so famous in the Lithuanian songs as the emblem of maidenhood, for the worms do not eat them, and, marvellous to say, no insect alights on them; the young ladies hunted for the slender pine-lover, which the song calls the colonel of the mushrooms.52 All were eager for the orange-agaric; this, though of more modest stature and less famous in song, is still the most delicious, whether fresh or salted, whether ...
— Pan Tadeusz • Adam Mickiewicz
... unconsciously; for each man, limited to his own little sphere, and limited to his own interests, and guided by his own prejudices and passions, has been as ignorant of more general tendencies as the coral insect of the reef which it has helped to build. To become distinctly conscious of what it is that we have all been doing all this time, is one step in advance. We have obeyed in ignorance; and as obedience becomes conscious, we may hope, within certain ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... not require taking up every year, unless in constant use. Take out the tacks from these, fold the carpets back, wash the floor in strong suds with a tablespoonful of borax dissolved in it. Dash with insect powder, or lay with tobacco leaves along the edge, and re-tack. Or use turpentine, the enemy of buffalo moths, carpet worms and other insects that injure and destroy carpets. Mix the turpentine with pure water in the proportion of three ...
— The Whitehouse Cookbook (1887) - The Whole Comprising A Comprehensive Cyclopedia Of Information For - The Home • Mrs. F.L. Gillette
... know the wonderful little link between the fish and the insect; and the two chatted over its strange form, till the boat returned ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... experience to the believer which will be fraught with inestimably good things; that is, the act of dying, and not merely the being dead. It is no doubt as necessary to the nature of the soul, to its psychology, its soul-life, as the changes of the worm, chrysalis, and butterfly, are to the insect. And thus, as in all other things, where sin abounded, grace much more abounds, and even death, like a cross, is turned into a ministration ...
— Catharine • Nehemiah Adams
... believers in transmigration; and that this belief exists yet among the aborigines. I have noticed that my Indians were unwilling to kill any animal whatever, even the most noxious and dangerous, that inhabits the ruined monuments. I have often told them to kill some venomous insect or serpent that may have happened to be in our way. They invariably refused to do so, but softly and carefully caused them to go. And when asked why they did not kill them, declined to answer except by a knowing and mysterious ...
— Vestiges of the Mayas • Augustus Le Plongeon
... the water, and the active forms of monkeys and even of leopards darted among the trees. But the country—whether forest, mud-flat, or prairie—was always damp and feverish: a wet land steaming under a burning sun and humming with mosquitoes and all kinds of insect life. ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill
... of explanation is called for from one who has the temerity to offer a surfeited public still another book on wild flowers. Inasmuch as science has proved that almost every blossom in the world is everything it is because of its necessity to attract insect friends or to repel its foes - its form, mechanism, color, markings, odor, time of opening and closing, and its season of blooming being the result of natural selection by that special insect upon which each depends more or less absolutely ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... had no feeling of discomfort. Over all the dismal landscape a canopy of low, lead-colored clouds hung like a visible curse. In all this there were a menace and a portent—a hint of evil, an intimation of doom. Bird, beast, or insect there was none. The wind sighed in the bare branches of the dead trees and the gray grass bent to whisper its dread secret to the earth; but no other sound nor motion broke the awful repose of ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... one or two breaks in the reef surrounding this desert isle, as we could see from a link missing here and there in the chain of breakers. This was especially noticeable towards the south-western portion of the rampart the indefatigable coral insect had thrown up, where an opening about double the width of the Silver Queen's beam was plainly discernible. Through this fissure in the reef, piloted by that power which had watched over us throughout all the perils of our ...
— Afloat at Last - A Sailor Boy's Log of his Life at Sea • John Conroy Hutcheson
... and no single line about it quite straight. A cottage crazy with age, buried up to the thatch in sweetbrier, creepers, honeysuckle, and perched high above crossroads. A cottage almost unapproachable for beehives and their bees—an insect for which Clara had an aversion. Imagine on the rough, pebbled approach to the door of this cottage (and Clara had on thin shoes) a peculiar cradle with a dark-eyed baby that was staring placidly at two bees sleeping on a coverlet made of a rough linen such as Clara had never ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... this. Forget your own cares long enough to really see, but for a moment, yonder spray of roses waving in the breeze. Watch the play of light and shade in the flickering leaves overhead. Listen to the chorus of voices from bird, insect, and wind. The wine of gladness! Nature pours it in a sparkling flood, unceasing by day and night, for every ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... vile insect!" said a Lion angrily to a Gnat that was buzzing around his head. But the Gnat was ...
— The AEsop for Children - With pictures by Milo Winter • AEsop
... since visited Australia, has turned his attention to the subject, and the result of his experience, which will be found below, tends to overthrow the opinion I have previously expressed, to the effect, that this substance is the exudation of a tree, not the deposit of an insect.* ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 2 • John Lort Stokes
... simple language. So he could do unto, rather than being done in. He had never realized that violent death could come in so many repulsive forms. Everything here was deadly to man—from the smallest insect to the largest plant. ...
— Deathworld • Harry Harrison
... to the system of the Metempsychosis, a soul, to undergo purification, passes into the body of some insect or animal. It is of importance not to disturb this penance, as the work must in ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... the ineffable melancholy of twilight rising from an unknown strand; then the solemn coldness of moonlight watches, the scent of the burnt land under the fierce sun, when all nature was hushed save the dreamy buzz of insect-life: the green coolness of underwood or forest, the unutterable harmony of the sighing breeze, and the song of wild birds during the long patient ambushes of partisan war; the taste of bread in hunger, of the stream in the fever of thirst, of approaching ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... time—moving spectral over the black surface of the water—they would try the lake for a change, and catch a perch as they had caught the mouse. Their catholic digestions were equally tolerant of a rat or an insect. And there were moments, proud moments, in their lives, when they were clever enough to snatch a small bird at roost off his perch. On those occasions the sense of superiority which the large bird feels every where over the small, warmed their cool ...
— Man and Wife • Wilkie Collins
... guests might have separated with at least a semblance of good feeling, but the fatal word which he had feared in his forebodings came from Mrs. J. Harry Stott, who majestically descended the broad staircase carrying before her a small reddish-brown insect impaled on a darning-needle. She walked to the desk and presented it for Mr. Cone's consideration. It was a most indelicate action, but the knowledge that it was such did not lessen the horror with which the guests ...
— The Dude Wrangler • Caroline Lockhart
... Marston did it. No one ever saw her hurried or busy, yet the proofs of her industry were here. She worked like the coral insect, in the dark, as it were, of instinct unlit by intellect, and, like the coral insect, she raised a monumental structure ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... to find this. It is called the Tamarisk. This long, oval-shaped part is made by an insect which inhabits the plant, and is eaten by the inhabitants in the plains east of the Mediterranean Sea. It is there called Mount Sinai Manna, and is supposed to be the Manna which the Jews found when they were in the Wilderness after ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: The Mysteries of the Caverns • Roger Thompson Finlay
... varies with the changing light, while many a happy hour may be spent in watching the many coloured lizards which play among the rocks, the curious mantis and twig-insects, and other strange specimens of insect life which abound here; while, should you weary of sight-seeing and the glare of light, quietude and repose may be found among the fruit-laden fig-trees of Kitchener's Island, or in ...
— Peeps at Many Lands: Egypt • R. Talbot Kelly
... the least; not only islands, but whole Archipelagos are made annually, by the sea insects in that quarter of the world; but, then, you are not to form your notions of an insect in such an ocean, by the insects you see in such a bit of ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... The sky was full of strange gulls with long, forked tails, and a lovely little flying lizard with transparent wings of the palest green—like those of a grasshopper—was flitting about picking up insect stragglers. ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold
... of ingenuity in order to screen the mercury from the wind so as to obtain a well-defined reflection. No sooner was I getting a perfect contact of the sun's image and its reflection than some huge fly or other insect would begin to promenade on the mercury, disturbing its surface. Butterflies were even more troublesome, as they left upon the mercury—by the luminosity of which they were greatly attracted—sediments of multi-coloured powder and down from their wings and bodies. ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... will of the sweet sap. I remember also that my attempt to photograph a score of bees, two large brown butterflies and one humming-bird, all in attendance upon this birch feast, was a surprising failure. I secured a picture of the holes in the bark, to be sure, but the rapidly moving insect and bird life was too quick for an exposure of even a fraction of a second, and my negative was lifeless. These same yellow birches, picturesque in form, ragged in light-colored bark, give a brightness all their own to the deep forest, mostly of ...
