"Reptilian" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... The usual types of a racecourse appeared in force. Here and there were to be seen the dog-grooms leading in leash single Greyhounds or couples, shrouded in blankets, but showing their sinewy legs, their snaky necks, their shapely heads with long reptilian jaws, and their quick, nervous yellow eyes—hybrids of natural force and human ingenuity, the most wonderful running-machines ever made of flesh and blood. Their keepers guarded them like jewels, tended them like babies, and were careful to keep them from picking up odd eatables, ...
— Animal Heroes • Ernest Thompson Seton
... dragging toil—a steady pushing at a soggy, unresisting, yet heavy mass. And full concentration was imperative if anything was to be accomplished. The reptilian minds were as unstable as they were empty and would slip away unless firmly held. He stared motionlessly at his crystal, willing the huge reptiles to turn—to waddle back to the safe grasslands of the estate, far ...
— The Weakling • Everett B. Cole
... difference," Alexander said, "but it's mainly reptilian. Nothing over Group I. We'll ...
— The Lani People • J. F. Bone
... between birds and reptiles—two classes of vertebrate animals which at present appear to be more widely separated than any others. Yet the interval between them is completely filled, in the mesozoic fauna, by birds which have reptilian characters, on the one side, and reptiles which have ornithic characters, on the other. So again, while the group of fishes, termed ganoids, is, at the present time, so distinct from that of the dipnoi, or mudfishes, that they ...
— The Rise and Progress of Palaeontology - Essay #2 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... may find the modern representatives of these earliest Vertebrates. Of these two groups one consists chiefly now of the Gar-Pikes of our Western waters, though the Sturgeons share also in some of their features. In these fishes there is a singular union of reptilian with fish-like characters. The systems of circulation and of respiration in them are more complicated than in the common fishes; the structure of the skull resembles that of the skull in reptiles, and they have ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... keep one at such a height, I should never draw a sober breath again. But this is not a world of free freights. One pays according to an iron schedule—for every strength the balanced weakness; for every high a corresponding low; for every fictitious god-like moment an equivalent time in reptilian slime. For every feat of telescoping long days and weeks of life into mad magnificent instants, one must pay with shortened life, and, ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London
... that disfiguring facial defect, hare-lip, due to a failure of the three parts of which our upper jaw is built to unite properly,—this triple construction of the jaw being an echo of ancestral fishlike and reptilian times when our jaws were built in five pieces to permit of wide distention in the act of swallowing our prey alive. All over the surface of the body are to be found innumerable little sebaceous glands originally intended to lubricate hairs, ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... favors. He founded and led the Progressive Party and, in 1912, received the most amazing popular tribute in our history. And he would have pushed on his work for that party had not the coming of the World War changed his perspective. Thenceforth, he devoted himself to saving civilization from the reptilian and atrocious Hun; that was a task, in comparison with which the fortune of a political ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... reptile population spread over the earth. From one of these early reptiles the birds were evolved. Geology furnishes the missing link between the bird and the reptile in the Archaeopteryx, a bird with teeth, claws on its wings, and a reptilian tail. From another primitive reptile the important group of the mammals was evolved. We find what seem to be the transitional types in the rocks of South Africa. The scales gave way to tufts of hair, ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... a few mild tricks. Shuffle the Brogan followed Hot Back. Thorpe took all of it good-naturedly. Finally a tall individual with a thin white face, a reptilian forehead, reddish hair, and long baboon arms, suggested tossing in a blanket. Thorpe looked at the low ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... rivulet. Mean and small as it was—not larger in area inside its fringe of rushes than a fashionable drawing-room—its natural history would have formed an interesting volume; and many a half-hour have I spent beside it in the heat of the day, watching its numerous inhabitants—insect, reptilian, and vermiferous. There were two—apparently three—different species of libellula that used to come and deposit their eggs in it—one of the two, that large kind of dragon-fly (Eshna grandis), scarce smaller than one's ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... now quite a reptilian form, the oral cavity, m, has more or less of the adult outline. A transverse groove near the anterior end of the lower jaw marks off the tongue, tn; and the rudiments of teeth are seen but not shown in the figure because ...
— Development of the Digestive Canal of the American Alligator • Albert M. Reese
... And by a clever reptilian movement, which Tartlet imitated as well as he could, he managed, without showing his head above the grass, to reach the bend ...
— Godfrey Morgan - A Californian Mystery • Jules Verne
... remain poised about fifteen feet from the ground. It was a dinosaur, and belonged to the scaled or armoured species. In a few moments another head appeared, and towered several feet above the first. The head was obviously reptilian, but had a beak similar to that of their tortoise. The hind legs were developed like those of a kangaroo, while the small rudimentary forepaws, which could be used as hands or for going quadruped-fashion, now hung down. The strong thick tail was ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... in New Zealand are lizards, and a lizard-like animal called Tuatara. It is about 18 inches long, and is allied to crocodiles and turtles, as well as lizards. It is the sole representative of an ancient reptilian ...
