"Fossil" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... reason why we no longer have so many grand old men is that we no longer have so many old men. Instead we have numbers of octogenarian sportsmen like the late Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, who have not yet been caught by the arch-reactionary fossil-collector, Senility. This is a fair omen for the future of progress. "If only the leaders of the world's thought and emotion," writes Bourne in "Youth," "can, by caring for the physical basis, keep themselves young, why, ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... familiar conjunctions of things wherewith the inanimate world baits the mind of man when he pauses in moments of suspense, opposite Knight's eyes was an imbedded fossil, standing forth in low relief from the rock. It was a creature with eyes. The eyes, dead and turned to stone, were even now regarding him. It was one of the early crustaceans called Trilobites. Separated ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... or of the distinctive features of the dragon and its history. But when the Keeper of the Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities in the British Museum, in a book that is not intended to be humorous,[135] seriously claims Dr. Andrews' discovery of a gigantic fossil snake as "proof" of the former existence of "the great serpent-devil Apep," it is ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... had been for thousands of years, by various races. We learn, from the recent discoveries in the Swiss Lakes, that man was in Switzerland before that time; in France, as Boucher's and Rigollet's discoveries prove; in Great Britain, as the caves in Devonshire show; in North America, as the fossil human skull beneath Table Mountain demonstrates. Hence, for the flood to destroy man alone at so recent a period, it must have been as wide ...
— The Deluge in the Light of Modern Science - A Discourse • William Denton
... not even a native of Europe, but of the East, whence it was very early introduced into Europe; so early, indeed, that it has recently been found "fossil in a tufaceous deposit in the South of France."—DARWIN. It was no doubt brought into England by the Romans. Tacitus, describing England in the first century after Christ, says expressly that the Vine did not, and, as he evidently thought, could not grow there. "Solum, ...
— The plant-lore & garden-craft of Shakespeare • Henry Nicholson Ellacombe
... would have ensued, the gum would have ossified, while the nerve of the tooth becoming apostrophized, the roots would have concatenated in their hiatuses, and the jaw-bone, no longer acting upon their fossil exoduses, would necessarily have led to the entire suspension of the capillary organs of your stomach and brain, and—death would supervene ...
— The Humors of Falconbridge - A Collection of Humorous and Every Day Scenes • Jonathan F. Kelley
... mines at Muzo in Granada, and from the results of his analyses, together with the fact of finding emeralds in conjunction with the presence of fossil shells in the limestone in which they occur, he arrived at the conclusion that they have been formed in the wet way—deposited from a chemical solution. He also found that when extracted they are ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science - Vol. XI, No. 27, June, 1873 • Various
... Herbal was a favorite book, and it set him to look in every direction for as many of the plants described in it as the countryside could supply. A story has been circulated that on these occasions he did not always confine his researches in zoology to fossil animals. That Livingstone was a poacher in the grosser sense of the term seems hardly credible, though with the Radical opinions which he held at the time it may readily be believed that he had no respect for the sanctity of game. If a salmon ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie
... discovered by looking within upon the soul or without upon the world. A truth written upon the human heart to-day in its full play of emotions or passions, cannot be at any real variance even with a truth written upon a fossil whose poor life was gone millions of years ago. And this being so, it would also seem a truth irrefragable; that the search for each of these kind of truths must be followed out in its own lines, by its own methods, to its ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various
... these hypotheses, living beings, such as now exist, have existed from all eternity upon this earth. We tested that hypothesis by the circumstantial evidence, as I called it, which is furnished by the fossil remains contained in the earth's crust, and we found that it was obviously untenable. I then proceeded to consider the second hypothesis, which I termed the Miltonic hypothesis, not because it is of any particular consequence to me whether John Milton seriously entertained it or not, but ...
— American Addresses, with a Lecture on the Study of Biology • Tomas Henry Huxley
... contains these shells has been subjected to enormous pressure in a direction at right angles to the planes of cleavage. The shells are all flattened and spread out in these planes. Compare this fossil trilobite of normal proportions with these others which have suffered distortion. Some have lain across, some along, and some oblique to the cleavage of the slate in which they are found; but in all cases ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... large eyes. The name of Rhodes is said to come from a Phoenician word, meaning a serpent, and the Greeks called this isle of serpents, which is all in favor of the truth of the story. But, on the other hand, such traditions often are prompted by the sight of the fossil skeletons of the dragons of the elder world, and are generally to be met with where such minerals prevail as are found in the northern part of Rhodes. The tale is disbelieved by many, but it is hard to suppose it an entire invention, though the description ...
— A Book of Golden Deeds • Charlotte M. Yonge
... call tropical flourished within the present Arctic Circle. If some future daring navigator reaches the north pole and finds solid land there, he will probably discover in the rocks at his feet the fossil remains of the oranges and bananas of the ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... which I now approached with a strange mingling of reverence and curiosity. Perhaps, like a geologist, I was about to turn up to the light some of the buried strata of the human world, with its fossil remains charred by passion and petrified by tears. Perhaps I was to learn how my father, whose personal history was unknown to me, had woven his web of story; how he had found the world, and how the world had left him. Perhaps I was to find only the records of lands ...
— Phantastes - A Faerie Romance for Men and Women • George MacDonald
... That's only one thing. Every time we go out to ride she gathers up from the wayside such a load of small rocks as makes the buggy-springs ache. We found a smooth round stone, yesterday, that looks so much like my head she declares it must be a fossil, and is bound to have it set over the front door instead of a monogram. We follow your lead in another direction; if we can't rise in the world without going up stairs for it, we'll try to cultivate ...
— Homes And How To Make Them • Eugene Gardner
... And to those who say, 'You were born in time, and in time you must die, as all other creatures do; Time is your king and lord, as he has been of all the old worlds before this, and of all the races of beasts, whose bones and shells lie fossil in the rocks of a thousand generations;' then we can answer them, in the words of the wise man, and in the name ...
