"Parasitical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Ponder thereon, ye small antiquaries who make barn-door-fowl flights of learning in "Notes and Queries!"—ye Historical Societies, in one of whose venerable triremes I, too, ascend the stream of time, while other hands tug at the oars!—ye Amines of parasitical literature, who pick up your grains of native-grown food with a bodkin, having gorged upon less honest fare, until, like the great minds Goethe speaks of, you have "made a Golgotha" of your ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... the ravages of many terrestrious insects which attack its roots; and also some very curious diseases. One of these has been very clearly elucidated by our munificent patron of science, Sir Joseph Banks, in the investigation of a parasitical plant which destroys the blood of the stalk and leaves, renders the grain thin, and in some cases quite destroys the crop, which has done that gentleman's penetration great credit [Footnote: Sir Joseph Banks On the Blight in Corn.]. ...
— The Botanist's Companion, Vol. II • William Salisbury
... twenty-four hours. I.O.U.'s accepted." He slipped off the after-hatch, and dragged up from the counter a venerable relic of a spinnaker, which was one vivid mottle of mildew. The sail was duly mocked and set. The wind was freshening, and our pace increased. The cutter and her parasitical escort kicked up enough wake for a ...
— The Recipe for Diamonds • Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne
... place to about 75 feet. At the time this territory was purchased by the agents of the American Colonization Society, in December 1821, this tract of land was covered by a dense and lofty forest, entangled with vines (a very large description of parasitical plant, so called) and brushwood, which rendered it ...
— A Voyage Round the World, Vol. I (of ?) • James Holman
... would always be disadvantageous. My experience in tropical countries has led me to the conclusion that in such parts at least there is one serious drawback to the advantages of having the skin covered with hair. It affords cover for parasitical insects, which, if the skin were naked, might more easily ...
— The Naturalist in Nicaragua • Thomas Belt
... dark-skinned aborigine to the yellow-skinned Mongolian and the fair European. Similarly do plants and animals vary in form: from the straight pines and palms to the spreading, umbrageous oaks and laurels; from upstanding lilies to parasitical orchids; from monstrous spiky beetles to symmetrical dragon-flies; from ungainly rhinoceros to graceful antelope; from short, sturdy Bhutias to tall, slim Hindustanis. Likewise in character individuals are as different as the strong, firm tree ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... clearing where the grass was rich and luxuriant, where overshadowing branches formed an idealic bower, where heavy white waxen flowers were looped from branch to branch holding the green boughs in their parasitical clutch. Hamilton followed the direction of his eyes. In the middle of the clearing a long, sinuous shape, dark brown, and violently coloured with patches of green and vermillion, that was swaying backward and forward, hissing angrily ...
— Bones - Being Further Adventures in Mr. Commissioner Sanders' Country • Edgar Wallace
... freedom, had deliver'd himself of this, we arrived at Crotona, where having refresht our selves in a little inn, we took up at the next day, designing an enlargement of our house and fortune, we fell into the company of some parasitical Corbacchio's who immediately enquir'd what we were and whence we came? When, according to our contrivance, prudently advancing our characters, we told the credulous parasites whence we came, and ...
— The Satyricon • Petronius Arbiter
... stone, high walls of brick, fretted away by time, porticoes covered with parasitical vegetation, stand out boldly from the sheet of silver light which blends the horizon with the limpid blue of the heavens. Some rays of the moon, gliding through the opening on one of these porticoes, fall upon two colossal statues at the foot ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... out. Maecenas is of the party, and comes in leaning heavily on the two umbrae (guests of his own inviting) whom he has brought with him,—habitues of what Augustus called his "parasitical table," who make talk and find buffoonery for him. He is out of spirits to-day, and more reserved than usual, for a messenger has just come in with bad news from Spain, or he has heard of a conspiracy against Augustus, ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin
... extent to which they or he obey this will of God; that the destinies of a people or of an individual are controlled by this will of God, which rewards or punishes according to the degree of obedience manifested.—In place of all that pitiable lie reality has this to say: the priest, a parasitical variety of man who can exist only at the cost of every sound view of life, takes the name of God in vain: he calls that state of human society in which he himself determines the value of all things "the kingdom of God"; ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche
... there a life of your own? With all your powers you must live at the whim of other cultures. Where is your culture? Where is your own purpose? In spite of all you have, your life is a parasitical one." ...
— Cubs of the Wolf • Raymond F. Jones
... into Lady Shafto's drawing-room, he saw many ladies, but only one gentleman, who was, the before-mentioned Dr. Denton—a poor, shallow-headed, parasitical animal. Pembroke having seen enough of him to despise his pretensions both to science and sincerity, returned his wide smirk and eager inquiries with a ceremonious bow, and took his seat by the side of the now delighted Miss Dundas. ...
— Thaddeus of Warsaw • Jane Porter
... rear its young, and thereby perpetuate the species. Strangely enough, our American cuckoos are not given to such slovenly habits, but build their own nests and faithfully perform the duties of nidification, as all respectable feathered folk should. However, this parasitical habit breaks out, quite unexpectedly, it must be conceded, in another American family of birds entirely ...
— Our Bird Comrades • Leander S. (Leander Sylvester) Keyser
... turn of the river we discovered objects of great interest. The dense and nearly impenetrable forest itself occupied our chief attention; magnificent trees, altogether new to us, were anchored to the ground by bush-rope, convolvuli, and parasitical plants of every variety. The flowers of these cause the woods to appear as if hung with garlands. Pre-eminent above the others was the towering and majestic Mora, its trunk spread out into buttresses; on its top would be seen the king of the vultures expanding ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 578 - Vol. XX, No. 578. Saturday, December 1, 1832 • Various
... finished product of modern capitalism. He is the perfect proletarian type—possessionless, homeless, and rebellious. He is the reverse side of the gilded medal of present day society. On the one side is the third generation idle rich—arrogant and parasitical, and on the other, the actual producer, economically helpless and denied access to the means of production unless he "beg his lordly fellow worm to give him leave to toil," as Robert ...
— The Centralia Conspiracy • Ralph Chaplin
... mothers, soon returning, fluttered down, they did not attack the booby, but protected their little ones by covering them with body and wings. Conviction came upon me that it was instinctive for the booby to kill the parasitical rabihorcado; and likewise instinctive for the rabihorcado to preserve the life ...
— Tales of Fishes • Zane Grey
... honest, true and straightforward. In matters of commerce they are men of their word. They are clear-headed, honest-minded, and keen in their desire for knowledge. Their natural simple common sense enables them to clear away all parasitical and traditional rubbish from their minds, and to stand before us as men of the highest excellence. All happiness and ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... In fact, it was almost on the boil; and yet in this tank a number of women were ducking their hens—not, as might be supposed, dead ones, in order to scald off their feathers, but live fowls, to rid them, as they said, of parasitical insects, and make them feel more comfortable! As the water was almost hot enough to parboil the poor birds, and as the women held them in it immersed to the necks, the comfort of the thing—so thought our travellers—was rather a ...
— Bruin - The Grand Bear Hunt • Mayne Reid
... country. His call is supposed to bode rain. Why do other birds, the robin for instance, often make war upon the cuckoo, chasing it from the vicinity of their nests? There seems to be something about the cuckoo that makes its position among the birds rather anomalous. Is it at times a parasitical bird, dropping its eggs into other birds' nests? Or is there some suggestion of the hawk about our species as well as about the European? I do not know. I only know that it seems to be regarded with a suspicious ...
— The Wit of a Duck and Other Papers • John Burroughs
... special action, and even though it derive its stimulus to activity from other parts, yet alone effects the actual performance of duties. . . . Every single epithelial and muscular fibre-cell leads a sort of parasitical existence in relation to the rest of the body. . . . Every single bone corpuscle really possesses conditions of nutrition peculiar to itself.' Each element, as Sir J. Paget remarks, lives its appointed time, and then dies, and is replaced after ...
— Life and Habit • Samuel Butler
... "Blacks of exceptional quality," like the two gentlemen he has specially mentioned, "will avail themselves of opportunities to rise." Most certainly they will, Mr. Froude—but, for the present, only in America, where those opportunities are really free and open to all. There no parasitical non-workers are to be found, eager to eat bread, but in the sweat of other people's brows; no impecunious title-bearers; no importunate bores, nor other similar characters whom the Government there would ...
— West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas • J. J. (John Jacob) Thomas
... than half an hour they were so busily engaged in forcing and hewing their way through the dense, parasitical undergrowth that they had no attention to spare for anything else; but at length they became conscious of certain discordant sounds, reaching their ears above the roar of the rapids, which presently became distinguishable as the beating of drums, mingled with a sort of braying bellow, ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... the horizon. Here they beheld trees of that stupendous growth seen only in the equinoctial regions. Some were so large, that sixteen men could hardly encompass them with extended arms! 4 The wood was thickly matted with creepers and parasitical vines, which hung in gaudy-colored festoons from tree to tree, clothing them in a drapery beautiful to the eye, but forming an impenetrable network. At every step of their way, they were obliged to hew ...
