"Mastodon" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... when the world was very young indeed, when the mountains were new, and before the descent of the great glaciers taught the meaning of cold, they were the rulers of the earth, but they have been conquered in the struggle for existence. Their great cousins, the mastodon and the mammoth, are completely gone, and their own tribe can now be ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... shaking hands and fondling their little ones, while the venerable aboriginal sequoia, ancient of other days, keeps you at a distance, looking as strange in aspect and behavior among its neighbor trees as would the mastodon among the homely bears and deers. Only the Sierra juniper is at all like it, standing rigid and unconquerable on glacier pavements for thousands of years, grim and silent, with an air of antiquity about as pronounced as that of ...
— The Yosemite • John Muir
... face to face with the old puzzles of matter and mind. He should be able to trace in imagination the growth of stellar systems; the history of our own earth; the evolution of plant and animal life, from the first protoplasmic nuclei to the mammoth and mastodon; the emergence of man from brute hood into self-consciousness, his triumph over nature and the other animals, and his achievement of civilization. He should watch primitive man wrestling with problems as yet partly unsolved, see him gradually establishing ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... that he had a quotidian nod from Michael and a daily "How are you, old boy?" from Gabriel. Emerson does well when he puts him down as the representative man of mystery; and when he calls him the mastodon and missourian of literature, he will have the concurrence of all ...
— Our Churches and Chapels • Atticus
... man.' It was a saying of some great French religious teacher. But surely this is false. God can do without man. God could do without the ichthyosauri and the mastodon. These monsters failed creatively to develop, so God, the creative mystery, dispensed with them. In the same way the mystery could dispense with man, should he too fail creatively to change and develop. The eternal ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... wonders of nature and art very well to each other, by suggesting that these great masses of stone were transported by means of the mastodon, whose remains are occasionally disinterred in ...
— The Story of Extinct Civilizations of the West • Robert E. Anderson
... decoctions for imparting strength. Then after a few score yards of invitation to debauch there came, with characteristic admirable English common sense, a cure for indigestion, so large that it would have given ease to a mastodon who had by inadvertence swallowed an elephant. And then there were the calls to pleasure. Astonishing, the quantity of palaces that offered you exactly the same entertainment twice over on the same night! Astonishing, the reliance on number in this matter of amusement! Authenticated ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett
... far back beyond the origin of history or tradition, before our coast had taken its present shapes; before Shasta, and Lassen, and Castle Peaks had poured out their lava floods; before the Sacramento river had its birth; and while, if not before, the mastodon, the elephant, the rhinoceros, the horse, the mammoth bull, the tapir, and the bison lived in the land. They are indeed among the most remarkable discoveries of the age, and among the greatest wonders of geology. They deserve some common name, and we have to choose between 'extinct' and ...
— The Young Miner - or Tom Nelson in California • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... the earth, and this produced many worms. The worms were then collected and scattered again. They matured into infants and these were then collected and scattered and became full-grown Dakotas. The bones of the mastodon, the Dakotas think, are the bones of Unktehees, and they preserve the with the greatest care in the medicine bag." Neill's Hist. Minn., p. 55. The Unktehees and the Thunder-birds are perpetually it war. There are various accounts ...
— Legends of the Northwest • Hanford Lennox Gordon
... together with broken clay kettles. In other portions of this wide slope of territory, a species of antique bricks have been disinterred.[13] It is in this general area, and in strata of a similar age, that gigantic bones, tusks and teeth of the mastodon, and other extinct quadrupeds, have been so profusely found within a few years, particularly ...
— Incentives to the Study of the Ancient Period of American History • Henry R. Schoolcraft
... ax, which hacked those jagged girdles around their huge trunks. Standing there leafless, rigid, and gray, they remind us, in their branching nakedness, of the antlered elk, and in their gigantic unsightliness of the monstrous mastodon, that thing of grisly bone which, as a thing of life, no son of Adam ever beheld. Hard by stands an enormous oak, whose main bough, scathed and deadened by lightning, is thrust from out its ragged green robe like the extended, ...
— Burl • Morrison Heady
... is the natural enemy of the elk, which, by the by, has become almost as rare an animal on the western continent as the mastodon or mammoth. As soon as he comes up with the elk, he leaps upon him, and fastens upon his neck, about which he twists his long tail, and then cuts his jugular. The elk has no means of shunning this disaster, ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 3 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... history is based. This corresponds roughly to the Pleistocene epoch of geology; it is included along with the much shorter time during which civilization has existed, in the latest and shortest of the geological periods, the Quaternary. It was the age of the mammoth and the mastodon, the megatherium and Irish deer and of other quadrupeds large and small which are now extinct; but most of its animals were the same species as now exist. It was marked by the great episode of the Ice Age, when considerable parts of the earth's surface were buried ...
— Dinosaurs - With Special Reference to the American Museum Collections • William Diller Matthew
... of hoofed mammals, of which the elephant is the sole survivor, began, so far as known, in the Eocene, in Egypt, with a piglike ancestor the size of a small horse, with cheek teeth like the Mastodon's, but wanting both trunk and tusks. A proboscidian came next with four short tusks, and in the Miocene there followed a Mastodon (Fig. 346) armed with two pairs of long, straight tusks on which rested a ...
— The Elements of Geology • William Harmon Norton
... is a time of vague veilings, of grotesque transformations, of remoulding and steeping in new dyes. Matter-of-fact objects, clear-cut during the day, assume fantastic shapes; a bush may appear a crouching mountain cat; a rock may masquerade as a mastodon. This is an hour of uncertainties. And doubtings and questionings and uncertainties were other shadow shapes thronging the demesnes of two men's souls. Silence and dim dusk without, dim dusk and ...
— The Desert Valley • Jackson Gregory
... us any trouble is that old mastodon. If he comes around again, I'm going to take a skillet and bang him in ...
— Project Mastodon • Clifford Donald Simak
... some years ago, the miners came across a large mass of tallow weighing about one hundred and fifty pounds, and in proximity were the bones and tusks of a huge animal. Many bones and tusks of the mammoth and mastodon, not to mention the remains of other animals, have been found in the ancient river-bed. Probably some of these elephantine animals were sporting in the water and dashing it over themselves when the stream of lava, sweeping down, ...
— Wealth of the World's Waste Places and Oceania • Jewett Castello Gilson
... emerging from, and stepping over the annihilation of its predecessor, till we come down to the present—is there no future progress for this earth as a planet? Is there to be no other era, where man himself, like the sauruses, like the mastodon, shall have passed away, to be succeeded by some nobler animal structure, some loftier intelligence, some more cunning invention of ...
— Wild Northern Scenes - Sporting Adventures with the Rifle and the Rod • S. H. Hammond
... of those heroic times? For nature brings not back the Mastodon, Nor we those times; and why should any man Remodel models? these twelve books of mine ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... immortal youths, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, were about to go forth on their great journey across the continent, they were admonished by Thomas Jefferson that they would in all likelihood encounter in their travels, living and stalking about, the mammoth or the mastodon, whose bones had been found in the great salt-licks of Kentucky. We smile now at such a supposition; yet it was not unreasonable then. No man knew that tremendous country that lay beyond the ...
— The Passing of the Frontier - A Chronicle of the Old West, Volume 26 in The Chronicles - Of America Series • Emerson Hough
... hundred and seventy-six bundles, bags, and presents. Jim was in one of those fur-bags that babies use in the East. Everything we were about to forget the last minute got shoved into that bag with Jim, and it surely began to look as if we had brought a young and very lumpy mastodon into the world! ...
— An American Idyll - The Life of Carleton H. Parker • Cornelia Stratton Parker
... their own way are the remains of other hoofed forms that lead down to the elephants of to-day and to the mammoth and mastodon of relatively recent geologic times. Common sense would lead to the conclusion that a form like a modern tapir was the prototype from which these creatures have arisen, and common sense would lead us to expect that if any fossils of the ancestors of the modern group of elephants occurred ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... Society of Glasgow, and Clan MacLean Association of Glasgow; Corresponding Member Davenport Academy of Sciences, and Western Reserve Historical Society; Author of History of Clan MacLean, Antiquity of Man, The Mound Builders, Mastodon, Mammoth and Man, Norse Discovery of America, Fingal's Cave, Introduction Study St. John's Gospel, ...
— An Historical Account of the Settlements of Scotch Highlanders in America • J. P. MacLean
... doubt, now, you will read between the lines of that bird speech down there?" (She looked at me curiously, but with none of the mournful speculativeness of a soul struggling against the dimness of its own vision.) "To me it is articulate happiness—nothing more abstruse. Yes, I have seen a mastodon; and I was as glad to happen on the beast as a naturalist is glad to find a missing link in a chain of evidence. From the moment, I knew myself quite clearly to be the recovered ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... American writer professes to have discovered in Missouri the fossil remains of a bogged mastodon, which had been killed precisely in this way by human contemporaries. (See Lubbock, Preh. ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... at fifty cents each, or a bushel might be had at $160. In the succeeding years Vick's Hundred Seed, Brown's, Pitt's, Prolific, Sugar Loaf, Guatemala, Cluster, Hogan's, Banana, Pomegranate, Dean, Multibolus, Mammoth, Mastodon and many others competed for attention and sale. Some proved worth while either in increasing the yield, or in producing larger bolls and thereby speeding the harvest, or in reducing the proportionate weight of the ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... the cliffs for a considerable distance. The ground was rolling and tree-dotted and covered with grazing animals, alone, in pairs and in herds—a motley aggregation of the modern and extinct herbivore of the world. A huge woolly mastodon stood swaying to and fro in the shade of a giant fern—a mighty bull with enormous upcurving tusks. Near him grazed an aurochs bull with a cow and a calf, close beside a lone rhinoceros asleep in a dust-hole. Deer, antelope, ...
— The People that Time Forgot • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... clouds they come, muttering thunder of rebellion, the ghosts of beasts. Huuh! Hark! Huuh! Parallax stalks behind and goads them, the lancinating lightnings of whose brow are scorpions. Elk and yak, the bulls of Bashan and of Babylon, mammoth and mastodon, they come trooping to the sunken sea, Lacus Mortis. Ominous revengeful zodiacal host! They moan, passing upon the clouds, horned and capricorned, the trumpeted with the tusked, the lionmaned, the giantantlered, snouter and crawler, rodent, ruminant and pachyderm, all their moving moaning multitude, ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... fire-proof building where we keep our inflammable beasts. That big, sleeping creature that looks like a mastodon lizard is the dragon that your friend St. George, of London, got the best of, and sent here with his compliments. I'll give the beast a prod and let you ...
— Olympian Nights • John Kendrick Bangs
... Behring's Straits; and in all seasons and all oceans declared everlasting war with the mightiest animated mass that has survived the flood; most monstrous and most mountainous! That Himmalehan, salt-sea Mastodon, clothed with such portentousness of unconscious power, that his very panics are more to be dreaded than his most fearless ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... ax and arrow the wilderness of the Blue Ridge teemed with wild animal life. The bones of mastodon and mammoth remained to attest their supremacy over an uninhabited land thousands upon thousands of years ago. Then, following the prehistoric and glacial period, more recent fauna—buffalo, elk, deer, bear, and ...
— Blue Ridge Country • Jean Thomas
... chewing their cuds, or dozing in a pasture. The last was unusually large, the biggest a monster, appearing, to my wide-opened eyes, with his eight or nine foot height, and ten or eleven foot spread of antlers, as he stood up there against the sky, like some reproduced mastodon of the old legends. Quietly falling back and running in under a screening treetop, I pulled down a branch and put in under my foot to hold and steady my canoe. When I raised my rifle, I aimed it for the heart of the big moose, and fired. ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson
... of naturalisation in the different Malay islands, and which I have thought to certain extent would account for anomalies. Timor has been my greatest puzzle. What do you say to the peculiar Felis there? I wish that you had visited Timor: it has been asserted that a fossil mastodon or elephant's tooth (I forget which) had been found there, which would be a grand fact. I was aware that Celebes was very peculiar; but the relation to Africa is quite new to me and marvellous, and almost passes belief. It is as anomalous as the relation ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant
... hands that knew not what they knew, As one that shelters in the night, unknowing, Beneath a stranded shipwreck, with a cry He touched the enormous rain-washed belted ribs And bones like battlements of some Mastodon Embedded there until ...
— Collected Poems - Volume One (of 2) • Alfred Noyes
... less than fifty per cent of it. Its efforts to amend or repeal the hardy old law of Supply and Demand had simply met with the indifferent success that has marked all such efforts since the first attempted corner in stone hatchets, or mastodon tusks, or whatever it may have been. In the language of one of its newspaper critics, the "Trust" had been "founded on misconception and prompted along lines of self-destruction. Its fundamental principles were the restriction of product, ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... period, and their bones deposited contemporaneously with those of modern species and man. Another is that the geologists may be vastly mistaken as to the date of the extinction of species, and that in fact the mastodon, mammoth, and other species found in juxtaposition with human remains and works of art, have probably survived until a very recent period. Without entering into detail on these points, we would venture the prediction that when weighed in the balance ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... man who had dug up the tooth of the mastodon was Louis Bloche. Details were wanting. As to his history, it was comprised in one of the volumes of the Lisieux Academy, and he could not lend his own copy, as he was afraid of spoiling the collection. With regard to the alligator, it had been discovered ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert |
