"Flying fish" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... we account for the wings of the insect? Here we can offer nothing more than speculation, but the speculation is not without interest. It may be laid down in principle that the flying animal begins as a leaping animal. The "flying fish" may serve to suggest an early stage in the development of wings; it is a leaping fish, its extended fins merely buoying it, like the surfaces of an aeroplane, and so prolonging its leap away from its pursuer. But the great difficulty ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... come to that," his father asserted; "nothing handsomer will ever be seen than an East India-man in the northeast trades with the captain on the quarter-deck in a cocked hat and sword, the shoals of flying fish and albacore skittering about a transom as high and carved and gilded as a church, the royal pennant at the mainmast head. Maybe it would be the Earl of Balcarras with her cannons shining and the ...
— Java Head • Joseph Hergesheimer
... say little about the first part of our voyage. We had the usual amount of rough weather and calm; also we saw many strange fish rolling in the sea, and I was greatly delighted one day by seeing a shoal of flying fish dart out of the water and skim through the air about a foot above the surface. They were pursued by dolphins, which feed on them, and one flying-fish in its terror flew over the ship, struck on the rigging, and fell ...
— The Coral Island - A Tale Of The Pacific Ocean • R. M. Ballantyne
... the memory of young Harold,—the porpoises playing fearlessly around her canoe as the princess, with graceful, effortless strokes, paddled around one after another of the pointed tongues of rock; the flying fish, skimming the surface of the ocean until, by virtue of their speed alone, they rose like gleaming bows of silver from the foam. Intent to show him all her treasures, Wildenai guided him to a quiet stretch of water lying close to shore within the shadow of tall cliffs ...
— Their Mariposa Legend • Charlotte Herr
... hundred and fifty miles from Havana, but were then driven in the direction of Yucatan. The two following days we had contrary wind, but charming weather. We studied the chart, and read, and walked on deck, and played at drafts, and sat in the moonlight. The sea was covered with flying fish, and the "Portuguese men of war," as the sailors call the independent little nautilus, sailed contemptuously past us in their fairy barks, as if they had been little steamers. A man fell overboard, but the weather being calm, was saved immediately. ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... Berkeley Sound the Coquille, driven by a favourable breeze, passed immense shoals of whales and dolphins, flocks of gulls and numerous flying fish, the ordinary tenants of those tempestuous regions. The Falkland Isles were reached, and Duperrey with a few of his fellow-travellers felt a lively pleasure at revisiting the land which had been to them a place of refuge for three ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne
... They broke water like flying fish, and their wings shot backward from their notches in the myriad bulbous bodies to click into place in flying position as the scores of aero-subs took the air above the invisible hiding places ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science April 1930 • Various
... hosts of locusts, the spawn of those conjured up by Moses, and the ship was covered with them. At length, though, it surged on a lifeless blue sea, where they saw no things around them, except from time to time the flying fish skimming ...
— An Iceland Fisherman • Pierre Loti
... brought by a native to Challoner, who with a fellow-trader and several local chiefs was sitting outside his house smoking and enjoying the cool of the evening, and watching the flashing torches of a number of canoes catching flying fish beyond the barrier reef. Neither of them felt surprised, and Challoner remarked to the native that it was good to know that one bad and useless man was dead, but that it would be better still to ...
— The Brothers-In-Law: A Tale Of The Equatorial Islands; and The Brass Gun Of The Buccaneers - 1901 • Louis Becke
... the clear depths, we see the dolphins as distinctly as the birds overhead. Shoals of flying fish dart out of the water, their fins serving as sails for an instant; then ...
— A Little Journey to Puerto Rico - For Intermediate and Upper Grades • Marian M. George
... full of rose-crowned amorini, and the moon wore a rose-coloured veil of bright pink cloud, all so light, so airy, so brilliant, and so fleeting, that it was a kind of intoxication. It is far less grand than northern colour, but so lovely, so shiny. Then the flying fish skimmed like silver swallows over the blue water. Such a sight! Also, I saw a whale spout like a very tiny garden fountain. The Southern Cross is a delusion, and the tropical moon no better than a Parisian one, at present. We are now in lat. 31 degrees ...
— Letters from the Cape • Lady Duff Gordon
... Bob! are rather insolent, you know, At being disappointed in your wish To supersede all warblers here below, And be the only Blackbird in the dish; And then you overstrain yourself, or so, And tumble downward like the flying fish Gasping on deck, because you soar too high, Bob, And fall, for lack of moisture, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... creatures of his fear: he was unhappy, he trembled under these visionary deities; under the supposed influence of visionary beings created by himself; under the terror inspired by blocks of stone; by logs of wood; by flying fish; or the frowns of men, mortal as himself, whom his disturbed fancy had elevated above that Nature of which alone he is capable of forming any idea. His very posterity laughs at his folly, because experience has convinced ...
— The System of Nature, Vol. 1 • Baron D'Holbach
... or small trunks which sloped outward in tent-like shape, each becoming a root. The larger trees of this type looked as if their trunks were seated on the tops of the pole frames of Indian tepees. At one point in the stream, to our great surprise, we saw a flying fish. It skimmed the water like a swallow for over ...
— Through the Brazilian Wilderness • Theodore Roosevelt
... in the cotton field was to him an infinite satisfaction. He could sit for hours gazing at a solitary flower and philosophizing about the mysteries and riddles of being. A blue heron on a tiny crescent of sandy beach, a silvery splatter of flying fish, or a sunset of pearl and rose across the lagoon, could entrance him to all forgetfulness of the procession of wearisome days and of the heavy lash ...
— When God Laughs and Other Stories • Jack London
... during the night, and Palma was consequently still visible when I came on deck at daybreak. We had a light fair wind in the morning, accompanied by a heavy swell, which caused us to roll so much that I found it very difficult to do anything. Several shoals of flying fish skimmed past us along the surface of the water, occasionally rising to a considerable height above it. Their beautiful wings, glittering in the bright sunlight, looked like delicate silver filigree-work. In the night one flew on board, only to be preserved ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey
... latitude of the trade winds. The inky blackness of the sea had gradually turned into translucent and then into transparent azure, which looked as if it could be quarried out into blocks of pure blue crystal. The flying fish, glancing in quick, short flights above the sunny waters, now gave the charm of happy, graceful life to our weary voyage out of the tempestuous north. And when at last we saw land, although it appeared only in the shape of the two small islands mentioned above, which seem to be little more than ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No 3, September 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... "Flying Fish:" A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure. By Harry Collingwood. With 12 full-page Illustrations by Gordon Browne, Crown 8vo, cloth elegant, ...
— Tales of Daring and Danger • George Alfred Henty
... to crack which are far too hard for many a learned master of arts. Nobody expects chivalric virtues and the accompanying expenditure from this simple fellow; yet he practises them, and, when he once opens his hand, people stare at him as they do at flying fish and the hen that lays a golden egg. Appreciative surprise gazes at him, beseeching forgiveness, wherever he is known, as surely as happy faces welcome your Majesty's entry into any Netherland city. Fortune, lavish when she once departs from ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... sailors call "a bone in her mouth." The frill, rising to a continuous wave along the side, catches the sunlight and a perpetual rainbow dances in it, changing always but remaining ever. Whew! What a rush! Flying fish. Look at them! These are the first we have seen so near; when they spring out of the water like that and skim along in the air they are not doing it for fun, but to escape a bitter enemy in the water, the bonito, a ferocious ...
— Round the Wonderful World • G. E. Mitton
... stalagmites will be collected and reconstructed for the American Museum of Natural History. The explorers expect to find also flying fish, flying salamanders, rare insects and thousands of bats. A Government representative will go along, and drawings and motion pictures will ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science January 1931 • Various
... polyommata, Richards., found on all the Australian coasts from New South Wales to Western Australia, family Cottidae. It is a distinct species, not included in the British species. They have large pectoral fins, but are not known to possess the power of supporting themselves in the air like the "flying fish" which belong to other genera. Sir Fredk. McCoy says that Sebastes Percoides, Richards., is called Gurnet, or Garnet-perch, by the fishermen and dealers, as well as the more common Neosebastes scorpoenoides, ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... lightning was racing all over the sky, and wave his flipper politely to the stumpy-tailed Albatross and the Man-of-war Hawk as they went down the wind; how to jump three or four feet clear of the water like a dolphin, flippers close to the side and tail curved; to leave the flying fish alone because they are all bony; to take the shoulder-piece out of a cod at full speed ten fathoms deep, and never to stop and look at a boat or a ship, but particularly a row-boat. At the end of six months what Kotick did not know about deep-sea fishing was not ...
— The Jungle Book • Rudyard Kipling
... expedition proceeded south from Sydney at the close of 1839. His vessels were the 'Vincennes', a sloop of war of seven hundred and eighty tons, the 'Peacock', another sloop of six hundred and fifty tons, the 'Porpoise', a gun-brig of two hundred and thirty tons and a tender, the 'Flying Fish' of ninety-six tons. The scientists of the expedition were precluded from joining in this part of the programme, and were left behind in Sydney. Wilkes himself was loud in his denunciation both of the ships and of the stores, though they had been specially assembled by the naval department. ...
— The Home of the Blizzard • Douglas Mawson
... dotted with ships; with bergs of ice, like cathedrals; with waves that curled or swept in huge rhythms; with currents defined in lines and whorls; with gulls that mewed and whales that blew like pretty fountains; with the little Portuguese men-of-war; with the cleaving of flying fish and the tumbling of dolphins, all this was water. All this joyous green, this laughing white, the deep reflective blue, the somber exquisite gray, was water. An infinity of barrels of water, immense vats ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... She had heard of mermaids as signs of inns and as sea-wonders, but never of flying fish. Not so Job. He put down his pipe, and nodding his head as a token of approbation, ...
— Mary Barton • Elizabeth Gaskell |