— The Water of Life and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... immensely interesting fossil word. It lies just at the foot of the Wrekin, and the hill which takes that name in English must have been pronounced by the old Celtic inhabitants much like Uricon: for of course the awkward initial letter has only become silent in these later lazy centuries. The Romans turned ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... accustomed to them before he started upon his manuscript that he rather slighted them. As I stood there beneath that tree—a tree which should have been part of a coal-bed countless ages since—and looked out across a sea teeming with frightful life—life which should have been fossil before God conceived of Adam—I would not have given a minim of stale beer for my chances of ever seeing my friends or the outside world again; yet then and there I swore to fight my way as far through this hideous land as circumstances ...
— The People that Time Forgot • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... downs and through the valleys, till it reaches the sea-shore, as it did in Hawaii in the Sandwich Islands this very year. And then it cools, of course; but often not before it has killed the fish by its sulphurous gases and heat, perhaps for miles around. And there is good reason to believe that the fossil fish which we so often find in rocks, perfect in every bone, lying sometimes in heaps, and twisted (as I have seen them) as if they had died suddenly and violently, were killed in this very way, either by heat ...
— Madam How and Lady Why - or, First Lessons in Earth Lore for Children • Charles Kingsley
... world has outgrown, still lingers in our schools of learning. Let us admit the divine right of Science, admit the fitness of a limited number of our youth to become high-priests in her temple, but no divine right of fossil interpreters of Science to compel the entire generation to disembowel their sons and make of these living temples mere receptacles of Roman, Grecian, or Egyptian relics. We don't believe that "mummy ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 40, February, 1861 • Various
... the blue bay held many fossil shells. Children sometimes strayed here and there with hammers, pounding out fossils from fallen pieces of the cliffs. On the extent of sands that bordered the cliffs and stretched up the coast between them and the breakers, old ...
— Out of the Triangle • Mary E. Bamford
... but we assured him that the man was far ahead of many specimens we had met. We never see an opossum in Virginia—a fossil animal in most other places—but it seems the sign of the moral stratification around. There are many varieties of opossum in Virginia,—political and religious: Saturn, who devours his offspring, has ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... effects are similar, whatever acids we employ; only the colour will be darker when we make use of the strong, than when we use the weak acids. By degrees the pupil should be accustomed to employ the strong acids; such as the vitriolic, the nitric, and the muriatic, which three are called fossil acids, to distinguish them from the vegetable, or weaker acids. We may be permitted to advise the young chemist to acquire the habit of wiping the neck of the vessel out of which he pours any strong acid, ...
— Practical Education, Volume II • Maria Edgeworth
... pale, and there was a curious look about her whole figure. It seemed as if shrinking from something, twisting itself rigidly, as a fossil tree might shrink in a wind that could ...
— Jane Field - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... should think so. Heaps of it, stacks of it. The old mud shanty was bursting with it. You would think there was not a single tusk left either above or below the ground in the whole country. 'Mostly fossil,' the manager had remarked, disparagingly. It was no more fossil than I am; but they call it fossil when it is dug up. It appears these niggers do bury the tusks sometimes—but evidently they couldn't bury this parcel deep enough ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad
... Wayland Hall. Our crowd live there, too. It's the best house on the campus, and hard to get into. It has two drawbacks; an idiot of a manager, and dear Miss Bean and her crowd. We have made complaint against the manager and she may have to go. She's a hateful old fossil and shows partiality. We can't do much about this crowd of which I've been telling you, unless they do something very malicious against us. Just let them start anything, though——" Her small black ...
— Marjorie Dean, College Sophomore • Pauline Lester
... universal assent even among those naturalists whose lives had been devoted with the greatest success to the study of organisms. Take, for instance, that great naturalist, Professor Owen, by whose labours vast extension has been given to our knowledge of the fossil animals which dwelt on the earth in past ages. Now, though Owens researches were intimately connected with the great labours of Darwin, and afforded the latter material for his epoch-making generalization, yet Owen deliberately refused ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... 4. "A fossil flat-iron." This antediluvian relic was found imbedded in a Sandy deposite opposite Surrey-street, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, September 25, 1841 • Various
... of Englishmen ruined themselves in the sinking of mines in search of coal. They might have saved their money had they known that a certain fossil which they dug up in abundance belongs to a geological stratum below which no coal is ever found. They went on digging cheerfully and wasting their money. An acquaintance with that fossil and its meaning would have saved ...
— Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers • Arthur Brisbane
... with the old fossil!" David cried. "And I'm not going to take that back or be sorry for saying it. Hadn't he better sense than to throw a wet blanket ...
— Patchwork - A Story of 'The Plain People' • Anna Balmer Myers
... could have led to important results. Yet therein lay the germ of the electric telegraph, which binds the intelligence of continents together, and, probably before many years have elapsed will "put a girdle round the globe." So, too, little bits of stone and fossil, dug out of the earth, intelligently interpreted, have issued in the science of geology and the practical operations of mining, in which large capitals are invested and vast ...
— How to Get on in the World - A Ladder to Practical Success • Major A.R. Calhoon
... clothed in a light vestment of life, which, back in geologic time, seems to have more completely enveloped it than at present, as both the arctic and the antarctic regions bear evidence in their coal-beds and other fossil ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... "Java find" is known in science by the name of Pithecanthropus, which means the ape-man. Whether we look upon this fossil as a serious find or not, it is very certain that in the caves of Europe belonging to the Quaternary period we find abundant evidences of primitive man. The older these evidences are, the more likely they are to be distinctly ...
— The Meaning of Evolution • Samuel Christian Schmucker
... the following battles: Fort Sumter, First Manassas, Yorktown, New Stone Point, West Point, Seven Pines, Mechanicsville, Chancellorsville, Riddle's Shop, Darby's Farm, Fossil's Mill, Petersburg, Jerusalem, Plank Road, Reams' Station, Winchester, Port Republic, and Cedar Run. Severely wounded in leg at Mechanicsville and again at Cedar Run, October 12th, 1864. ...
— History of Kershaw's Brigade • D. Augustus Dickert
... varieties or incipient species necessarily attain the rank of species. They may whilst in this incipient state become extinct, or they may endure as varieties for very long periods, as has been shown to be the case by Mr. Wollaston with the varieties of certain fossil land-shells in Madeira. If a variety were to flourish so as to exceed in numbers the parent species, it would then rank as the species, and the species as the variety; or it might come to supplant and exterminate ...
— On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection • Charles Darwin
... perceptible manner all the effects of different causes of degeneration. Only it should be remarked in regard to these greater species, such as the elephant and hippopotamus, that in comparing their fossil remains with the existing forms we find the earlier ones to have been larger. Nature was then in the full vigour of her youth, and the interior heat of the earth gave to her productions all the force and all the extent of which they were capable ... ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... godlike attribute of creating and embodying them with an instantaneous thought, and therefore we often find sculptures from his hand left at the critical point of their struggle to get out of the marble. The statue of St. Matthew looks like the antediluvian fossil of a human being of an epoch when humanity was mightier and more majestic than now, long ago imprisoned in ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... Hergott Springs, Mr. Waterhouse learnt that Mr. Burtt, whose station* is only a few miles distant, in opening these springs discovered some fossil bones, casts of which were forwarded to Professor Owen, who pronounced them to be the remains of a gigantic extinct marsupial, named Diprotodon Australis. (* Hergott Springs were only discovered and named by Stuart three years before, yet we now find a station close by them. ...
— Explorations in Australia, The Journals of John McDouall Stuart • John McDouall Stuart
... I stood on the log and heaved while Wes stood on the shore and pushed. Suddenly it occurred to me that if Tunemah made up his silly mind to come, he would probably do it all at once, in which case the Tenderfoot and I would have about as much show for life as fossil formations. I didn't say anything about it to the Tenderfoot, but I hitched my six-shooter around to the front, resolved to find out how good I was at wing-shooting horses. But Tunemah declared he would die for his convictions. "All right," said we, "die then," with the embellishment of profanity. ...
— The Mountains • Stewart Edward White
... Japan, and he used to write in the Japanese character even if they understood English. That was what he chiefly used the Chinese ink for. But he also used to copy the inscriptions from these things." Here Stephen lifted from the mantelpiece what looked like a fossil Bath bun, but was actually a clay tablet ...
— The Mystery of 31 New Inn • R. Austin Freeman
... eternity." Symbol was his native tongue, his first form of speech—as, indeed, it is his last—whereby he was able to say what else he could not have uttered. Such is the fact, and even the language in which we state it is "a dictionary of faded metaphors," the fossil poetry of ages ago. ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton
... humorous Dean, the travelled cynic, and he, the one of his day, the iridescent Irishman, whose remembered repartees are a feast, sharp and ringing, at divers tables descending from the upper to the fat citizen's, where, instead of coming in the sequence of talk, they are exposed by blasting, like fossil teeth of old Deluge sharks in monotonous walls of our chalk-quarries. Nor are these the less welcome for the violence of their introduction among a people glad to be set burning rather briskly awhile ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... animals and plants which lived and died while the mud of which the rocks are formed was yet soft ooze, and could receive and bury them. It would be a great error to suppose that these organic remains were fragmentary relics. Our museums exhibit fossil shells of immeasurable antiquity, as perfect as the day they were formed, whole skeletons without a limb disturbed—nay, the changed flesh, the developing embryos, and even the very footsteps of primieval organisms. ...
— The Darwinian Hypothesis • Thomas H. Huxley
... of the marriage of the tulasi shrub (Ocymum sanctum) with the salagram stone, or fossil ammonite, ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... this excavation must have been made, at a great expense, out of the solid cliff, and in making it some of the most curious specimens of petrifaction and fossil remains were found. You see that the roof is vaulted, and that it is only now and then a lump of chalk has fallen in, or a great piece of flint; and now we come ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... leisure. The people of those isles call the bird 'Rukh.'" Yule has an interesting note (vol. II, p. 348) showing how old and widespread the fable of the Rukh was, and is of opinion that the reason that the legend was localized in the direction of Madagascar was perhaps that some remains of the great fossil Aepyornis and its colossal eggs were found in that island. Professor Sayce states that the Rukh figures much—not only in Chinese folk-lore—but also in the old, Babylonian literature. The bird is of course familiar to ...
— The Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela • Benjamin of Tudela
... those words, but . . . well, it was years ago, and 'tisn't as vivid now as it was when they were fresh. That sort of words doesn't keep, in the kind of climate we have out here. Professor Marsh said those skeletons were fossils. So that makes me part blue grass and part fossil; if there is any older or better stock, you will have to look for it among the Four Hundred, I reckon. I am satisfied with it. And am a happy horse, too, though born out ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... our finite humanity,—will certainly fail to keep all these laws perfectly. Disease is one of the penalties of one of the forms of such failure. It is prefigured in the perturbations of the planets, in the disintegration of the elemental masses; it has left its traces in the fossil organisms of extinct creations. [Professor Agassiz has kindly handed me the following note: "There are abnormal structures in animals of all ages anterior to the creation of mankind. Malformed specimens of Crinoids are known from the Triassic and Jurassic deposits. Malformed and diseased bones ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... ANIMALCULES, Living and Fossil, containing Descriptions of every species, British and Foreign, the methods of procuring and viewing them, &c., illustrated by numerous Engravings. By ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 234, April 22, 1854 • Various
... smiled to himself to see Daisy's face at this statement, though outwardly he kept perfectly grave. Daisy's own simple orbs were so full and intent. She looked from him to the fossil. ...
— Melbourne House, Volume 1 • Susan Warner
... "Count Alfieri, sir," he said, "has doubtless explained to you the necessity that obliges me to be so private in receiving my friends; and now perhaps you will join these gentlemen in examining some rare fossil fish newly sent me ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... him, it gave this superstitious Indian about the biggest fright he had ever received. It was a book in which were pictured and described many of the great extinct monsters of the old times. These enormous hideous creatures, whose bones and fossil remains are still occasionally to be found, quite alarmed him. Yet the book was generally about the first ...
— Algonquin Indian Tales • Egerton R. Young
... geology to which he had devoted a large share of his attention. But even in his works we look in vain for a satisfactory treatise on the mountain-rocks of Palestine, on the geognostic formation of that interesting part of Western Asia, or on the fossil treasures which its strata are understood to envelop. We are therefore reduced to the necessity of collecting from various authors, belonging to different countries and successive ages, the scattered ...
— Palestine or the Holy Land - From the Earliest Period to the Present Time • Michael Russell
... not the case. Quatrefages, speaking of this wonderful genealogical tree which Haeckel has drawn up with such scientific accuracy of description, observes: "The first thing to remark is that not one of the creatures exhibited in this pedigree has ever been seen, either living or in fossil. Their existence is based entirely upon theory." (Les Emules de Darwin, ii. p. 76). "Man's pedigree as drawn up by Haeckel," says the distinguished savant, Du Bois-Reymond, "is worth about as much as is that of Homer's ...
— At the Deathbed of Darwinism - A Series of Papers • Eberhard Dennert
... upon any religious subject. Mr. Torrence would have had Huxley and Haeckel and Tyndall arrested; would have had Humboldt and John Stuart Mill and Harriet Martineau and George Eliot locked up in the city jail. Mr. Torrence is a fossil from the old red sandstone of a mistake. Let him rest. To hear these people talk you would suppose that God is some petty king, some Liliputian prince, who was about to be dethroned, and who was nearly ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... playing the slave part," he said—"a slave to conventions and fossil-methods of instruction. One can really learn more from studying the actual formation of rocks than from those worthy Dons whom nothing will move out of their customary ruts of routine. Even at that early time I felt that, given a man of health and good physical condition, with sound brain, sound ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... my return I received orders instructing me to accompany Professor Marsh on a fossil-hunting expedition into the rough lands of the Big Horn Basin. The party was to consist of a number of scientists besides Professor Marsh, together with twenty-five students from Yale, which institution was sending out ...
— An Autobiography of Buffalo Bill (Colonel W. F. Cody) • Buffalo Bill (William Frederick Cody)
... annoyed by the vulgar curiosity of the populace, who gape in our faces as if we were South Sea Islanders or specimens of fossil life." ...
— Joseph II. and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... French parties, French plays, French lectures. We read French, speak French, sing French, and look French; and, if you are so barbarously ignorant as not to understand that language, why, you might just as well retire for an old fossil or petrifaction. You're obsolete, that's all; as much behind the times as RIP VAN WINKLE himself, after his memorable sleep. English is out of date here—a relic of the Dark Ages. Fashionable ladies return from Paris, bringing with them ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 8, May 21, 1870 • Various
... the bookshelf, where he looked to see the life of Jesse James, he was astonished and somewhat reassured to discover a title like "Fossil Fishes of the Old Red Sandstone of the British Isles." It was unlikely, he reasoned, that a man who voluntarily read, for instance, "Contributions to the Natural History of the United States," would split his skull when his back was turned. Yet they smacked of affectation ...
— The Man from the Bitter Roots • Caroline Lockhart
... and poles, in quest of the mallard. That "swopping" bird, still justly respected, was thought, for many ages, to linger in the college of which he is the protector. But now all hope of recovering him alive is lost, and it is reserved for the excavator of the future to marvel over the fossil bones of the "swopping, ...
— Oxford • Andrew Lang
... eighteenth century a learned gentleman had taken much pains to gather together this account of the town. He began with the story of Brutus, and showed that one of the monarchs descended from the illustrious Trojan founded a city here. Some fossil shells, indeed, that had been dug up furnished him with conclusive proof that the Deluge had not left the site uncovered, since no how else could they have got there: an argument commonly accepted in his day. Thus he commenced, like the monks themselves, with the beginning of the ...
— Round About a Great Estate • Richard Jefferies
... fortifications, consisting of a steep ditch, some thirty feet deep by sixty or eighty wide, cut out of the solid rock, and the precipice-like wall above, with towers crested with forked battlements set along it at due intervals. The rock is a soft and crumbling limestone, containing "fossil creatures still so like the creatures they were once, that there it first occurred to the human brain to imagine that the buried shapes were not mockeries of life, but had indeed once lived; and, under those white banks by the roadside, was born, like a poor Italian gypsy, the modern ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... are known to us only by their fossil and mostly fragmentary skeletons, but it may be said that at least in the ungulate line, the successive geological periods show steady structural progression in certain directions. Of great importance are a decrease in the number of functional ...
— American Big Game in Its Haunts • Various
... while off Cape Byron, an interesting addition to zoology was made in a small floating shellfish, which has since proved to constitute a new genus,* throwing light, I am informed, upon many fossil univalves in the older formations; and a rare bird of the noddy kind (Anous leucocapillus) perched on the rigging towards evening, and was added to the collection; for even the beauty and innocence of a tired wanderer like it was insufficient ...
— Narrative Of The Voyage Of H.M.S. Rattlesnake, Commanded By The Late Captain Owen Stanley, R.N., F.R.S. Etc. During The Years 1846-1850. Including Discoveries And Surveys In New Guinea, The Louisiade • John MacGillivray
... church, with a long flight of steps leading up to it from the harbor along which the people go, and when there is a funeral the coffin has to be slung in order to be carried up the steps. Whitby is famous for its jet, which is worked into numerous ornaments: this is a variety of fossil wood, capable of being cut and taking a high polish. It is also celebrated for its production of iron-ore, which indeed is a product of all this part of Yorkshire; while at night, along the valley of the Tees, not far north ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... list of birds might close, but for a bird which anciently existed in Europe so strangely different from all modern kinds, that it must certainly be here adverted to. This bird is the Archeopteryx, found in fossil ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... fiction. Nevertheless, such is the fortunate recuperative faculty of boyhood that day after day I would forget the horrors of that hour, and be happy in climbing over the decayed chalk acclivities of Whitby, picking up the fossil shells that nestle there. Yonder on my table, as I write, lies a coiled ammonite found there; it had been there ten thousand years or ages before I detached it from its bed, and, for aught I know, my remotest posterity may use it, as I have done, for a paper-weight. Thanks to eternal ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... productions of nature than of man, and have the lastingness of such, delighting our age with the same startle of newness and beauty that pleased our youth. Is it his thought? It has the shifting inward lustre of diamond. Is it his feeling? It is as delicate as the impressions of fossil ferns. He seems to have caught and fixed forever in immutable grace the most evanescent and intangible of our intuitions, the very ripple-marks on the remotest shores of being. But this intensity of mood which insures high quality ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... the ivory throughout Northern Russia," says Lyell, Principles, vol. 1, p. 183, "that, according to Tilesius, thousands of fossil tusks have been collected ...
— The Christian Foundation, April, 1880
... with people in the mass, David, and no one living can do it better. I am like most women, I think: I deal with the individual. That is all the difference. When do the Annerses go out to the fossil-beds?" ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde
... to render the volume more fitted for popular reading; but I trust that naturalists will remember, that they must refer for details to the larger publications which comprise the scientific results of the Expedition. The Zoology of the Voyage of the Beagle includes an account of the Fossil Mammalia, by Professor Owen; of the Living Mammalia, by Mr. Waterhouse; of the Birds, by Mr. Gould; of the Fish, by the Rev. L. Jenyns; and of the Reptiles, by Mr. Bell. I have appended to the descriptions of each species an account of its habits and range. ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... than those of steam or water, being especially efficacious in severe, and often apparently otherwise incurable, cases of rheumatism. There are also some pleasant walks by the River Adour, and in the neighbourhood there is a bed of fossil salt. ...
— Twixt France and Spain • E. Ernest Bilbrough
... Report on the Sandstone of the Connecticut Valley, especially its Fossil Footmarks, made to the Government of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. By Edward Hitchcock, Professor in Amherst College. Plates, etc. Boston. William White, Printer to the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... bearing their newly established significance of geological epochs. The famous tracing of the Creator's footsteps, undertaken by a gifted compromiser, was felt by even the most bigoted to be a lame rejoinder. His ASTEROLEPSIS, the giant fossil-fish from the Old Red Sandstone, the antiquity of which should show that the origin of life was not to be found solely in "infusorial points," but that highly developed forms were among the earliest created—this single prop was admittedly not strong ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... sympathetic moods under whose influence one gazes with a certain poignant tenderness at the worn face of the moon; that little "fossil world'' (the child of our mother earth, too) bears such terrible scars of its brief convulsive life that a sense of pity is awakened by the sight. The moon is the wonder-land of the telescope. Those towering mountains, whose "proud aspiring peaks'' cast silhouettes of shadow that ...
— Curiosities of the Sky • Garrett Serviss
... the lias clay there are large numbers of a fossil shell, Gryphea incurva, known locally as "devils claws"; they certainly have a demoniac claw-like appearance, and worry the drainers by catching on the blade of the draining tool, and preventing its ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... there,—went, merely because Mr. Tutt was one of the very few friends of his father that he knew. And he held towards the old lawyer rather the same sort of patronizing attitude that he had had towards the old man. It would be a rotten dinner probably followed by a deadly dull evening with a snuffy old fossil who would tell him long-winded, rambling anecdotes of what New York had been like when there were wild goats ...
— By Advice of Counsel • Arthur Train
... Stimulated either by this compliment, or by her burning indignation, that illustrious woman then added, 'Let him meet it if he can!' And, with a rigid movement of her stony reticule (an appendage of great size and of a fossil appearance), indicated that Clennam was the unfortunate person at whom the ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... our knowledge of geological deposits to suppose that an ocean basin of this size, which must have been submerged during an immensely long period in order to accumulate formations of such a thickness, should not contain numerous remains of the animals formerly inhabiting it.[B] The only fossil remains of any kind truly belonging to it, which I have found in the formation, are the leaves mentioned above, taken from the lower clays on the banks of the Solimoens at Tomantins; and these show a vegetation similar in general character to that which prevails there ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... that are due the different sorts of coal, of which industry makes use. Thus in the lowest layers of the coal ground appears the anthracite, which, being almost destitute of volatile matter, contains the greatest quantity of carbon. In the higher beds are found, on the contrary, lignite and fossil wood, substances in which the quantity of carbon is infinitely less. Between these two beds, according to the degree of pressure to which they have been subjected, are found veins of graphite and rich or poor coal. It may be asserted that it is for want of sufficient pressure ...
— The Underground City • Jules Verne
... the antediluvian affairs I ever beheld, the old fellow now coming towards us is the queerest; he looks like a fossil edition of Methuselah, dug up and modernised some hundred years ago at the very least. Holloa! he's going mad I believe; I hope he does ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... in shallow mines in North and South Carolina, Georgia, Florida and Tennessee, and also as pebbles in the river beds. They are the fossil remains of animals. After being dug from the mines the rock is kiln dried and then ground to a very fine powder called "floats" which is used on the soil. The phosphoric acid in the floats is insoluble and becomes available only as the phosphate decays. ...
— The First Book of Farming • Charles L. Goodrich
... pronunciation, resulting from trivial differences in National and Individual condition and culture; like the Flesh of the animal, which readily decays from the Bony Skeleton, while the last remains preserved for ages as a fossil. The Vowel-Sounds so readily lose their identity, that they are of slight importance to the Etymologist or Comparative Philologist, who is, in fact, dealing in ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 6, No 5, November 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... that the shell becomes more and more thickened and bulky. Judging from the great thickness to which some oyster-shells have attained, this mollusc is capable, if left to its natural changes and unmolested, of attaining a patriarchal longevity. Among fossil oysters, specimens are found occasionally of enormous thickness; and the amount of time that has passed between the deposition of the bed of rock in which such an example occurs, and that which overlies it, might be calculated from ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 431 - Volume 17, New Series, April 3, 1852 • Various
... their steps with a monotonous song, the bearers started at a swinging trot. For half an hour or so I lay still, reflecting on the very remarkable experiences that we were going through, and wondering if any of my eminently respectable fossil friends down at Cambridge would believe me if I were to be miraculously set at the familiar dinner-table for the purpose of relating them. I do not want to convey any disrespectful notion or slight ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... could have said he was blooming—blooming modestly—like a violet, not like some of these blatant tropical flowers. He had been in the house for six weeks, and had not as yet attempted to slap him on the back, or address him as "old boy," or try to make him feel a superannuated fossil. He had nothing of the exasperating young man's chatter. He was good-tempered, had not much to say for himself, was not clever by any means, thank goodness—wrote my friend. It appeared, however, that Jim was clever enough to be quietly appreciative ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad
... relics by which the geologist tries to regain the history of the past races and families of the fauna and flora of the ancient world. Surely, as a mere matter of scientific pursuit, the ancient or fossil states of man should—for man himself—have attractions as great, at least, as the ancient or fossil states of plants and animals; and the old Celt, or Pict, or Saxon, be as interesting a study as ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... great work on Etymologies, Isidore took up Augustine's attempt to bring the creation into satisfactory relations with the book of Genesis, and, as to fossil remains, he, like Tertullian, thought that they resulted from the Flood of Noah. In the following century Bede ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... Balfour held that Christ, in obedience to the will of God, secures eternal life for all men in the most literal manner, by causing the resurrection of the dead from their otherwise endless sleep in the grave, a doctrine nearly or quite fossil now.15 ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... writer was startled by hearing, casually dropped by an old man visiting a shop in Royston, the strange remark—"My grandfather was chairman to the Marquis of Rockingham." The remark seemed like the first glimpse of a rare old fossil when visiting an old quarry. Of the truth of it further inquiry seemed to leave little doubt, and the meaning of it was simply this: The Marquis of Rockingham, Prime Minister in the early years of George III., would, like the rest of the beau monde, ...
— Fragments of Two Centuries - Glimpses of Country Life when George III. was King • Alfred Kingston
... is remarkable. The geologist proves that the world has stood many thousands of years, and we cannot deny it. He points to fossil remains, and tells us of orders of animals that lived many years before the Mosaic period of the creation of man. The Bible tells us that MAN was created about six thousand years ago. Now, the material fact is, that amid all the fossil remains of the geologist, and all ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... Ammonium-Ichthyol-Sulphonate is prepared by treating with sulphuric acid, and afterwards with ammonia, the hydrocarbon oil containing sulphur obtained by the dry distillation of the fossil remains of fish and sea-animals, which form a bituminous mineral deposit in Germany. This product has been admixed with soap for many years, the quantity generally used being about 5 per cent.; the resultant soap is possessed of a characteristic empyreumatic smell, ...
— The Handbook of Soap Manufacture • W. H. Simmons
... the deposits of salt, petroleum, and lignite, and in association with the second is found the substance known as ozokerit or fossil wax. This is a brownish-yellow translucent crystalline hydrocarbon, which softens with the warmth of the hand, and burns with a bright light. It has never been industrially applied, excepting in small quantities by the peasantry, who themselves ...
— Roumania Past and Present • James Samuelson
... The fossil evidence clearly shows the close agreement of the Rhenish and south Devonshire areas. In north Devonshire the Devonian rocks pass upward without ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... backbone. Reptiles are cold-blooded animals having scaly skins, and breathing by lungs and not by gills as do the fish. Strange as it may seem they are related to the birds. In prehistoric times they were of enormous size and many of them were capable of flying. Fossil forms of reptiles are very numerous and scientists have given these fossil forms such sonorous names as Dinosaurs, Ichthyosaurs, Plesiosaurs and Pterosaurs. These names are made up of Greek words meaning terrible lizards, fish lizards, ...
— Pathfinder - or, The Missing Tenderfoot • Alan Douglas
... guess and by tradition. A general diffusion of scientific knowledge saves the community from innumerable wasteful and foolish mistakes. In England, not many years ago, the partners in a large mining company were ruined from not knowing that a certain fossil belonged to the old red sandstone, below which coal is never found. In another enterprise, L20,000 were lost in the prosecution of a scheme for collecting the alcohol that distils from bread in baking, all of which might have been saved, ...
— In the School-Room - Chapters in the Philosophy of Education • John S. Hart
... Formula formulo. Forsake forlasi. Fort fortikajxeto. Fortify (milit.) fortikigi. Fortify fortigi. Fortitude kuragxeco. Fortnight du semajnoj. Fortress fortikajxo. Fortune ricxeco. Forward! antauxen! Forward (in advance) antauxe. Forward ekspedi, sendi. Fossil elfosatajxo. Foster nutri. Foster child sucxinfano. Foul malpura. Foulard silktuko. Found fondi. Foundation fondo, fondajxo. Founder (ship) sxipperei. Foundry fandejo. Fountain fontano. Four kvar. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... deer with Laton A. Huffman in the wildest and most picturesque bad-lands of central Montana, we pitched our tent near the upper waterhole of Hell Creek. [Footnote: A few months later, acting upon the information of our fossil discoveries that we conveyed to Professor Henry Fairfield Osborn, an expedition from the American Museum of Natural History ushered into the scientific world the now famous Hell Creek fossil bed, and found, about five hundred feet from ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday
... a prosperous Western-style capitalist economy, with a per capita GNP comparable to levels in industrialized West European countries. Rich in natural resources, Australia is a major exporter of agricultural products, minerals, metals, and fossil fuels. Of the top 25 exports, 21 are primary products, so that, as happened during 1983-84, a downturn in world commodity prices can have a big impact on the economy. The government is pushing for increased exports of manufactured ...
— The 1991 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... which are regarded as equivalent in age to those known as the Upper Nari in Sind and Eastern Baluchistan, but the still later deposits, belonging to the well-known Siwalik series, are famous on account of the great variety and large size of many of the vertebrate fossil remains which they have yielded. In these beds to the north of the Salt Range there have been found remains of Dinotherium, forms related to the ancestors of the giraffe and various other mammals, some of them, like the Sivatherium, Mastodon, and Stegodon, being animals ...
— The Panjab, North-West Frontier Province, and Kashmir • Sir James McCrone Douie
... round the north-east extremity of Asia, passing long before the birth of Bering through the strait which now bears the name of that navigator. Stadukhin also explored these eastern seas in search of the islands full of fossil ivory, of which he had heard from the natives. In 1735, Pronchishchev and Lasinius embarked at Yakutsk and sailed down the Lena, exploring its delta and neighbouring coasts. Pronchishchev reached a point ...
— Russia - As Seen and Described by Famous Writers • Various
... bachelor retirement. My host described a mammal's tooth that weighed nearly fourteen pounds, which had been taken from a phosphate mine; it had been sent to a public room at Beaufort, South Carolina. A fossil shark's tooth, weighing four and a half pounds, was also found, and a learned ichthyologist has asserted that the owner of this remarkable relic of the past must have been one hundred ...
— Voyage of The Paper Canoe • N. H. Bishop
... respecting the dodo was obtained, and some authors have gone so far as to pretend that it never existed; but amongst a great mass of satisfactory evidence in favour of the recent existence of this species, we may mention that an assemblage of fossil bones were recently discovered, under a bed of lava, in the Isle of France, and sent to the Paris museum by M. Desjardins. They almost all belonged to a large living species of land-tortoise, called ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 19, No. 531, Saturday, January 28, 1832. • Various
... yourself into a chair like that! When an old Johnny got to such a state it was really a mercy when he snuffed out, and made way for younger men. How his Companies could go on putting up with such a fossil for chairman was a marvel! The fossil rumbled and said in that almost ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... where the waterfall splashed cold upon his chest and face, yet could not cool the inward fire; climbing, hand and knee, up cliffs of sharp-edged rock; striding over downs where huge rocks lay crouched in the grass, like fossil monsters of some ancient world, and seemed to stare at him with still and angry brows. Upward still, to black terraces of lava, standing out hard and black against the grey cloud, gleaming like iron in the moonlight, stair above stair, like those ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... fossil resin of a pine tree, was found in Sicily, the shores of the Baltic, and other parts of Europe. It was a precious stone then as now, and an article of trade with the Phoenicians, those early merchants of the Mediterranean. The attractive power might enhance ...
— The Story Of Electricity • John Munro
... Australia are all of the oldest rocks, in which there are either no fossil traces of past life, or the traces are of life in the most ancient forms. Resemblance of the Australian cordilleras to the Ural range, which he had especially been studying, caused Sir Roderick Murchison, in 1844, to predict that gold would be found in Australia. The first ...
— Early Australian Voyages • John Pinkerton
... blackness of a Merovingian night, through which, guiding us with groping finger-tips beneath the shadowy vault, ribbed strongly as an immense bat's wing of stone, Theodore or his sister would light up for us with a candle the tomb of Sigebert's little daughter, in which a deep hole, like the bed of a fossil, had been bored, or so it was said, "by a crystal lamp which, on the night when the Frankish princess was murdered, had left, of its own accord, the golden chains by which it was suspended where the apse is to-day and with ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust
... intervenes must be left to the imagination. The Polyporus had then invaded the hollow, and the acorns, and had dissolved and destroyed the cellular and starchy contents of the latter, leaving only the cuticularized and corky shells, looking exactly like fossil eggs in the matrix. I hardly think geology can beat this for a ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 643, April 28, 1888 • Various
... .. < chapter civ 30 THE FOSSIL WHALE > From his mighty bulk the whale affords a most congenial theme whereon to enlarge, amplify, and generally expatiate. Would you, you could not compress him. By good rights he .. should only be treated of in imperial folio. Not to tell over again his furlongs from spiracle to tail, and ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... of the organic kingdoms, from the slate, which lies lowest of the fourth order, to the most recent beds of the tertiary, and to so much of the diluvium as has been examined in the old continent. And although in the isolated case of the diluvium at New-York, no fossil remains have been found, we are yet unprepared to admit this as more than an exception, and are inclined to think that the remains of the mastodon, for instance, must be diluvian, or pre-diluvian. In this opinion, however, we know that we ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... would be impregnable, inasmuch as it is quite impossible to prove the contrary. If a man choose to maintain that a fossil oyster shell, in spite of its correspondence, down to every minutest particular, with that of an oyster fresh taken out of the sea, was never tenanted by a living oyster, but is a mineral concretion, there ...
— On the Method of Zadig - Essay #1 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... some few specimens of fossil shells from the shingly beds of the Khyber Pass. They seem to be a Spirifer with a very square base, quite different from the common species of the Bolan Pass, which is like a large cockle, and of which I have one beautiful specimen. ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith
... the groups of reptiles that gave rise to mammals is preserved in the fossil record, but the musculature of these reptiles has been lost forever. Nevertheless, a reasonably accurate picture of the morphology and the spatial relationships of the muscles of many of these extinct vertebrates can be inferred by studying the scars or other marks delimiting the origins ...
— The Adductor Muscles of the Jaw In Some Primitive Reptiles • Richard C. Fox
... in the East, where the short rein is very universal, the double part of the bridle is prolonged by a single strap; this strap is used as a whip, and hence the whip of the Hussar attached to the reins; hence, also, as I imagine, the Austrian driving rein described page 54. When fossil remains of the extinct postboy shall be discovered, it will be seen that he used the short rein, and with great propriety; since his horse may be said to have been always "au trot," and needed only ...
— Hints on Horsemanship, to a Nephew and Niece - or, Common Sense and Common Errors in Common Riding • George Greenwood
... the Christian era. This looks like an extraordinarily long period of time, but it must be remembered that geologists claim that the remains of man found in the caves of Europe date back 500,000 years; and the fossil Calaveras skull was found deep under the base of Table Mountain, California, the whole mountain having been formed since the man to whom ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... The sacred beetle, bound upon the breast Of the blind heathen! Snatch the curious prize, Give it a place among thy treasured spoils, Fossil and relic,—corals, encrinites, The fly in amber and the fish in stone, The twisted circlet of Etruscan gold, Medal, intaglio, poniard, poison-ring,— Place for the Memphian beetle with ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... pill-box. "So far as I am a judge this human bone is the analogue of the one which you hold in your hand. That will give you some idea of the size of the creature. You will observe from the cartilage that this is no fossil specimen, but recent. What do you ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... I do? The old fossil doesn't treat the students like gentlemen; and if he behaves so, what can you expect of the fellows? He is cross, crabbed, ...
— Dikes and Ditches - Young America in Holland and Belguim • Oliver Optic
... Irish acquaintance whether she retained recollection enough of her own country to be entertained with "that strange caricature, Castle Rack Rent." Contemporary judgments such as these (not more extravagant than Horace Walpole's) are to the historian of literature what fossil remains ...
— Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale) (2nd ed.) (2 vols.) • Mrs. Hester Lynch Piozzi
... accumulated a mass of particulars concerning this little-known country. It was he, indeed, who gave the earliest authentic account of "geysers," those springs of warm water which occasionally reach to such great heights, and he also supplied curious details of the existence of fossil wood, which prove that at an early geological period, Iceland, now entirely devoid of trees, possessed ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part 2. The Great Navigators of the Eighteenth Century • Jules Verne
... any sense would take to Miss Mariner. If I told you how near I came to spilling the sauce-boat accidentally over that old fossil's head, you'd be surprised, Ellen. She just sat there brooding like an old eagle. If you ask my opinion, Miss Mariner's a long sight too ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... or river-horse, is found exclusively in the great rivers, lakes, and swamps of Africa. Fossil remains of extinct species have been discovered in both Europe and Asia, but ages have passed since they existed. This animal is amphibious, and can remain under water five minutes or more without breathing. ...
— Harper's Young People, March 16, 1880 - An Illustrated Weekly • Various
... melting point of 138 degrees, and that will cover all of our needs for hot countries. But in getting paraffins that melt at 136, 137 or 138 degrees we have a rather definite crystalline element. Mr. Bixby has suggested the use of the earth wax which is mined in Australia. It is really a fossil paraffin and is not so granular. I found that it is not to be had in this country at the present time, however, although various dealers told me that they had it, and I obtained from a firm in New York City a misbranded specimen called "Ozokerite," which they said ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Fourteenth Annual Meeting • Various
... proceeded to make those remarkable solitary explorations of Kentucky which have given him immortality—through the valley of the Kentucky and the Licking, and along the "Belle Riviere" (Ohio) as low as the falls. He visited the Big Bone Lick and examined the wonderful fossil remains of the mammoth found there. Along the great buffalo roads, worn several feet below the surface of the ground, which led to the Blue Licks, he saw with amazement and delight thousands of huge shaggy ...
— The Conquest of the Old Southwest • Archibald Henderson
... experiments in air-breathing are no doubt in progress in this group—we already have tropical land-crabs—and as far as we know there is no reason why in the future these creatures should not increase in size and terrestrial capacity. In the past we have the evidence of the fossil Paradoxides that creatures of this kind may at least attain a length of six feet, and, considering their intense pugnacity, a crab of such dimensions would be as formidable a creature as one could well ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... their body was covered with cilia, and they possessed a simple body of an oval shape, entirely without appendages. These acoelomatous worms did not as yet possess a true body cavity (coelom) nor blood. No member of the next higher animals are in existence, neither are there any fossil remains, owing to the soft nature of their body. They are therefore called soft worms, or scoleceda. They developed out of the turbellaria of the sixth stage by forming a true body cavity (a coelom) ...
— Was Man Created? • Henry A. Mott
... Though I applied to several such in London, I never could meet with an entire specimen; nor could I ever find in books any engraving from a perfect one. In the superb museum at Leicester House, permission was given me to examine for this article; and, though I was disappointed as to the fossil, I was highly gratified with the sight of several of the shells themselves in high preservation. This bivalve is only known to inhabit the Indian Ocean, where it fixes itself to a zoophyte, known by ...
— The Natural History of Selborne, Vol. 1 • Gilbert White
... necessary to look for a far more powerful engine than any now existing; there must have been some denuding agent in those remote ages—ages far more distant from us than the Carboniferous period, far older than any forms of life, fossil or otherwise, ages among the oldest known to geology—a denuding agent must have then existed, far more powerful ...
— Pioneers of Science • Oliver Lodge
... I know it, because the day he was born I picked up my fossil of the sea-horse, just by Dulmansberry church, when the joy-bells were ringing! My fossil sea-horse! It will be ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... vessels caused to perform voyages in opposition to wind and tide, and a power placed in human hands which seems almost unlimited. To these novel and still extending improvements may be added others, whish, though of a secondary kind, yet materially affect the comforts of life, the collecting from fossil materials the elements of combustion, and applying them so as to illuminate, by a single operation, houses, streets, and even cities. If you look to the results of chemical arts you will find new substances of the most extraordinary nature applied ...
— Consolations in Travel - or, the Last Days of a Philosopher • Humphrey Davy
... was a grindlestone, another he said "Nay; It's nought but an' owd fossil cheese, that somebody's roll't ...
— The Three Jovial Huntsmen • Randolph Caldecott
... American writer professes to have discovered in Missouri the fossil remains of a bogged mastodon, which had been killed precisely in this way by human contemporaries. (See Lubbock, Preh. Times, ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa |
