"Rodent" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the animal has no right to the name, although, like the true rat, it is a rodent, and much resembles the rat in size and in the length and colour of its fur. The likeness, however, extends ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII, No. 355, October 16, 1886 • Various
... of birch-bark containing these relics inclosed also the skin of a small rodent (Spermophilus sp.?) but in a torn and moth-eaten condition. This was used by the owner for purposes unknown to those who were consulted upon the subject. It is frequently, if not generally, impossible to ascertain the use of most of the fetiches and other sacred objects contained ...
— The Mide'wiwin or "Grand Medicine Society" of the Ojibwa • Walter James Hoffman
... the boat with our guns, ready to shoot all that came to the edge of the stream—the habits of both animals, when hard-pressed, being to take to the water. We had not long to wait. The first arrival was a Paca, a reddish, nearly tail-less rodent, spotted with white on the sides, and intermediate in size and appearance between a hog and a hare. My first shot did not take effect; the animal dived into the water and did not reappear. A second was brought down by my companion as ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... some of the mud. Rick reached down and splashed a handful on his face. It was warm. He saw a wet black head emerge from under the duck blind and speed for shore. It was a startled water rat. Alerted by the small splash of their coming, the rodent decided to take better cover. Then they were at the corner of the blind where the ...
— The Flying Stingaree • Harold Leland Goodwin
... instanced the eye of the cuttle-fish as not only analogous to, but also homologous with, the eye of a true fish—that is to say, the eye of a mollusk with the eye of a vertebrate. And he has also instanced the remarkable resemblance of a shrew to a mouse—that is, of an insectivorous mammal to a rodent—not to mention other cases. In the chapter alluded to these instances of homology, alleged to occur in different branches of the tree of life, were considered with reference to the process of organic evolution as a fact: ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... joints all quaked and knocked together, As they packed their Saratogas in lugubrious despair. It was ever their misfortune to be pillaged by extortion, And they thought they smelled a rodent on the ...
— The Foreign Hand Tie • Gordon Randall Garrett
... of food conservers are the hamsters, members of the great rodent family. They have made their dwellings most comfortable and even luxurious in arrangement and furnishings. Like wealthy farmers, they are not satisfied with comfortable dwellings only, but they too must have spacious barns adjoining ...
— The Human Side of Animals • Royal Dixon
... a little ship-shape again Redwood went and stared at the huge misshapen corpse. The brute lay on its side, with its body slightly bent. Its rodent teeth overhanging its receding lower jaw gave its face a look of colossal feebleness, of weak avidity. It seemed not in the least ferocious or terrible. Its fore-paws reminded him of lank emaciated hands. Except for one neat round hole with a scorched rim on either side of its neck, ...
— The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth • H.G. Wells
... abundant here. 3rd, The lower jaw of some large animal which, from the molar teeth, I should think belonged to the Edentata; 4th, some large molar teeth which in some respects would seem to belong to an enormous rodent; 5th, also some smaller teeth belonging to the same order. If it interests you sufficiently to unpack them, I shall be very curious to hear something about them. Care must be taken in this case not to confuse the tallies. They are mingled ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... behold that indefatigable mole, that rodent which undermines and disintegrates the soil, parcels it out and divides an acre into a hundred fragments,—ever spurred on to his banquet by the lower middle classes who make him at once their auxiliary and their prey. This essentially unsocial element, created by the Revolution, will some ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... centiped stowed away in the hold; but one of them I drove out of the ship, and the other I caught. This is how it was: for the first one with infinite pains I made a trap, looking to its capture and destruction; but the wily rodent, not to be deluded, took the hint and got ashore the day ...
— Sailing Alone Around The World • Joshua Slocum
... resinous gum of the hiawa-tree. Acouri, one of the agutis; a rodent about the size of a rabbit. Acuero, a species of palm. Aeta, a palm of great size; it may reach a hundred feet before the leaves begin. Ai, the three-toed sloth. Albicore, a fish closely related to the tunny. Anhinga, the darter or snake-bird; a cormorant-like ...
— Wanderings In South America • Charles Waterton
... animals the chief in Australia is the 'possum (which is not really an opossum, but is somewhat like that American rodent, and so got its name), and the koala, or native bear. Why this little animal was called a "bear" it is hard to say, for it is not in the least like a bear. It is about the size of a very large and fat cat, is covered with a very thick, soft fur, and its face ...
