"Antediluvian" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... not speak of an antediluvian race, nor of any family who escaped the waters. Michabo, the spirit of the dawn, their supreme deity, alone existed, and by his power formed and peopled it. Nor did their neighbors, the Dakotas, though ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... Rain had begun to fall, that would make it harder to find a taxi. It would happen, now of all times! Ten minutes passed, then up the street chug-chugged a somewhat battered motor-vehicle with the apache hanging on the step. Yes, it was a taxi, an antediluvian one, but she must not be critical. If a chariot offered one a lift out of hell, one would not stop to inquire its horse-power. The apache helped her in and closed the door. She turned grateful eyes on him through the open ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... One, in particular, I had copied with tolerable exactness from a notice of one of my own discourses, which, from its superior tone and appearance of vast experience, I concluded to have been written by a man at least three hundred years of age, though I recollected no existing instance of such antediluvian longevity. Nevertheless, I afterwards discovered the author to be a young gentleman preparing for the ministry under the direction of one of my brethren in a neighbouring town, and whom I had once instinctively corrected in a Latin quantity. But this I have been forced ...
— The Biglow Papers • James Russell Lowell
... Tom, 'if you really wish it.' So he accompanied Mr Tigg to the retreat in question; on arriving at which place that gentleman took from his hat what seemed to be the fossil remains of an antediluvian pocket-handkerchief, and ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... necessary ingredients in the character of its votaries, extirpating from among them that simplicity which was so fatal an obstacle to the progress of Newton,—and turning the newly discovered joint of an antediluvian reptile into a theme of perennial and ambitious declamation; nothing is said about those discussions on baptismal fonts, those discoveries of trochees for iambics, or the invention of new potatoe boilers, which in the days of Hegel, Berryer, Schlosser, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various
... fail utterly in trying to find its beginning, unless we accept the tradition which ascribes to Menu, their great lawgiver (who is supposed to have been Noah), the saving of three out of the four divine books or Vedas from the deluge. This would carry us back to the Antediluvian times for the beginning of our investigations; but without taking any such extreme view of the subject we will find traces of science clearly marked out for us in the ...
— On the Antiquity of the Chemical Art • James Mactear
... to call yourself Birdie!' For Birdie had been a pet name of Rose Rollstone; and Bertha Morton, though slim and curly-headed, had a worn look about her eyes, and a countenance such as to show her five-and-thirty years, and to the eyes of fourteen was almost antediluvian; indeed, older observers might detect a worn, haggard, strained look. He was somewhat disgusted, too, at the thin rolls of bread-and-butter on the low table, whence she proceeded to hand teacups, as he thought of the substantial meals at home. When they had been conducted to their rooms, ...
— That Stick • Charlotte M. Yonge
... in the same regions, and must have come from elsewhere." Geoffrey Saint Hilaire opposed to Cuvier's inductive treatment of the question the following expression of belief: "I have no doubt that existing animals are directly descended from the animals of the antediluvian world," but added, "it is my belief that the season has not yet arrived for a really ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... he had said about the signs of breed in Hugh's exterior, certainly applied to himself as well. His carriage was full of dignity, and a certain rustic refinement; his voice was wonderfully gentle, but deep; and slowest when most impassioned. He seemed to have come of some gigantic antediluvian breed: there was something of the Titan slumbering about him. He would have been a stern man, but for an unusual amount of reverence that seemed to overflood the sternness, and change it into strong love. No one had ever seen him thoroughly angry; his simple displeasure with any of ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... with as much certainty as we can be entitled to require—that the mixture between the two species of created beings was sinful on the part of both, and displeasing to the Almighty. It is probable, also, that the extreme longevity of the antediluvian mortals prevented their feeling sufficiently that they had brought themselves under the banner of Azrael, the angel of death, and removed to too great a distance the period between their crime and its punishment. ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... favour. 'Emulating,' says Professor Smyth, 'the enchanted tales of Bagdad,' the court poets of Al Mamoun (son of the far-famed Haroun al Raschid) 'drew gorgeous pictures of the contents of the pyramid's interior.... All the treasures of Sheddad Ben Ad the great Antediluvian king of the earth, with all his medicines and all his sciences, they declared were there, told over and over again. Others, though, were positive that the founder-king was no other than Saurid Ibn Salhouk, a far greater one than the other; and these ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... Tutt, entering the offices of Tutt & Tutt and hanging his antediluvian stovepipe on the hat-tree in the corner, "I see by the morning paper that Payson ...
— By Advice of Counsel • Arthur Train
... edifying sight is this venerable dame, bearing an exalted title, as she mopes and mouths over her varying luck, missing her stake twice out of three times, when she fain would push it with her rake into some particular section of the table! She is very intimate with one or two antediluvian diplomatists and warriors, who are here striving to bolster themselves up for another year with the waters, and may be heard crowing out lamentations over her fatal passion for play, interspersed with bits of moss-grown scandal, disinterred from the social ruins of an age long past: ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... trying their bows upon every bit of ice we could get near, without getting into a scrape with the commodore; and, from the ease with which they cut through the rotten stuff around our position, I already foresaw a fresh era in arctic history, and that the fine bows would soon beat the antediluvian ...