— Getting Acquainted with the Trees • J. Horace McFarland
... continent to the amount of over four hundred million dollars annually. Insects destroy the crops upon which man depends for his food. Going to school hasn't made you very wise, has it? Well, the toads are insect destroyers. That's their business. If the State only knew enough to make use of them, millions of dollars might be saved every year. Does it seem to you that the human animal is so clever as it might be, when it allows such numbers of ...
— The Ontario Readers - Third Book • Ontario Ministry of Education
... Poisonous snakes are the karait, the cobra, and Russell's viper. The first is sometimes an intruder into houses. Lizards and mongooses are less unwelcome visitors. White ants attack timber and ruin books, and mosquitoes and sandflies add to the unpleasant features of the hot weather. The best known insect pest is the locust, but visitations on a large scale are rare. Of late years much more damage has been done by an insect which harbours in ...
— The Panjab, North-West Frontier Province, and Kashmir • Sir James McCrone Douie
... "'faint heart never won fair lady.' And I'm determined to win this kaliedoscope of beauty or perish in the attempt!" You will notice that our insect had a way of using big words to express himself, which leads us to suspect that the school system in Oz is the same they employ ...
— The Woggle-Bug Book • L. Frank Baum
... bees, who line their nests with small round pieces of leaves, which they themselves cut and then fit together so exactly, without gum, that they hold their stores of honey and do not leak a bit. Well, a sharp-eyed observer has found, on one of these bees, an insect whose body is no longer than the width of the dot of this "i" (1-90th of an inch), and which is believed to be the smallest insect known. It is called Pteratomus, a word which means "winged atom," and it lives entirely ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, September 1878, No. 11 • Various
... to which we had made up our minds. Is it that we despise little things; that we are not prepared for them; that they take us in our careless, unguarded moments, and tease us out of our ordinary patience by their petty, incessant, insect warfare, buzzing about us and stinging us like gnats, so that we can neither get rid of nor grapple with them; whereas we collect all our fortitude and resolution to meet evils of greater magnitude? Or is it that there is a certain stream of irritability that is ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... greater space and freedom. It suggests besides, that the universe is not rough-hewn, but perfect in its details. Nature will bear the closest inspection; she invites us to lay our eye level with the smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain. She has no interstices; every part is full of life. I explore, too, with pleasure, the sources of the myriad sounds which crowd the summer noon, and which seem the very grain and stuff of which eternity is made. Who does not remember the shrill roll-call of the ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau
... angurek warna and katong'ging; the first of which I apprehend to be the anggrek bunga putri (Angraecum scriptum, R.) and the other the anggrek kasturi (Angraecum moschatum, R.) or scorpion-flower, from its resembling that insect, as the former does the butterfly. The musky scent resides at the ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... the diseases of "the lower animals." Now the fact is that already we share a great many diseases with the lower animals, a few of them being tuberculosis, anthrax, rabies, tetanus, cancer, pleuro-pneumonia, certain insect-borne diseases, some parasitic worm diseases and some skin diseases like favus. As the knowledge of the lowly origin of many of our diseases is more widespread, this sort of ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... a great many of them," answered Arthur, "and it is supposed that new ones are constantly being formed by the labours of the coral insect. A bare ledge of coral first appears, just at the surface; it arrests floating substances, weeds, trees, etcetera; soon the sea-birds begin to resort there; by the decay of vegetable and animal matter a thin soil gradually covers the foundation of coral; a cocoa-nut is drifted upon ...
— The Island Home • Richard Archer
... explained," said Nern, simply, "that Venus dwellers, due to our advanced knowledge of sanitation and health conversation, live about 800 years and then die invariably of old age. The only unnatural cause of death encountered is this giant insect. Accidents do occur, but they are rare. There are no deliberate ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science April 1930 • Various
... felling of trees, it having been scientifically proved that trees in a certain quantity, not only purify the air from disease germs affecting the human organization, but also save the crops from many noxious insect- pests and poisonous fungi. Having learned the lesson at last, that the Almighty may be trusted to know His own business, and that trees are intended for wider purposes than mere timber, the regulations were strict concerning them. No one could fell a tree on his own ground ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... a reader has assimilated from any given book his own proper nourishment and pleasure, the rest of the book is so much oyster shell. The end of true reading is the development of individuality. Like a certain water insect, the reader instinctively selects from the outspread world of books the building materials for the house of his soul. He chooses here and rejects there, and remembers or forgets according to the formative desire ...
— The Guide to Reading - The Pocket University Volume XXIII • Edited by Dr. Lyman Abbott, Asa Don Dickenson, and Others
... The insect can be divided, because it has limbs with which to move; and an intelligence higher than man can doubtless see emanations from those particles of light. But a monad is indivisible! Think of each cubic inch of this great earth containing a million grains of sand, and those countless grains ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams
... evening, the whole party determined to take time by the forelock, and abandoning their cabins remove with their household goods and herds of cattle before the insect plunderers had prepared the way for a famine which they were certain to do before many days. Hastily loading their carts with their household goods and stores, and collecting their cattle, five hundred in number, they set out for the ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... to the peak, the lawns And winding glades high up like ways to Heaven, The slender coco's drooping crown of plumes The lightning flash of insect and of bird, The lustre of the long convolvuluses That coil'd around the stately stems, and ran Ev'n to the limit of the land, the glows And glories of the broad belt of the world, All these he saw; but what he fain had seen He could not see, the kindly human face, Nor ever hear ...
— Beauties of Tennyson • Alfred Tennyson
... poor little captive will possibly be miserable, pining for liberty, hating its prison, dreading the visits of its jailor, and so harassed in its terror that in some cases the poor little heart is broken, and in a few hours death is the result. In the following simple sketches of animal, bird, and insect life, I have tried to show how confidence must be gained, and the little wild heart won by quiet and unvarying kindness, and also by the endeavour to imitate as much as possible the natural surroundings of its own life ...
— Wild Nature Won By Kindness • Elizabeth Brightwen
... the torrid zone, with its luxuriant vegetation, is also prolific of insect and reptile life; and, from this very circumstance, the denizen of a hot country is often subject to a greater amount of personal discomfort than the dweller in the Arctic zone. Even the scarcity of vegetable food, and the bitter, biting frost, are far easier to endure than the plague of tipulary ...
— The Plant Hunters - Adventures Among the Himalaya Mountains • Mayne Reid
... those who have never seen this delicious insect, I take leave to mention here, that, when full grown, it is a large dingy brown—coloured beetle, about two inches long, with six legs, and two f eelers as long as its body. It has a strong anti—hysterical flavour, something between rotten cheese and assafoetida, and seldom stirs aboard ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... great rubber industry of Brazil the trees grow and produce with but little if any cultivation, this is not true of the coffee trees. They have to be cultivated and carefully looked after. Insect pests that are so destructive to coffee trees in many countries, are almost absent in Brazil and this fact has not a little to do with making this the greatest coffee country in the world. In the state of Sao Paulo ...
— Birdseye Views of Far Lands • James T. Nichols
... with the solicitude of a mother removing some buzzing insect from her child's cradle, and, making a sign to enjoin silence, added in a low voice, "She is neither dead nor poisoned. Some philtre has been given to her for a bad purpose. Her breathing is even, and she cannot fail to recover from ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... to see, capacity to suffer, one may come Ito understand all things. In an insect's death are hinted all disasters. Through a knot-hole can be seen the sky and ...
— Chantecler - Play in Four Acts • Edmond Rostand
... doubling his fist and holding it within an inch of my nose. "Say afraid again, you miserable insect, and I'll ...
— Blue Jackets - The Log of the Teaser • George Manville Fenn
... in the later part of the winter, and the glazed frost that often follows them; the frosts and the snow-storms which return every year in the second half of May, when the trees are already in full blossom and insect life swarms everywhere; the early frosts and, occasionally, the heavy snowfalls in July and August, which suddenly destroy myriads of insects, as well as the second broods of the birds in the prairies; the torrential rains, due to the monsoons, which fall in ...
— Mutual Aid • P. Kropotkin
... the middle of the sixth century that two Persian monks, who had long resided in China, and made themselves acquainted with the mode of rearing the silkworm, succeeded in carrying the eggs of the insect to Constantinople. Under their direction they were hatched and fed. A sufficient number of butterflies were saved to propagate the race, and mulberry trees were planted to afford nourishment to the rising generations of caterpillars. Thus the industry was propagated. It spread into the Italian ...
— Men of Invention and Industry • Samuel Smiles
... coral insect, obeying the blind instinct of its nature, adds particle to particle, and builds a house for itself at the same time that it helps to construct a continent; so we, obeying the voice of God, in every little duty, performed not grudgingly, ...
— The Elements of Character • Mary G. Chandler
... of kinds as in the surrounding virgin forests. What a struggle between the several kinds of trees must here have gone on during long centuries, each annually scattering its seeds by the thousand; what war between insect and insect—between insects, snails, and other animals, with birds and beasts of prey—all striving to increase, and all feeding on each other or on the trees, or their seeds and seedlings, or on the other plants which first clothed the ground and thus checked the growth of the trees! ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... fellow first," said the Goblin, pointing to a large, round insect that went flying by, humming like a top. Ribsy snapped at it, and swallowed it, and the next instant disappeared with a tremendous explosion in a great cloud ...
— Davy and The Goblin - What Followed Reading 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland' • Charles E. Carryl
... but as they were not yet used to raise and manage the silk-worm, they reaped nothing but their trouble for their pains. They tore up the mulberry-trees they had planted, and, in spite of De Serres, asserted that the northern climate was not adapted for the rearing of that tender insect. The great Sully, from his hatred of all objects of luxury, countenanced the popular clamour, and crushed the rising enterprise of De Serres. The monarch was wiser than the minister. The book had made sufficient noise to reach the ear of Henry IV.; who ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... vanished into dust again. And other kings usurped their place, Who called themselves of Kintu's race, And worshipped Kintu; not as he, The mild, benignant deity, Who held all life a holy thing, Be it of insect or of king, Would have ordained, but with wild rite, With altars heaped, and dolorous cries, And savage dance, and bale-fires light, An unaccepted sacrifice. At last, when thousand years were flown, The great Ma-anda filled the throne: A prince of generous heart and high, ...
— Verses • Susan Coolidge
... resulting in curved outlines of eccentric character. This eccentricity, coupled with the very unusual character of the details at the outer extremities of the figures, leads to the surmise that each part of the design is a conventional representation of some life form, a bird, an insect, or ...
— A Study Of The Textile Art In Its Relation To The Development Of Form And Ornament • William H. Holmes
... soldier, the rope for the assassin, the fist for the rowdy; but, by Heaven! it's a ludicrous thing to squander gunpowder when insect powder will accomplish the same results. I told you, I had waited until I had the evidence," he said. "Now you are going ...
— The Price of the Prairie - A Story of Kansas • Margaret Hill McCarter
... have done the most in this world for God and for men? The largely endowed men? 'Not many wise, not many mighty, not many noble are called.' The coral insect is microscopic, but it will build up from the profoundest depth of the ocean a reef against which the whole Pacific may dash in vain. It is the small gifts that, after all, are the important ones. So let us cultivate ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... provisions and for other things. These multitudinous insects seem to flourish on the rattan vine especially, and no means are known whereby to exterminate them. Ants, especially the white ant, pay frequent visits to the house, but the worst scourge of all is the ravenous bedbug. This unpleasant insect is found under the joists just beneath the floor laths, but in greatest numbers under those parts of the floor that are continually used as sleeping places, and in the hammocks. Occasionally an effort is made to scrape them out, but they are so cunning ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... 100 of them went down to Guildford early in the morning, and returned late in the evening. It was a beautiful day, bright and cloudless; and as those London boys wandered about the country lanes and meadows of Guildford, and heard the ceaseless hum of insect life, and the uncaged birds singing high in the blue sky, and saw the wild-flowers in the hedgerows, and the glancing waters in their way, we may be sure that more than mere enjoyment was stored up in their minds, and that thoughts which might ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 446 - Volume 18, New Series, July 17, 1852 • Various
... than a heavy heart? The soothing voices of insect life which soften the darkness and cheer the wayfarer in the countryside seemed only to mock her with their myriad care-free songs. And to make matters worse there suddenly rang in her ears from far over to the west the loud clatter of those ...
— Pee-wee Harris • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... of pinch-bugs, and another is professor of toads, and another is professor of lobsters, and so on until all the kinds of insects has each a professor to itself. And them they call specialists, and each one knows more about his own kind of insect than any other man in th' world knows. So mebbe the Frinchmin is professor ...
— Mike Flannery On Duty and Off • Ellis Parker Butler
... tangled glen; wayside well—perennial, patient, silent, clear, stealing through its square font of rough-hewn stone; ever thus deep, no more;—which the winter wreck sullies not, the summer thirst wastes not, incapable of stain as of decline;—where the fallen leaf floats undecayed, and the insect darts undefiling: cressed brook and ever-eddying river, lifted even in flood scarcely over its stepping stones,—but through all sweet summer keeping tremulous music with harp-strings of dark water among the silver fingering of the pebbles. ...
— Frondes Agrestes - Readings in 'Modern Painters' • John Ruskin
... together, if you're going that way." So Tom stepped off, brushing through the steaming long grass, gemmed with wild flowers, followed by the keeper; and, as the grasshoppers bounded chirruping out of his way, and the insect life hummed and murmured, and the lark rose and sang above his head, he felt happier than he had done for many a long month. So his heart opened towards his companion, who kept a little ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... books from the American press is Episodes of Insect Life, by ACHETA DOMESTICA, just reprinted by J. S. Redfield. The natural history and habits of insects of every class are delineated by a close observer with remarkable minuteness, and in a style of unusual ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... things, like stones—inorganic things as they are called. Living things—organisms, as they are called—he cannot explain to you at all. When he meddles with them, he always ends like the man who killed his goose to get the golden eggs. He has to kill his goose, or his flower, or his insect, before he can analyse it; and then it is not a goose, but only the corpse of a goose; not a flower, but only the dead ...
— Madam How and Lady Why - or, First Lessons in Earth Lore for Children • Charles Kingsley
... completely unaware was Franklin Kane, who sat, as usual, just outside the circle in the sun, balancing his tea-cup on his raised knees and 'Fletcherising' a slice of cake. Gerald had glanced at him as one might glance—Althea had felt it keenly—at some nice little insect on one's path, a pleasant insect, but too small to warrant any attention beyond a casual recognition of type. But Franklin, who had a casual interest in nobody, was very much aware of the newcomer, and he gazed attentively at Gerald Digby as he had gazed at Helen on the first evening of ...
— Franklin Kane • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... piece of dead coral, William. Do you see that on every branch there are a hundred little holes? Well, in every one of these little holes once lived a sea-insect; and as these insects increase, so do the ...
— Masterman Ready • Captain Marryat
... waken them, but they would open their eyes only for a moment, then fall asleep again. Soon he began to feel a strange, sleepy feeling coming over him. He shook himself and tried to keep awake. Just then he noticed a very large insect on a branch of a tree. It had many wings on its back, which kept up a steady, droning noise. When it noticed the hunter looking at it, the insect said, "I am Weeng, the spirit of sleep. Your dogs came too near my home, and so they have fallen under my spell. ...
— Thirty Indian Legends • Margaret Bemister
... pierce the glories of the sunset and see into the streets of heaven. He is dressed in black, and is rather more clerical in appearance than most English curates are nowadays; but he does not wear the collar and waistcoat of a parish priest. He is roused from his trance by the chirp of an insect from a tuft of grass in a crevice of the stone. His face relaxes: he turns quietly, and gravely takes off his hat to the tuft, addressing the insect in a brogue which is the jocular assumption of a gentleman and not the natural speech of ...
— John Bull's Other Island • George Bernard Shaw
... by their familiars); they then attack and devour the large white lilies, and honeysuckles; finally, they spread themselves impartially all over the garden, and having literally stripped that bare, are now attacking the fruit. It is an insect which I have never seen in England; a species of beetle, much smaller, but not unlike the cockchafer we are familiar with. Their number is really prodigious, and they seem to me to propagate with portentous rapidity, for every day, ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... with the remains of the corn, or sprinkled them with wine-drops. Glaukias had the art of imitating the pattering of rain and the humming of a fly to perfection with his lips; and when the girls complained of the tiresome insect buzzing in their faces, or declared, when a drop fell on them, that in spite of the blue and cloudless sky it was certainly beginning to rain, the two men had to cover their mouths with their hands, that their laughter ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... all; they were only part of the Victorian absurdity. It is obvious that religious enthusiasm, as a personal matter, means nothing to him. He investigates the feelings of Newman or Keble as a naturalist might the contortions of an insect. The ceremonies and rites of the Church are objects of subdued hilarity to him, and in their presence, if he suppresses his laughter, it is solely to prevent his missing any detail precious to his curiosity. When the subject of ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... at sea between Mazzorbo and Murano. The ruddy arches overhead were reflected without interruption in the waveless ruddy lake below. Our black boat was the only dark spot in this sphere of splendour. We seemed to hang suspended; and such as this, I fancied, must be the feeling of an insect caught in the heart of a fiery-petalled rose. Yet not these melodramatic sunsets alone are beautiful. Even more exquisite, perhaps, are the lagoons, painted in monochrome of greys, with just one touch of pink upon a western cloud, scattered in ripples here and there on the waves below, reminding ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... with horror at the description I had given of those terrible engines, and the proposal I had made. "He was amazed, how so impotent and grovelling an insect as I" (these were his expressions) "could entertain such inhuman ideas, and in so familiar a manner, as to appear wholly unmoved at all the scenes of blood and desolation which I had painted as the common effects of ...
— Gulliver's Travels - into several remote nations of the world • Jonathan Swift
... mind tire upon this, from the repeated use, another of nature's kingdoms opens itself at once upon him; the plant he is weary of observing, feeds some insect he may examine; nor is there a stone that lies before his foot, but may afford ...
— Hypochondriasis - A Practical Treatise (1766) • John Hill
... already showing the measure of their coming harvest, and then strawyard and farm buildings would slide into view; heavy dairy cattle, roan and skewbald and dappled, stood near the gates, drowsily resentful of insect stings, and bunched-up companies of ducks halted in seeming irresolution between the charms of the horse-pond and the alluring neighbourhood of the farm kitchen. Away by the banks of some rushing mill-stream, in a setting of copse and cornfield, a village might ...
— When William Came • Saki
... numerous on Mars, the conditions being very favourable to insect life; and they are all on a very much larger scale than our insects, especially those ...
— To Mars via The Moon - An Astronomical Story • Mark Wicks
... the fat body of the spider, I fired. But with another of the remarkably quick movements the spider landed the usual safe distance from destruction. Then I gave it up. For all I know, that animal, I can scarcely call it an insect after using a big game pistol on it, is still occupying the hut. About nine months later I was telling Captain Barnett, of the R.M.S. Napo which picked me up on the Amazon on my way home, about my ill success in hunting the spider. "Lange," ...
— In The Amazon Jungle - Adventures In Remote Parts Of The Upper Amazon River, Including A - Sojourn Among Cannibal Indians • Algot Lange
... much more constant means of concealment, has rendered brilliant colour less hurtful there than in the temperate and colder regions. Again, this perennial vegetation supplies abundance of both vegetable and insect food throughout the year, and thus a greater abundance and greater variety of the forms of life are rendered possible, than where recurrent seasons of cold and scarcity reduce the possibilities of life to a minimum. Geology furnishes us with another reason, in the fact, that ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... to be assaulted ferociously. As we walked we could feel them resisting our progress, and it seemed as if we were forcing our way through solid banks of them. If we rested, they alighted in such myriads that soon we appeared literally sheathed in tiny atoms of insect life, vainly trying to pierce the mesh of our clothing. To bare a hand was to have it covered with blood in a moment, and the thought of being at their mercy was an exquisitely horrible one. Night and day their voices blended in a vast drone, ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... To her, alone, in all that party, the warm arms of the sun brandished javelins, and the calm riches of the landscape concealed jibes. The meanest field labourer seemed happier than she, the commonest insect more wanton ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... window is better than a yard of crape on the door." The greatest triumph in connection with the building of the Panama Canal was not the engineering but the reduction in the death-rate among the workers, which, on account of these insect-borne diseases, had previously prevented the successful execution ...
— How to Live - Rules for Healthful Living Based on Modern Science • Irving Fisher and Eugene Fisk
... cheek the crimson ray By changes comes and goes, As rosy-hued Aurora's play Along the polar snows; Gay as the insect-bird that sips From scented flowers the dew— Pure as the snowy swan that dips Its wings in waters blue; Sweet thoughts are mirrored on her face, Like clouds on the calm sea, And every motion is a grace, Each word ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... with this great man, he felt that he was no bigger than an insect. He seated himself on the shore and ...
— The Indian Fairy Book - From the Original Legends • Cornelius Mathews
... the catalogue of the flying leaves and small cheap journals, political and satirical, that sprung into existence after the revolution, mostly in Berlin and Vienna; not more than three or four of them now exist. The insect world was a favorite source of names for the satirist, the sting of whose production was frequently only in the title: every week produced the Hornet, the Wasp, the Gadfly, and their plurals, the Wasps and the Gadflies; there was also an ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Vol. I. No. 3, July 15, 1850 • Various
... Dieman's Land is a smaller but much more splendid insect than the English wasp; it has four orange-coloured wings, and horns and legs of the same colour, a hard body, and a formidable sting. It is an inhabitant of the forest, and is at war with a spider that makes its ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 10, No. 279, October 20, 1827 • Various
... together with descriptions of their chief insect pests and fungous diseases, and remedies for their control. It contains an account of modern methods in feeding and handling all farm stock, including poultry. The diseases which affect different farm animals and poultry are ...
— Clovers and How to Grow Them • Thomas Shaw
... the madwoman, and then on his father and uncle. His professional instinct was getting the better of him, and he studied the mother and the sons, with all the keenness of a naturalist observing the metamorphosis of some insect. He pondered over the growth of that family to which he belonged, over the different branches growing from one parent stock, whose sap carried identical germs to the farthest twigs, which bent in divers ways according to the sunshine or shade in which they lived. And for a moment, as by ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... held the child; he remained there open-mouthed. He only dropped his head a moment when a nettle, which felt like an insect, stung his leg; then he looked up again—he looked above him at the face which looked down on him. It appeared to regard him the more steadfastly because it had no eyes. It was a comprehensive glance, having an indescribable fixedness in which there were both light and darkness, ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... still, under the whisper of the wind. He discovered that he was listening—listening for the buzz of an insect, the squeak of some grass dweller, anything which would mean that there was life about them. As he chewed on the ration concentrate and drank sparingly from his canteen, Raf continued to ...
— Star Born • Andre Norton
... record of the germs and first causes of all the greatest poets' conceptions! The elder Brunei's first hint for his "shield," in constructing the tunnel under the Thames, was taken from watching the labor of a sea-insect, which, having a projecting hood, could bore into the ship's ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... contempt for some one who is regarded as very mean-spirited is sometimes shown by describing such a person as a "worm," or worse, if possible, a "reptile." A "bookworm," on the other hand, the name of a little insect which lives in books and eats away at paper and bindings, is applied to people who love books in another way—great readers—and is, of course, not at ...
— Stories That Words Tell Us • Elizabeth O'Neill
... of this little book is to afford an outline sketch of the facts and meaning of insect-transformations. Considerations of space forbid anything like an exhaustive treatment of so vast a subject, and some aspects of the question, the physiological for example, are almost neglected. Other books already published in this series, such as ...
— The Life-Story of Insects • Geo. H. Carpenter
... lady-birds, may-flies, bees, and a variety of other inhabitants of the insect world, are descanted upon in a pleasing style, combining scientific information with romance, in a manner ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... fortified now against certain insect plagues which once afflicted him, and the brilliant professor laid his head on an old cork fender and slept like an infant. He did not return until next evening; he went without books, tobacco, ...
— A Dream of the North Sea • James Runciman
... observing that Ludlow was about to quit the room—"Let the time of our uncertainty be short, I pray thee. Our mistress is like the insect, which takes the color of the leaf on which it dwells. You have seen her in her sea-green robe, which she never fails to wear when roving over the soundings of your American coast: but in the deep waters, her mantle vies with the blue of the ocean's depths. Symptoms of a change, ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... way to one of those fearful bursts of rage which no experience had succeeded in teaching him to curb. He howled till the dirt sticking about the vaulted ceiling, and the earth choking up the air-hole, dropped piecemeal to the ground, and every insect that had ears covered them up the best way it could to prevent its becoming instantaneously deafened by the horrid sound; then tearing round and round and round the confined space of his cell, till there ...
— The Adventures of a Bear - And a Great Bear too • Alfred Elwes
... Word Scarabaeus. Veneration of the Ancient Egyptians for the scarabaeus. Entomology of the insect. Symbolism of according to Plutarch, Pliny and Horapollo. Its astronomical value. Worship of insects by other peoples. Symbolism, with the Egyptians, of the scarabaeus. Uses of it with ...
— Scarabs • Isaac Myer
... qualities of its vines attracted the attention of French viticulturists. Phylloxera had been introduced from America into France and threatened the existence of French vineyards. After trying all possible remedies for the scourge, it was discovered that the insect could be overcome by grafting European grapes on American vines resistant to phylloxera. A trial of the promising species of New World grapes showed that vines of this species were best suited for ...
— Manual of American Grape-Growing • U. P. Hedrick
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