— Peeps At Many Lands: Australia • Frank Fox
... genera grouped in several distinct families—such, e.g., as the family of mice and rats (Muridae), of squirrels (Sciuridae), of guinea-pigs and spine-bearing porcupines (Hystricidae), &c. The largest form of rodent is the capybara (or river-hog of the Rio de la Plata),—which is preyed on by the jaguar. Though a near ally of the little guinea-pig, it is as large as a hog. Amongst the more interesting rodents ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... but in like conditions, has produced in the end very similar results in both cases. Still, when we come to examine the more intimate underlying structure of the two animals, a profound fundamental difference at once exhibits itself. The one is distinctly a true squirrel, a rodent of the rodents, externally adapted to an arboreal existence; the other is equally a true phalanger, a marsupial of the marsupials, which has independently undergone on his own account very much the same adaptation, for ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... rodent, indeed, at that instant emerged from the wreckage of what had once been a copper cauldron near by, and walked slowly away towards a slope of dust garnished with broken bottles and abandoned cabbage stalks. The Prophet shuddered and longed to flee, but the two ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens
... and in a published discourse he has said of him: "He read men and women as great scholars read books. He took life at first hand, and not filtered through alphabets....He would get what he wanted out of a book as dexterously as a rodent will get the meat of a nut out of its shell.... He handled his rapidly acquired knowledge so like an adept in book-lore that one might have thought he was born in an alcove and cradled on a book-shelf." Dr. Bigelow was so frequently in Dr. Holmes's thought in the latter days that ...
— Authors and Friends • Annie Fields
... instance, whether the Australian marsupials, which are divided into groups differing but little from each other, and feebly representing, as Mr. Waterhouse and others have remarked, our carnivorous, ruminant, and rodent mammals, could successfully compete with these well-developed orders. In the Australian mammals, we see the process of diversification in an early and ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... direction of the trail to the Mandanes. The children in my tent forgot me and dashed out with the rest. I could not doubt the cause of the clamor. This was the morning of the warriors' return; and getting the knife in my teeth, I began filing furiously at the ropes about my wrists. Man is not a rodent; but under stress of necessity and with instruments of his own designing, he can do something to remedy his human helplessness. To the din of clamoring voices outside were added the shouts of approaching warriors, the galloping of a multitude ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... suddenly and it seemed that the muscles pulsated with an accession of energy. Then one leg was stretched forth spasmodically. There was a convulsive heave as the lungs drew in a first long breath, and, with that, an astonished and very much alive rodent scrambled to its feet, blinking wondering ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930 • Various
... edible plants, although there might be some. There are a few species of rodent-like animals—they're scavengers—and a herbivore we called the woods goat. The prowlers are the dominant form of life on Ragnarok and I suspect their intelligence is a good deal higher than we would ...
— Space Prison • Tom Godwin
... can't get away with that everywhere. Our orchard is far enough away from the nursery that we don't have any rodent damage. We have had some trouble from skunks, and they finally find out that the nuts are in there in a row where we have planted them, and they go right down and get them. But we have no trouble from mice or rats. We are far ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Incorporated 39th Annual Report - at Norris, Tenn. September 13-15 1948 • Various
... lapsed into a pose of deep concentration, like a two-bit swami. Cam noticed a tiny, rodent-type nose thrusting itself up from Everett's side pocket. "Fear ... I detect great apprehension—panic—hysteria verging on the loss of reason ... third booth this side ...
— Telempathy • Vance Simonds
... different sorts of animals which the doctor wished to examine or to add to his museum. There were among them three monkeys, a titi, a minas leonidas (a miniature lion—a curious little creature), a spider-monkey with white whiskers; besides a paca (a small rodent which burrows in the ground), and an opossum with a prehensile tail, which we saw with half-a-dozen little ones on its back. The doctor observed that, having no pouch, it thus carries its young, and is from this circumstance called Dorsigereas, or "back-bearing." The young ones were clinging on ...
— The Young Llanero - A Story of War and Wild Life in Venezuela • W.H.G. Kingston
... development; and in the hyrax (or "coney") he has one more of those living fossils, or primitive survivors, which still fairly preserve the ancestral form. The hyrax has four toes on the front foot and three on the hind foot, and the feet are flat. Its front teeth resemble those of a rodent, and its molars those of the rhinoceros. In many respects it is a most primitive and generalised little animal, preserving the ancestral form more or less faithfully since Tertiary days in the ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... such a menace to the hogs that they climbed the wall at the high ground and disappeared in the country beyond. And after them went the cowardly dingoes that preyed on their young. Rodent animals, more difficult to hunt, and a species of small kangaroo furnished him occupation and food until they, too, emigrated, when he was forced to follow; he was now a carnivorous animal, no longer satisfied ...
— "Where Angels Fear to Tread" and Other Stories of the Sea • Morgan Robertson
... I will dispose of him first. Captain Ezra Triplett was a hard-bitten mariner. In fact, he was, I think, the hardest-bitten mariner I have ever seen. He had been bitten, according to his own tell, man-and-boy, for fifty-two years, by every sort of insect, rodent and crustacean in existence. He had had smallpox and three touches of scurvy, each of these blights leaving its autograph. He had lost one eye in the Australian bush where, naturally, it was impossible to ...
— The Cruise of the Kawa • Walter E. Traprock
... absent. North and South America, perhaps, present one or two exceptions to the last rule, but they are readily susceptible of explanation. Thus, in Australia, the later Tertiary mammals are marsupials (possibly with exception of the Dog and a Rodent or two, as at present). In Austro-Columbia the later Tertiary fauna exhibits numerous and varied forms of Platyrrhine Apes, Rodents, Cats, Dogs, Stags, Edentata, and Opossums; but, as at present, no Catarrhine Apes, no Lemurs, ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... that it is usually safe to avoid one who pretends to be a friend without having any reason to be. It wasn't safe in this instance, however; for the cat went after that departing rodent, ...
— Cobwebs From an Empty Skull • Ambrose Bierce (AKA: Dod Grile)
... the nitrogen bulb they stood in the cell of the dead man, gathered about the cage of the rat—a prison within a prison. After the first start caused by the needle prick, the rodent again shrank back into its corner. For perhaps ten minutes it remained thus, and then it began to exhibit signs of uneasiness. It stood up on its haunches and began to bite at the wires of the cage. It squeaked, more as though ...
— The Diamond Cross Mystery - Being a Somewhat Different Detective Story • Chester K. Steele
... one time supposed to be connecting links between groups, belong altogether to one group, and not at all to the other. For example, the aye-aye[103] (Chiromys Madagascariensis). {108} was till lately considered to be allied to the squirrels, and was often classed with them in the rodent order, principally on account of its dentition; at the same time that its affinities to the lemurs and apes were admitted. The thorough investigation into its anatomy that has now been made, demonstrates that it has no more essential ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... However it is assuredly not an otter, but is doubtless an unfinished or rudely executed ground squirrel, of which animal it conveys in a general way a good idea, the characteristic attitude of this little rodent, sitting up with paws extended in front, being well displayed. Carvings of small rodents in similar attitudes are exhibited in Stevens's "Flint Chips," p. 428, Figs. 61 and 62. Stevens's Fig. 61 evidently represents ...
— Animal Carvings from Mounds of the Mississippi Valley • Henry W. Henshaw
... it was all utterly insane and incomprehensible. A rodent, looking like a prairie dog, a little; but plainly possessing a high order of intelligence. And a voice whose soothingly familiar words were more repugnant somehow, simply because they could never belong in a place as eerie ...
— The Eternal Wall • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... inspect the stone-heaps, especially those which come from the quarry-works. Here we often find the Field-mouse sitting on a grass mattress, nibbling acorns, almonds, olive-stones and apricot-stones. The Rodent varies his diet: to oily and farinaceous foods he adds the Snail. When he is gone, he has left behind him, under the overhanging stones, mixed up with the remains of other victuals, an assortment of empty shells, sometimes plentiful enough to remind me of the heap of Snails which, cooked ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre
... home, it seemed. He was a pitiful little rodent, and it was a shame to torment him; but Hal stuck to him for ten or twenty minutes longer, arguing and insisting—until finally the little rodent bolted for the door, and made his escape in an automobile. "You can go to the Chief of Police ...
— King Coal - A Novel • Upton Sinclair
... your jig round that if you've got to, and get it over, and then perhaps we can go on and not waste any more time over rubbish-heaps. Can we eat a door-mat? Or sleep under a door-mat? Or sit on a door-mat and sledge home over the snow on it, you exasperating rodent?" ...
— The Wind in the Willows • Kenneth Grahame
... easily noticed in their structure and development. The peculiar structure of the enlarged heads of the warrior termites was particularly noticeable. Some had a formidable head provided with tentacles and powerful rodent clippers—as well as the peculiar whitish cuirasses in sections of the body. The workers had more normal shapes, the head being ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor |
