"Cocoon" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... by the larvæ of the hornet. Under the wing of each insect an egg is attached; the egg soon hatches, and the grub at once proceeds to devour the food its thoughtful parent has provided. As it grows, it weaves itself a sort of shell or cocoon, in which, after a time, it undergoes its metamorphosis, and comes out, I think, a perfect insect ...
— The Writings of John Burroughs • John Burroughs
... caterpillar which, instead of being contented with a caterpillar's life and feeding on caterpillar's food, was always striving to turn itself into a chrysalis; and as that would be an unhappy chrysalis which should lie awake at night and roll restlessly in its cocoon, in efforts to turn itself prematurely into a moth; so will that art be unhappy and unprosperous which, instead of supporting itself on the food, and contenting itself with the customs, which have been enough for the support and guidance ...
— Selections From the Works of John Ruskin • John Ruskin
... in private collections or museums. A lifeless moth fades rapidly under the most favourable conditions. A moth at eight days of age, in the last stages of decline, is from four to six distinct shades lighter in colour than at six hours from the cocoon, when it is dry, and ready for flight. As soon as circulation stops, and the life juices evaporate from the wings and body, the colour grows many shades paler. If exposed to light, moths soon fade ...
— Moths of the Limberlost • Gene Stratton-Porter
... journey!—had to be emptied of its feminine possessions, and David's little belongings stowed in their place. David himself had views about this packing; he kept bringing one thing or another—his rubber boots, a cocoon, a large lump of slag honeycombed with air- holes; would she please put them ...
— The Awakening of Helena Richie • Margaret Deland
... pent-up message of Greece—the glory of her days, the beauty of temples and statues and tombs—was freed by the tale of his lips. The world was new-born for him. He lifted the empty fig-box, from which the child had set free the butterfly that had hung imprisoned in its grey cocoon throughout the long winter, and placed it carefully on the shelf. The lettering traced along its side was faded and dim; but he saw again the child's eyes lifted to it—the lips half-parted, the eager question and swift demand—that he should tell her of Athens and the ...
— Mr. Achilles • Jennette Lee
... laid a large number of eggs in a silken cocoon, in shape a balloon, and secreted, like the web, by her invaluable spinnerets. Indeed, the real reason—I won't say excuse—for the rapacity and Gargantuan appetite of the spider lies, no doubt, in the immense amount of material ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... pleased to think on these points of current business?' Majesty serenely issues his thoughts, in the form of orders; which are found correct to pattern. This is the process with his Majesty. A poor Majesty, taking deeply into tobacco; this is the way they have him benetted, as in a dark cocoon of cobwebs, rendering the whole world invisible to him. Which cunning arrangement is more and more perfected every year; so that on all roads he travels, be it to mass, to hunt, to dinner, any-whither in his Palace or out of ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XV. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... gray watered-silk wings. This is the imago or mature form of the insect known as the codlin-moth (it lives on codlins or apples). The larvae or "worms" were brought into the cellar in the apples; some of them crawled out, spun themselves in a cocoon and pupated; in due season the moth emerged, ready to lay the eggs for other larvae. Ordinarily the fruit-grower does not see the moth, for it is a small object amidst the foliage of apple-trees; the larva or ...
— The Apple-Tree - The Open Country Books—No. 1 • L. H. Bailey
... called cockchafer is here known only as the oak-web, and a smaller beetle as fern-web. It seems hard to guess why they should be named web (which in Anglo-Saxon means weaver), as they do not, I think, form any cocoon. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 75, April 5, 1851 • Various
... Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because Thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes" (Matt. 11:25). No one can find out how it happens; it passes human understanding, how the caterpillar in the dried-up cocoon takes a new life with the arrival of Spring. Before they reached that part in that precious Book where it begins to tell of the sufferings of and, finally, the death of the Lord Jesus, Ondrejko felt in his heart that all happened for him also. He could not quite explain it, and no ...
— The Three Comrades • Kristina Roy
... searched the bushes and low trees behind the garden and all around the edge of the woods on their land, and having little success, at last came to the road. Almost the first thorn bush she examined yielded a Polyphemus cocoon. Elnora lifted her head with the instinct of a hunter on the chase, and began work. She reached the swamp before she knew it, carrying five fine cocoons of different species as her reward. She pushed back her hair and gazed around longingly. ...
— A Girl Of The Limberlost • Gene Stratton Porter
... all through the sunny hours two vanessa butterflies have alternately floated and feasted, one a mourning cloak, the other a Compton tortoise, Vanessa antiopa and Vanessa j-album. These are late arrivals that have come from the cocoon upon a cold world and are doing their best to make good in it. Both are of a species that are hardy beyond belief and both may well winter in the crevice within the gnarled trunk of the old tree into which they creep benumbed when the chill of night begins ...
— Old Plymouth Trails • Winthrop Packard
... is fixed, a partition one or two millimetres thick. (.039 to.079 inch.—Translator's Note.) The rooms separated by these partitions form so many little barrels or kegs, each compactly filled with a reddish, transparent cocoon, through which the larva shows, bent into a fish-hook. The whole suggests a string of rough, oval amber beads, touching at their ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre
... with spices, and, spontaneously burning, soars from the aromatic fire, rejuvenescent for a thousand years; and he cannot but take the phoenix for a miraculous type of his own soul springing, free and eternal, from the ashes of his corpse. Having watched the silkworm, as it wove its cocoon and lay down in its oblong grave apparently dead, until at length it struggles forth, glittering with rainbow colors, a winged moth, endowed with new faculties and living a new life in a new sphere, he conceives that so the human ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... their full growth, they leave their tents and scatter in all directions, seeking for some protected place where each one spins its spindle-shaped cocoon of whitish silk intermingled with sulphur colored powder, Fig. 15, d. They remain in these cocoons, where they have changed to pupae, from twenty to twenty-five days, after which the moths emerge, pair, and the females lay their eggs ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 803, May 23, 1891 • Various
... Daddy Chip and the boys, flopped the blanket vigorously this way and that in an effort to get it straightened, flopped himself on his knees and folded the blanket round and round him until he looked like a large, gray cocoon, and cuddled himself under the ledge with his head on the bag of doughnuts and his wide eyes fixed upon the first pale stars and his mind clinging sturdily to his mission and to this first real, man-sized adventure that had come into ...
— The Flying U's Last Stand • B. M. Bower
... when the manufacturer undergoes his change, it serves for various chemical works. Certain Oil-beetles, such as the Sitaris, locate in it the urate of ammonia, the refuse of the transformed organism; the Sphex, the Pelopaei, the Scoliae use it to manufacture the shellac wherewith the silk of the cocoon is varnished. Further investigations will only swell the aggregate of the ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... Apollonius, he exchanges indifferent words with him? Then two powers strive on his brow which his son, confronted by the shield over his father's eyes, does not see. He wants to ask something but he does not ask. So thick is the cloud that the old man has spun about him like a cocoon that there is no longer any way through it from him out into the world nor any, leading from outside in to him. He behaves as if he knew about everything. If he did not do so, he would show the world his helplessness and himself challenge it ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. IX - Friedrich Hebbel and Otto Ludwig • Various
... into the ground, and form a weak cocoon of earth, the inside being made smooth by a sort of gum. In this they soon change to pupae, from which are produced a second breed of flies by the end of June and beginning of July. Under the influence of July weather, the whole process of egg depositing, etc., is rapidly repeated, ...
— Success With Small Fruits • E. P. Roe
... Head-clerk in an old silk-house, the "Golden Cocoon," rue des Bourdonnais. He bought the establishment in 1793, at the "maximum" moment, and in ten years had made a large fortune, thanks to the dowry of one hundred thousand francs brought him by his wife; she was a Demoiselle Husson, and gave him four children. Of ...
— Repertory Of The Comedie Humaine, Complete, A — Z • Anatole Cerfberr and Jules Franois Christophe
... of danger. The larvae are ingeniously sorted as regards age and size, and are never mixed. The larvae period generally extends through a month, although often much longer, and in most species when the larvae pass into pupae they spin a cocoon of white or straw color, looking much like a shining pebble. Other larvae do not spin a cocoon, but spend the pupal state naked. When they mature they are carefully assisted from their shells by the workers, which also assist in unfolding and ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 822 - Volume XXXII, Number 822. Issue Date October 3, 1891 • Various
... physical and mental evolution. From the crude to the perfect is the law; if this perfection of species, or of phases, could be attained without pain, it were well. Pain comes from lack of wisdom to realize that out of the lower the higher inevitably springs, as the butterfly springs from the cocoon; as the flower springs from the seed; "as above so below" is a translation of an old Sinto saying, which also bids us "trust in ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad
... queen. The whiteness was almost startling, for the neck and arms were like pearl in tint, the hair flowing in full curls on her shoulders was like shining flax or pale silk just unwound from the cocoon, and the only relief of colour was the deep blue of the eyes, the delicate tint of the lips, and the tender rosy flush that was called up by her presentation to her hosts by stout old Sir Philip, in plum-coloured coat ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge
... her face like moonrise, two radiant wings sprang from her shoulders; and even as a butterfly bursts from its dull cocoon, so the human Psyche ...
— Old Greek Folk Stories Told Anew • Josephine Preston Peabody
... sweet, so palaver done set." Every load then, by the light of the bush lights held by the women, we arranged. I had to unpack my bottles of fishes so as to equalise the weight of the loads. Every load is then made into a sort of cocoon with ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley
... 155).) I always distrust myself when I differ from him; but I cannot admit that birds learn to make their nests from having seen them whilst young. I must think it as true an instinct as that which leads a caterpillar to suspend its cocoon in a particular manner. Have you had any experience of birds hatched under a foster-mother making their nests in the proper manner? I cannot thank you enough ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin Volume II - Volume II (of II) • Charles Darwin
... that I came down sitting with a shock that numbed me for the moment. It threw me on my back and billowed up round me as though I were in the trough of a stormy sea. Quicker than I can write it lapped a corner over and rolled me in its folds like a chrysalis in a cocoon. I gave a wild yell and made one frantic struggle, but it was too late. With the leathery strength of a giant and the swiftness of an accomplished cigar-roller covering a "core" with leaf, it swamped my efforts, straightened my limbs, ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold
... it, for it was never mentioned," said the girl. "The Contessa does not think it worth while. I am at present in the cocoon. If I am pretty enough when I am quite grown up, then she will ...
— Sir Tom • Mrs. Oliphant
... was before her. How could she keep this too precocious insect in its chrysalis state? How could she shut it up in its dark cocoon ...
— Jacqueline, v1 • Th. Bentzon (Mme. Blanc)
... turns out to be a small acorn. That is one of Master Tit's ways—storing away provisions for a time of need. With his stout, conical beak he is able to break the shell of an acorn, peck a corn grain into swallowable bits, and tear open the toughest casing of a cocoon. He will even break the hard pits of the dogwood berry to secure the kernel within, the ground below often being strewn with the shell fragments. No danger of Parus bicolor coming to want or going ...
— Our Bird Comrades • Leander S. (Leander Sylvester) Keyser
... burst like a butterfly into space, crawled back into his cocoon and pondered upon the stars from a ...
— Make Mine Homogenized • Rick Raphael
... silk threads upon apparatus which, mechanically speaking, is nearly or quite as primitive as the ancient spinning wheels. Thousands of operatives are constantly employed in forming up these threads by hand, adding filament by filament to the thread as required, while watching the unwinding from the cocoon of many miles of filament in order to produce a single pound of the raw silk thread, making up the thread unaided by any mechanical device beyond a simple reel on which the thread is wound as finished, and a basin of heated water in which ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 620, November 19,1887 • Various
... towards the large cradles, urged on by her great desire, and the guard make way before her. Listening only to her furious jealousy, she will fling herself on to the first cell she comes across, madly strip off the wax with her teeth and claws, tear away the cocoon that carpets the cell, and divest the sleeping princess of every covering. If her rival should be already recognisable, the queen will turn so that her sting may enter the capsule, and will frantically stab ...
— The Life of the Bee • Maurice Maeterlinck
... are several things necessary, in order that the silk worm should be a good one to make silk from. In the first place, the fibre of the silk that he spins must be fine, and also strong. In the next place, it must easily unwind from the cocoon. Then the animal must be a tolerably hardy one, so as to be easily raised in great numbers. Then the plant or tree that it feeds upon must be a thrifty and hardy one, and easily cultivated. The mulberry silk worm has been found to answer to these conditions better than any hitherto ...
— Rollo in Rome • Jacob Abbott
... reminds me of a story and picture in a comic paper that the boys were chuckling over last night. It was of a well-intentioned beetle who fattened a nice green caterpillar for its family's thanksgiving dinner, and the thing went and spun itself into a cocoon the night before!" ...
— People of the Whirlpool • Mabel Osgood Wright
... nothing of the modern languages and special courses in summer in botany, conchology, and physiology. And then, dating from a long anticipated day, or rather night, a metamorphosis startling as the transition of the cocoon; a formal letting loose of the finished maiden on the polished parquet floor of the social arena. Tra-la-la-la-la! Tra-la-la-la-la! Off she whirls to the rythm of a Strauss waltz or a blood-stirring ...
— The Opinions of a Philosopher • Robert Grant
... time and if he's not in a pukka hospital within the next few hours it's all up with him. He's going to have the distinction of being the first casualty removed to hospital by flying-machine. I'll tie him on somewhere. We'll splint him up as well as possible, and then make him into a blooming cocoon with the cord, and whisk ...
— Snake and Sword - A Novel • Percival Christopher Wren
... white face, with blazing eyes and jaws that worked ceaselessly at the loop of the string that was drawn round its neck. The effect, under the electrics, was that of a demon caterpillar wrathfully spinning its own cocoon. ...
— A Diversity of Creatures • Rudyard Kipling
... complexion on Miss Blood. I have a theory to reconstruct. I have been philosophizing her as a simple country girl. I must begin on an operatic novice. I liked the other better. It gave value to the black silk; as a singer she'll wear silk as habitually as a cocoon. She will have to take some stage name; translate Blood into Italian. We shall know her hereafter as La Sanguinelli; and when she comes to Boston we shall make our modest brags about going out to Europe with her. I don't know; I think I preferred the idyllic flavor I was beginning to find in ...
— The Lady of the Aroostook • W. D. Howells
... balance, banish;—" and many unaccented ones to be "long;" as the last in sofa, specie, noble, metre, sorrow, daisy, valley, nature, native; or the first in around, before, delay, divide, remove, seclude, obey, cocoon, presume, ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown
... snuff-box. "No? roll you, then, a cigarette," taking out a plush pouch containing a mixture of the choicest native roots. These, we were told, are grown on the monastery's estate. We speak of the cocoon products ...
— The Book of Khalid • Ameen Rihani
... caterpillar of a certain species of moth mines leaves, and eating away the cellular structures, causes them to twist irregularly, and eventually spins on the spot a cocoon of green silk in which it undergoes metamorphosis. A local caterpillar, too, converts the tough harsh leaves of a fig-tree (FICUS FASCICULATA) into a close and perfect scroll by an elaborate system of haulage, spinning silken strands as required, having ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... a small galvanometric helix, r, analogous to Thomson's siphon recorder, which is suspended from a cocoon fiber and capable of moving in an extremely powerful magnetic field, N S. This helix carries, as may be seen in Figs. 1, 3 and 4, a prolongation, v, at its lower end whose form is that of a prism, and which is arranged in front ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 508, September 26, 1885 • Various
... they came out upon shelving sand and saw before them the waves which promised safety and escape to the mermen. Dalgard sat down in the blue-gray sand beside Raf. The sea people had assured him that the stranger was making a good recovery, that within a matter of hours he could be freed from his cocoon of healing. ...
— Star Born • Andre Norton
... entomologist, entomologic, chrsalis, pupa, cicada, cocoon, credpitaculum, entomophilous, entornophily, entomtaxy, entomotomy, insecticidal, insectifuge, insectile, larva, lepidopterist, larvarium, stridor, stridulate, stridulation, silphology, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... in figs. 2 and 3. But the ordinary knapsack hooks and rings, if procurable, would answer the purpose better. The straight lines in fig. 1 show the way in which the bag is to be folded into the shape of fig. 3. Fig. 4 shows the sleeper inside his bag, in which he fits very like a grub in its cocoon. There is no waste of space. For the sake of warmth, the bag is made double from the knees downwards, and also opposite to ...
— The Art of Travel - Shifts and Contrivances Available in Wild Countries • Francis Galton
... establishment on middle Broadway, secured the managerial services of a slender young man fresh from the Louis Quinze rooms of Madam Roth—Modes, Fifth Avenue, tripled her prices, and emerged from the brown cocoon of Twenty-third Street, Madam ...
— Every Soul Hath Its Song • Fannie Hurst
... by peasants and used for the raising of silk worms are, in general, small, close, and miserable. Throughout America the roomy barns which are empty at the cocoon season, will, with little preparation, be much preferable, and enable the raisers to work to very much ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 324, March 18, 1882 • Various
... by the two large eye-like spots on the under side of the hind wings. What are these butterflies doing about their chosen plants? Certainly the minute florets of the everlasting offer no great inducements to a creature that lives only on nectar. But that cocoon, compactly woven with silk and petals, which hangs from the stem, tells the story of the hunter's butterfly's presence. A brownish-drab chrysalis, or a slate-colored and black-banded little caterpillar ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... into a box, and covered it with gauze to prevent their escape. After a few days we saw, from more than three fourths of them, about eight or ten little caterpillars of the ichneumon-fly come out of their backs, and spin each a small cocoon of silk, and in a few days the large caterpillars died. This small fly it seems lays its egg in the back of the cabbage caterpillar, which when hatched preys upon the material, which is produced there for the purpose of making silk for the future ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... wear a silk most beautiful in texture and colour, called "Sun Silk." To obtain this silk, the sun is made to bear on silk-worms at particular hours of the day, and the result is, that the silk of the cocoon is of a colour resembling that of ...
— Another World - Fragments from the Star City of Montalluyah • Benjamin Lumley (AKA Hermes)
... recur. To those who admit the gradual evolution of species, a most striking instance of the perfection with which the most difficult consensual movements can be transmitted, is afforded by the humming-bird Sphinx-moth (Macroglossa); for this moth, shortly after its emergence from the cocoon, as shown by the bloom on its unruffled scales, may be seen poised stationary in the air, with its long hair-like proboscis uncurled and inserted into the minute orifices of flowers; and no one, I believe, has ever seen this moth learning ...
— The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals • Charles Darwin
... by little worms called silkworms. When the worm is fully grown, it spins round itself a small ball of silk, called a cocoon. If this cocoon were left to itself, the worm would change to a moth, and the moth would eat its way out of this little house. But this, of course, would cut the little threads and spoil the silk. As soon, therefore, as the cocoon is made, ...
— Home Geography For Primary Grades • C. C. Long
... spiders! And the greatest spinner of all, his own tenacity, for ever wrapping its cocoon of threads round any clear way out. What was that fellow hanging round Irene for? Was it really as Polteed suggested? Or was Jolyon but taking compassion on her loneliness, as he would call it—sentimental ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... certain ways, which are formed by particular organs, or are elaborated within the organism, and are not the result of the intelligent effort of the individual. To this category belong the threads which the Spider stretches, and the cocoon with which the Caterpillar surrounds ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay
... truths. I am less interested in the sermons in stones than I am in the life under the stones. The significance of the metamorphosis of the grub into the butterfly does not escape me, but I am more occupied with the way the caterpillar weaves her cocoon and hangs herself up for the winter than I am in this lesson. I had rather see a worm cast its skin than see a king crowned. I had rather see Phoebe building her mud nest than the preacher writing his sermon. I had rather see the big moth emerge from ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... outward? I have known young ladies, much better educated, and with an outward world diversified by instructive lectures, to say nothing of literature and highly-developed fancy-work, who have spun a cocoon of visionary joys and sorrows for themselves, just as Penny did. Her elder sister Letitia, who had a prouder style of beauty, and a more worldly ambition, was engaged to a wool-factor, who came all the way from Cattelton to see her; and everybody knows that a wool-factor ...
— Brother Jacob • George Eliot
... larva of one species of large dimensions, Batocera rubus[2], called by the Singhalese "Cooroominya" makes its way into the stems of the younger trees, and after perforating them in all directions, it forms a cocoon of the gnawed wood and sawdust, in which it reposes during its sleep as a pupa, till the arrival of the period when it emerges as a perfect beetle. Notwithstanding the repulsive aspect of the large pulpy larvae of these beetles, they ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... in, answered the other.—Here we are!" and entering the room he folded his arms and began twirling his head round and round with immense rapidity, like Harlequin in the Pantomime when he first issues from his cocoon or envelope. Miss Fotheringay laughed with all her heart: a wink of Foker's would set her off laughing, when the bitterest joke Bows ever made could not get a smile from her, or the finest of poor Pen's speeches would only puzzle her. At the end of the harlequinade ...
— The History of Pendennis • William Makepeace Thackeray
... inclinations. It is most salutary. Even I am but a worm, Miss Hugonin, though the press has been pleased to speak most kindly of me. Even you—ah, no!" cried Mr. Jukesbury, kissing his finger-tips, with gallantry; "let us say a worm who has burst its cocoon and become a butterfly—a butterfly with a charming face and a most ...
— The Eagle's Shadow • James Branch Cabell
... to Bevan. "The larva is no sooner perfectly inclosed than it begins to line the cell by spinning round itself, after the manner of the silk worm, a whitish silky film or cocoon, by which it is encased, as it were, in a pod. When it has undergone this change, it has usually borne the name of nymph or pupa. The insect has now attained its full growth, and the large amount of nutriment which it has taken serves ...
— Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-Bee - A Bee Keeper's Manual • L. L. Langstroth
... The essence of the change may be conveyed in a single sentence. The sun was thenceforth regarded, not as a mere heated body, or—still more remotely from the truth—as a cool body unaccountably spun round with a cocoon of fire, but as a vast heat-radiating machine. The terrestrial analogy was abandoned in one more particular besides that of temperature. The solar system of circulation, instead of being adapted, like that of the earth, to the distribution of heat received from without, ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke
... time; but morning or evening, in country or in town, well or ill, writing with his own pen or dictating to an amanuensis in the intervals of screaming-fits due to the torture of cramp in the stomach, Scott spun away at his imaginative web almost as evenly as a silkworm spins at its golden cocoon. Nor can I detect the slightest trace of any difference in quality between the stories, such as can be reasonably ascribed to comparative care or haste. There are differences, and even great differences, ...
— Sir Walter Scott - (English Men of Letters Series) • Richard H. Hutton
... girdle of silver chains. Her neck is loaded with silver chains, amber necklaces, etc., and her head adorned with a coronet of scarlet cloth, studded with seed-pearls, jewels, glass beads, etc. The common dress is a long robe of indi, a cloth of coarse silk, spun from the cocoon of a large caterpillar that is found wild at the foot of the hills, and is also cultivated: it feeds on many different leaves, ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... tingle in his blood that day when he met Miss Jeanette Barclay, aged eighteen, and home for the spring vacation from the state university; and seeing her for the first time with her eyes and her hair and her pretty, strong, wide forehead poking through the cocoon of gawky girlhood, created a distinct impression on young ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... the beginning thereof,' Claude answered, stepping into the boat. 'This wreck is but a torn scrap of the chrysalis-cocoon; we may meet ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... growing inmates bulge over, and, obsessed with their ravening hunger, incontinently eat each other; and time at last when, one after the other, each grub, having grown out of more than one suit of clothes and donned new ones, cast its skin for the last time, refused all further food, spun a cocoon of silk with a dome-shaped silken floor to each cell, and for a period retired from the prying eyes of the world, even of its own mother, into the sacred sanctuary of the chrysalis state. Then the queen's ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... tissues of a human subject, found little specks of extraneous matter, which, when taken to the professor of comparative anatomy, Richard Owen, were ascertained, with the aid of the microscope, to be the cocoon of a minute and hitherto unknown insect. Owen named the insect Trichina spiralis. After the discovery was published it transpired that similar specks had been observed by several earlier investigators, but no one had previously suspected or, at any rate, demonstrated their nature. Nor was the ...
— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... itself he walked weakly to the window and, lifting the sash, sat in a corner of the embrasure and leaned his elbow upon the sill. The rain had drawn off; and amid the moving vapours from point to point of light the city was spinning about herself a soft cocoon of yellowish haze. Heaven was still and faintly luminous and the air sweet to breathe, as in a thicket drenched with showers; and amid peace and shimmering lights and quiet fragrance he made a covenant with ...
— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man • James Joyce
... really become smaller. They are restless and wander about. Now and then they throw out threads of silk as fine as a spider's web. They know exactly what they want; each little worm wants to make a cocoon, and all they ask of you is to give them the right sort of place to make it in. When they live out of doors in freedom, they fasten their cocoons to twigs; and if you wish to give them what they like best, ...
— Makers of Many Things • Eva March Tappan
... a piece of counsel. You sit too close to your books. You read and read,—you spin yourself into your own views like a cocoon. Travel—hear what others say—above all, go into retreat! No one need know. It would do you ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... huge, grimy oil painting representative of some flowers and fruit, half a water melon, a boar's head, and the pendent form of a dead wild duck. Attached to the ceiling there was a chandelier in a holland covering—the covering so dusty as closely to resemble a huge cocoon enclosing a caterpillar. Lastly, in one corner of the room lay a pile of articles which had evidently been adjudged unworthy of a place on the table. Yet what the pile consisted of it would have been difficult ...
— Dead Souls • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... with snow, hooded, shawled and coated till she resembled a huge cocoon. The Squire placed a big armchair for her near the fire, and Marshy sat down, but not without disdaining Anna's offers to remove her wraps. She sniffed at Anna—no other word will express it—and savagely clutched her big old-fashioned muff when Anna would have ...
— 'Way Down East - A Romance of New England Life • Joseph R. Grismer
... against these fellows sometimes- -" The grumbling voice would go on and on; Cherry would pause at the door, carrying out plates, to have him finish a phrase; would nod sympathizingly as she set his dessert before him. But her soul was like some living thing spun into a cocoon, hearing the sounds of life only vaguely, interested in them ...
— Sisters • Kathleen Norris
... crunches nuts like a squirrel. One takes a three months' journey, and passes a season at Vichy or at Dieppe, and when one returns, presto! see the transformation. The butterfly has burst forth from its cocoon. No longer a little girl, but a woman. Those saucy eyes of old now look at you with an expression which disturbs your heart. One might have offered, six months before, two sous' worth of chestnuts ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... the other, but always returned and rested on Rex. Then, as there was a mountain chill in the morning air, he crawled back into bed, hauling his night cap over his generous ears and rolling himself in a cocoon of featherbeds, until he should emerge about noon, like some ...
— In the Quarter • Robert W. Chambers
... from Milan or Bologna or Padua. But the truth is different; all round Ferrara, indeed, stretches the fertile flatness of Lombard cornfields, and they produce, as infallibly as they produce their sacks of grain and tuns of wine and heaps of silk cocoon, the intellectual and social equivalents of such things in Renaissance Italy: industry, wealth, comfort, scepticism, art. But on either side, into the defiles of the Euganean hills to the north, into the widening torrent valleys of the Modenese Apennines to the south, the Marquisate of ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. II • Vernon Lee
... nurse had been standing with the quiet small packet which was the storm centre of preparation lying like a cocoon or a giant seed-pod against ...
— The Power and the Glory • Grace MacGowan Cooke
... done our work on earth—of necessity, of labor, of love, or of duty—like the silk-worm that spins its little cocoon and dies, we too depart. But, short though our stay in life may be, it is the appointed sphere in which each has to work out the great aim and end of his being to the best of his power; and when that is done, the accidents of the flesh will affect but little the immortality we shall ...
— How to Get on in the World - A Ladder to Practical Success • Major A.R. Calhoon
... promulgated in all the stern simplicity of its awful Theism, where the Divine is fundamentally and emphatically represented as the Omnipotent and the Avenger, was an emphatic protest against that self-isolation in which the man folds himself up like a chrysalid in its cocoon whenever his individual happiness—the so-called saving of his own soul—becomes the aim and aspiration of his life. In one sense the Jew of Moses had no individual as apart from a national existence. The secret sin of Achan, the vaunting pride of David, ...
— The Ethics of George Eliot's Works • John Crombie Brown
... to eat, and you must then make a little paper toilet, about two inches deep, for each worm, and drop it in. You have now nothing to do (except to watch the worms regularly) for some weeks, in which time the cocoon has been finished and the worm has become a chrysalis. When the chrysalis inside the cocoon rattles the time has come to wind the silk, or the moth will shortly emerge and eat it. The outside of the cocoon is useless and can be removed by placing the cocoon in warm water. ...
— What Shall We Do Now?: Five Hundred Games and Pastimes • Dorothy Canfield Fisher
... SILK to Pekin, to wind himself around the Celestial emperor's heart, and also to make a cocoon for the Tycoon of Japan, after worming himself into his affections. Perhaps, for being such a darin' man, he may be made ...
— Punchinello, Vol.1, No. 4, April 23, 1870 • Various
... child of the Mackenzie learns to make is "Mash!" an evident corruption of the French "Marche." This is what Shakespeare meant when he speaks of "a word to throw at a dog." A brown baby just emerged from the cocoon stage of the moss-bag toddles with uplifted pole into a bunch of these hungry mongrels and disperses them with a whack of the stick and the lordly "Mash!" of the superior animal. For our own part we ...
— The New North • Agnes Deans Cameron
... in April, however, a cocoon was found in a tree on James Island, of a very different appearance from the others. It was of loose texture, and, instead of being pear-shaped, was hemispherical in form, and attached by its flat surface to the lower side of a leaf. This also contained ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... puissance of attributes.[1615] From the status of humanity, he goes to heaven and from heaven he comes back to humanity, and from humanity he sinks into hell for many long years. As the worm that fabricates the cocoon shuts itself, completely on every side by means of the threads it weaves itself, even so the Soul, though in reality transcending all attributes, invests himself on every side with attributes (and deprives himself of liberty).[1616] ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 3 - Books 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 • Unknown
... become highly sensitized, and as the ovum enters the uterus from the fallopian tube, this sensitized lining catches it and holds it in its folds—actually covers it with itself—holding the precious mass much as the cocoon, you have so often seen fastened to the side of a plant or leaf, holds its treasure ...
— The Mother and Her Child • William S. Sadler
... jelly makes her grow fast, and in five days she is so large as to nearly fill the cell. Then she stops eating, spins a cocoon, and lies in it for about two and a half days more. When she comes out of this, she is called a Pupa. Sixteen days after the laying of the egg, the young Queen is ready to come out of her cell. It takes twenty-one days for a Worker to become fully ...
— Among the Farmyard People • Clara Dillingham Pierson
... before, as the egg, from which its own caterpillar was hatched, was laid inside the body of one of those caterpillars, and the caterpillar upon which it fed had been eaten up and disappeared at least six months before the Ichneumon Fly had even made its way out of its own cocoon; and yet this insect is not only forced, by some mysterious power, to lay its egg in the body of a caterpillar, but there is only one species which will serve its purpose, and it has to hunt up this particular caterpillar from among thousands of ...
— Science and the Infinite - or Through a Window in the Blank Wall • Sydney T. Klein
... the Son of Heaven inclined to the little Shiobara. It had reached the Emperor that a Recluse of the utmost sanctity dwelt in that forest. His name was Semimaru. He had made himself a small hut in the deep woods, much as a decrepit silkworm might spin his last Cocoon and there had the Peace ...
— The Ninth Vibration And Other Stories • L. Adams Beck
... bears many queer-shaped clusters which the entomologist calls pine cone galls; in the center of each one a larva dwells in his silken case. On the red oaks over head are other galls,—the oak apples. The buttonbush has the ash-colored cocoon of the giant silkworm, made out of a rolled leaf, the petiole of which is fastened to the branch with silk. Many others are to be found for the looking. All tell the story of Nature's abundant life,—even the morning after a ...
— Some Winter Days in Iowa • Frederick John Lazell
... cultivation of Cynthia is that the cocoon cannot be reeled. But it can be carded, and if the Chinese can make excellent silk goods from it, why cannot we? I suspect, too, that Cynthia silk can be worked in with cotton, or, perhaps, woolen goods, adding to their beauty and durability (for it is indestructible ...
— Scientific American, Volume XXIV., No. 12, March 18, 1871 • Various
... affected will fall prematurely, and should be picked up and fed to swine. This done every day during their falling, which does not last a great while, will remedy the evil in two seasons. The worm that crawls from the fallen apple gets into crevices in rough bark, and spins his cocoon, in which he remains till ...
— Soil Culture • J. H. Walden
... died with that issue, and none but envious people have ever tried to rob me of the honour and credit of killing it. The 'Jumping Frog' was the first piece of writing of mine that spread itself through the newspapers and brought me into public notice. Consequently, the 'Saturday Press' was a cocoon and I the worm in it; also, I was the gay-coloured literary moth which its death set free. This simile ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... after page upon it. Day and night we have toiled and perspired over that distressing problem. Through Summer's sun and Winter's snow, with all unfaltering purpose, we have strung miles of ink upon acres of paper, weaving wisdom into eloquence with the tireless industry of a silkworm fashioning his cocoon. We have refused food, scorned sleep, and endured thirst to see our work grow beneath our cunning hand. The more we wrote the wiser we became; the opinions of one day were rejected the next; the blind surmising of yesterday ripened into the full knowledge of to-day, ...
— The Fiend's Delight • Dod Grile
... larvae and place them in the vivarium with some twigs of horse-chestnut. Observe the spinning of the cocoon and, about two weeks later, look for the emergence of ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Nature Study • Ontario Ministry of Education
... I observed close to us what I took to be a seed-pod of some aerial plant, hanging straight down from a bough, at about six feet from the ground. On going up to it, I found to my surprise that it was a cocoon about the size of a sparrow's egg, woven by a caterpillar in broad meshes of a rose-coloured silky substance. It hung, suspended from the tip of an outstanding leaf, by a strong silken thread about six inches in length. On examining it carefully, I found that the glossy ...
— On the Banks of the Amazon • W.H.G. Kingston
... of very rapid reproduction at room temperatures in a worm box. They lay eggs encased in a lemon-shaped cocoon about the size of a grain of rice from which baby worms will hatch. The cocoons start out pearly white but as the baby worms develop over a three week period, the eggs change color to yellow, then light brown, and finally ...
— Organic Gardener's Composting • Steve Solomon
... on. Malone sagged inside it like a rather large and sweaty butterfly rewrapped in a cocoon. Dimly, he realized that he sounded like every other nut in the world. All of them would be sure to tell the doctor and the attendants that they were making a mistake. All of them would ...
— Brain Twister • Gordon Randall Garrett
... hardly seemed dressed for house-cleaning. A tremendous floppy hat crowned her flaxen head; she was tightly incased, like a chrysalis in its cocoon, in a delicate creation of pink; her gloves were long and tight, and her high-heeled boots were longer and tighter. Nevertheless she promptly proceeded with a reckless discard of her finery—a process she had begun on her way up- stairs, like a country boy on his approach ...
— The Auction Block • Rex Beach
... to themselves; for they are unwound like a cocoon, and know not which way the thread ...
— The Treason and Death of Benedict Arnold - A Play for a Greek Theatre • John Jay Chapman
... never had such a splendid time in her life, and the brightness of her cheeks catching the flame from her eyes bore out this statement. Marita, too, seemed to have "shook her cocoon," Jack said, his economy of language scarcely making up for the little difference in "shook" and "shaken." Certainly she managed to climb from one boat to another with remarkable alertness, while Bess, Belle and Cora acted like up-to-date society maidens, only they ...
— The Motor Girls on Crystal Bay - The Secret of the Red Oar • Margaret Penrose
... brought it round so as to rest under his right shoulder; fourthly, by a particular tour d'adresse, he treated the other corner in the same way, and finally contrived to roll it round his whole person. Thus swathed like a mummy, or (as I used to tell him) self-involved like the silk-worm in its cocoon, he awaited the approach of sleep, which generally came on immediately. For Kant's health was exquisite; not mere negative health, or the absence of pain, but a state of positive pleasurable sensation, and a genial ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... be decomposed by any practicable expedient, having been finished, they all of them unite, and ranging themselves in vertical and even files, form in the centre a perfect square. Being thus disposed, each of them makes its cocoon, or pod, of a coarse and short silk, in which it is transformed from the grub into the chrysalis, and from the chrysalis into the papilio, or moth. In proportion as they afterwards quit their confinement, to take ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 17, Number 490, Saturday, May 21, 1831 • Various
... support must become at last their destruction. And so it is I infer that, whether violently as a revolution or quietly and slowly, this grey confusion that is Democracy must pass away inevitably by its own inherent conditions, as the twilight passes, as the embryonic confusion of the cocoon creature passes, into the higher stage, into the higher organism, the world-state of the ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... said he had "busted the bottle" by falling against the wagon wheel; and Ford, for a wonder, believed and did not ask for proof. He muddled around camp for a few indecisive minutes, then rolled himself up like a giant cocoon in his blankets, and slept heavily through ...
— The Uphill Climb • B. M. Bower
... Kelly hurled herself into a corner. Her body activated a pressure plant and a pair of mummy-like plastifoam plates slid curvingly out the wall and locked her in a soft cocoon. A dozen similar safety clamps were located throughout the car at every working and ...
— Code Three • Rick Raphael
... children with d^o.,—early maturity,—longevity,—old men, brothers, of same disease—young children of d^o. I said men do not select for quality of young,—calf with big bullocks. Silk-worms, peculiarities which, appear in caterpillar state or cocoon state, are transmitted to corresponding states. The effect of this would be that if some peculiarity was born in a young animal, but never exercised, it might be inherited in young animal; but if exercised that part of structure ...
— The Foundations of the Origin of Species - Two Essays written in 1842 and 1844 • Charles Darwin
... meaning a baby or doll, is indicative of its youth. In this state it hangs suspended to a twig or other object; while the silk worm, and others of its kind, previous to moulting, or casting their skins, spin a silken cocoon, which envelops and ...
— Our Common Insects - A Popular Account of the Insects of Our Fields, Forests, - Gardens and Houses • Alpheus Spring Packard
... the lithe walk of him, the haughty carriage of the head. Slowly greened the sky until the banana fronds were etched in sepia against the swollen moon. The dismal croak of the Baroto bird shattered the black cocoon of ...
— Witch-Doctors • Charles Beadle
... handsomest, the most powerful; oh! yes, the most powerful, for that very day—But an ominous screech, a heart-rending wail from the jackal, maddened by the monotony of her desert, suddenly makes the studio windows rattle and sends the terrified old chrysalis back into her cocoon. ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... it becomes a large worm or caterpillar of a yellowish white color, (which is its first state;) this caterpillar feeds on the leaves of the mulberry tree, till, arriving at maturity, it winds itself up in a silken bag or case, called a cocoon, about the size and shape of a pigeon's egg, and becomes a chrysalis; in which state it lies without signs of life; in about ten days it eats its way out of its case, a perfect butterfly, which lays ...
— A Catechism of Familiar Things; Their History, and the Events Which Led to Their Discovery • Benziger Brothers
... girl already rolled like a cocoon in a pretty blue "wooley" and coiling up on a rug in the farthest corner. "Jane Alien, you're a perfect lamb, and I hope you'll stay with ...
— Jane Allen: Junior • Edith Bancroft
... few more. As the emotion of the scene grew, the proportion of her words audible in the gallery diminished. Until she became, for him, totally inarticulate, raving away there and struggling in a cocoon of hexameters. ...
— The Regent • E. Arnold Bennett
... earthly billet. But of course these are all mere surmises, and hardly to be regarded seriously. On Thursday I am to be sent to Rondebosch, Tommy's oft and ever-repeated cry, "Roll on, dear old Blighty" (England), seems vainer than ever as time spins out its endless cocoon. ...
— A Yeoman's Letters - Third Edition • P. T. Ross
... without a sleeping partner, for she had forgotten to ask someone herself, and it just happened that no one had asked her. She was philosophically trying to make her bed up for a single, by doubling the poncho over lengthwise into a cocoon effect, when she heard a sniffle coming out of the bushes beside her. Investigating, she found Carmen Chadwick sitting disconsolately upon a very much wrinkled poncho, her chin in her ...
— The Campfire Girls at Camp Keewaydin • Hildegard G. Frey
... master would do. The dauntless gander bit furiously, and pounded with his one undamaged wing, and earned his adversary's unstinted commendation: but in a minute or two he found himself helpless, swathed like a cocoon in a stout, woollen hunting-coat, and his head ignominiously bagged in one of the sleeves. In this fashion, his heart bursting with fear and wrath, his broken wing one hot throb of anguish, he was carried under the hunter's arm for what seemed to him a whole night long. ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts
... length when fully extended, gray and striped, leathery in appearance, very closely resembling the back of the tree upon which they rest when not feeding. Having attained its full growth as a caterpillar, it ties together two or three leaves with strands of silk, thus making a loose cocoon within which it pupates. The pupa is dark brown, covered with a whitish or bluish-white bloom. In about one month the moths emerge. They are large in size, the body being one to one and one-fourth inches long and the expanded wings two ...
— The Pecan and its Culture • H. Harold Hume
... has no business to be the mother's chrysalis. God never intended her to wind herself up into a cocoon. If He had, He would have made her a caterpillar. She has no right to bury her womanly nature in the tomb of childhood. It will surely be required at her hands. It was given her to sun itself in the broad, bright day, to root itself fast and firm in the earth, to spread itself wide to the sky, that ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... been making sketches of the development of several butterflies. This kind of work he dearly loved. He would spend hours, sometimes, watching a delicate insect emerge from its cocoon and slowly dry its dainty, crumpled wings until it ...
— Buffalo Roost • F. H. Cheley
... a small walnut tree caught his attention. He stopped to investigate. There was an unusually large Luna cocoon, and the moth was bursting the upper end in its struggles to reach light and air. Freckles ...
— Freckles • Gene Stratton-Porter
... entomology that Pasteur visited him in 1865. The illustrious chemist had been striving to check the plague that was devastating the silkworm nurseries, and as he knew nothing of the subject which he proposed to study, not even understanding the constitution of the cocoon or the evolution of the silkworm, he sought out Fabre in order to obtain from his store of entomological wisdom the elementary ideas which he would find indispensable. Fabre has told us, in a moving page (4/20), with what a total lack of comprehension ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... like odour. It fashioned around her a nimbus of sound, like that made by the light issuing from the blessed ones, as beheld by Dante, which revealed their presence but hid them in its radiance, as the moth is hid in the silk of its cocoon. Richard felt entirely well. The warmth entered into him, and met the warmth generated in him. All was peace and hope and bliss, quaintest mingling of expectation and fruition. Even Arthur Lestrange beside Barbara could not blast his joy. ...
— There & Back • George MacDonald
... way they seem to shed those things, as a worm does its cocoon, after they are here for a while," she answered. "In the light of loving care, the sunny child nature comes out—it cannot help it, any more than a rose can help blooming in the sun; and, with the other children who have been here from the first to regulate ...
— What Two Children Did • Charlotte E. Chittenden
... web. For Colonel Bellairs to touch business of any kind was immediately to become hopelessly and inextricably involved in it, with much furious buzzing. His mere presence entangled the plainest matter into a confused cocoon, with himself struggling in ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... about falling down black pits, swinging spider-like, at the end of ropes which I somehow spun by drawing long threads of my brains out of a hole in the back of my head, something after the fashion of a silkworm making a cocoon. ...
— Charge! - A Story of Briton and Boer • George Manville Fenn
... was rather moth-eaten and shabby, but on a high bracket and best side foremost the effect was fine, for the yellow glass eyes glared, and the mouth snarled so naturally, that Teddy shook in his little shoes at sight of it, when he came bringing his most cherished treasure, one cocoon, to lay ...
— Little Men - Life at Plumfield With Jo's Boys • Louisa May Alcott
... month of June last, my friend Professor Guibourt, of Paris, laid before the Academie des Sciences[G] some account of a remarkable substance called Trehala, the cocoon of a Curculionidous insect found in Persia, where, as well as in other parts of the East, it enjoys some celebrity as the basis of a mucilaginous drink ...
— Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society - Vol. 3 - Zoology • Various
... the blacksmith's daughter, burst from the next gate, like a beautiful butterfly from a green cocoon. Joanna was glorious in a pink silk and white shoes, and a hat trimmed with pink roses. She was a very handsome girl, but she was fast nearing the danger line of thirty, and a long attachment to Trooper Tom Boyd, who was a gay lad, attached ...
— In Orchard Glen • Marian Keith
... cap, not unlike the obelisk in St. Peter's Square. Since the said wig, like a piece of texture all tumbled and tangled, spread out thick and wide all over his back, it might very well be taken for the cocoon out of which the fine ...
— Weird Tales. Vol. I • E. T. A. Hoffmann
... the fertile egg comes the little worm, which grows, and casts its skin. This process of moulting is repeated two or three times at intervals during the life of the insect. After the last moulting the worm climbs the brambles placed to receive it, and spins among them its cocoon. It passes thus into a chrysalis; the chrysalis becomes a moth, and the moth, when liberated, lays the eggs which form the starting-point of a new cycle. Now Pasteur proved that the plague-corpuscles might be incipient in the egg, and escape detection; they might also be germinal ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... performed by the emperor over the silkworms and mulberry-trees, whose leaves are the food of the worm. From before the twenty-third century B.C., the care of the silkworm, and the spinning and weaving of the thread from the cocoon, has been the particular labor of the women. The mulberry-tree grows everywhere in the country, and silk is manufactured in greater or ...
— Four Young Explorers - Sight-Seeing in the Tropics • Oliver Optic |
