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Metamorphosis   Listen
noun
Metamorphosis  n.  (pl. metamorphoses)  
1.
Change of form, or structure; transformation.
2.
(Biol.) A change in the form or function of a living organism, by a natural process of growth or development; as, the metamorphosis of the yolk into the embryo, of a tadpole into a frog, or of a bud into a blossom. Especially, that form of sexual reproduction in which an embryo undergoes a series of marked changes of external form, as the chrysalis stage, pupa stage, etc., in insects. In these intermediate stages sexual reproduction is usually impossible, but they ultimately pass into final and sexually developed forms, from the union of which organisms are produced which pass through the same cycle of changes. See Transformation.
3.
(Physiol.) The change of material of one kind into another through the agency of the living organism; metabolism.
Vegetable metamorphosis (Bot.), the doctrine that flowers are homologous with leaf buds, and that the floral organs are transformed leaves.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Metamorphosis" Quotes from Famous Books



... sorceress and her magic, he importunes the girl to procure from her mistress a magic salve which will transform him at will into an owl. By mistake he receives the wrong salve; and instead of the bird metamorphosis which he had looked for, he undergoes an unlooked-for change into an ass. In this guise, and in the service of various masters, he has opportunities of observing the follies of men from a novel standpoint. His adventures are numerous, ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner

... power, and was successful; the diamond disappeared, and there remained a few drops of water. He looked at his wife and smiled; she raised her eyes to his, astonished and pleased, took the cup from his hand, and looked at the precious metamorphosis. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348 • Various

... invariably succeeded in that in which the greatest men in the country fail! Am I to be branded because I have made half a million by a good book? What if I have kept a gambling-house? From the back parlour of an oyster-shop my hazard table has been removed to this palace. Had the play been foul, this metamorphosis would never have occurred. It is true I am an usurer. My dear sir, if all the usurers in this great metropolis could only pass in procession before you at this moment, how you would start! You might find some Right Honourables among them; many a great functionary, many a grave magistrate; ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli

... she would have immediately transformed that new Actaeon into a stag. But there, entre nous, it is possible that she would have preferred first to transform him into a husband, regardless of a more exact rendering of the classical metamorphosis. ...
— The Grandee • Armando Palacio Valds

... of O'Leary's assuming such a metamorphosis was too absurd not to throw me into a hearty fit of laughing, in which the ...
— The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer, Complete • Charles James Lever (1806-1872)

... condition bordering on that of the hibernating animals—a condition in which I had neither eaten, nor slept, nor thought, nor moved, when I could help it—into not only a full, but a keen and joyous, possession of my health and faculties. It was almost a metamorphosis. I was no longer the clod I had been, but a bird exulting in the earth and air, and in the liberty of motion. Then to remember it was a new earth and a new sky that I was beholding,—that it was England, the old mother at last, no longer a faith or a fable, but an actual fact there before my ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs

... I am frequently sober, but at such times I am fit company for neither man nor beast; I am harsh and unsympathetic; I scheme and I connive. With nightfall, however, there comes a metamorphosis. Ah! Believe ME! When the Clover Club is strained and descends like the gentle dew of heaven, when the Bronx is mixed and the Martini shimmers in the first rays of the electric light, then I humanize and harmonize, For me gin is a tonic, rum a restorative, vermuth a balm. Once I am stocked ...
— The Auction Block • Rex Beach

... general principle; and, without entering into the details, we may sum up his general argument by saying, in the words of another,[41] that, according to his theory, "dulse and hen-ware became, through a very wonderful metamorphosis, cabbage and spinach; that kelp-weed and tangle bourgeoned into oaks and willows; and that slack, rope-weed, and green-raw, shot up into mangel-wurzel, rye-grass, and clover." So much for the FLORA; and now for the Fauna, and the ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan

... inhabitants of a star nor of a drop of water; our ears deceive us, for they transmit to us the vibrations of the air in sonorous notes. Our senses are fairies who work the miracle of changing that movement into noise, and by that metamorphosis give birth to music, which makes the mute agitation of nature a harmony. So with our sense of smell, which is weaker than that of a dog, and so with our sense of taste, which can scarcely distinguish the ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant

... converse on ordinary Occasions as they are Beauties. Ask Belinda what it is a Clock, and she is at a stand whether so great a Beauty should answer you. In a Word, I think, instead of offering to administer Consolation to Parthenissa, I should congratulate her Metamorphosis; and however she thinks she was not in the least insolent in the Prosperity of her Charms, she was enough so to find she may make her self a much more agreeable Creature in her present Adversity. The Endeavour to please is highly promoted by a Consciousness ...
— The Spectator, Volume 2. • Addison and Steele

... there the same stout young gentleman, with whiskers and general appearance slightly altered, was standing behind a big tree, firing at a hare who was coming straight toward him, pursued by a pack of terrible hounds; again, on a third wall, the stout young gentleman had undergone a further metamorphosis which almost endangered his identity; he was standing at the edge of a swamp, and a couple of ducks were making somersaults in the air, as they fluttered with bruised wings down to where the dogs stood expecting them; on wall ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen

... beyond all other things in life, the other was making very little show of loving him at all, or of concealing her indifference. Lord Hartledon was not the only husband who has been disagreeably astonished by a similar metamorphosis. ...
— Elster's Folly • Mrs. Henry Wood

... so great a metamorphosis in the bearing of the outer man, as a sudden change of fortune. The anemone of the garden differs scarcely more from its unpretending prototype of the woods, than Robert M'Corkindale, Esq., Secretary ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 58, Number 360, October 1845 • Various

... December, 1714. John Rich was a clever mimic, and after a year or two he found it to his advantage to compete with the actors in a fashion of his own. He was the inventor of the modern English form of pantomime, with a serious part that he took from Ovid's Metamorphosis or any fabulous history, and a comic addition of the courtship of harlequin and columbine, with surprising tricks and transformations. He introduced the old Italian characters of pantomime under changed conditions, and ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson

... do, for there are few birds or beasts that need it more. It was highly fitting for sooty little Tom, seeing he had to turn into something, to become a Water Baby. And if these smaller, winged sweeps of our American chimneys are contemplating a metamorphosis, it ought to be toward ...
— Roof and Meadow • Dallas Lore Sharp

... company on that journey into the unknown. But grief seldom kills. Sometimes it hardens. Always it works a change, a greater or less revamping of the spirit. It was so with Stella Fyfe, although she was not keenly aware of any forthright metamorphosis. She was, for the present, too actively involved in ...
— Big Timber - A Story of the Northwest • Bertrand W. Sinclair

... herself, try to form some manly resolution; but she was kept in leading strings by the need for money. And so, slowly and in spite of the ambitious protests and grievous recriminations of her own mind, she underwent the provincial metamorphosis here described. Each day took with it a fragment of her spirited determination. She had laid down a rule for the care of her person, which she gradually departed from. Though at first she kept up with the fashions and the little novelties of elegant life, she was ...
— Parisians in the Country - The Illustrious Gaudissart, and The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac

... In six weeks' time the metamorphosis in the woman had been as complete as it was in the case ...
— The Forfeit • Ridgwell Cullum

... characteristics of the period into which European societies entered and about were to live. Rising to a higher point of view than that to which he had confined himself in studying France, M. Taine regarded its metamorphosis as a case of transformation as general as the passage of the Cite antique over to the Roman Empire over to the feudal State. Now, as formerly, this transformation is the effect of a "change in the intellectual and physical condition ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine

... knows how long, without ceasing,—made me frightfully sleepy, and on arriving at my favourite spot beneath a lofty pine, I had slept till, for very shame, my eyelids could keep closed no longer. It was then nine o'clock, and the metamorphosis of sunset had commenced in solemn earnest. The evening was charming, ideal of the heart of summer; the air soft, sweetly scented; the sky unspotted blue. A peaceful hush, broken only by the chiming of some distant church bells, and the faint, the very ...
— Byways of Ghost-Land • Elliott O'Donnell

... Here was an almost entirely new element, gradually eliminating from the scene of the struggle other elements which had grown old through centuries of war, and while this transformation was taking place in Northern and Central, a similar revolution was effecting a no less surprising metamorphosis in Southern Syria. There, too, newer races had gradually come to displace the nations over which the dynasties of Thutmosis and Ramses had once held sway. The Hebrews on the east, the Philistines and their allies on the south-west, were about to undertake ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 6 (of 12) • G. Maspero

... Bodhisattva corresponding to the Buddha Akshobhya. He is green or blue and carries a thunderbolt. It seems probable that he is a metamorphosis of Indra.] ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, An Historical Sketch, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Charles Eliot

... mind that had been dulled were restored to animation and keenness. Not a trace of irascibility remained; but in its place came trooping the sweet angels that Father Faber says continually hover over the good-humored man. I declare that the metamorphosis was so complete that I almost needed an introduction to my new self. And this prodigy was created by one grand, complete and unusual slumber, when wearing a nightcap! Subsequent experiments have been relatively successful; so I am getting to be an enthusiast on the ...
— Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56: No. 4, January 26, 1884 - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various

... then, was this little islet to be observed from the shore. Usually, it appeared of a jet black colour; but there were other times when it was as white as if covered a foot deep with snow, and then it showed plainer and more attractive. I knew very well what caused this singular metamorphosis in its colour. I knew that the white mantle that covered it was neither more nor less than a vast flock of beautiful sea-fowl, that had settled upon the rocks, either to rest themselves after so much flying, or to search for such small fish or Crustacea ...
— The Boy Tar • Mayne Reid

... to state, that he was carried after his metamorphosis into the chapel, where he heard the preacher seemingly about the close of his harangue, the tenor of which he also mentioned. Words, he said, could not express the agony which he felt when he found that his bearer, in placing the instrument ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott

... retainer of the Wenman family near Thame, the author, probably or certainly, of a quaint defence of retainership, Sword and Buckler (1602), and of other poems—Pastoral Elegies, Urania, Polyhymnia, etc.—together with an exceedingly odd piece, The Metamorphosis of the Walnut-Tree of Boarstall, which is not quite like anything else of the time. Basse, who seems also to have spelt his name "Bas," and perhaps lived and wrote through the first forty or fifty years of the seventeenth century, is but a moderate poet. Still he is not contemptible, ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury

... temple really founded in 496, or at some time thereabout? And was it founded in obedience to some Sibylline direction? These questions are of real importance, for upon our answer to them depends the date of the beginning of a gradual metamorphosis of the Roman religious practice. The so-called Sibylline books and their keepers were responsible, as we shall see directly, for the introduction at Rome of what was known as the Graecus ritus,—for the foundation ...
— The Religious Experience of the Roman People - From the Earliest Times to the Age of Augustus • W. Warde Fowler

... out, Reilly changed his dress, and in a few minutes underwent such a metamorphosis that poor Mrs. Buckley, on reentering the house, ...
— Willy Reilly - The Works of William Carleton, Volume One • William Carleton

... had been so sudden and so unexpected that it left me for a moment forgetful of aught else than my strange metamorphosis. My first thought was, is this then death! Have I indeed passed over forever into that other life! But I could not well believe this, as I could feel my heart pounding against my ribs from the exertion ...
— A Princess of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... night at the bidding of the slaves of the lamp, could scarcely have been a greater paradox to the aged Sultan, than this increase of prosperity on the part of Scotland was to our southern legislators. How to explain the metamorphosis seemed for a time a mystery. One thing, at all events, was clear—that English gold had no participation in the change. North of the Tweed, a guinea was a suspected article, apt to be rung, and examined, and curiously weighed, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various

... short novel, one of the masterpieces of that period. This book, of a dangerous example, was classed with "Adolphe," a dreadful lamentation, the counterpart of which is found in Camille's work. The true secret of her literary metamorphosis and pseudonym has never been fully understood. Some delicate minds have thought it lay in a feminine desire to escape fame and remain obscure, while offering a man's name and work ...
— Beatrix • Honore de Balzac

... end of the six months of probation approached, Madam became more and more anxious. Ever since Eleanor's high-handed departure she had been undergoing a metamorphosis. Like most autocrats, the only things of which she took notice were the ones that impeded her progress. When they proved sufficiently formidable to withstand annihilation, she awarded them the respect that was their ...
— Quin • Alice Hegan Rice

... spurted up into its pitiful fulness—and in Smarlinghue's stead stood another man. Gone were the stooping shoulders, gone the hollow cheeks, the thin, extended lips, the widened nostrils, as the little distorting pieces of wax were removed; and out of the metamorphosis, hard and grim, set like chiselled marble, was revealed the ...
— The Further Adventures of Jimmie Dale • Frank L. Packard

... The most remarkable metamorphosis which the German Democrats have undergone, is shown in their changed attitude to England. This country gave a home to Marx and Engels; the former is buried in Highgate cemetery. For many decades the party professed enthusiastic admiration of British institutions ...
— What Germany Thinks - The War as Germans see it • Thomas F. A. Smith

... of the tyrant himself. It was soon reduced to a shapeless mass. Small portions were carried away and preserved for generations in families as heirlooms of hatred. The bulk was melted again and reconverted, by a most natural metamorphosis, into the cannon from which ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... poor man had been kidnapped, also at night, and forced into the same illegal jail. He sat in the dock—an innocent man, to be made into a beast. The metamorphosis had begun;—he was already in chains and his human heart seemed dead in him; sixty ruffians were about him, aiding in this drama, hired out of the brothels and rum-shops for a few days, the lust of kidnapping serving to vary the continual glut of those other and less brutal appetites ...
— The Trial of Theodore Parker • Theodore Parker

... bits of evidence. Thus the author of Martin's Month's Mind (1589) speaks of "twittle-twattles that I had learned in ale-houses and at the Theatre of Lanham and his fellows." Again, Nash, in Pierce Penniless (1592), writes: "Tarleton at the Theatre made jests of him"; Harrington, in The Metamorphosis of Ajax (1596): "Which word was after admitted into the Theatre with great applause, by the mouth of Master Tarleton"; and the author of Tarlton's Newes out of Purgatory (c. 1589) represents Tarleton as connected with the Theatre. Now, unless Lanham, Tarleton, and their "fellows" usually ...
— Shakespearean Playhouses - A History of English Theatres from the Beginnings to the Restoration • Joseph Quincy Adams

... point of energy, is again degraded to the inorganic and thrown out. Every cell has its history. Activity is, therefore, not contradictory to the organism, but favors in it the natural progressive and regressive metamorphosis. This process can go on harmoniously; that is, the organism can be in health only when not only the whole organism, but each special organ, is allowed, after its productive activity, the corresponding rest and recreation necessary for its self-renewal. We have this periodicity exemplified ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz

... in my opinion, produces a very beggarly effect. In every other circumstance of dress, male and female, the contrast between the two nations, appears equally glaring. What is the consequence? when an Englishman comes to Paris, he cannot appear until he has undergone a total metamorphosis. At his first arrival he finds it necessary to send for the taylor, perruquier, hatter, shoemaker, and every other tradesman concerned in the equipment of the human body. He must even change his buckles, and the form of his ruffles; ...
— Travels Through France and Italy • Tobias Smollett

... really saw was, that the Hon. M. Elgin suddenly underwent a complete metamorphosis. A new Sir Thorn appeared, whom no one would have ever suspected under the cloak of icy reserve which the former had worn. His sympathetic pity of former days was succeeded by more tender sentiments. It ...
— The Clique of Gold • Emile Gaboriau

... betrayed appeared in a new character. Observe their course with him. First he was made a commissioner. Then he was changed from a commissioner to be a voluntary accuser. He now undergoes another metamorphosis: he appears as a culprit before Mr. Hastings, on the accusation of the donor of Mr. Hastings's bribes. He is to answer to the accusations of Debi Sing. He is permitted to find materials for his own defence; and he, an old Company's servant, is to acknowledge it as a favor to be again ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. X. (of 12) • Edmund Burke

... generation of men, as Hume remarks, does not go off the stage at once, and another succeed, like silkworms and butterflies. No more did this metamorphosis of Masonry, so to name it, take place suddenly or radically, as it has become the fashion to think. It was a slow process, and like every such period the Epoch of Transition was attended by many problems, uncertainties, and difficulties. Some of the Lodges, as we have noted, would never ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton

... the contemplated deal with meticulous care and consummate administrative skill. They elaborated a programme which would undoubtedly have proved in the highest degree advantageous to Russia, had the conditions not undergone a complete metamorphosis owing to the outbreak of the Revolution in Petrograd a very few days after they landed, sanguine and reassuring, in this ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell

... state of consternation, and expected to see the earth open and swallow up the whole camp, while he sat calmly cracking their gods with his hammer, as he would have cracked so many walnuts. The Tulasi is a small sacred shrub (Ocymum sanctum), which is a metamorphosis of Sita, the wife of Rama, the seventh incarnation ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman

... Josephus," and makes merry over "the rude and shapeless block" which the guide assured him was the statue of Lot's wife, explaining the want of human form in the salt pillar by telling him that this complete metamorphosis ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White

... de Vermandois was only seven years old when exaggerated scruples and bad advice deprived him of his mother. This amiable child, who loved her, at first suffered much from her absence and departure. He had to be taken to the Carmelites, where the sad metamorphosis of his mother, whom he had seen so brilliant and alluring, made him start back ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre

... the metamorphosis of that periodical into a newspaper. With youthful ambition, Mr. Dowdell is resolved to furnish the United with the latest items of interest concerning amateurs. While the general style of the paper is ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft

... Uncle Ezra. "Uncle, what strange metamorphosis has happened to this picture? The spiritual light from that color must shine as brightly as ever; the intrinsic value remains forever fixed in Maud's soul; it is desecration to reject such a precious message. Why, it's like sending back the girl you ...
— Literary Love-Letters and Other Stories • Robert Herrick

