"Reptilian" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... this work were: first, the remodeling of the classification of the whole type of fishes, fossil and living, and especially the separation of the Ganoids from all other fishes, under the rank of a distinct order; second, the recognition of those combinations of reptilian and bird-like characters in the earlier geological fishes, which led the author to call them prophetic types; and third, his discovery of an analogy between the embryological phases of the higher present fishes and the gradual introduction of the ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... and Rhizodus, comprising large fishes, with rhomboidal scales, unsymmetrical ("heterocercal") tails, and powerful conical teeth. These fishes are sometimes said to be "sauroid," from their presenting some Reptilian features in their organisation, and they must have been the scourges of the Carboniferous seas. The remains of Placoid fishes in the Carboniferous strata are very numerous, but consist wholly of teeth and fin-spines, referable to forms more or less ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... least one example. The pigment of a small American lizard is converted into uric acid under the prolonged action of boiling hydrochloric acid.[10] This cannot be an isolated instance; and there is reason to believe that the reptilian class daubs its garments ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... limbs, as much alike in general plan as the four legs of a lizard; subsequently the ones at the front change into real wings and the hinder ones become legs. Meanwhile the internal organs slowly transform from fishlike structures into things that display the characteristics of reptilian counterparts, and only later do they become truly avian. Last of all the finishing touches are made, and the whole creature becomes a particular kind of a bird which picks its way out of the shell and shifts for itself ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton
... menace to society," said Robert Cairn. "When I meet the reptilian glance of those black eyes of his and reflect upon what the man has attempted—what he has done—my blood boils. It is tragically funny to think that in our new wisdom we have abolished the only laws that could have touched him! He ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer
... No, Punch begs the ophidian's pardon! The slimiest slug in the filthiest garden Is not so revolting as these are, These ultra-reptilian rascals, who spy Round our homes, and, for pay, would, with treacherous eye, Find flaws in ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 98 January 11, 1890 • Various
... mammalian character, and to lay eggs. And, in further confirmation of this supposition, we find, in tracing the mammals and reptiles back through the geological record, that in the Permian and Triassic rocks there occur central forms which combine, in a most remarkable way, reptilian and ...
— Text Book of Biology, Part 1: Vertebrata • H. G. Wells |
