"Mollusca" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... literally or metaphorically, leaderless. The word is used literally in biology; and metaphorically in prosody or grammar for a verse or sentence with a beginning wanting. In zoology, the mollusca are divided into cephalous and acephalous (Acephala), according as they have or have not an organized part of their anatomy as the seat of the brain and special senses. The Acephala, or Lamellibranchiata (q.v.), are commonly known as bivalve shell-fish. In botany the word is used for ovaries ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... of the Mesozoic sea-bottom into a westward extension of the Mesozoic continent, over which the mammalian fauna, by which it was already peopled, gradually spread. This invasion of the land was prefaced by a previous invasion of the Cretaceous sea by modern forms of mollusca and fish. ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... on his arrival upon the earth was necessarily to make sure of food. Wild berries, acorns, and ephemeral grasses only last for a time, whilst land mollusca and insects, forming but a miserable diet at the best, disappear during the winter. Meat must certainly have been the chief food of prehistoric man; the accumulations of bones of all sorts in the caves and other places ...
— Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples • The Marquis de Nadaillac
... extends appears to be extremely improbable. The lava seems to have been poured, during a long succession of ages, over a land surface, uneven and broken in parts, 'with intervals of rest sufficient for lakes, stocked with fresh- water mollusca, to form on the cold surfaces of several of the lava- flows' (Holland, in I.G. (1907), i. 88). A great tract of the volcanic region appears to have remained almost undisturbed to the present day, affected by sub-aerial erosion ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... and which had been visited by Mr. Darwin and Captain Fitzroy. The Nautilus skirted the shores of this desert island for a little distance. Its nets brought up numerous specimens of polypi and curious shells of mollusca. Some precious productions of the species of delphinulae enriched the treasures of Captain Nemo, to which I added an astraea punctifera, a kind of parasite polypus often found fixed to ...
— Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea • Jules Verne
... of crystallization seems a microcosm of the universe. Radiata, mollusca, feathers, flowers, ferns, mosses, palms, pines, grain-fields, leaves of cedar, chestnut, elm, acanthus: these and multitudes of other objects are figured on your frosty window; on sixteen different panes I have counted ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various
... such as the Ganges and Brahmapootra have poured for thousands of years into the Bay of Bengal. Part of this bay, although of considerable depth, might at length be filled up before an appreciable amount of change was effected in the fish, mollusca, and other inhabitants of the sea and neighbouring land. But if the bottom be lowered by sinking at the same rate that it is raised by fluviatile mud, the bay can never be turned into dry land. In that case one new layer of matter may ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... to be independent, on the other, derivative—or of varieties, which are confessedly derivative. The proof of the finer gradation appears to be forthcoming. Des Hayes and Lyell have concluded that many of the middle Tertiary and a large proportion of the later Tertiary mollusca are specifically identical with living species; and this is still the almost universally prevalent view. But Mr. Agassiz states that, "in every instance where he had sufficient materials, he had found that ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... immutable. It is exactly as if in the earliest geological epochs it had been concluded from the flora and fauna then existing that it was impossible for a fauna and flora ever to exist differing from them as widely as do the cryptogams from the conifers, or the mammalia from the mollusca. ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri
... that the shells of land-mollusca are affected by the abundance of lime in different districts. Isidore Geoffroy St. Hilaire[697] gives the case of Helix lactea, which has recently been carried from Spain to the South of France and to the Rio Plata, and in both these countries now presents a distinct ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... creation. He enjoys most, and he suffers most. From man, the scale of creation descends, and in its descent, as animals are less and less perfect, so is meted out equal but smaller proportions of pleasure and pain, until we arrive to the Mollusca and Zoophyte, beings existing certainly, but existing without pleasure and without pain—existing only to fill up the endless variety, and add the links to the chain of nature necessary to render it complete. The question which naturally will be put is, "how do you know this? it ...
— Olla Podrida • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... But Dr. Schmidt says that the valves in Lepas are composed of 3.09 of albuminates, and 96.81 of incombustible residue; I cannot but think that the existence of the albuminates is an error caused by Dr. Schmidt's belief that the Cirripedia were intermediate between Crustacea and Mollusca, in the shells of which latter, the animal basis consists of albuminates. For after placing the valves of Lepas and Pollicipes in cold acid, I found that the membrane left could not be dissolved in boiling caustic potash, but could, ...
— A Monograph on the Sub-class Cirripedia (Volume 1 of 2) - The Lepadidae; or, Pedunculated Cirripedes • Charles Darwin
... conducting a natural history survey of the State through the voluntary labour of its members. To Powell was assigned the department of conchology. This work he entered upon with his usual application and made the most complete collection of the mollusca of Illinois ever brought together by one man. Incidentally, botany, zoology, and mineralogy received attention, and in these lines he secured notable collections. With the broad mental grasp which was a pronounced trait, he perceived that these studies were but parts of the greater science of geology, ...
— The Romance of the Colorado River • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... been transferred to one pan in that direction, named Chuantsa; on it we see a cake of salt and lime an inch and a half thick. All the others have an efflorescence of lime and one of the nitrates only, and some are covered thickly with shells. These shells are identical with those of the mollusca of Lake Ngami and the Zouga. There are three varieties, ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... work in Botafogo Bay, provided with a wire-gauze meat cover, and a curious machine for cleaning rice; these answered capitally as substitutes for sieves, and enabled us by a thorough examination of the contents of the dredge, to detect about forty-five species of mollusca and radiata, some of which were new to science. Among these acquisitions I may mention a new species of Amphioxus, a genus of small fishes exhibiting more anomalies than any other known to ichthyologists, and the lowest organisation ...
— Narrative Of The Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Commanded By The Late Captain Owen Stanley, R.N., F.R.S. Etc. During The Years 1846-1850. Including Discoveries And Surveys In New Guinea, The Louisiade • John MacGillivray
... sandy beaches of the sea, the valleys and hills of the interior, the pastures, mossy banks, thickets, woods, rocks, ruins, walls, ditches, pools, canals, rills, and rivers, were all to be assiduously searched. No collections of mollusca made in the district were known to me, nor do any of our libraries contain the works necessary to be consulted, although that of King's College supplies some of great value. In a situation so remote from the great centres of civilisation, the solution of doubts is often ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 216, December 17, 1853 • Various
... hosts of the fishes may be the mollusca or other creatures on which they feed, and hence the new fields for Atkinson in Nelson's catches. There is a relative simplicity in the round of life in its higher forms in these regions that would seem ...
— Scott's Last Expedition Volume I • Captain R. F. Scott
... thousands, upon thousands of those mollusks and zoophytes which can exist only in its salt waters. The sides of the caves, as far as the highest tides swept, were studded with crimson and purple and amber mollusca, glistening like jewels in the light pouring down upon them from the eyelet-openings overhead. Not the space of a finger-tip was clear. Above them in the clefts of the rock hung fringes of delicate ...
— The Doctor's Dilemma • Hesba Stretton
... organisation of these mollusca and crustacea, and looking at their very complex nature, that it does indeed require a very strong imagination to conceive that these were the first created of all living things. And you must take into consideration the fact that we have not the slightest ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... the dissipating club-houses. "Paid your money?" Sacrifice that rather than your soul. "Good fellows," are they? They cannot stay what they are under such influences. Mollusca live two hundred fathoms down in the Norwegian seas. The Siberian stag grows fat on the stunted growth of Altaian peaks. The Hedysarium thrives amid the desolation of Sahara. Tufts of osier and birch grow on the hot ...
— The Abominations of Modern Society • Rev. T. De Witt Talmage
... spoken, nor is it possible for me to-day, to speak adequately, of the moral power of the imagination: but you may for yourselves enough discern its nature merely by comparing the dignity of the relations between the sexes, from their lowest level in moths or mollusca, through the higher creatures in whom they become a domestic influence and law, up to the love of pure men and women; and, finally, to the ideal love which animated chivalry. Throughout this vast ascent it is the gradual increase of the imaginative ...
— Lectures on Art - Delivered before the University of Oxford in Hilary term, 1870 • John Ruskin |