... case. When a Touarghee wears his litham, and when he pulls it off, he undergoes a complete metamorphosis, so that strangers cannot recognize the parties in their change ...
— Travels in the Great Desert of Sahara, in the Years of 1845 and 1846 • James Richardson

... it a multitudinous gradation of progress, and a line of space is marked out into millionths, of every one of which the consciousness takes note. At the same time his senses are open to every impression from things around him, only they appear to him in a strangely exalted metamorphosis, the reflex of his own mental exaltation either in bliss or torture, while the fancies of a man mingle with the facts thus introduced and modify and are in turn modified by them; whereby out of the ...
— Thomas Wingfold, Curate • George MacDonald

... reproach him with these insanities, when we hear another, misled by the Monkey's build, acclaim the Pithecanthropus as man's precursor? Shall we reject the metamorphosis of the Chaoucho-grapaou, when people tell us in all seriousness that, in the present stage of scientific knowledge, it is absolutely proved that man is descended from some rough-hewn Ape? Of the two transformations, Favier's strikes me as the more credible. A painter ...
— More Hunting Wasps • J. Henri Fabre

... to collect them, and not remembering the precise terms of the contract by which the fiend was bound to obey her commands for a certain space, the sorceress exclaimed, "Deevil, that neither I nor they ever stir from this spot more!" The words were hardly uttered, when, by a metamorphosis as sudden as any in Ovid, the hag and her refractory flock were converted into stone, the angel whom she served, being a strict formalist, grasping eagerly at an opportunity of completing the ruin of her body and soul by a literal obedience to her orders. ...
— The Black Dwarf • Sir Walter Scott

... Latin form, which simply changes is to es: as, amanuensis, amanuenses; analysis, analyses; antithesis, antitheses; axis, axes; basis, bases; crisis, crises; diaeresis, diaereses; diesis, dieses; ellipsis, ellipses; emphasis, emphases; fascis, fasces; hypothesis, hypotheses; metamorphosis, metamorphoses; oasis, oases; parenthesis, parentheses; phasis, phases; praxis, praxes; synopsis, synopses; synthesis, syntheses; syrtis, syrtes; thesis, theses. In some, however, the original plural is not so formed; but is made ...
— The Grammar of English Grammars • Goold Brown

... as far as possible from being a dramatic poet, if he was destitute of that supreme creative power which involves the transformation of an author's own personality, he possessed, on the other hand, in the highest degree, that faculty of demi-metamorphosis which is the exercise and the triumph of criticism, and which consists in putting one's self in the the place of the author, occupying the point of view to the subject under examination, and reading every writing in the spirit by which ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various

... and players, the beaux and men of wit and pleasure about town. In reading the pages of the Tatler, we seem as if suddenly carried back to the age of Queen Anne, of toupees and full-bottomed periwigs. The whole appearance of our dress and manners undergoes a delightful metamorphosis. The beaux and the belles are of a quite different species from what they are at present; we distinguish the dappers, the smarts, and the pretty fellows, as they pass by Mr. Lilly's shop-windows in the Strand; we ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin

... An hour later he was washed beautifully clean, and was gorgeously dressed in a Turkish costume of light blue woollen cloth, trimmed with gold and black braid, with a new tarboosh, a handsome silk shawl in thick folds around his waist, and his sabre dangling by his side. This sudden metamorphosis from dirt and ashes to dazzling attire was symbolical of disgrace and humiliation succeeded by pardon and restoration ...
— Ismailia • Samuel W. Baker

... Aristotle, the Atlas of the church. This was no less than pure Pantheism,—God in and through all, the infinite Intelligence. Deus est monadum monas—nempe entium entitas. This creed, by an incomprehensible metamorphosis, was styled, in the language of the day, Atheism; its promulgation, even its conception, was pronounced a crime whose penalty was death. And Bruno, who, from the depths of infamous superstition, had risen into the pure light of heaven, ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol I, Issue I, January 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... lost one of her shoes, the hag sent her husband back to look for it, while she proceeded with the metamorphosis of the hapless infant who had fallen into her hands. She smeared the little face with muddy water from the margin of the pool; she jerked out the semi-circular comb which held back Marian's cloud of dusky ...
— The Golden Shoemaker - or 'Cobbler' Horn • J. W. Keyworth

... with educated persons, when brought face to face with the false assertions of a hysterical girl, and of two ignorant and deceitful peasants. If there is any one thing we know, it is that there can be no force without the metamorphosis of matter of some kind. Here was a girl maintaining her weight—actually growing—her animal heat kept at its due standard, her mind active, her heart beating, her lungs respiring, her skin exhaling, ...
— Fasting Girls - Their Physiology and Pathology • William Alexander Hammond

... defence against injury. He was also of opinion that they underwent various transformations analogous to those of living crustaceans. M. Barrande, author of an admirable work on the Silurian rocks of Bohemia, confirms the doctrine of their metamorphosis, having traced more than twenty species through different stages of growth from the young state just after its escape from the egg to the adult form. He has followed some of them from a point in which they show no eyes, no joints, or body rings, and no distinct ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell

... of a plant, or stump, include atoms derived from every other cell of the whole organism and capable of development, I gain a distinct idea. But this idea would not be worth a rush, if it applied to one case alone; but it seems to me to apply to all the forms of reproduction—inheritance—metamorphosis— to the abnormal transposition of organs—to the direct action of the male element on the mother plant, etc. Therefore I fully believe that each cell does ACTUALLY throw off an atom or gemmule of its contents;—but whether or not, this hypothesis serves as a useful connecting link for ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin

... of the regiment saluted each other as American citizens and not as soldiers, and though the metamorphosis was sudden, it seemed to have the ...
— History of the Eighty-sixth Regiment, Illinois Volunteer Infantry, during its term of service • John R. Kinnear

... Tordenskjold. The first thing I did, on obtaining possession of these treasures, was to get them into the dyeing-vat. They were unrecognizable when I got them back — in ultramarine blue, or whatever it was called. The metamorphosis was complete: their warlike past was ...
— The South Pole, Volumes 1 and 2 • Roald Amundsen

... had occasioned the metamorphosis, the countenance of the dying woman rapidly changed, and her features bore the same appearance they had in years gone by. A smile lingered round her lips, and over her face was a beautiful and saint-like expression. The husband gazed upon it, and ...
— The Trials of the Soldier's Wife - A Tale of the Second American Revolution • Alex St. Clair Abrams

... metamorphosis they like. If they see a debauchee with long flowing locks and hairy as a beast, like the son of Xenophantes,[505] they take the form of a Centaur[506] in derision ...
— The Eleven Comedies - Vol. I • Aristophanes et al

... was that first they lost their reason, and a few moments after, their bodies took the forms and features of various animals; some unwieldy, some small. Ulysses alone, having the wisdom to withstand the temptation of the treacherous cup, escaped the metamorphosis. He, besides possessing wisdom, bore the look of a hero and had the gift of honeyed speech, so that it came about that the goddess herself imbibed a poison little different from her own; that is to say, she became enamoured of the hero ...
— The Original Fables of La Fontaine - Rendered into English Prose by Fredk. Colin Tilney • Jean de la Fontaine

... theories on Colour which were for a time accepted by leading authorities on that subject and besides making a discovery which had escaped the investigations of professional Anatomists (that of the intermaxillary bone), Goethe was the discoverer of a law, that of the metamorphosis of leaves and flowers, which may be said to have almost revolutionised the ...
— The Faust-Legend and Goethe's 'Faust' • H. B. Cotterill

... desiring to be what they are not, makes them go out of a method, in which they might be received with applause, and would certainly excel, into one, wherein they will all their life have the air of strangers to what they aim at. For this reason, I have not lamented the metamorphosis of any one I know so much as of Nobilis, who was born with sweetness of temper, just apprehension, and everything else that might make him a man fit for his order. But instead of the pursuit of sober studies and applications, ...
— The Tatler, Volume 1, 1899 • George A. Aitken

... Nova was detected in this country by Mr. H. Corder, on whose notification Mr. Espin, on August 21, examined its nearly monochromatic spectrum.[1492] The metamorphosis of Nova Cygni seemed repeated.[1493] The light of the new object, like that of its predecessor, was mainly concentrated in a vivid green band, identified with the chief nebular line by Copeland,[1494] Von Gothard,[1495] and Campbell.[1496] The second nebular line was also represented. ...
— A Popular History of Astronomy During the Nineteenth Century - Fourth Edition • Agnes M. (Agnes Mary) Clerke

... end, Mercury dooms the ugly boot to take the semblance of a man, and the satire closes with its painful metamorphosis into Gifford. The poem is not without cleverness, but it is chiefly remarkable for a savage tone which is not, we think, repeated elsewhere throughout the writings of Hunt. The allusions to Gifford's relations, nearly half a century earlier, to that Earl Grosvenor who first ...
— Gossip in a Library • Edmund Gosse

... This so provoked him that he gathered all his strength and energy for one grand effort and gave her a kick that sent her clean across the river. On landing she was converted into the mass of rock which remains to this day a memorial of her viciousness and a warning to all future scolds. The metamorphosis was effected by the Tshaumen, but how the necessary force was acquired to send her across the river (here about half a mile wide), or whether the kick was administered by the Tshaumen or the husband, my narrator could not say. He ...
— Klondyke Nuggets - A Brief Description of the Great Gold Regions in the Northwest • Joseph Ladue

... leit-motif in Tristan are two: in Tristan they are more significant—indeed, they are pregnant to bursting—and more fully charged with energy and colour; also they are not stated and restated in their elementary form as in Lohengrin, but continually subjected to a process of metamorphosis. This last mode of developing a theme he probably learnt from Liszt, and without it both Tristan and the Ring would be very different. But while these are the most striking characteristics of Wagner's later leading themes ...
— Wagner • John F. Runciman

... over the wreck of a once brilliant mind, when Desyvetaux, suspending his antics long enough to look about him, perceived her and rushed to her side with the liveliest expressions of joy. He removed her suspicions of his sanity by explaining his metamorphosis in ...
— Life, Letters, and Epicurean Philosophy of Ninon de L'Enclos, - the Celebrated Beauty of the Seventeenth Century • Robinson [and] Overton, ed. and translation.

... time with Gloria and Anthony, this first year of marriage, and the gray house caught them in that stage when the organ-grinder was slowly undergoing his inevitable metamorphosis. She was twenty-three; he ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald

... relievo, with a high heroic box nose and shoeties of columbine.[72] But that was long ago. Now I count the buds of my primrose with a new kind of interest, and you never saw such a primrose! I begin to believe in Ovid, and look for a metamorphosis. The leaves are turning white and springing up as high as corn. Want of air, and of sun, I suppose. I should be loth to think it—want ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon

... envelope of the chrysalis, which accordingly prepares to take its chance for a precarious metamorphosis—into the wings of the butterfly or into the bosom of the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various

... Natural-Selection acts by slight variations.—These must be useful at once.—Difficulties as to the giraffe; as to mimicry; as to the heads of flat-fishes; as to the origin and constancy of the vertebrate, limbs; as to whalebone; as to the young kangaroo; as to sea-urchins; as to certain processes of {viii} metamorphosis; as to the mammary gland; as to certain ape characters; as to the rattlesnake and cobra; as to the process of formation of the eye and ear; as to the fully developed condition of the eye and ear; as to the voice; as to shell-fish; as to orchids; as to ants.—The necessity for ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart

... intermediary filaments of mycelium, it seems to me probable that the reproduction has taken place through the union, which happens in the following manner: Two filaments of mycelium become juxtaposed; after which the filaments of mycelium disappear in the sporangia newly formed, which by this same metamorphosis are deprived of the faculty of reproducing themselves through the filaments of myclium of which they are deprived. The smallest portion of a filament of mycelium evidently possesses the faculty of producing ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 385, May 19, 1883 • Various

... drew into the depot at Akron, there stood Tom with Aunt Susan, but what a metamorphosis! Tom just escaped being a fashionably dressed swell. He was too manly for that. He wore a blue serge suit, colored negligee shirt with tie to match, a Panama hat, and russet ties. His handsome face was so full of character that Mrs. Hollister ...
— Ethel Hollister's Second Summer as a Campfire Girl • Irene Elliott Benson

... pretended to discover it in their countenances: at Zayla I was shown a Bedouin, by name Farih Badaun, who notably became a hyena at times, for the purpose of tasting human blood. [27] About forty years ago, three brothers, Kayna, Fardayna, and Sollan, were killed on Gulays near Berberah for the crime of metamorphosis. The charge is usually substantiated either by the bestial tail remaining appended to a part of the human shape which the owner has forgotten to rub against the magic tree, or by some peculiar wound which ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton

... to anything final but tendency; but tendency appears on all hands; planet, system, constellation, total nature is growing like a field of maize in July; is becoming something else; is in rapid metamorphosis. The embryo does not more strive to be man, than yonder burr of light we call a nebula tends to be a ring, a comet, a globe, and parent of new stars." "In short, the spirit and peculiarity of that impression nature ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... Bhon"[2] illustrates the belief in the metamorphosis of these demons. po Bhon was a Manbo of the Kasilaan River. One day, in the olden time, he went forth to hunt but had no luck, though three times he had offered his tributes to the Lord of the Agibwa marshland. Wearied with this hunt, he lay down to rest toward evening ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan

... a movement with his hand, and, directly he did so, it happened as on the previous evening, that a metamorphosis took place in the very abysses of my being. I woke from my torpor, as he put it, I came out of death, and was alive again. I was far, yet, from being my own man; I realised that he exercised on me a degree of mesmeric force which I had never dreamed that one creature could exercise on another; ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh

... dilemma. If the species originated by descent from the most closely related lower species, and under certain circumstances also from species of the same rank, and even by degeneration from the next higher, it must have occurred in one of two ways: either by leaps—called by naturalists "metamorphosis of germs" or "heterogenetic conception"—or by a succession of imperceptibly small alterations of the individuals from generation to generation. Each of these changes would have been no greater than the differences we observe to-day between the individuals of the very same species, ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid

... living protein mass neither tends to exhaustion of its forces nor to any permanency of form, but is essentially distinguished as a disturber of equilibrium so far as force is concerned,—as undergoing continual metamorphosis and change, in ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley

... life! One life out of two lives; one nature out of two natures! Mysterious and extraordinary metamorphosis. She had brought her nature to his, and he his nature to hers, and they were to mingle and become one nature.... Absurdly and inappropriately his mind picked up and presented to him the grotesque words, "High Jinks and Low Jinks." A note ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson

... greater than those which separate kind from kind.' And so this Proteus of a Church, which has changed its form so completely since the Gospel was first preached in the subterranean galleries of Rome, may undergo another equally startling metamorphosis and come to believe in a God who never intervenes in history. We may here remind our readers of Newman's tests of true development, and mark the ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge

... melancholy, hoping to revive my spirits in the fresh air, but scarcely had I set foot upon the public promenade when a girl, by no means homely, met me, and, calling me Polyaenos, the name I had assumed since my metamorphosis, informed me that her mistress desired leave to speak with me. "You must be mistaken," I answered, in confusion, "I am only a servant and a stranger, and am by no means worthy of such ...
— The Satyricon, Complete • Petronius Arbiter

... of outlook. But as his gaze came in contact with the frowning crags to the east, a sudden light of interest, even apprehension, leaped into his eyes. In a moment he became a creature transformed. His bucolic calm had gone. The metamorphosis ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum

... vulgarer ruffian, "Jim Robinson," "a little man, stockish, oily, and red in the face, a jaunty fellow, too, with a certain shabby air of coxcombry even in his travel-stained attire,"—and how accurately does he describe the metamorphosis of this nauseous grub into a still ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various

... find metamorphosis; for Betty and John, egged on by nurse, had taken advantage of his day from home to turn out the study. This study had not been properly cleaned for years. It had never had what servants are fond of calling a spring cleaning. Neither spring nor autumn found any change for the better ...
— Girls of the Forest • L. T. Meade

... about. Sagacious persons opined that Vassily Ivanovitch had till then been crushed under the weight of some secret trouble, that he saw chances of returning to the capital... but the true cause of Vassily Ivanovitch's metamorphosis was ...
— The Jew And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev

... of his observations. "Looking on Saturn," says he, "within these few days, I found it solitary, without the assistance of its accustomed stars, and, in short, perfectly round and defined like Jupiter; and such it still remains. Now, what can be said of so strange a metamorphosis? Are the two smaller stars consumed like the spots on the sun? Have they suddenly vanished and fled? or has Saturn devoured his own children? or was the appearance indeed fraud and illusion, with which the glasses have for so ...
— The Martyrs of Science, or, The lives of Galileo, Tycho Brahe, and Kepler • David Brewster

... probably quite useless objects" found by Mr. Haddon in the chain of isles south-east of New Guinea. Mr. Romilly and Dr. Wyatt Gill attest the existence of similar axes of ceremony. "They are not intended for cleaving timber." We see "the metamorphosis of a practical object ...
— The Clyde Mystery - a Study in Forgeries and Folklore • Andrew Lang

... decide?" It is contended by one group of scientists that the water lily, which shows the plainest metamorphosis of some sort, has developed its stamens from petals - just the reverse of Nature's method, other botanists claim. A perfect flower, we know, may consist of only a stamen and a pistil, the essential organs, all other parts being desirable, but of only ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan

... both had forgotten, looked on at first in gaping, silent awe, staring and blinking at his travelling companion, who had undergone such a metamorphosis. But restraint and silence were impossible to him for long, and in time he ambled clumsily into the conversation. It jarred, of course, but he could not be ignored, and gradually he claimed more and more of the talk until the young ...
— The Silver Horde • Rex Beach

... different being at different levels of his growth. Each period is marked by peculiar physical, mental and moral characteristics which demand specific treatment. So great and sudden are some of these changes that they are sometimes likened to a metamorphosis, indicating an analogy with certain insects as a change from the larvae and pupae stages to ...
— Parent and Child Vol. III., Child Study and Training • Mosiah Hall

... she often foil the highest skill! Listen to an old man; I am speaking quite seriously. Rodion"—(on saying which Porphyrius Petrovitch, who was hardly thirty-five years of age, seemed all of a sudden to have aged, a sudden metamorphosis had taken place in the whole of his person, nay, in his very voice)— "to an old man who, however, is not wanting in candor. Am I or am I not candid? What do you think? It seems to me that a man could hardly be more ...
— The Most Interesting Stories of All Nations • Julian Hawthorne

... epoch-making chapter Darwin shows what conditions must prevail in any given place in order that fossils shall be formed, how unusual such conditions are, and how probable it is that fossils once imbedded in sediment of a sea-bed will be destroyed by metamorphosis of the rocks, or by denudation when the strata are raised above the water-level. Add to this the fact that only small territories of the earth have been explored geologically, he says, and it becomes clear that the paleontological record as we now possess it shows ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams

... Bottom, to the infinite amusement of all present, especially of those who were well acquainted with the original; and when he was "translated" by Puck, he bore the ass's head, his newly-acquired dignity, with an appearance of conscious greatness, which made the metamorphosis, though in itself sufficiently farcical, irresistibly comic. He afterwards displayed the same humour in his frolics with the fairies, and the intercourse which he held with Messrs. Cobweb, Mustard-seed, Pease-blossom, and the rest of Titania's cavaliers, who lost all command of their countenances ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott

... water once a year to deposit their spawn in its native surroundings. Once more, crabs pass their earlier larval stages as free-swimming crustaceans, somewhat shrimp-like in appearance, and as agile as fleas: it is only by gradual metamorphosis that they acquire their legs and claws and heavy pedestrian habits. Now there are certain kinds of crab, like the West Indian land-crabs (those dainty morsels whose image every epicure who has visited the ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen

... Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, ll. 427-450. Only Mirrha among these poems, however, makes specific acknowledgment of a debt to Shakespeare (see p. 177). Finally, Dom Diego's plangent laments at Ginevra's cruelty recall Glaucus' unrestrained weeping at Scylla's cruelty in Lodge's Scillaes Metamorphosis. But whereas the "piteous Nimphes" surrounding Glaucus weep till a "pretie brooke" forms,[29] "the fayre Oreades pitty-moved gerles" that comfort Dom Diego are loath to lose the "liquid pearles" he weeps. Consequently they gather (and presumably preserve) ...
— Seven Minor Epics of the English Renaissance (1596-1624) • Dunstan Gale

... alters 'From a Dutchman you are turned into a Briton. What? was I a Saxon, then, when I went hence?' Again, when the same speaker had said, 'Your garb shows that you are changed from a Batavian into a Gaul,' he puts 'Briton' for 'Gaul'; and when the speaker had replied, 'I had rather that metamorphosis, than into a Hen,' alluding to 'Cock:' he changed 'Hen' into 'Bohemian.' Presently, when there is a joke, 'that he pronounces Latin in French style,' he changes 'French' into 'British,' and yet allows the following to stand, 'Then ...
— Colloquies of Erasmus, Volume I. • Erasmus

... transformed into a district magistrate, collector, or military commander of a populous province, without any other counsellor than his own crude understanding, or any other guide than his passion. Such a metamorphosis would excite laughter in a comedy or farce; but, realized in the theatre of human life, it must give rise to sensations of a very different nature. Who is there that does not feel horror-struck, and ...
— The Former Philippines thru Foreign Eyes • Fedor Jagor; Tomas de Comyn; Chas. Wilkes; Rudolf Virchow.

... time," said the Count, "here they run well into one another. In two years the building itself will put on a proper appearance, there will be a complete metamorphosis in beauty and improvement. I shall show you the drawings, and I shall show you the architect, for he ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen

... within these few days, I found it solitary, without the assistance of its accustomed stars, and in short perfectly round and defined, like Jupiter, and such it still remains. Now what can be said of so strange a metamorphosis? Are perhaps the two smaller stars consumed like spots on the sun? Have they suddenly vanished and fled? Or has Saturn devoured his own children? Or was the appearance indeed fraud and illusion, with which the glasses have so long time mocked me and so ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge

... this scene—supposed to represent "Pharaoh's Daughter and The Infant Moses"—change the second time, then turned abruptly away, just as the metamorphosis back to marble began, to find herself confronted by a fine-looking, middle-aged gentleman, who was gazing with ...
— Katherine's Sheaves • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon

... ghastly affair. The subject to be discussed was the "Metamorphosis of Negative Matter." You may imagine that I was staggered. I had no more idea what negative matter was than the inhabitants of Mars. They took us alphabetically. When they got to "H," Mrs. Dahlgren (who, as president, sat in a comfortable ...
— The Sunny Side of Diplomatic Life, 1875-1912 • Lillie DeHegermann-Lindencrone

... of Japanese life are more surprising than the metamorphosis of the gawky student into the dignified, impassive, easy-mannered official. But a little time ago he was respectfully asking, cap in hand, the explanation of some text, the meaning of some foreign idiom; to-day, perhaps, he is judging cases in some court, or managing diplomatic correspondence ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn

... match-box, and as far as I remember took all the matches with it. There were caterpillars, though, of a gentler nature who stayed with me, and of these some were obliging enough to turn into chrysalises. Not all by any means. A caterpillar is too modest to care about changing in public. To conduct his metamorphosis in some quiet corner—where he is not poked every morning to see if he is getting stiffer —is what your caterpillar really wants. Mine had no private life to mention. They were as much before the world as royalty or an actress. And even those who brought off the first event safely ...
— Not that it Matters • A. A. Milne

... The metamorphosis of these men could not have been more complete. They hated themselves, they grew to hate the home which was theirs, the wild in which they lived. They set their traps and hunted because it was their habit to do so, but always with only secondary thought for ...
— In the Brooding Wild • Ridgwell Cullum

... reptile the vertebrate skeleton now became completely ossified. Gills were abandoned and breathing was by lungs alone. The development of the individual from the egg to maturity was uninterrupted by any metamorphosis, such as that of the frog when it passes from the tadpole stage. Yet in advancing from the amphibian to the reptile the evolution of the vertebrate was far from finished. The cold-blooded, clumsy and sluggish, small- brained and unintelligent reptile is as far inferior ...
— The Elements of Geology • William Harmon Norton

... followed, a certain metamorphosis seemed to have taken place in Susan. She was still the same modest, self-effacing, helpful roommate, but in Honora's eyes she had changed —Honora could no longer separate her image from the vision of Silverdale. ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... in the Book of Fate, and Smiles' life underwent another metamorphosis as complete as the ...
— 'Smiles' - A Rose of the Cumberlands • Eliot H. Robinson

... change takes place in girls generally at from thirteen to fifteen, and in boys a year or two later, though it is not completed for a period of five or six years. During this time the most profound alterations take place in nearly all parts of the body; the mind undergoes a similar metamorphosis, so that often the child so carefully watched from babyhood seems entirely superseded by a ...
— The Renewal of Life; How and When to Tell the Story to the Young • Margaret Warner Morley

... hypothesis), is wholly immaterial to the essence of the theory of descent; and it is equally immaterial to its fundamental idea what mechanical causes are assumed for the transformation of the varieties. This assumption of a transformation or metamorphosis of species is, however, indispensable, and the theory of descent is very properly called also the "metamorphosis hypothesis," or "doctrine of transmutation;" as well as Lamarckism, after Jean Lamarck, who first founded ...
— Freedom in Science and Teaching. - from the German of Ernst Haeckel • Ernst Haeckel

... so that the parasites are sucked up with the blood of the victim. Once inside the stomach they soon free themselves from the inclosing sheath and make their way through the walls of the stomach and enter the muscular tissue, particularly the thoracic muscles. Here they undergo a metamorphosis and increase enormously in size, some attaining one-sixteenth ...
— Insects and Diseases - A Popular Account of the Way in Which Insects may Spread - or Cause some of our Common Diseases • Rennie W. Doane

... as sorceresses; and the more that, in particular instances, they became dreaded for their power, the more they were detested, under the conviction that they derived it from the enemy of man. The deities of the northern heathens underwent a similar metamorphosis, resembling that proposed by Drawcansir in the "Rehearsal," who threatens "to make a god ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott

... as if they had been stratified under water, the sea and the shore having alternately given place to each other. Of the white earth abounding on every side, which has given to the place the old name of Campi Leucogaei, and is the result of the metamorphosis of the trachytic tufa by the chemical action of the gases that rise up through the fumaroles, a very fine variety of porcelain—known to collectors as Capo di Monti—used to be made on the hill behind Naples, and it has been supposed that the china clays of ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan

... they undertook, by repeating their arguments, to destroy the effect of the prophetic warning to which the king had just listened. They succeeded but too well. "That instant," says Henry of Anjou, "we perceived a sudden change, a strange and wonderful metamorphosis in the king. He placed himself on our side, and adopted our opinion, going much beyond us and to more criminal lengths; since, whereas before it was difficult to persuade him, now we had to restrain him. For, rising and addressing ...
— History of the Rise of the Huguenots - Volume 2 • Henry Baird

... That is to say, he is a gentleman pretty certainly as well as a genius, which Rabelais might have been, at any rate in other circumstances, but did not choose to be, and which neither Francois Arouet nor Laurence Sterne could have been, however much either had tried, though the metamorphosis is not quite so utterly inconceivable in Sterne's case as in the other's. Hamilton, it has been confessed, is sometimes "naughty"; but his naughtiness is neither coarse nor sniggering,[308] and he depends upon it so little—a ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury

... larva, almost exactly like the larva that hatched from the egg, only, of course, it is larger. There is no hint of wings. It has no separate thorax and abdomen. Could we see under the bank where it has crept, to undergo its great metamorphosis, we should find, not a larva, but a strange-looking, ...
— The Insect Folk • Margaret Warner Morley

... well-authenticated natural phenomenon, and I have myself seen such a specimen. In some cases the change is a gradual process; in others it may occur suddenly within an hour, especially when the gem, long kept in the dark, is exposed to brilliant sunshine. I should say, however, that in this metamorphosis there is always an intermediate stage: the stone first changes from blue to a pale colour spotted with brown, and, lastly, to a pure white. Thus, Ul-Jabal having stolen the stone, finds that it is of the wrong colour, and soon after ...
— Prince Zaleski • M.P. Shiel

... is styled English Metamorphosis, by T. Rowley. It consists of eleven stanzas of ten lines each, all fluent and spirited, and some of very superior merit. It is the fable of Sabrina, Milton's "daughter of Locrine," transliquefied to the river Severn, while her mother, Elstrida, was changed ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. CCCXXXII. - June, 1843.,Vol. LIII. • Various

... and dark; but I confess, the comedy admirably recompensed that defect. I never laughed so much in my life. It began with Jupiter's falling in love out of a peep-hole in the clouds, and ended with the birth of Hercules. But what was most pleasant, was the use Jupiter made of his metamorphosis; for you no sooner saw him under the figure of Amphitrion, but, instead of flying to Alcmena, with the raptures Mr Dryden puts into his mouth, he sends for Amphitrion's taylor, and cheats him of a laced coat, and his banker of a bag of money, a Jew of a diamond ring, and bespeaks a great supper ...
— Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M—y W—y M—e • Lady Mary Wortley Montague



Words linked to "Metamorphosis" :   transfiguration, heterometaboly, hemimetaboly, hemimetamorphosis, hemimetabolism, biological process, organic process, metamorphous, revision



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