— John Rutherford, the White Chief • George Lillie Craik
... sweetly to recommend itself unto his gentle senses, it had at least to retain certain rudimentary characteristics allying it to such "dragons of the prime" as toads and snakes. His scientific sympathies were distinctly reptilian; he loved nature's vulgarians and described himself as the Zola of zoology. His wife and daughters, not having the advantage to share his enlightened curiosity regarding the works and ways of our ill-starred ...
— Stories by Modern American Authors • Julian Hawthorne
... partook as per Mr. Clarke's suggestion, did not appeal so strongly to its taste. Swordfish steak, we feel, is probably a taste acquired by long and diligent application. At the first trial it seemed to the club a bit too reptilian in flavour. The club will go there again, and will hope to arrive in time to grab one of those tables by the windows, looking out over the docks and the United Fruit Company steamer which is so appropriately named the Banan; but it is the sense of the meeting that ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... know the man, or you wouldn't ask. There's something damnable about him—something reptilian. My gorge always rises at him. I should put him down as a man with secret vices—an evil liver. He's no fool, though. They say that he is one of the best men in his line that they have ...
— Round the Red Lamp - Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life • Arthur Conan Doyle
... of Pellucidar succeeded in overthrowing the mighty Mahars, the dominant race of reptilian monsters, and their fierce, gorilla-like soldiery, the ...
— Pellucidar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... I seen such eyes?" said Vansittart Smith to himself. "There is something saurian about them, something reptilian. There's the membrana nictitans of the snakes," he mused, bethinking himself of his zoological studies. "It gives a shiny effect. But there was something more here. There was a sense of power, of wisdom—so I read them—and of weariness, utter weariness, and ineffable despair. It may be all imagination, ...
— The Captain of the Pole-Star and Other Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... special Australian type. . . . come the bush-turkeys or mound-makers . . . all these birds have the curious reptilian character of never sitting on their eggs, which they bury under mounds of earth or decaying vegetable matter, allowing them to be hatched by the heat of the sun, or that ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris
... and now overworked, meaning a task, or performance in one's trade, or calling,—doubtless a variant of stint, without that word's suggestion of allotment and limitation. It is still in the reptilian stage of evolution. ...
— Write It Right - A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults • Ambrose Bierce
... gong-stroke of the following day Kai Lung was finally brought up for judgment in accordance with the venomous scheme of the reptilian Ming-shu. In order to obscure their guilty plans all justice-loving persons were excluded from the court, so that when the story-teller was led in by a single guard he saw before him only the two whose enmity he faced, and one who stood at a distance ...
— Kai Lung's Golden Hours • Ernest Bramah
... suggested tentatively, forming a mind picture of the vicious reptilian danger which the colonists tried to kill on sight whenever and wherever encountered. His hand went to the knife at his belt. One met with weapons only that hissing hatred motivated by a brainless ferocity which did not ...
— Star Born • Andre Norton
... brilliantly coloured lizard, has the back of its tail armed with plates. These it has a habit of rubbing together, and by this means it produces a shrill, chirruping sound, which actually attracts crickets and grasshoppers toward the noise, so that they fall easy prey to this reptilian trapper. So in colour, sound, motion, and many other ways, animals act and react upon each other, a useful and necessary habit being perverted by an enemy, so that the death of the creature results. Yet it would never be claimed that the lizard ...
— The Log of the Sun - A Chronicle of Nature's Year • William Beebe
... fish there are in Reelfoot. Here, bigger than anywhere else, you find the garfish, all bones and appetite and horny plates, with a snout like an alligator, the nearest link, naturalists say, between the animal life of today and the animal life of the Reptilian Period. The shovel-nose cat, really a deformed kind of freshwater sturgeon, with a great fan-shaped membranous plate jutting out from his nose like a bowsprit, jumps all day in the quiet places with mighty splashing sounds, as though a horse ...
— The Escape of Mr. Trimm - His Plight and other Plights • Irvin S. Cobb
... period which has been so deservedly called "the age of reptiles," not only did many huge species of the class stalk over the land (either browsing on its foliage or preying on their fellows), and many others swarm in the then existing waters, but it shows us that the atmosphere also had its reptilian tenants. Flying reptiles which formed the now extinct order, Pterosauria, and which were some of small, some of very large size, as truly "flew" as do the bats of our own day fly, and by a very similar ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... organisms as must have existed in the past if the succession of life on the globe has been an unbroken lineal succession. Here are reptiles with bat-like wings, and others with bird-like pelves and legs adapted for bipedal locomotion. Here are birds with teeth, and other reptilian characters. In short, what with reptilian birds and birdlike reptiles, the gap between modern reptiles and birds is quite bridged over. In a similar way, various diverse mammalian forms, as the tapir, the rhinoceros, ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... There's probably another one," he said; and soon, by the same reptilian methods, was back for another try. There was another one, and yet another, and then a little fellow, barely hooked. "That's all," said Jonathan, as he rose to put him back into the pool, and we watched the pretty spotted creature fling himself ...
— More Jonathan Papers • Elisabeth Woodbridge
... shades of black, brown, and olive, and these are all nocturnal reptiles, and there can be little doubt conceal themselves during the day in holes, so that the green protective tint would be useless to them, and they accordingly retain the more usual reptilian hues. ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - The Naturalist as Interpreter and Seer • Various
... asserted, most frequently by superficial observers, however, that the reptilian psychos is exceedingly low; this is a popular error, for many reptiles give evidence, on occasions, of a, comparatively speaking, high degree of intelligence. Especially is this true in regard ...
— The Dawn of Reason - or, Mental Traits in the Lower Animals • James Weir
... reptiles have 4 feet, some 2, some none. All birds have two feet. The bird's structure is so well suited for flight and shows the marks of design so clearly, that the clumsy aeroplane is but a poor imitation. Yet to link the 12,000 species of birds to their unknown reptilian ancestors, they show us two fossils of the archaeopteryx, as the sum total of the evidence showing the transition from reptiles to birds. The fossil varies slightly but not essentially from other birds. It has a feathered ...
— The Evolution Of Man Scientifically Disproved • William A. Williams
... mythical, represented according to locality by some known animal which seems to indicate best the mythical conception. Some figures evidently refer to the alligator, and others apparently to the iguana; that on plates 4 and 5 of the Dresden Codex is purely mythical, but contains reptilian characteristics. ...
— Day Symbols of the Maya Year • Cyrus Thomas
... Triassic Reptiles are scattered and disconnected; no complete skeleton has yet been discovered, nor has any foot been found; so that no direct comparison can be made with the steps. It is, however, my belief, from all we know of the character of the Animal Kingdom in those days, that these animals were reptilian, but combined, like so many of the early types, characters of their own class with those of higher animals yet to come. It seems to me probable, that, in those tracks where one toe is turned backward, the impression is made not by a toe, but by a heel, or by a long sole projecting backward; ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... to a conclusion. Carlie and Georgie bowed; Marjorie Jones and Baby Rennsdale curtesied, and there was loud applause. In fact, the demonstration became so uproarious that some measure of it was open to suspicion, especially as hisses of reptilian venomousness were commingled with it, and also a hoarse but vociferous repetition of the dastard words, "Carrie dances ROTTEN!" Again it was the work of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern; but the plot was ...
— Penrod and Sam • Booth Tarkington
... congregated within view. All the bottom area round the water-edge was alive with their young ones, and with hideous mothers brooding upon their leathery, yellowish eggs. From this crawling flapping mass of obscene reptilian life came the shocking clamor which filled the air and the mephitic, horrible, musty odor which turned us sick. But above, perched each upon its own stone, tall, gray, and withered, more like dead and dried specimens than ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... first part of the reptilian time shades insensibly into the second part, called the Cretaceous, which immediately follows it. During this period the lands were undergoing perpetual changes; rather deep seas came to cover much of the land surfaces, and there is some reason to believe ...
— Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) - Wonders of Earth, Sea and Sky • Various
... admirers would have been much assisted. It might have been wished that the scourge of Italian wickedness and "Champion of the honour of women" had had a less miserable leg, and only the normal sum of toes; that his mouth had been of a less reptilian width of slit, his nose and head of a less exorbitant outline. But the thin leg rested on cloth of gold and pearls, and the face was only an interruption of a few square inches in the midst of black velvet and gold, and the blaze of rubies, and the brilliant tints of ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... coiffure of the women, its main interest is of a somewhat different kind. Two figures are rudely drawn on the inside of the basin, one of which represents a woman, the other, judging from the character of the posterior extremity of the body, a reptilian conception in which a single foreleg is depicted, and the tail is articulated at the end, recalling a rattlesnake. Upon the head is a single feather;[128] the two eyes are represented on one side of the head, and the line of the alimentary tract is roughly drawn. The figure is represented as ...
— Archeological Expedition to Arizona in 1895 • Jesse Walter Fewkes
... and his two eyes are deeply sunken in his head. He is clean-shaven, pale, and ascetic-looking, retaining something of the professor in his features. His shoulders are rounded from much study, and his face protrudes forward, and is forever slowly oscillating from side to side in a curiously reptilian fashion. He peered at me with great curiosity in ...
— Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... 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
... children bitterly and wipes out her surplus of human life as she destroys the overproduction of beast and bird, of insect and reptilian life. She inspires the minds of men with an overmastering desire for possessions. She hides her wealth in inaccessible places and sets her jealous, invisible forces to guard and determinedly hold all possible ...
— Insights and Heresies Pertaining to the Evolution of the Soul • Anna Bishop Scofield
... he does. We are great friends." Would there always be women like that in the world, she asked herself—women whose horizon ended with the beginning of sex? It was a feminine type that seemed to her as archaic as some reptilian bird of the primeval forests. How long would it be, she wondered, before it would survive only in the dry bones of genealogical scandals? As she looked after Rose Stribling's bright green car, ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... order. We know of at 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 with ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre
... between the pointed teeth. The leader holds. The natives haul at the line as sailors haul at a halliard. Soon there emerges from the churning waters a long and incredibly ugly snout, followed by a low, reptilian head, with venomous, heavy-lidded, scarlet eyes, a body as broad as a row-boat and armored with horny scales, and finally a tremendous tail, twice as long as an elephant's trunk and twice as powerful, that spells ...
— Where the Strange Trails Go Down • E. Alexander Powell
... take the rude outline of sail in Fig. 3, and now considering it as a jib of one of our own sailing vessels, slightly exaggerate the loops at the edge, and draw curved lines from them to the opposite point, Fig. 4; and I have a reptilian or dragon's wing, which would, with some ramification of the supporting ribs, become a bat's or moth's; that is to say, an extension of membrane between the ribs (as in an umbrella), which will catch the wind, ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... may fairly say, from the evidence before us, that there have been two Augustan Ages of big animals in the history of our earth—the Jurassic period, which was the zenith of the reptilian type, and the Pliocene, which was the zenith of the colossal terrestrial tertiary mammals. I say on purpose, 'from the evidence before us,' because, as I shall go on to explain hereafter, I do not myself believe that any one age has much surpassed ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... Gardens that an official of a large hospital in the neighbourhood was sent there yesterday to enquire how soon it would be safe for the convalescent patients to resume their daily airing in the Park, as to the probabilities of further lethal reptilian monsters ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... returned no answer, but smiled rather peculiarly and sat down beside him. Before many minutes he was able to distinguish the shapes and colors of the flying monsters. They were not birds, but creatures with long, snakelike bodies, and ten reptilian legs apiece, terminating in fins which acted as wings. The bodies were of bright blue, the legs and fins were yellow. They were flying, without haste, but in a somewhat ominous fashion, straight toward them. He could make out a long, thin ...
— A Voyage to Arcturus • David Lindsay
... on heat!" Arcot said. "I've noticed that he seems almost cold-blooded; his body is at the temperature of the room at all times. In a sense, he is reptilian, but he's vastly more efficient and greatly different than any reptile Earth ever knew. He eats food, all right, but he only needs it to replace his body cells ...
— Islands of Space • John W Campbell
... not to say reptilian, metres, this is perhaps the most intolerable; indeed, it was not until touched to new life by the genius of Blake that it deserved to be called ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... of Grom himself. Leaping upon its mighty hind-legs, and holding its mailed fore-paws before its chest, it came bounding like a colossal kangaroo through the jungle, smashing down the branches and smaller trees as it came, and balancing itself at each spring with its massive, reptilian tail. Its vast head, something like a cross between that of a monstrous horse and that of an alligator, was upborne upon a long, snaky neck, and its eyes, huge and round and lidless, were like two discs ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts
... five scientific memoirs, amongst them his classification of birds and "Remarks upon Archaeopteryx Lithographica" ("Proceedings of the Royal Society" 16 1868 pages 243-248). This creature, a bird with reptilian characters, was a suggestive object from which to popularise some of the far-reaching results of his many years' labour upon the morphology of both birds and reptiles. Thus it led to a lecture at the Royal Institution, on February 7, "On the Animals which ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... the other Mammals are viviparous. In 1894 Richard Semon further proved that these large eggs, rich in food-yelk, have a partial segmentation and discoid gastrulation, as I had hypothetically assumed in 1879; here again they resemble their reptilian ancestors. The construction of the mammary gland is also peculiar in the Monotremes. In them the glands have no teats for the young animal to suck, but there is a special part of the breast pierced with holes like a sieve, from which ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.2 • Ernst Haeckel
... also different from those of today, although some would not be very noticeably so at first glance. Among molluscs, the Ammonites, related to the modern Pearly Nautilus, are an example of a race very numerous and varied during all the periods of the Reptilian Era, but disappearing at its close, leaving only a few collateral descendants in the squids, cuttlefish and nautili of the modern seas. The Brachiopods were another group of molluscs, or rather molluscoids for ...
— Dinosaurs - With Special Reference to the American Museum Collections • William Diller Matthew |