— History Of The Conquest Of Peru • William Hickling Prescott
... heights above them, continue round the coast for six hundred miles or more northward of Cape Horn, till, in the more northern and warmer latitudes, they give place to semi-tropical vegetation. Now stately trees of various kinds appear, with smooth and highly-coloured bark, loaded with parasitical plants; while large and elegant ferns, and numerous and arborescent grasses, entwine the trees into one entangled mass. Palm-trees appear in latitude 37 degrees; and an arborescent grass, very like the bamboo, three ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... a sort of parasite, Professor Sanborn, the "Consulting Naturalist" of Andover, Massachusetts, informs me that he has discovered as many as four or five parasitical worms preying upon the inside tissues of the minute ...
— Four Months in a Sneak-Box • Nathaniel H. Bishop
... then again we made our way close along the edge. The water was clear and bright, and the sun shone directly down upon the channel, which had now assumed the character of an igarape, the trees by it adorned with numberless creepers and parasitical plants, covered with gaily-coloured flowers, which hung in fantastic wreaths from the boughs. I felt that a swim would be very enjoyable. Being somewhat warm, however, I rested on an overhanging bough before taking off my trousers to plunge in, ...
— The Wanderers - Adventures in the Wilds of Trinidad and Orinoco • W.H.G. Kingston
... On replying in the negative, and remarking that it was altogether unsuitable for such a purpose, he rejoined, that, previously to that event, it was a large strong tree, but subsequently had been doomed to have only a parasitical (not that he ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 183, April 30, 1853 • Various
... may become approved in the building up of the Church, is that of impressing the demands of Jesus Christ upon those who bear His name. Preaching needs to be more exacting than it is. There are vast multitudes in the Church whose religious life—if indeed they have such a life—is absolutely parasitical. They render no service; they offer no sacrifice; their only confession of faith is a more or less intermittent attendance at the public sessions of worship. By such people, one has humourously said, the Church seems to be regarded as a Pullman car bound for glory. Their chief desires are ...
— The Message and the Man: - Some Essentials of Effective Preaching • J. Dodd Jackson
... able to inform language by some strange means other than the choice and arrangement of words and phrases. Real novelty of vocabulary is impossible; in the matter of language we lead a parasitical existence, and are always quoting. Quotations, conscious or unconscious, vary in kind according as the mind is active to work upon them and make them its own. In its grossest and most servile form quotation is a lazy folly; a thought has ...
— Style • Walter Raleigh
... qualities which add to their intrinsic value, instead of expending it in the struggle for existence. Given, thus, free access to the soil and sunshine, with needful nourishment supplied and their fungous or parasitical enemies destroyed, the domesticated plants yield trustful obedience to the protecting hand of the husbandman. Freed altogether from the necessity of self-protection they become prolific and pour into the world's bread basket ...
— The Stewardship of the Soil - Baccalaureate Address • John Henry Worst
... he told me that they were not all graybacks. There is a great variety of species, but they all belong to the same parasitical family, and wage a non-discriminating warfare upon the soldiery on both sides of No-man's-Land. Germans, British, French, Belgians ...
— Kitchener's Mob - Adventures of an American in the British Army • James Norman Hall
... existence. Never was a man more constrainedly benevolent, and less recompensed for pecuniary sacrifice by applauding conscience, than the doomed inhabitant of Alhambra Villa. In the utter failure of his attempts to discover Sophy, or to induce Jasper to accept Colonel Morley's proposals, he saw this parasitical monster fixed upon his entrails, like the vulture on those of the classic sufferer in mythological tales. Jasper, indeed, had accommodated himself to this regular and unlaborious mode of gaining "sa pauvre vie." To call ...
— What Will He Do With It, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... miles to Rio Macao, which lasted eighteen days. Here I first saw a tropical forest in all its sublime grander—nothing but the reality can give any idea how wonderful, how magnificent the scene is. If I was to specify any one thing I should give the pre-eminence to the host of parasitical plants. Your engraving is exactly true, but underrates rather than exaggerates the luxuriance. I never experienced such intense delight. I formerly admired Humboldt, I now almost adore him; he alone gives any notion of the feelings which are raised in the mind on first entering the Tropics. ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... seat; and some parasitical plant with a deep red flower, had twined round the withered boughs, and mingled ...
— A Love Story • A Bushman
... The third parasitical disease common in some parts of the United States has received much attention during this last year and is known as the hookworm disease. It is a new discovery in medical science, and whereas the physical condition of ...
— Rural Hygiene • Henry N. Ogden
... instincts of his race and those of his genius, weighed down by the burden of a parasitical past, which covered him with a crust that he could not break through, he floundered along, and was much nearer than he thought to all that he shunned and banned. All his compositions were a mixture of truth ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... a somewhat similar fig (VALIDINERVIS) growing in the locality and displaying, though not in such a cruel manner, parasitical tendencies. Passing from green to orange with deep red spots to rich purple, the fruit—about the size of an average grape—indicates arrival at maturity by the exudation of a drop of nectar. Clear as crystal, the nectar partially solidifies. Fragrant and luscious, pendant from the polished ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... the meantime Dick learned more about his acquaintance on all sides: heard of his yacht, his chaise and four, his brief season of celebrity amid a more confiding population, his daughter, of whom he loved to whimper in his cups, his sponging, parasitical, nameless way of life; and with each new detail something that was not merely interest nor yet altogether affection grew up in his mind towards this disreputable stepson of the arts. Ere he left Paris ...
— Tales and Fantasies • Robert Louis Stevenson
... which was the old conception of marriage, is quite obsolete. It has given way to the triangular theory, by which a new element, in the shape of a parasitical adorer, has been introduced into the holy state. Matrimony, as reconstituted by fashionable scholiasts, comprises husband, wife, and, to relieve the tedium of the situation, a good-looking appendage of the male sex, who is an agreeable companion ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... canoe. In most places it was a slough of soft mud, where man might not tread, nor any kind of water-craft make way. Over it, at all times, hung the obscurity of twilight. The solar rays, however bright above, could not penetrate its close canopy of cypress tops, loaded with that strangest of parasitical plants—the tillandsia usneoides. ...
— The Death Shot - A Story Retold • Mayne Reid
... her in the air, singing all the time. The homely object of his passion always appears utterly indifferent to this curious and pretty performance; yet she must be even more impressionable than most female birds, since she continues scattering about her parasitical and often wasted eggs during ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 3 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... microscopic organisms. They are widely diffused in the natural world, existing independently and also in a parasitical way, in connection with larger forms of organic life. They multiply with the greatest rapidity. On the whole, the bacterium fulfills its vital offices in two ways, or with two results; first, fermentation, and ...
— Notable Events of the Nineteenth Century - Great Deeds of Men and Nations and the Progress of the World • Various
... to carry its parasitical burden of hydrogen and helium, like Sindbad in the clasp of the Old Man of the Sea! Surely, the human imagination is never so wonderful as when it bears an astronomer on its wings. Yet it must be admitted that the ...
— Pleasures of the telescope • Garrett Serviss
... island, exactly upon the border of the schistus district, as will be described in the natural history of that island. This pudding-stone is composed of gravel formed of the hardest parts of the schistus and granite or porphyry mountains. That compound parasitical stone has been also again cemented by heat and fusion; I have a specimen in which there is a clear demonstration of that fact. One of the water-worn stones which had been rounded by attrition, has in this pudding-stone been broken and shifted, the one half ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 1 (of 4) • James Hutton
... significance of scientific science lies in this alone. It has now become a distributer of diplomas for idleness; for it alone, in its sanctuaries, selects and determines what is parasitical, and what is organic activity, in the social organism. Just as though every man could not find this out for himself much more accurately and more speedily, by taking counsel of his reason and his conscience. It seems to men of scientific science, ...
— What To Do? - thoughts evoked by the census of Moscow • Count Lyof N. Tolstoi
... of, the plaything of; under one's orders, under one's command, under one's thumb; a slave to; at the mercy of; in the power of, in the hands of, in the clutches of; at the feet of; at one's beck and call &c. (obedient) 743; liable &c. 177; parasitical; stipendiary. Adv. under. Phr. "slaves - in a land of light and ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... anus, terminating at a point where the intestine seems enlarged. The length of the intestines, large and small, was 90 feet; circumference generally about 2 inches. Thousands and tens of thousands of parasitical worms were found in the stomach, but none in the intestine. In the stomach also we found four mandibles of the cuttlefish, but no remains of anything in the intestines, ...
— Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society - Vol. 3 - Zoology • Various
... And yet it is not a distinct power, made up of elements unknown to the other three; any more than a sphere contains elements other than those referable to the three co-ordinates, which determine the position of every point in space. The Fourth Power is parasitical to the three others; and lives upon their life, without any separate existence. One portion of it forms a part, which may be termed an integral part, of the House of Lords, another of the House of Commons; and the two conjointly, nestling within the precinct of Royalty, ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph
... relative to luxury, wages, machinery; to the pretended tyranny of capital; to colonies, outlets, population; to emigration, association, imposts, and loans, have encumbered the field of Science with a crowd of parasitical arguments,—Sophisms, whose rank growth calls for the ...
— Sophisms of the Protectionists • Frederic Bastiat
... unmeaning. It fails to conceive its own interests or the situations that might support or defeat those interests. If it pictures anything clearly, it is only some phantastic image which in no way represents its own complex basis. Thus the parasitical human mind, finding what clear knowledge it has laughably insufficient to interpret its destiny, takes to neglecting knowledge altogether and to hugging instead various irrational ideas. On the one hand it lapses into dreams which, while ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... one of the sketches I took in Cornwall two or three miles from the Land's End. It is a poor, unhappy furze-bush, covered with dodder. The dodder is what is called a parasitical plant; that is, a plant that lives entirely on another. There are several kinds of dodders: some live entirely on flax, some on nettles, but those that stick to clover and furze-bushes are the ...
— Woodside - or, Look, Listen, and Learn. • Caroline Hadley
... from accents of ardent love to those of glad fruition, when the sonnet to his "mistress's eyebrow" is shortly to give place to the lullaby, then, like the "worm i' the bud," the cow-bird begins her parasitical career. How many thousands are the bird homes which are blasted in ...
— My Studio Neighbors • William Hamilton Gibson
... birds' nest—in Selborne Hanger under the shady beeches, to whose roots it seems to be parasitical, at the north-west end ...
— The Natural History of Selborne, Vol. 2 • Gilbert White
... replied Jervis. "I have become parasitical on Thorndyke! 'The big fleas have little fleas,' you know. I am the additional fraction trailing after the whole number in the rear of ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman
... every branch and twig of the dead tree, and clothing it, as it were, with a second but a new kind of foliage. This lichen will sometimes hang down from the branches in strings of weeping vegetation to the length of five feet and more. You may sometimes ride under the living tree where this parasitical foliage is mixed with the real covering of the boughs, forming the most anomalous, and yet the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various
... Archipelago. An awning was spread over its spacious deck, under which we lived like a swarm of flies, fifty in number, feeding on detestable provender, and sleeping in beds remarkable for uncleanness and their innumerable parasitical tenants. The place marked on our route to be first visited was that part of the Island of Marmora containing the quarries which have supplied Constantinople with building materials from time immemorial; but in reference to the precise spot where they were to be found, there were as many opinions ...
— Journal of a Visit to Constantinople and Some of the Greek Islands in the Spring and Summer of 1833 • John Auldjo
... He studies the parasitical habit of the cuckoo and hits on an explanation of it. He speculates why the partridges and deer in South America are ...
— The Last Harvest • John Burroughs
... parasitical, his discourse full of precedents, quotations, classic scenes, and historic allusions, sometimes savoring of schoolboy recitations, sophomoric and declamatory, stilted and grotesque. Yet he is in the list of wonderful men. Others thought ...
— Senatorial Character - A Sermon in West Church, Boston, Sunday, 15th of March, - After the Decease of Charles Sumner. • C. A. Bartol
... plain, they entered the heart of the mountains, and every point as they advanced, disclosed to them heights of rugged magnificence. The valleys were clothed with bright and luxuriant verdure, and flowering parasitical plants wound along the trunks of spreading trees. This beautiful spot, however, abounded in scorpions and panthers. Next day they approached the Fellatah town of Dirkulla. Boo Khaloom and his Arabs, with Barca Gana, and one hundred of his bravest warriors, began the attack, while ...
— Life and Travels of Mungo Park in Central Africa • Mungo Park
... the mighty corpse of what had once been an ancestral tree. He remembered how it had stood there, bleakly, under the morning sunlight,—its myriad spreading branches and twigs long since killed by the tons of parasitical gray moss which festooned its every inch of surface with long trailing masses ...
— Black Caesar's Clan • Albert Payson Terhune
... by its signs. These were madness, melancholy, sometimes dumbness, sometimes fits and convulsions; the man was dominated by an alien power; there was a strange, awful double consciousness; 'We are many,' 'My name is Legion.' There was absolute control by this alien power, which like some parasitical worm had rooted itself within the poor wretch, and there lived upon his blood and life juices—only that it lived in the spirit, dominated the will, and ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... continued, with the shore presenting a succession of lovely pictures which could be enjoyed from the boat far more than while trudging over the sand. Groves of cocoa-nut trees, and beyond them the dense green of the jungle, with, as they progressed, piled-up rocks, black, dark-brown, and glorious with parasitical and creeping growths. ...
— Mother Carey's Chicken - Her Voyage to the Unknown Isle • George Manville Fenn
... to cluster along its extent, and take away all hardness from the outline; and so the whole stone fence looks as if God had had at least as much to do with it as man. The trunks of the trees, too, exhibit a similar parasitical vegetation. Parasitical is an unkind phrase to bestow on this beautiful love and kindness which seems to exist here between one plant and another; the strong thing—being always ready to give support and sustenance, and the weak thing to repay with beauty, so ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... seen springing up, a full crop, from the old Poor-law, the Commission of 1831 presented a report which left no alternative but a sweeping measure of reform of the parochial life if England was to be saved from its own children, who, living a parasitical life, were eating away the vitals of that upon which they thrived. Salvation from within the parish was now well-nigh impossible. So the new Poor-law of 1834 swept away the parish as a unit of Poor-law administration—the Churchwardens and Overseers were no longer to meet after ...
— Fragments of Two Centuries - Glimpses of Country Life when George III. was King • Alfred Kingston
... we went on over a smooth sea, at the rate of about three knots an hour. For two days I continued my course to the southward, upon my novel conveyance, during which I had nothing to eat except a few small barnacles, and some parasitical vermin, peculiar to the animal, which I discovered under his fins. I also found a small remora, or sucking fish, near his tail, but when I put it to my mouth, it fixed itself so firmly on both my lips that I thought they were sealed for ever. No force could ...
— The Pacha of Many Tales • Captain Frederick Marryat
... pursue the same ignoble superstition, which, in fact, under Romish hands, soon crept like a parasitical plant over Christianity itself, until it had nearly strangled its natural vigor, back into times far preceding that of the fathers. Spite of all that could be wrought by Heaven, for the purpose of continually ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... to it as cottage or mill, such elements of sublimity—complex light and shade, varied color, undulatory form, and so on—as can generally be found only in noble natural objects, woods, rocks, or mountains. This sublimity, belonging in a parasitical manner to the building, renders it, in the usual sense ...
— Modern Painters, Volume IV (of V) • John Ruskin
... clumsily made. On the 21st June last a boy brought me a nest of this species containing eight eggs. Two, if not three, of this clutch are easily separable from the others, being more oval and somewhat smaller, and are unquestionably parasitical eggs; but it is quite impossible to say whether they belong to ...
— The Nests and Eggs of Indian Birds, Volume 1 • Allan O. Hume
... form an idea. We dismounted from our mules, and my guide threw back, on either side, the low-hanging branches, and cut through the thick web of creepers; while, one moment, we were obliged to climb over broken trunks, or squeeze ourselves between others, at the next we sank knee-deep among endless parasitical plants. I began almost to despair of ever effecting a passage, and, even up to the present day, am at a loss to understand how we succeeded in escaping ...
— A Woman's Journey Round the World • Ida Pfeiffer
... carbonaceous matter is produced, and at length a soil is formed, in which grass can fix its roots. In the crevices of walls, where this soil is washed down, even the seeds of trees grow, and, gradually as a building becomes more ruined, ivy and other parasitical plants cover it. Even the animal creation lends its aid in the process of destruction when man no longer labours for the conservation of his works. The fox burrows amongst ruins, bats and birds nestle in the cavities in walls, the snake and the lizard likewise make them their habitation. Insects ...
— Consolations in Travel - or, the Last Days of a Philosopher • Humphrey Davy
... women permit as much of their interest and affection and effort and occupation of mind to go out towards the world and worldly things, as, alas! most of us do, no wonder if the tiny, yellow, rather than green, blade is choked and gets covered with parasitical disease, and perhaps dies at last. You cannot grow two crops on one field. Some of us have tried; it will never do. It must be one thing or another, and we must make up our minds whether we are going to cultivate corn or thorn. May God help ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... the most numerous and the best chosen company. It is a school of humanity, the renewal of hospitality after the antique. All the poets who fall, we pick them up; all decried musicians, all the authors who are never read, all the actresses who are hissed, a parcel of beggarly, disgraced, stupid, parasitical souls, and at the head of them all I have the honour of being the brave chief of a timorous flock. It is I who exhort them to eat the first time they come, and I who ask for drink for them—they are so shy. A few young ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... the obligation on a new Jewish State, if it ever came, to safeguard these divine curios; the grotesque incongruity of all this around the tomb of the Prince of Peace, the tomb itself of very dubious authenticity, to say nothing of the thirty-six parasitical sanctities!... ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... last to the conclusion that knowledge based on reason is fallacious, and that the knowledge of truth can be secured only by living. I had come to feel that I must live a real, not a parasitical life, and that the meaning of life could be perceived only by observation of the combined lives ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol X • Various
... be built. "Dress the face". Zeyd would answer, "to this part", showing her with his hands the south, for if his booth's face be all day turned to the hot sun there will come in fewer young loitering and parasitical fellows that would be his coffee-drinkers. Since the sheukh, or heads, alone receive their tribes' surra, it is not much that they should be to the arms [of his] coffee-hosts. I have seen Zeyd avoid [them] as he saw them approach, or even rise ungraciously ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... out the vine-simile, I might as well add at once that, in the end, the parasitical plant has triumphed, and stifled the sterner growth. In other words, ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... esteem in which it was held by the Druids, we have written in page 127. This parasitical plant was regarded as a charm of no ordinary virtue. But the misletoe was only one of many articles they had ...
— The Mysteries of All Nations • James Grant
... in England. The road through a succession of woody country; trees covered with every variety of blossom, and loaded with the most delicious tropical fruits; flowers of every colour filling the air with fragrance, and the most fantastical profusion of parasitical plants intertwining the branches of the trees, and flinging their bright blossoms over every bough. Palms, cocoas, oranges, lemons, succeeded one another, and at one turn of the road, down in a lovely green valley, we caught a glimpse of an Indian woman, with her long hair, resting under ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... name; and, as the climax of his offences, that he dishonored the purple— aischrois epitdeumasin—by the baseness of his pursuits. All that is true, and more than that. But these considerations were not of a nature to affect his parasitical attendants very nearly or keenly. Yet the story runs—that Marcia, his privileged mistress, deeply affected by the anticipation of some further outrages upon his high dignity which he was then meditating, had carried the importunity of her deprecations too ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... the dedication tells us, for schools and colleges, and a little of the pedantry and ample leisure of a teacher who has his audience safe under his own control is apparent in them. Little goes without saying; the whole story is told; yet it is always easy to put aside the parasitical growth and get at the solid and useful idea. The book was not written for critics who desire to have everything summed up in a single sentence, and who are apt to praise the volumes which encumber the book-seller's shelves ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, September, 1885 • Various
... is little doubt but that some of the recorded instances of natural or artificial grafting of plants of distant botanical affinities are untrustworthy, yet the instances of adhesion between widely different plants are too numerous and too well attested to allow of doubt. Moreover, when parasitical plants are considered, such as the Orobanches, the Cuscutas, and specially the mistleto (Viscum), which may be found growing on plants of very varied botanical relationship, the occurrence of occasional adhesion between ...
— Vegetable Teratology - An Account of the Principal Deviations from the Usual Construction of Plants • Maxwell T. Masters
... together. I am no great hand at describing scenery. I remember it was wild in the extreme—blue ranges of hills and deep valleys, and plains partly cultivated, but mostly left in a state of nature overgrown with giant ceybas, between which were seen in rich profusion every species of parasitical plant twining and twisting and hanging in drooping wreaths, which monkeys converted into swings, while humming-birds at the pendant ends built their tiny nests. Then there were mango thickets, which as we journeyed among them, with their dense ...
— Hurricane Hurry • W.H.G. Kingston
... a tall tree in the vain hope of catching sight of Leith's party as it crossed the small cleared spaces in the middle of the impenetrable growth, but nothing except the green plain of bushy tops and parasitical creepers was visible. As we waited beneath the tree the "ticking" of a wood bug sounded like hammer blows in the tremendous quietude, while the bursting of a pod reminded one of the beginning of a Fourth of July celebration. We had lost all trace of Leith, ...
— The White Waterfall • James Francis Dwyer
... necessarily inherent to his condition, and consequently that this vast multitude in society remain ever in an irrecoverably ungovernable state. We discover only the cunning depredator of the household; the tip-toe spy, at all corners—all ear, all eye: the parasitical knave—the flatterer of the follies, and even the eager participator of the crimes, of his superior. The morality of servants has not been improved by the wonderful revelations of Swift's "Directions," where the irony is too refined, while it plainly inculcates the practice. This celebrated tract, ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... fables of Jupiter and Juno, of Apollo and Minerva, of Venus and Bacchus. "Through the rank and poisonous vegetation of mythic phraseology, we may always catch a glimpse of an original stem round which it creeps and winds itself, and without which it can not enjoy that parasitical existence which has been ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... nationality possessing its own political institutions, governed by its own consent, and co-extensive with its natural boundaries. As we shall see later, political development does not always stop at the Nation-State. Further growth, however, is extra-national in character; it may either take the parasitical form of one nation imposing its will and its "culture" upon other nations, or it may assume the proportions of that highest type of polity yet known to mankind, a commonwealth of nations freely associating together within the confines of a ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,
... tides of the la-goon. Its rivers are its veins; when agonized, earthquakes are its throes; it shouts in the thunder, and weeps in the shower; and as the body of a bison is covered with hair, so Mardi is covered with grasses and vegetation, among which, we parasitical things do but crawl, vexing and tormenting the patient creature to which we cling. Nor yet, hath it recovered from the pain of the first foundation that was laid. Mardi is alive to its axis. When you pour water, does ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville
... discovered three different new species of Heath, one bearing a yellow blossom, the two others a red and purple one;—also, a beautiful new Kalmia, and several extraordinary parasitical plants, bearing some resemblance to the pineapple plant, growing on the eastern side of the cyprus tree in swamps, about 6 or 10 feet ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 19, Issue 546, May 12, 1832 • Various
... itself the germ of a great many infectious diseases which develop spontaneously in certain conditions; for instance, that tuberculosis is the result of fatigue, privations, and physiological miseries. Well, recently it has been admitted, that is to say, the revolutionists admit, a parasitical origin for these diseases, and in France and Germany there is an army looking for these parasites. I am a soldier in this army, and to help me in these researches I established a laboratory in the dining-room. It is to the parasites of tuberculosis ...
— Conscience, Complete • Hector Malot
... formidable competition for this purpose—the competition of those employers who habitually undercut them by the worst processes of sweating. I cannot believe that the process of raising the degenerate and parasitical portion of these trades up to the level of the most efficient branches of the trade, if it is conducted by those conversant with the conditions of the trade and interested in it, will necessarily result in an increase of the price of the ultimate product. It may, even as ...
— Liberalism and the Social Problem • Winston Spencer Churchill
... instead of being green, were of a deep, rich crimson hue, or a fine ruddy bronze, like that of the copper beech. And, as though this were not in itself enough of beauty, many of the more sombre foliaged trees were draped and festooned in riotous profusion with parasitic creepers, the blooms upon which would have driven a painter to distraction, so rich and varied were their tints, while the shapes of some of them were fantastic enough to suggest that Dame Nature must have been under the influence of a nightmare when she formed them. A few of them were ...
— In Search of El Dorado • Harry Collingwood
... come) imperatively demands expression, and that only in connection with the concepts directly affected (there is, for instance, no need to be informed that the whiteness is a doing or doer's whiteness[60]). The other relational concepts are either merely parasitic (gender throughout; number in the demonstrative, the adjective, the relative, and the verb) or irrelevant to the essential syntactic form of the sentence (number in the noun; person; tense). An intelligent and sensitive Chinaman, ...
— Language - An Introduction to the Study of Speech • Edward Sapir
... spelling and figuring, together with attainment of a certain amount of muscular dexterity, "essentials." Such conditions also infect the education called liberal, with illiberality. They imply a somewhat parasitic cultivation bought at the expense of not having the enlightenment and discipline which come from concern with the deepest problems of common humanity. A curriculum which acknowledges the social responsibilities of education must present situations where problems are relevant to the ...
— Democracy and Education • John Dewey
... met with a terrible reverse at Ticonderoga, where the American militia had outnumbered the old-country regulars by half as much again. Nevertheless Boston built a 'stately bonfire,' which made a 'lofty and prodigious blaze'; while Philadelphia, despite its parasitic Quakers, had a most elaborate display of fireworks representing England, Louisbourg, the siege, the capture, the triumph, and ...
— The Great Fortress - A Chronicle of Louisbourg 1720-1760 • William Wood
... behind the front, and pointed—a formidable looking weapon. The object, probably, of these rhinoceros-birds, as they may be called, in thus pitching on his body, was to feed upon the ticks, and other parasitic insects, which swarm upon those animals. They also attend upon the hippopotamus, and, whether intentionally or not I cannot say, often thus give him warning of danger. Presently up rose the rhinoceros and looked about him. I, unfortunately, not intending to go far from the camp, had left my rifle ...
— In the Wilds of Africa • W.H.G. Kingston
... north-west. The lower and upper sky was tolerably clear, and the sun looked cheerily down on the deep blue of the sea; but along the higher ridges of the land there lay long level strata of what the meteorologists distinguish as parasitic clouds. When every other patch of vapor in the landscape was in motion, scudding shorewards from the Atlantic before the still-increasing gale, there rested along both the Scuir of Eigg and the tall opposite ridge of the island, and along the steep peaks of Rum, clouds that seemed ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... large tree, probably because it is too windy and cold there for him; but, as soon as night draws on, he descends from the height and seeks out a fit bed in the lower and darker part, or in the leafy top of a small tree, among which he prefers Nibong Palms, Pandani, or one of those parasitic Orchids which give the primeval forests of Borneo so characteristic and striking an appearance. But wherever he determines to sleep, there he prepares himself a sort of nest: little boughs and leaves are drawn together round ...
— Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature • Thomas H. Huxley
... thrown down from their branches those singular aerial roots so common here, and seemed standing on stilts. Here and there, when we coasted along by the bank, we had a glimpse into the deeper forest, with its drapery of lianas and various creeping vines, and its parasitic sipos twining close around the trunks, or swinging themselves from branch to branch like loose cordage. But usually the margin of the lake was a gently sloping bank, covered with a green so vivid ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866 • Various
... was excellent, was quite of the parasitic order, requiring to wind itself about a stronger intellect, to keep itself in the region of fresh air and possible growth. Left to itself, its weak stem could not raise it above the ground: it would grow and mass upon the earth, ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... distances, when the fish have reached the spawning grounds, besides the usual changes of the breeding season, their bodies are covered with bruises on which patches of white fungus develop. The fins become mutilated, their eyes are often injured or destroyed; parasitic worms gather in their gills, they become extremely emaciated, their flesh becomes white from the loss of the oil, and as soon as the spawning act is accomplished, and sometimes before, all of them die. The ascent of the Cascades and the ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 275 • Various |
