"Vertebrate" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... than the fiscal barrier is the barrier of poltroonery. The one character that distinguishes man from the other higher vertebrate, indeed, is his excessive timorousness, his easy yielding to alarms, his incapacity for adventure without a crowd behind him. In his normal incarnation he is no more capable of initiating an extra-legal affair—at all events, ...
— In Defense of Women • H. L. Mencken
... the bull's neck, I drew my long stone knife and, setting the point carefully over the brute's spine, drove it home with both hands. At the same instant I leaped clear of the stumbling animal. Now, no vertebrate can progress far with a knife through his spine, and the thag is no exception to ...
— Pellucidar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... we shall seek as vainly to transform the lower animal types into the higher ones by any of our theories, as did the alchemists of old to change the baser metals into gold.' He also says: 'To me the fact that the embryonic form of the highest vertebrate recalls in its earlier stages the first representatives of its type in geological times and its lowest representatives at the present day, speaks only of an ideal relation, existing, not in the things themselves, but in the mind that made them. ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... first place, the unity of plan which can be found pervading any great class of animals or plants seems to point to unity of ancestry. Why, for instance, should the vertebrate animals be formed on a common plan, the parts of the framework being varied from species to species, but the framework as a whole always exhibiting the same fundamental type? If they all descended from a common ancestor, and the ...
— The Relations Between Religion and Science - Eight Lectures Preached Before the University of Oxford in the Year 1884 • Frederick, Lord Bishop of Exeter
... which register its gradual progression. As the paleontological remains imbedded in the rocks present a succession of organic types which gradually improve in form and function, from the first sea-weed to the palm-tree, and from the protozoa to the highest vertebrate, so the history of ancient philosophy presents a gradual progress in metaphysical, ethical, and theistic conceptions, from the unreflective consciousness of the Homeric age, to the high reflective consciousness of the Platonic period. And ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... of Evolution tell us, that in the genealogical ages during which man has struggled upward, from the lower stages of vertebrate and mammal to the genus of catarrhine apes, he has gradually thrown off bestial instincts, and that the tiger taint will ultimately be totally eliminated; that "original sin is neither more nor less than the ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... this genesis of life take man out of the definitional formula embracing the "beasts of the earth." From the lowest vertebrate, in Mr. Darwin's plexus, to the highest quadrumane (his nearest allied type to man), covering almost an infinite variety of distinct living forms, the distance to be traversed, in order to reach man, is hardly more than one-third the length of the still unlinked and uncompleted chain. ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... is PROTECTIVE; but in snakes, spiders, mantids, and other preying animals it is termed AGGRESSIVE, since it enables these animals to stalk their prey undetected. It is probable that this power, when possessed by a vertebrate animal, nearly always bears the double meaning, as in the green tree frog, where the colouration is protective so far as it provides concealment from snakes, which are particularly fond of these frogs, and aggressive in that it allows flies and other insects to approach ...
— The Naturalist in Nicaragua • Thomas Belt
... ancient skull-less vertebrata were directly developed. Among the coelomati of the present day, the ascidians are the nearest relatives of this exceedingly remarkable worm, which connect the widely differing classes of invertebrate and vertebrate animals. To these animals have been given the name of sack-worms (himatega). They originated out of the worms of the seventh stage by the formation of a dorsal nerve marrow (medulla tube), and by the formation of the spinal rod (chorda dorsalis) which lies below it. It is just the position ...
— Was Man Created? • Henry A. Mott
... the Washoe Canary, in Dakota, the Senator, and everywhere the Donkey. The animal is widely and variously celebrated in the literature, art and religion of every age and country; no other so engages and fires the human imagination as this noble vertebrate. Indeed, it is doubted by some (Ramasilus, lib. II., De Clem., and C. Stantatus, De Temperamente) if it is not a god; and as such we know it was worshiped by the Etruscans, and, if we may believe Macrobious, by the Cupasians also. Of the only two animals admitted ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... the force employed has first to overcome the weight of the body. A man can easily bound a height of two feet, and he weighs as much as a hundred thousand grasshoppers, while a hundred thousand grasshoppers could leap no higher than one—say a foot. This shows that the vertebrate has the advantage. A man represents the volume of fifteen millions of ants, yet can easily move more than three hundred feet a minute, a comparison which gives him forty times more power, bulk for bulk, than the ant possesses. Yet were all the conditions compared, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 430, March 29, 1884 • Various
... terrestrial insects, living or extinct, do not, as a matter of fact, measure six inches in length; "but here, against the lesser gravitation of the moon, a creature certainly as much an insect as vertebrate seems to have been able to attain to ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... doctrines, or at any rate abstain from opposing them." His prescience has in less than a generation been justified by the discovery of intermediate fossil forms of animals too numerous to be here recounted. The break between vertebrate and invertebrate animals, between flowering and non-flowering plants, between animal and plant, is now bridged over by discoveries in the life histories of animals and plants which exist to-day. Embryo animals ...
— Life of Charles Darwin • G. T. (George Thomas) Bettany
... will be thought," says Mr. Spencer, "our Houses of Parliament discharge in the social economy functions that are, in sundry respects, comparable to those discharged by the cerebral masses in a vertebrate animal.... The cerebrum co-ordinates the countless heterogeneous considerations which affect the present and future welfare of the individual as a whole; and the Legislature co-ordinates the countless heterogeneous ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... the animal as such" (paragraph 318). "Thus, in Fishes, the first changes consist in the segmentation of the vitellus and the formation of a germ, processes which are common to all classes of animals. Then the dorsal furrow, characteristic of the Vertebrate, appears—the brain, the organs of the senses; at a later period are formed the intestine, the limbs, and the permanent form of the respiratory organs, from which the class is recognised with certainty. It is only after exclusion that the peculiarities ...
— Facts and Arguments for Darwin • Fritz Muller
... spinal cord, for they originate simultaneously in a soft, jelly-like condition in which the microscope cannot detect the latent structure, not as they are in the adult, but as they are in the foetus in which they first appear, with a structure similar to that of the lowest class of vertebrate animals, the fishes. ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, April 1887 - Volume 1, Number 3 • Various
... compared to the lamprey's entrance-hall, which differs from ours in quite another way. The lamprey, as I have already told you, ranks almost lowest among fishes, and consequently among vertebrate animals, of which fishes form the rear-guard. Indeed, it is almost stretching a point to consider her worthy to bear the proud title of a vertebrate at all; for the vertebral column, so clearly marked in other fishes, where it forms the large central bone, is only faintly indicated in certain ...
— The History of a Mouthful of Bread - And its effect on the organization of men and animals • Jean Mace
... that Natural-Selection acts by slight variations.—These must be useful at once.—Difficulties as to the giraffe; as to mimicry; as to the heads of flat-fishes; as to the origin and constancy of the vertebrate, limbs; as to whalebone; as to the young kangaroo; as to sea-urchins; as to certain processes of {viii} metamorphosis; as to the mammary gland; as to certain ape characters; as to the rattlesnake and cobra; as to the process of formation of the eye ...
— On the Genesis of Species • St. George Mivart
... sometimes reverse their conclusions. Although favorably disposed to the doctrine of the transmutation of the animalic forms, I want a complete proof before I can believe in a transformation of the vertebrate type into that of the mollusca." Moreover, the zooelogists Semper and Dohrn find in the embryonic development of the sharks, the scates, and other cartilaginous fishes, organs which would bring them rather ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... attention to the exploration of the Rocky Mountain region, and found that there, in the strata of the ancient lake beds, records of the age of mammals had been made and preserved with a fulness surpassing that of any other known region on earth. The profusion of vertebrate remains brought to light was almost unbelievable. Prof. Marsh, who was first in the field, found three hundred new tertiary species between 1870 and 1876, besides unearthing the remains of two hundred birds with teeth, six hundred flying dragons, and fifteen ...
— American Men of Mind • Burton E. Stevenson
... in 1909, [Footnote: Mendel's Principles of Heredity. Camb. Univ. Press, 1909.] Bateson referred to the effects of castration as evidence that in different types sex may be differently constituted. Castration, he urged, in the male vertebrate on the whole leads merely to the non-appearance of male features, not to the assumption of female characters, while injury or disease of the ovaries may lead to the assumption of male characters by the female. This was supposed to support the view that the male is ...
— Hormones and Heredity • J. T. Cunningham
... Jena, is the Coryphaeus. I know of no more solid and important contributions to biology in the past seven years than Haeckel's work on the "Radiolaria," and the researches of his distinguished colleague Gegenbaur, in vertebrate anatomy; while in Haeckel's "Generelle Morphologie" there is all the force, suggestiveness, and, what I may term the systematising power, of Oken, without his extravagance. The "Generelle Morphologie" is, in fact, an attempt to put the ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... presents, as it were, the prelude to this vast chapter of natural history in the simultaneous appearance of the four great types of the animal kingdom: Radiates, Mollusks, Articulates, and Vertebrates. Then comes the orderly development of the class by which the vertebrate plan was first expressed, namely, the fishes. Underlying all its divisions and subdivisions, is the average expression of the type in the past and present; the Placoids and Ganoids, with their combination of reptilian and fishlike features, characterizing the earlier geological ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... column, rachis, chine. Associated Words: Vertebrata, Invertebrata, vertebra, vertebrate, cyrtosis, chiropractic, chiropractor, spondyle, coccyx, rickets, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... of a sub-kingdom of animals which possess a spinal column, or backbone, and which are known as vertebrate animals. Such are all beasts, birds, reptiles, and fishes. There are also a variety of remotely allied marine organisms known as tunicates, sea-squirts, or ascidians (Fig. 2). There is, further, an immense group of arthropods, consisting of all insects, crab-like creatures, hundred-legs and ...
— Young Folks' Library, Volume XI (of 20) - Wonders of Earth, Sea and Sky • Various
... most of the vertebrate animals exist in man, though they render him little or no service. These are the thymus and thyroid glands, apparently vestigial structures. The thymus gland attains a considerable development in the embryo and shrinks away to the ...
— Man And His Ancestor - A Study In Evolution • Charles Morris
... consists of transparent, structureless, semi-fluid living bioplasm—when it would not be possible to distinguish the growing moving matter which was to evolve the oak from that which was the germ of a vertebrate animal. Nor can any difference be discerned between the bioplasm matter of the lowest, simplest, epithelial scale of man's organism and that from which the nerve cells of his brain are to be evolved. Neither by studying bioplasm under the microscope nor ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... forms of animals are represented among the fossils was sustained by the evidence of many strange and anomalous forms, some of them of gigantic size. In 1816 the famous Ossements Fossiles, describing these novel objects, was published, and vertebrate paleontology became a science. Among other things of great popular interest the book contained the first authoritative description of the hairy elephant, named by Cuvier the mammoth, the remains of which bad been found embedded in ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... all the higher animals, including the hermaphrodites, the male germinal cells, or spermatozoa are characterized by their mobility. Their protoplasm is contractile and their form varies according to the species. In man and vertebrate animals they resemble infinitely small tadpoles, and their tails are equally mobile. The female germinative cell, on the contrary, is immobile and much larger than the male cell. Conjugation consists in the movement of the ...
— The Sexual Question - A Scientific, psychological, hygienic and sociological study • August Forel
... was the first Darwin of antiquity, for he is said to have begun his creation from below, and after passing from the invertebrate to the sub-vertebrate, from thence to the backbone, from the backbone to the mammalia, and from the mammalia to the manco- cerebral, he compounded man of ...
— Samuel Butler's Canterbury Pieces • Samuel Butler
... above-mentioned together constitute the highest of those sub-kingdoms into which the whole animal kingdom itself is divided. This highest sub-kingdom is named VERTEBRATA, and is called the vertebrate sub-kingdom, because every creature which belongs to it possesses a "spinal column," which is generally built up of bones, each of which is called ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... him. He was succeeded by Bosc. Desfontaines had the chair of botany, but his attainments as a botanist were mediocre, and his lectures were said to have been tame and uninteresting. Portal taught human anatomy, while Mertrude lectured on vertebrate anatomy; his chair was filled by ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... me. They induced me to lay aside part of my clothing that they might examine me more minutely, especially about the joints of the ankle, the knee, shoulder, and elbow; and were never weary of examining my neck and spinal column. I could not talk to them, and they had never seen a vertebrate higher in organization than their frogs and toads; wherefore, at the end of four weeks, they reported "that I was a new and wonderful gigantic Batrachian"; that "they recommended the Society to purchase ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... Invertebrate Zoology — an advanced course which omits all consideration of insects, and all discussion of parasitic forms. Vertebrate Zoology — mainly a course in comparative morphology, which gives no field knowledge of California vertebrates, the most essential thing for ...
— Adequate Preparation for the Teacher of Biological Sciences in Secondary Schools • James Daley McDonald
... the temptation to notice one of those small points in which the accuracy of the Bible is so constantly brought to light. The popular notion of angels gives them wings as well as hands—a form quite impossible from the natural history point of view; all animals of the vertebrate orders never have more than two pairs of limbs. And in winged animals the fore-limbs become wings. The popular notion about angels is, however, artistic, not Biblical. Just the contrary in fact. Here is ...
— Creation and Its Records • B.H. Baden-Powell
... evolved the Third—the Lemurian. Their bodies had become material, being composed of the gases, liquids and solids which constitute the three lowest sub-divisions of the physical plane, but the gases and liquids still predominated, for as yet their vertebrate structure had not solidified into bones such as ours, and they could not, therefore, stand erect. Their bones in fact were pliable as the bones of young infants now are. It was not until the middle of the Lemurian period that man ...
— The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria • W. Scott-Elliot
... spine, or scale, could I detect among their organisms, identical with the ichthyic remains of the Lias. I had got amid the remains of an entirely different and incalculably more ancient creation. My new-found organisms represented, not the first, but merely the second age of vertebrate existence on our planet; but as the remains of the earlier age exist as the mere detached teeth and spines of placoids, which, though they give full evidence of the existence of the fishes to which they belong, throw scarce any light on their ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller
... Labyrinthodont Fauna of the Carboniferous rocks is more extensive and diversified than that of the Trias, while its chief types, so far as osteology enables us to judge, are quite as highly organised. Thus it is certain that a comparatively highly organised vertebrate type, such as that of the Labyrinthodonts, is capable of persisting, with no considerable change, through the period represented by the vast deposits which constitute the Carboniferous, the Permian, ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... anatomy. At one time, the tracing of this ancestral series encountered a very serious check. When we examined the groups of living animals, we found none that illustrated or explained the passage from the non-backboned—invertebrate—to the backboned—vertebrate—animals. This gap was filled some years ago by the discovery of the lancelet—Amphioxus—and the young of the sea-squirt—Ascidia. The lancelet has a slender rod of cartilage along its back, and corresponds very closely with the ideal I have sketched of our primitive backboned ancestor. ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... could teach him many things that he has overlooked and correct him in many mistakes. But the ants will labor ingloriously without an observer to chronicle their doings, and the archivists and annalists will pile up facts forever like so many articulates or mollusks or radiates, until the vertebrate historian comes with his generalizing ideas, his beliefs, his prejudices, his idiosyncrasies of all kinds, and brings the facts into a more or less imperfect, but still organic series of relations. The history which is not open to adverse criticism is worth little, ...
— Memoir of John Lothrop Motley, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. |