— Stray Leaves from an Arctic Journal; • Sherard Osborn
... of old almost entirely by the arsenal works, is a desolate little stronghold among towering mountains, the ruins being in the foreground. The precipices on either side of the river belong to the Elk Ridge, through which, at some antediluvian period, the colossal current has hewed its way. At the base of the Virginia side of the mountains, hugged in by the Potomac and Shenandoah Rivers, and by Loudon and Bolivar ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various
... metempsychosis, to which indeed my reader (if there shall ever be one) may perhaps not be inclined to give implicit belief. It is unnecessary for me, therefore, to begin by alluding to my former visit to this earth. I shall not even hint, whether if it ever took place, it was in antediluvian ages, or during the Babylonian, Grecian, or Roman glory; or in more modern times. Be assured, however, gentle reader, (if any there ever be,) that I have the faculty of observation—that I have seen many generations of men—that I have been in almost every corner of the habitable world, and that ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 343, November 29, 1828 • Various
... no warrant to the common assumption that God revealed monotheism to Adam, Noah, and others before the Flood, and that the traces of monotheistic beliefs and tendencies in heathendom are derivable from the tradition of this primitive and antediluvian monotheism. The one true God is represented as making himself known by particular words and in particular ways to Adam, but is nowhere said to have taught him that He only was God." It is plain that Professor Flint is here dealing with a ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... same climate of sympathy with his audience. Tear away the old sofa, ragged and spring-broken, on which the pastors of forty years have been obliged to sit, and see whether there are any cats in your antediluvian pulpit. ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage
... appearance. The soil is composed of sand and red or yellow clay, and this is covered by a layer of earth, in which the vegetation takes root. The geologist would find rich treasures in the tertiary strata here, for it is full of antediluvian remains—enormous bones, which the Indians attribute to some gigantic race that lived in ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... said nothing. Now as she stood by the old gig, toppling forward with its shafts resting upon the floor, she thought she had never seen such a horrible, antediluvian old trap in her life. Nothing could add so much to her disappointment in going so soon, as going in that thing. If there had been anything to say which might prevent her brother from carrying out his intention, she would have said it, but so ...
— The Girl at Cobhurst • Frank Richard Stockton
... surface of this gigantic drift showed again that "exfoliated" appearance which I have described. Strange to say, this very exfoliation gave it something of a quite peculiarly desolate aspect. It looked so harsh, so millennial-old, so antediluvian and pre-adamic! I still remember with particular distinctness the slight dizziness that overcame me, the sinking feeling in my heart, the awe, and the foreboding that I had challenged a force in Nature which might defy all tireless effort ...
— Over Prairie Trails • Frederick Philip Grove
... This, if anything, seems to have been an antediluvian conception; for we find primitive men thinking that almost everything is significant and can exert influence of some sort. The search for the more definite influences seems to have started in the question: "Who, or what, is to blame?"—for any illness, namely, or disaster, or ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... name I have forgotten, sent me a collection of fossils—tiny mollusk shells beautifully marked, and bits of sandstone with the print of birds' claws, and a lovely fern in bas-relief. These were the keys which unlocked the treasures of the antediluvian world for me. With trembling fingers I listened to Miss Sullivan's descriptions of the terrible beasts, with uncouth, unpronounceable names, which once went tramping through the primeval forests, tearing down the branches of gigantic trees for food, ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume IV (of 6) - Authors and Journalists • Various
... gradually by those singular steps, or ridges, formerly banks or shores oL antediluvian oceans, till it reaches the vicinity of the Holland river, a tortuous, sluggish, marshy, natural canal, flowing or lazily creeping into Lake Simcoe, at an elevation of upwards of seven-hundred and fifty feet above Lake Ontario, and emptying itself into Lake Huron by a ...
— Canada and the Canadians - Volume I • Sir Richard Henry Bonnycastle
... of the old Court ladies embattled themselves against Marie Antoinette's encroachments upon their habits. The leader of them was a real medallion, whose costume, character, and notions spoke a genealogy perfectly antediluvian; who even to the latter days of Louis XV., amid a Court so irregular, persisted in her precision. So systematic a supporter of the antique could be no other than the declared foe of any change, and, of course, ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... "Antediluvian Archaeology in its relation to Genesis and the Iliad," and now all that remains to do is to carry the rest of my books down to the new library, make catalogue, consider subjects for five more speeches, write thirty-six letters and ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., November 8, 1890 • Various
... There they sat in throbbing, quivering silence with the rest of the "entertainers," until the first strains of the piano solo broke forth, when they walked sedately out and took their seats along the side of the platform—an antediluvian custom which has long been discarded by everything ...
— Prudence Says So • Ethel Hueston
... after the flood, while some who had witnessed the sin and the destruction of the antediluvian world were still living, Jehovah saw fit, in accordance with his designs of eternal wisdom, to separate Abraham from his brethren, calling upon him to leave the land of his birth and go out into a strange land, to dwell in a far country. He was to pass the rest of his days ...
— Notable Women of Olden Time • Anonymous
... movement was decided on. My aunt's demise required, my father's presence in the metropolis. My mother's wardrobe demanded an extensive addition,—for, sooth to say, her costume had become, as far as fashion went, rather antediluvian. Constance announced that a back-tooth called for professional interference. May heaven forgive her if she fibbed!—for a dental display of purer ivory never slily solicited a lover's kiss, than what her joyous laugh exhibited. My poor mother entered a protest against the "spes ultima gregis," ...
— International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 5, July 29, 1850 • Various
... learning. However, I contrived to extricate myself, and advanced with awful admiration through the vast avenues of the library. I perceived on every side innumerable volumes and repositories of ancient learning, and all the science of the Antediluvian world. Here I met with Hermes Trismegistus, and a parcel of old philosophers debating upon the politics and learning of their days. I gave them inexpressible delight in telling them, in a few words, all the discoveries ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen • Rudolph Erich Raspe
... as endeavor to impose a Papist upon him for a true follower of King William. He could have given you more generic distinctions to guide you in the decision than ever did Cuvier to designate an antediluvian mammoth; so that no sooner had he seated himself upon the coach than he buttoned up his great-coat, stuck his hands firmly in his side-pockets, pursed up his lips, and looked altogether like a man that, feeling himself out of his element, resolves to "bide his time" in ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... respected your rights, Miss Effingham, though, with a wish to prevent any violence to your tastes, I have caused sundry antediluvian paintings and engravings to ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... rewarded by a little adventure. As he cantered up to London with two servants and a post-boy, all riding on horses ordered in relays beforehand, he came up with an antediluvian coach, stuck fast by the road-side. Looking into the window, with the humane design of quizzing the elders who should be there, he saw a young lady of surpassing beauty. This altered the case; Sir Charles instantly drew bridle and offered ...
— Peg Woffington • Charles Reade
... the mine-sweepers could gather them up), this did not prevent at least one representative of the navy from passing that barrier. This was the Australian submarine, A2. It may not be generally known that Australia had two submarines at the outbreak of war. These would appear antediluvian alongside the latest underwater monster, but, nevertheless, one of these accomplished a feat such as no German submarine has ever approached. The first of our submarines met an unknown fate as it disappeared somewhere near New Guinea. There has been much speculation as to what happened to ...
— "Over There" with the Australians • R. Hugh Knyvett
... Babylonia; and incidentally they necessitate a revision of current views with regard to the cradle of Babylonian civilization. The most remarkable of the new documents is one which relates in poetical narrative an account of the Creation, of Antediluvian history, and of the Deluge. It thus exhibits a close resemblance in structure to the corresponding Hebrew traditions, a resemblance that is not shared by the Semitic-Babylonian Versions at present known. But in matter the Sumerian ...
— Legends Of Babylon And Egypt - In Relation To Hebrew Tradition • Leonard W. King
... with the terrific sacrifice of at least two hundred and fifty thousand souls, to say nothing of herds and flocks past all reckoning. These had all perished: ox, cow, horse, mule, ass, sheep, or goat, not one survived—only the camels. These arid and adust creatures, looking like the mummies of some antediluvian animals, without the affections or sensibilities of flesh and blood—these only still erected their speaking eyes to the eastern heavens, and had to all appearance come out from this long tempest of trial unscathed and unharmed. ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... girl for herself, as well as for the fact that, in this remote corner of the world, she represented the sole bit of feminine companionship which is the rightful heritage of every son of Eve. True, there was Miss Arthur; but Miss Arthur was antediluvian. Under these conditions, it was galling to Weldon to see Ethel absorbed by a comrade who, he frankly admitted to himself, was far the more personable man of the two. And the girl's blue eyes had laughed up into the eyes of the stranger just exactly as, two short weeks ...
— On the Firing Line • Anna Chapin Ray and Hamilton Brock Fuller
... days many grievances afflict this vast mass of buildings, buried under the Palais de Justice and the quay, like some antediluvian creature in the soil of Montmartre; but the worst affliction is that it is the Conciergerie. This epigram is intelligible. In the early days of the monarchy, noble criminals—for the villeins (a word signifying the peasantry in French and English alike) and the citizens came under the jurisdiction ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... or the discordance that went by that name, was furnished by two cowboys with banjos and an antediluvian gentleman with a fiddle. Nevertheless, it was music that could be danced to, and there ...
— The Rustlers of Pecos County • Zane Grey
... Sir, that means to dine with you,' and there was the muffled knock at the door which he knew so well, and a rustling behind him. So the doctor turned him about quickly with a sort of chill between his shoulders, and perched on the back of his chair sat a portentous old quizzical carrion-crow, the antediluvian progenitor of the whole race of carrion-crows, monstrous, with great shining eyes, and head white as snow, and a queer human look, and the crooked beak of an owl, that opened with a loud grating 'caw' ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... have no doubt heard that it has been rumoured that I have a depraved old man's fancy for you and that I have always hoped to marry you. That is as false as the other story I denied. I am not in love with you even in an antediluvian way. You would not marry me for your own sake. That goes without saying. But I will repeat what I said in the Wood when you told me you would believe me. There is Something—not you—not Donal—to be saved ...
— Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... absorbed and gradually lost by intermarriage amongst other tribes of the ordinary standard. Occasional exhumations of such Titan skeletons would strengthen the common prejudice. They would be taken, not for a local variety, but for an antediluvian or prehistoric type, from which the present races of man ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... very depths of that pleasant little garden, where it would play in the waters of the pool, like a beam of golden light which gleams through the chinks of a shutter into a room in Spain, that has been carefully darkened for a siesta. When the sun rose above the old crater that some antediluvian revolution had filled with water, its rocky sides took warmer tones, the extinct volcano glowed again, and its sudden heat quickened the sprouting seeds and vegetation, gave color to the flowers, and ripened the fruits of this forgotten ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... spend whole months in gnawing at the bone of an antediluvian monster, in calculating the laws of nature, when there is an opportunity to peer into her secrets, the Grecians and Latinists who dine on a thought of Tacitus, sup on a phrase of Thucydides, spend their life in brushing ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part I. • Honore de Balzac
... Gaster. Hem! Mr Mac Laurel! there is a degree of profaneness in that observation, which I should not have looked for in so staunch a supporter of church and state. Milk and honey was the pure food of the antediluvian patriarchs, who knew not the use of the grape, happily for them.—(Tossing off a bumper ...
— Headlong Hall • Thomas Love Peacock
... his own name, he will be respected by the heirs; but how often it is when the son finds the father in famine, as Joseph found Jacob in famine, the young people make it very hard for the old man. They are so surprised he eats with a knife instead of a fork. They are chagrined at his antediluvian habits. They are provoked because he cannot hear as well as he used to, and when he asks it over again, and the son has to repeat it, he bawls in the old man's ear: "I hope you hear that!" How long he must wear the old coat or the old hat before they get him a new one! ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... the Nile when we discovered its source—and dried it in the sun, and then baked it under a bonfire, like in Foul Play. And most of the things were such queer shapes that they should have done for almost anything—Roman or Greek, or even Egyptian or antediluvian, or household milk-jugs of the cavemen, Albert's uncle said. The pots were, fortunately, quite ready and dirty, because we had already buried them in mixed sand and river mud to improve the colour, and not remembered ...
— The Wouldbegoods • E. Nesbit
... we wandered through saloons of antediluvian animals, some set up in skeletons, others imprisoned in solid stone; also specimens of still extant animals, birds, reptiles, shells, minerals,— the whole circle of human knowledge and guess-work,—till I wished that the whole Past might be swept away, and each generation ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... out where roofs had been and should be again, where gables had been pulled down, and where floors had vanished, showing her how to reconstruct their details from marks in the walls, much as a comparative anatomist reconstructs an antediluvian from fragmentary bones and teeth. She appeared to be interested, listened attentively, but said little in reply. They were ultimately in a long narrow passage, indifferently lighted, when Somerset, treading on a loose ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... Buss plate. He introduced a farcical incident not in the text—the ball knocking off the fielder's hat, who is quite close to the batsman. A very poor production. Observe the "antediluvian" shape of the bat—no paddings on the legs. The sketch is valuable as showing how not to interpret Dickens' humour, or rather how to interpret it in a strictly literal way—that is, ...
— Pickwickian Manners and Customs • Percy Fitzgerald
... We meant to arrive, shed the dust at our hotel, and then saunter forth for dress parade, but instead of that we had to see the great sight of the day sitting in our motors. The poor Hippopotamus did look antediluvian among all the smart cars and carriages assembled! But the rest of us weren't so bad, even after a day's run, and, anyhow, we had no time to think of ourselves, there was too much else to ...
— The Lightning Conductor Discovers America • C. N. (Charles Norris) Williamson and A. M. (Alice Muriel)
... coast. The townspeople made shoes, and minded their own business. Dr. Sharpe bought the dying practice of an antediluvian who believed in camomile and castor-oil. Harrie mended a few stockings, made a few pies, and ...
— Men, Women, and Ghosts • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... mountain. The rather heavy gentleman is carried by fifteen men; each of the ladies by half-a-dozen. We who walk, make the best use of our staves; and so the whole party begin to labor upward over the snow—as if they were toiling to the summit of an antediluvian Twelfth-cake. ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII - Italy and Greece, Part Two • Various
... it would throw some light on the subject that absorbed her. But she shut up the volume in a rage when she found that it had nothing but excuses to offer for the fall of a married woman. After that, and guided only by chance, she read a number of other novels, most of which were of antediluvian date, thus accounting, she supposed, for their sentiments, which she found old fashioned. We should be wrong, however, if we supposed that Jacqueline's crude judgment of these books had nothing in common with true criticism. Her only object, however, in reading all ...
— Jacqueline, Complete • (Mme. Blanc) Th. Bentzon
... believed, that, like the sloths, to which they are intimately related, they subsisted by climbing back downwards on trees, and feeding on the leaves. It was a bold, not to say preposterous, idea to conceive even antediluvian trees, with branches strong enough to bear animals as large as elephants. Professor Owen, with far more probability, believes that, instead of climbing on the trees, they pulled the branches down to them, and tore up the smaller ones by the roots, and so fed on the leaves. The colossal breadth ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... poor friend. It seems the moral of his story, that human beings of Donatello's character, compounded especially for happiness, have no longer any business on earth, or elsewhere. Life has grown so sadly serious, that such men must change their nature, or else perish, like the antediluvian creatures that required, as the condition of their existence, a more ...
— The Marble Faun, Volume II. - The Romance of Monte Beni • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... they did not move when stones were thrown, were extremely interesting to the naturalist, and gave rise to numerous observations and suggestions in later works. The huge tortoises slowly carrying their great bodies about, appeared like strange antediluvian animals. The hideous large water-lizard (Amblyrhynchus), swimming with perfect ease, and capable of an hour's immersion in sea-water; and the land lizard of the same genus, so numerous that at James Island it was hardly possible to find a spot free from their burrows, the roofs of which constantly ...
— Life of Charles Darwin • G. T. (George Thomas) Bettany
... charms deepen the longer she is known; and he that loves her most warmly, has watched her with the narrowest inspection. She can bear the keenest glances of the microscope, and to see all her glory would exhaust an antediluvian life. The appetite, in her case, "grows with what it feeds on;" but such an appetite ...
— The Poetical Works of John Dryden, Vol II - With Life, Critical Dissertation, and Explanatory Notes • John Dryden
... far as it regards the separating of metals from foreign matters in the ore, smelting and refining them, is of the highest antiquity; it is even supposed to have been understood and practised in the antediluvian world. ...
— A Catechism of Familiar Things; Their History, and the Events Which Led to Their Discovery • Benziger Brothers
... latter with many injunctions to ascertain that two old-fashioned hirsute trunks containing her wardrobe were really put into the steamer at Quebec. Bluebell had treated herself to a smart little portmanteau for the cabin, being rather ashamed of her antediluvian luggage. She had ten sovereigns in her purse, that had been scraped together among them as a provision for any emergency. The Rolleston children had sent her a travelling-bag; but not even a message came from Cecil, which saddened Bluebell, but did not make her resentful, ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... I propose to relate occurred in antediluvian times, when there were giants in the earth who lived a thousand years. Then matter reigned, not mind. It was the age of brawn. Everything material existed on a gigantic scale, and man's architectural ...
— Daybreak: A Romance of an Old World • James Cowan
... The next object passing townward is a butcher's cart canopied with its arch of snow-white cotton. Behind comes a "sauceman" driving a wagon full of new potatoes, green ears of corn, beets, carrots, turnips and summer squashes, and next two wrinkled, withered witch-looking old gossips in an antediluvian chaise drawn by a horse of former generations and going to peddle out a lot of huckleberries. See, there, a man trundling a wheelbarrow-load of lobsters. And now a milk-cart rattles briskly onward, covered with green canvas and ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... town now and then by very bad news from abroad, one should be quite stupefied. There is nobody left but two or three solitary regents; and they are always whisking backwards and forwards to their villas; and about a dozen antediluvian dowagers, whose carcasses have miraculously resisted the wet, and who every Saturday compose a very reverend catacomb at my old Lady Strafford's. She does not take money at the door for showing them, but 'you pay twelvepence apiece under the denomination of card-money. Wit and beauty, ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... of Nicholas Danver's own choosing? He dismissed the idea. It savoured too much of early Victorian melodrama for the prosaic twentieth century. The support of some antediluvian servant or pet? Possibly. But then it would hardly be necessary to require verbal communication of such a condition; a brief written statement to the effect would have sufficed. The house ghost-haunted; a yearly exorcising ...
— Antony Gray,—Gardener • Leslie Moore
... coloured clays, strewn about all higgledy-piggledy, resolved themselves into uncouth antediluvian monsters, with faces so suggestive of something human and malign that they were more like the weird imaginings of some evil dream than inanimate things of clay. And over all brooded the mysterious dusk and the silence—the silence as of death that had been from the beginning, and which haunted ...
— The Rising of the Red Man - A Romance of the Louis Riel Rebellion • John Mackie
... Believe me, there is no time like the present. Here are the tools. They look quite antediluvian. Do you think now that it really was a flesh-and-blood Indian we saw here; or was it the ghost of some murdered priest? And has he been digging down here to excavate his own old bones, or have a peep to see that they ...
— Our Home in the Silver West - A Story of Struggle and Adventure • Gordon Stables
... by men of genius, in the infancy of the science, are those of Whiston, "who fancied that the earth was created from the atmosphere of one comet, and deluged by the tail of another;" and that, for their sins, the antediluvian population were drowned; "except the fishes, whose passions ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 13, No. 354, Saturday, January 31, 1829. • Various
... of "Atlantis, the Antediluvian World" was prepared from input provided by Mr. J.B. Hare. For an HTML text with the illustrations from the original ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... is restricted to antediluvian organic remains; which are considered by Aubrey, in Chapter VII. under the ...
— The Natural History of Wiltshire • John Aubrey
... swords made of black birch, the edges of which were inlaid with the teeth of animals, or the shells of fish, ground sharp. Besides these, were skulls of great size and in good preservation, stone pipes, pouches, and so on; also some enormous teeth and bones of an antediluvian animal, found in the Bras Dor lake in Cape Breton. It was, take it altogether, the most complete collection of relics of this interesting race, the Micmacs, and of natur's products to be found in this province. ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... one of the big public-houses, called hotels; but whether it called itself a cow, or horse, or stag, or angel, or a blue or green something, I cannot remember. They gave me what they called a beefsteak pie—a tough crust and under it some blackish cubes carved out of the muscle of an antediluvian ox-and for this delicious fare and a glass of stout I paid ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... has been more thoroughly examined there than elsewhere. The "blue lead" is a stratum of blue clay very rich in gold. It is found deep under other strata. The general opinion is, that the blue lead occupies the bed of a large antediluvian river, which ran parallel with the Sacramento and about sixty miles eastward of it. It has been traced twenty miles or more, passing near Monte Cristo, Alleghany Town, Forest City, Chip's Flat and Zion Hill. Mr. C. S. Capp wrote thus to the ...
— Hittel on Gold Mines and Mining • John S. Hittell
... investigator along these lines, in which the clairvoyant is able to give the history of certain places in ancient Egypt, from the connecting link of a piece of mummy-cloth; or else to give a picture of certain events in antediluvian times, from the connecting link of a bit of fossil substance. The history of Psychometry is filled with remarkable instances of this kind. Bullets gathered from battlefields also serve very effectively as such ...
— Genuine Mediumship or The Invisible Powers • Bhakta Vishita
... of making faithful and formative creatures of themselves, or unfaithful and de-formative. And this distinction between the creatures who, blessing, are blessed, and evermore benedicti, and the creatures who, cursing, are cursed, and evermore maledicti, is one going through all humanity; antediluvian in Cain and Abel, diluvian in Ham and Shem. And the question for the public of any given period is not whether they are a constitutional or unconstitutional vulgus, but whether they are a benignant or malignant vulgus. So also, whether it ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... first, whoever reads Dr. Prichard's[14] account of the contents of the earliest chronicles, consisting, amongst other matters, of an antediluvian Caesar; a landing of Partholanus with his wife Ealga, on the coast of Connemara, twelve years after the Deluge, and on the 14th of May; the colony of the Neimhidh, descendants of Gog and Magog; the Fir-Bolg from the Thrace; the Tuatha de Danann from Athens; and, above all, the famous Milesians, ...
— The Ethnology of the British Islands • Robert Gordon Latham
... man who blindly obeyed the will of God, and who succeeded in identifying himself with the celestial intelligences, possessed the philosopher's stone—he could cure all diseases, and prolong life to as many centuries as he pleased; it being by the very same means that Adam and the antediluvian patriarchs prolonged theirs. Life was an emanation from the stars—the sun governed the heart, and the moon the brain. Jupiter governed the liver, Saturn the gall, Mercury the lungs, Mars the bile, and Venus the loins. In the stomach of every human being there dwelt a demon, or intelligence, ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... Had met mine inscrutably, By a magic hid in the pipestem, Making me his familiar and hail fellow. Almost I felt his breath, And the muffled sound of his heart-beats; Almost I grasped his hand, And shook the antediluvian, With a shake of grimmest fellowship Trying to cozen him of his grim secret. But sudden the gusty wind came, Laughing away the illusion, And I was ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... a cheerful sort of House-Warming with one of you off scouring the country for more blisters and chilblains, and another huntin' antediluvian elephants." The Colonel spoke with uncommon irascibility. The great feast-day had certainly ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)
... mind. The wide hat, long, evenly parted hair, and pen-wiper cloak could be traced to these same old-fashioned ideas. These idiosyncrasies excited no comment so far as Nathan was concerned. He was always looked upon as belonging to some antediluvian period, but with a progressive man like Richard the case, his neighbors thought, ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... with some satisfaction before the looking-glass, and called his dog, Hope, a gift from his cousin, an old maid with an excellent heart, but no hair on her head. We started. My neighbour took with him the village constable, Arhip, a stout, squat peasant with a square face and jaws of antediluvian proportions, and an overseer he had recently hired from the Baltic provinces, a youth of nineteen, thin, flaxen-haired, and short-sighted, with sloping shoulders and a long neck, Herr Gottlieb von der Kock. My neighbour had himself only recently come into ...
— A Sportsman's Sketches - Volume II • Ivan Turgenev
... were most curious pitcher-plants. They took the form of half-climbing shrubs, their pitchers, of various sizes and forms, hanging in numbers from their leaves. Every ridge was now crowned with gigantic ferns, which reminded us of the descriptions of the antediluvian world, when ferns appear to have been the chief vegetation which covered the surface of the globe.—I will ...
— In the Eastern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... occasion he had the satisfaction at least of getting up plenty of excitement. What transpired in that fatal interview between him and the ruling elder could never be accurately learned from the former. When questioned upon the subject, he confined his remarks to dark hints regarding antediluvian pig-headedness and backwoods ignorance, but Wee Andra, who in his heart was rather proud of his sire's fighting qualities, spread the account of the schoolmaster's defeat over the whole neighbourhood, with the ...
— Duncan Polite - The Watchman of Glenoro • Marian Keith
... decay. Thus, about seventy years ago, a huge animal was found imbedded in the ice in Siberia: from a comparison of its skeleton with those of existing species, Cuvier inferred that this animal must have been antediluvian; and yet, so completely had the cold prevented putrefaction, that dogs willingly ate of the still existing flesh. At St Petersburg, when winter is approaching, the fish in the markets become almost like blocks of ice, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 460 - Volume 18, New Series, October 23, 1852 • Various
... dust. For toothbrushes and their purchase are determined by the nature of human beings, not by the nature of embryonic stars. And Spinoza's doctrine of necessity maintains that all events are determined by their proper causes, not that everything is immediately caused by some antediluvian event. And this is true even though we can start from any event in the present, no matter how trivial, and go back to an event causally antecedent, and from that to another, even until we recede into the stellar dust itself. But this only amounts to saying, what is undoubtedly true, ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... could not get near enough to see what it contained, but I may say here, that when, two days later, circumstances compelled him to have a close look at it, he saw that it consisted of about a dozen fine coprolites, deposited by some antediluvian creature or creatures, which, whatever else they may have been, were ...
— Erewhon Revisited • Samuel Butler
... both of their topics and of their manner, a contrast to the majority of his essays in the earlier volumes; but several of them, both in this vein and in one less lofty, are among the best known, if not the finest, of all his essays. Such are the "Mountain of Miseries''; the antediluvian novel of "Shalum and Hilpa''; the "Reflections by Moonlight on ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... clear sand amid the alders invites his feet; and now our steady approach compels him to seek a new retreat. It is a bird of the oldest Thalesian school, and no doubt believes in the priority of water to the other elements; the relic of a twilight antediluvian age which yet inhabits these bright American rivers with us Yankees. There is something venerable in this melancholy and contemplative race of birds, which may have trodden the earth while it was yet in a slimy and imperfect state. Perchance their tracks too are still visible ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau
... trip. I had long been familiar with a paint in my color-box called Burnt Sienna, and was now much interested to learn that it was made of the yellow clay on which the city of Siena stands; and when I discovered for myself that this clay, having formed the bed of some antediluvian ocean, was full of fossil shells, I thought that Siena was a place where I would do well to spend one of my lifetimes. The odd, parti-colored architecture of the town did not so much appeal to me, and certainly the streets and squares were less attractive in themselves than either the Roman ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... (black). As has been already indicated, Mr. R. Brown, jun., shows that "the Indian system of Yugas, or ages of the world, presents many features which forcibly remind us of the Euphratean scheme". The Babylonians had ten antediluvian kings, who were reputed to have reigned for vast periods, the total of which amounted to 120 saroi, or 432,000 years. These figures at once recall the Indian Maha-yuga of 4,320,000 years 432,000 x 10. Apparently the Babylonian and Indian systems of calculation ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... walk than take my chances in an antediluvian rattle-trap like that," said the tall wayfarer, bending quite close to her ear. "It will fall to ...
— Green Fancy • George Barr McCutcheon
... with the sunken continent of Atlantis, that Ouranos, one of the Atlantean kings, ordered his whole army to be circumcised that they might escape a fatal scourge then decimating the people to their westward.[3] This tradition tells us that the hygienic benefits of circumcision were recognized antediluvian facts, as it also points out the way by which circumcision traveled westward across to the Western World. As Donnelly has pointed out, many of the Americans possessed not only traditions, habits, and customs that must have come from the Old World, but the similarity of many words and their ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... was unlocking her own; welcomed him openly and was maddeningly respectful to him. This made him rage. What did she think he was, anyhow? An old professor, an antiquarian, an archaeologist? She might as well consider him an antediluvian ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... brim with ineffable peace and beauty. The vast expanse of water was without a ripple, mirroring all the changing shades of the sunset glow. Miles and miles of a desolate sandbank lay like a huge amphibious reptile of some antediluvian age, with its scales glistening in shining colours. As our boat was silently gliding by the precipitous river-bank, riddled with the nest-holes of a colony of birds, suddenly a big fish leapt up to the surface of the water and then ...
— Sadhana - The Realisation of Life • Rabindranath Tagore
... where we lunched off a tin of antediluvian Spanish sardines, some mouldy sweet biscuits, and black wine. (A distinction is made in these parts between black and red wine; the former is the Apulian variety, the other from Sulmona.) During this repast, we were treated to several bear-stories. For there are bears at Pescasseroli, and nowhere ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas
... one respect at least I was unjust to the little creature who is now my sister and calls me Miss Frances. Not by a word or look has she shown the least inclination to assume the position of mistress of the house, nor does she seem to think me at all in the way; but that she considers me quite an antediluvian I am certain, for, in speaking of something which happened in 1820, she asked if I remembered it! And I only three years older than Guy! But then she once called him a dear old grandfatherly man, and thought it a good joke that on their wedding tour she was ...
— Miss McDonald • Mary J. Holmes
... had provided, between the venerable patriarch Noah and the late eminent showman P. T. Barnum. The question to be debated was upon the resolution passed by the committee, that "The Animals of the Antediluvian Period were Far More Attractive for Show Purposes than those of Modern Make," and, singular to relate, the affirmative was placed in the hands of Mr. Barnum, while to Noah had fallen the task of upholding the virtues of the modern freak. It is with the ...
— A House-Boat on the Styx • John Kendrick Bangs
... glorious with form, color, and motion, that every globe in the remotest heaven; every chemical change from the rudest crystal up to the laws of life; every change of vegetation from the first principle of growth in the eye of a leaf, to the tropical forest and antediluvian coal-mine; every animal function from the sponge up to Hercules, shall hint or thunder to man the laws of right and wrong, and echo the Ten Commandments. Therefore is nature ever the ally of Religion: lends all her pomp and riches to the religious sentiment. Prophet and priest, David, ...
— Nature • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... dear friend," he said, "yet what you say possesses, shall we call it, a somewhat antediluvian flavour. Intrigue is no longer a clumsy game of knife and string and bowl. It becomes to-day a game of finesse. I can assure you that I have no desire to give a stage whistle and have you throttled at my feet. On ...
— The Yellow Crayon • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... in Scripture" were hung up in public places. Jurieu saw some of them thus suspended in one of the churches of Valence; and Henrion, apparently under the stimulus thus given, drew up tables showing the size of our antediluvian ancestors, giving the height of Adam as 123 feet 9 inches and that of Eve as 118 feet 9 inches ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... Mehrman Singh. His face was seamed with smallpox marks, and he had seven or eight black patches on it the first time I saw him, caused by the splintering of his flint when he let off his antediluvian gun. When he saw my breechloaders, the first he had ever beheld, his admiration was unbounded. He told me he had come on a leopard asleep in the forest one day, and crept up quite close to him. His faith in his old gun, however, was not so lively as to make him rashly ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis
... sudden appearance had occasioned this abrupt departure would, in truth, have been somewhat singular, not to say alarming, in aspect, to those who did not know its nature. At a distance it looked like one of those horrible antediluvian monsters one reads of, with a lank body, about thirty feet long. It was reddish-yellow in colour, and came on at a slow, crawling pace, its back appearing occasionally above the underwood. Presently its outline became more defined, and it turned ...
— The Wild Man of the West - A Tale of the Rocky Mountains • R.M. Ballantyne
... brother to the judge, and younger than he by five years, was a married man, and had had children around his hearthstone; but they were attacked in detail by measles, croup, and scarlet fever, and this had given the doctor a chance with his effective antediluvian methods; so the cradles were empty. He was a prosperous man, with a good head for speculations, and his fortune was growing. On the first of February, 1830, two boy babes were born in his house; one to him, one to one of his slave girls, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... not intended to witness both the seed-times and the harvests of forests,—both the planting of the sapling, and the felling of the huge tree into which it has grown; and so the incident impressed me strongly. It reminded me of the sage Shalum in Addison's antediluvian tale, who became wealthy by the sale of his great trees, two centuries after he had planted them. I pursued my walk, to revisit another little patch of water which I had found so very entertaining a volume three-and-twenty ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... cabinet made of vine wood, he opened it with a golden key, and then with great pomp and ceremony bore its contents to the Grand Duke. That chieftain took from the little dwarf the horn of a gigantic and antediluvian elk. The cunning hand of an ancient German artificer had formed this curious relic into a drinking-cup. It was exquisitely polished, and cased in the interior with silver. On the outside the only ornaments were three ...
— Vivian Grey • The Earl of Beaconsfield
... eulogium possible to a human character shines from them. He was a devout man, a fearless preacher of righteousness, an intimate friend of God, and the only man of his dispensation who did not see death. He sheds a lustre on the antediluvian age, and he shines still as an example to all generations of steady ...
— Men of the Bible; Some Lesser-Known Characters • George Milligan, J. G. Greenhough, Alfred Rowland, Walter F.
... been a prehistoric wretch," said the Ambassador, absently. "Dear me! I always knew he was extinct, but I had no idea he was antediluvian as well. That accounts for a lot of things. No wonder he was eccentric." And he gazed at ...
— Dick, Marjorie and Fidge - A Search for the Wonderful Dodo • G. E. Farrow
... is given with more than Talmudic exaggeration in the Targum of Jonathan ben Uzziel, while the author of the Book of Jasher (chap. lxv., verses 23, 24) makes the camp and the mountain forty miles in extent. The giant here figures in antediluvian tradition. He is said to have been saved at the Flood by laying hold of the ark, and being fed day by day through a hole in the side of the ark by Noah himself. A tradition which says the soles of his feet were forty ...
— Hebraic Literature; Translations from the Talmud, Midrashim and - Kabbala • Various
... across the table, the fingertips of one hand resting on the immaculate cloth. "A creature with an antediluvian lower jaw, hairy like a mastodon, and formed like a pre-historic ape, has laid this table. Are you awake, Lena? Am I? I would pinch myself, only I know that nothing would do away with this dream. Three covers. You know it is the shorter of the two who's coming—the ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... tendency to multiply sins; that is to say, when it transforms those sins into legal crimes. How would you like to be haled before a Court of law for some ridiculous trifle, which became a crime only because it used to be a sin, and became a sin only because some dyspeptic old antediluvian was envious of his neighbour's pleasure? Our statute-book reeks of discarded theories of conduct; the serpent's trail of the theologian, of the reactionary, is ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas |
