"Fossil" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... existence in the four corners of the earth, exploring, botanizing, shooting big game, and searching for big diamonds and rubies. He had written books on all sorts of out-of-the-way subjects, such as "The Flora of Chatham Islands," "Poisonous Spiders (genus Latrodectua) of Sardinia," "Fossil Reptilia and Moa Remains of New Zealand," and "Seals of the Antarctic." But his chief and greatest hobby was precious stones, of which he ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
... years ago some natives in Southern India were engaged in making an excavation under the superintendence of an English officer, when they discovered the remains of one of the largest fossil turtles ever found. They had penetrated the soil for several feet, when their implements struck against a hard substance which was at first supposed to be solid rock, but a bar sank through it, showing it to be either bone or wood. The earth being carefully removed, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... that I had not forgotten you before your letter came, here is the fragment of an unfinished one which I send you, to begin with—an imperfect fossil letter, which no comparative anatomy will bring much sense out of—except the plain fact that ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... time of matured thought and fearless inquiry, mythology has been the ever-recurrent subject of anxious wonder and careful study. The ancient philosophers, who could pass by the petrified shells on mountain-tops and the fossil trees buried in their quarries without ever asking the question how they came to be there, or what they signified, were ever ready with doubts and surmises when they came to listen to ancient stories of their gods and heroes. And, more curious still, even modern ...
— Chips From A German Workshop, Vol. V. • F. Max Mueller
... devoted my whole time to arranging my huge pile of notes, to observing, and to experimenting in relation to the transmutation of species. During the voyage of the Beagle I had been deeply impressed by discovering in the pampean formation great fossil animals covered with armor like that on the existing armadillos; secondly, by the manner in which closely allied animals replace one another in proceeding southward over the continent; and thirdly, by the South American character of most of the productions of the Galapagos Archipelago, and ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... 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
... explanation of the isolated masses of flint which abound in various chalk formations. "The mere assertion," says Rhymer Jones, "that flints were sponges, would no doubt startle the reader who was unacquainted with the history of these fossil relics of a former ocean;" and yet a little reflection "will satisfy the most skeptical." For long ages the sponge is imbedded in the chalk, through which water is continually percolating. A well-known law of chemistry explains why ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 1, No. 3, August, 1850. • Various
... 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 ...
— A Book of Golden Deeds • Charlotte M. Yonge
... figures, which are eternally opposed and dividing the dominion between them. Then he shows us the issues to which these two rulers respectively conduct their subjects; and the question that is trembling on his lips is 'Under which of them do you stand?' Surely that is not fossil theology, but truths that are of the highest importance, and ought to be of the deepest interest, to every one of us. They are to you the former, whether they are ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... has enjoyed a very high reputation in Eastern countries as a drug. Its supposed medicinal virtues, like those of the fossil teeth of China and the belemnites ("thunderbolts") of this country, seem to have been suggested by the peculiarity of its mode of occurrence. A knowledge of the substance was introduced into Western ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 595, May 28, 1887 • Various
... wall boulders from the stream were used, and many were found bearing bold imprints of fossil ferns, birds, and snakes. Mrs. Stevenson was delighted to have these reminders of a past age for her wall, but, alas, during her absence the stones were all cemented in place with the nice smooth sides outward ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez
... never have dreamed of offering me money. Old as a cathedral, painted like a miniature, sumptuous in dress, she lived in her great house as though Louis XV. were not dead, and saw none but old women and men of a past day,—a fossil society which made me think I was in a graveyard. No one spoke to me and I had not the courage to speak first. Cold and alien looks made me ashamed of my youth, which seemed to annoy them. I counted on this indifference to aid me in certain plans; ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... position of a supporter of the theory of primitive promiscuity and group marriage is analogous to that of an evolutionist who can only point to a few more or less useless peculiarities in the anatomy of man without being able to show resemblances between them and the corresponding portions of fossil or actually existing anthropoids. He calls them "vestiges[197]" and insists that homo is descended from a generalised anthropoid. The mere assertion of the vestigial character of such bones or organs would hardly carry conviction unless they could ...
— Kinship Organisations and Group Marriage in Australia • Northcote W. Thomas
... my head. I made for the lagoon, and went in up to my neck. He stopped at the water, for he hated getting his feet wet, and began to make a shindy, something like a peacock's, only hoarser. He started strutting up and down the beach. I'll admit I felt small to see this blessed fossil lording it there. And my head and face were all bleeding, and—well, my body ...
— The Country of the Blind, And Other Stories • H. G. Wells
... to discoveries made on the coast of Ecuador in 1860, by James S. Wilson, Esq. At various points along this coast he found "ancient or fossil pottery, vessels, images," and other manufactured articles, all finely wrought. Some of these articles were made of gold. The most remarkable fact connected with them is that they were taken from "a stratum of ancient ...
— Ancient America, in Notes on American Archaeology • John D. Baldwin
... as myself and my children; but it was rather for the enjoyment of a freer air than for any beauty of prospect, that we took our daily climb. These hills afford neither shrubs nor flowers, but furnish the finest specimens of millepore in the world; and the water courses are full of fossil productions. ...
— Domestic Manners of the Americans • Fanny Trollope
... 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 to accept the new doctrines. Like ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... spoken of 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 fabricate rude ...
— Roumania Past and Present • James Samuelson
... is this? 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 ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... rumoured at this time the discovery of the first known (?) fossil monkey, but its tail was missing. "Depend upon it, Daniel O'Conell's got hold of it!" said 'Adam' briskly.[15] Yule was very happy with Mr. Hamilton and his kind wife, but on his tutor's removal to Cambridge other arrangements became necessary, and in 1835 he was transferred to ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... My theory would give zest to recent & Fossil Comparative Anatomy: it would lead to study of instincts, heredity, & mind heredity, whole metaphysics, it would lead to closest examination of hybridity & generation, causes of change in order to know what we have come from & to what we tend, to what circumstances favour crossing ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... 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
... a fossil tipsy-cake The sponge each morn appeared; The bath, if plenished over-night, Was frozen ere the morning light, And more that frigid water-ache Than unwashed days I feared, Now while the milder zephyrs shake Once more the winter's might, My sponge, my bath, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100., Jan. 24, 1891. • Various
... and flint spears from the Island of Cozumel. Next follow fossil shells, collected by Mrs. Alice Le Plongeon from an excavation at Chichen-Itza, which may be useful in a ...
— The Mayas, the Sources of Their History / Dr. Le Plongeon in Yucatan, His Account of Discoveries • Stephen Salisbury, Jr.
... fissile results of the frost; the wavering line of ripple-marks of Seas that shall ebb no more; growth of lichen; an army of ants in full march; a passion-flower trailing from a crevice, its purple blooms lying upon the gray stone near where it is stamped with the fossil imprint of a sea-weed, faded long ago and forgotten. Or is it, alas! for the eyes that ...
— The Riddle Of The Rocks - 1895 • Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)
... 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 is no demonstrating his error. All that can be done is to show him that, by a parity ...
— On the Method of Zadig - Essay #1 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... 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 ...
— Early Australian Voyages • John Pinkerton
... knowledge, the primary material of his craft, he always appears incompletely outfitted. The grand sweep and direction of the literary currents elude him; he is eternally on the surface, chasing bits of driftwood. The literature he knows is the fossil literature taught in colleges—worse, in high schools. It must be dead before he is aware of it. And in particular he appears ignorant of what is going forward in other lands. An exotic idea, to penetrate his consciousness, must ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... ivory, historical collections, the useful arts, and biological sciences. Its work in the department of paleontology is particularly noteworthy as it has extended the boundaries of knowledge through its many explorations in the western fossil fields. The success of the Museum is largely due to the energy and erudition of Dr. W. J. Holland, its amiable director. In the music-hall, a symphony orchestra is maintained, and free recitals are given on the great organ twice every week by a capable performer. When ...
— A Short History of Pittsburgh • Samuel Harden Church
... from Cricklad to Highworth, Wiltsh., you find frequently roundish stones, as big,, or bigger than one's head, which (I thinke) they call braine stones, for on the outside they resemble the ventricles of the braine; they are petrified sea mushromes. [Fossil Madrepores ?-J. B.] ...
— The Natural History of Wiltshire • John Aubrey
... 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 own results, without any interference from investigators ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various
... the ranks; namely, that we need not be anxious to count heads, when we are sure that we are doing His work, nor even be afraid of being in a minority. Minorities are generally right when they are the apostles of new thoughts, though the minorities which cleave to some old fossil are ordinarily wrong. The prophet and his man were alone and ringed around with enemies, when he said, 'They that be with us are more than they that be with them'; and yet he was right, for the mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire. Let us be sure that ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... the first class,—originally laid down in much their present form,—are usually either oolitic, i. e., containing great numbers of flat rounded grains of iron minerals like flaxseeds, or consist in large part of fossil fragments of sea shells, replaced by iron minerals. The Clinton ores of the Birmingham district, the Wabana ores of Newfoundland, the minette ores of the Lorraine district in central Europe, and the oolitic ores of northern England are all ...
— The Economic Aspect of Geology • C. K. Leith
... Delhi with one of his carriages, which he was to have sold through Mr. McPherson, a European merchant of the city. He was ordered to stay there ostensibly for the purpose of learning the process of extracting copper from the fossil containing the ore, and purchasing dogs for the Nawab. He was to watch his opportunity and shoot Mr. Fraser whenever he might find him out at night, attended by only one or two orderlies; to be in no haste, but to ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... called Encamps, in the depths of Andorra, where no man has ever killed another, I found a man with a blue face, who was a fossil, the kind of man you would never find in the swelling life of Western Europe. He was emancipated, he had studied in Perpignan, over and beyond the great hills. He could not see why he should pay taxes to support a priest. "The priests" he assured me, "say the ...
— First and Last • H. Belloc
... 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, had the parties known that less ...
— In the School-Room - Chapters in the Philosophy of Education • John S. Hart
... 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 when I call those good and learned men fossils, but my experience is that people ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... considered, and its ancient richness in species and individuals; comparing our Sierra Giant and Sequoia sempervirens of the Coast Range, the only other living species of Sequoia, with the twelve fossil species already discovered and described by Heer and Lesquereux, some of which seem to have flourished over vast areas in the Arctic regions and in Europe and our own territories, during tertiary and cretaceous times,—then ...
— The Mountains of California • John Muir
... silence, biding its time, ponders its own ideals, not of literature and art only—not of men only, but of women. The idea of the women of America, (extricated from this daze, this fossil and unhealthy air which hangs about the word lady,) develop'd, raised to become the robust equals, workers, and, it may be, even practical and political deciders with the men—greater than man, ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... spare such lives. He was the friend and correspondent of Professor Owen, and supplied the Prince of Science with curious data of the strange, and then but scantily known, Australian fauna, from the platypus, at the head of modern wonders, back to the earliest marsupialdom of the fossil world. ...
— Personal Recollections of Early Melbourne & Victoria • William Westgarth
... those 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
... INFUSORIAL ANIMALCULES, Living and Fossil, containing Descriptions of every species, British and Foreign, the methods of procuring and viewing them, &c., illustrated by numerous ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 234, April 22, 1854 • Various
... remarkable fact, first noticed by Olbers, that no fossil meteoric stones have yet been discovered. If this fact be coupled with the hypothesis advanced by Olbers, in reference to the origin of the asteroidal group, we should have to date that tremendous catastrophe since the deposition of our tertiary formations, and therefore it might possibly be ...
— Outlines of a Mechanical Theory of Storms - Containing the True Law of Lunar Influence • T. Bassnett
... a maiden aunt of Sir James, Miss Patricia, a stern and awful specimen of the female sex in its fossil state; her ward, Miss Henderson, who, having long passed her pupilage, remained at Collingham-Westmore in the capacity of gouvernante and companion to the young heiress; the heiress aforesaid, and myself. A priest—did I say that the Collinghams still professed ...
— A Stable for Nightmares - or Weird Tales • J. Sheridan Le Fanu
... 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 notices which appear in their works, and of ...
— Palestine or the Holy Land - From the Earliest Period to the Present Time • Michael Russell
... 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, as the drops of the liquor will not ...
— Practical Education, Volume II • Maria Edgeworth
... Turner is right in giving so monotonous and severe verticality to the cliff above which the abbey stands; but I believe it must have some steep places about it, since the tradition which, in nearly all parts of the island where fossil ammonites are found, is sure to be current respecting them, takes quite an original form at Whitby, owing to the steepness of this rock. In general, the saint of the locality has simply turned all the serpents to stone; but at Whitby, St. Hilda drove them ...
— The Harbours of England • John Ruskin
... where he and some of the gentlemen employed by the company resided in 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 feet ...
— Voyage of The Paper Canoe • N. H. Bishop
... H. (no letter.)—1. and 2. Garnetiferous quartz rock. 3 and 4. Micaceous quartz rock. 5. Granite. 6. Basalt with traces of chalcopyrite.—L. C. G.—They are fossil sharks' teeth, common in marl beds.—J. E. C.—1. Iron sulphide and lead sulphide. 2. Quartzite, with traces of galena and molybdic sulphide. 3 and 4. Dolomite. 5. Fossiliferous argillaceous limestone, ...
— Scientific American, Volume XLIII., No. 25, December 18, 1880 • Various
... 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 ...
— By Advice of Counsel • Arthur Train
... Christ's all-comprehensive truth as they most need. There will be no shooting over people's heads, if we love them well enough to understand them. There will be no toothless generalities, when our interest in men keeps their actual condition and temptations clear before us. There will be no flinging fossil doctrines at them from a height, as if Christ's blessed Gospel were, in another than the literal sense, 'a stone of offence,' if we have taken our place on their level. And without such sympathy, these and a thousand other weaknesses and faults will certainly ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren
... do something to wean our segundo from that old man," said Fox Quarternight, as he rode up and overtook me, "he's liable to quit the herd and follow that old fossil back to Tennessee or some other port. Just look at the two now, will you? Old Joe's putting on as much dog as though he was asking the Colonel for his daughter. Between me and you and the gatepost, Quirk, I 'm a little dubious ...
— The Log of a Cowboy - A Narrative of the Old Trail Days • Andy Adams
... of life upon the globe. According to the first of 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 ...
— American Addresses, with a Lecture on the Study of Biology • Tomas Henry Huxley
... he went alone for mere curiosity to explore the cave, or, what is more likely, with an idea of finding treasure, is not known; nothing is certain but that his candle was burnt out while he was still far from the entrance, and that he died there. I said no fossil remains had been found, but the level floors of the great halls are continually being raised by fresh layers of stalagmite from the water dropping from the roof, and no one knows what may lie under them. These floors are in many places covered with little loose concretions ...
— Anahuac • Edward Burnett Tylor
... among all the tribes of the Vril-ya there is considerable commercial interchange. I may here observe, that their money currency does not consist of the precious metals, which are too common among them for that purpose. The smaller coins in ordinary use are manufactured from a peculiar fossil shell, the comparatively scarce remnant of some very early deluge, or other convulsion of nature, by which a species has become extinct. It is minute, and flat as an oyster, and takes a jewel-like ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... antiquated old fossil forever. Two real live gods are worth ten thousand stone quarries like that. If you say so, I'll have a few of his worshippers take him down and toss him ...
— Nedra • George Barr McCutcheon
... and 2 (magnified two hundred times) represent two sections, made in rectangular planes, of fragments of Lancashire cannel coal. In a certain measure, they remind one of Figs. 4 and 5, Pl 11, of Witham's "Internal Structure of Fossil Vegetables," and which were drawn from specimens of cannel coal derived likewise from Lancashire, but which are not so highly magnified. There is an interesting fact to note in this coincidence, and that is that this structure, which is so ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 481, March 21, 1885 • Various
... 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 ...
— The Underground City • Jules Verne
... by source This entry states the percentage share of electricity generated from each energy source. These are fossil fuel, hydro, nuclear, and other (solar, geothermal, ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... dawn, with a mattock and a pick, they made an attack on their fossil, whose covering cracked. It was an ammonite nodosus, corroded at the ends but weighing quite six pounds; and in his enthusiasm ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert
... the modern copal varnishes consists principally of linseed oil with some turpentine. Their base is Copal, a fossil, resinous substance of vegetable origin. The gums of which they are made have been chemically altered by long exposure in the earth. Other gums, as mastic, dammar, sandarac, and even resin are sometimes ...
— Handwork in Wood • William Noyes
... down practically unchanged from the steaming days of the Carboniferous period, when ferns grew one hundred feet high, and thronged with other rank tropical growths in matted masses to form the coal measures. The fossil remains of cycads in the rocks of that period prove that they once flourished in the tropic swamps where now are the hills of ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... Mountains is that long line which fringes the Somali coast from Tajurrah to Ras Jerd Hafun (Cape Guardafui). In the portion visited by Lieutenant Speke it is composed principally of limestones, some white, others brownish, and full of fossil shells. The seaward face is a gradual slope, yet as usual more abrupt than the landward side, especially in the upper regions. Steep irregular ravines divide the several masses of hill. The range was thinly covered with Acacia ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton
... an expert in his line, but young Marable had charge of these particular fossil blocks, the amber being pure because it was mixed with lignite. The particular block which held the interest of the three was a huge yellow brown mass of irregular shape. Vaguely, through the outer shell of impure amber, ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science July 1930 • Various
... of the soil, that must charm all who love our country and our country's poetry, in its every age." As for the villanelle, M. De Banville declares that it is the fairest jewel in the casket of the muse Erato; while the chant royal is a kind of fossil poem, a relic of an age when kings and allegories flourished. "The kings and the gods are dead," like Pan; or at least we no longer find them able, by touch royal or divine, to reanimate the ...
— Essays in Little • Andrew Lang
... 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 ...
— The Handbook of Soap Manufacture • W. H. Simmons
... 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 of Whitby, the blaze of the myriads of furnaces light ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... one of the most valuable of gums, and is furnished by many countries in the districts of Africa explored by Mr. H. M. Stanley, the discoverer of Livingstone. Copal is found in a fossil state in very large quantities. The natives collect the gum by searching in the sandy soil, mostly in the hilly districts, the country being almost barren, with no large tree except the Adansonia, and ...
— French Polishing and Enamelling - A Practical Work of Instruction • Richard Bitmead
... The fossil remains previously referred to are of course only a few of the most important, but it is remarked as a curious and notable fact that among the fossils of the lower orders of life in the Bad Lands, the heads have not been preserved. On account of scarcity of water it is necessary for parties to carry ...
— Cave Regions of the Ozarks and Black Hills • Luella Agnes Owen
... two considerations which present enormous force from an antecedent point of view. The first is that organic forms are only then recognised as species when intermediate forms are absent. If the intermediate forms are actually living, or admit of being found in the fossil state, naturalists forthwith regard the whole series as varieties, and name all the members of it as belonging to the same species. Consequently it becomes obvious that naturalists, in their work of naming species, may only have ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... geologist, from the nuts of a similar plant abounding in the tertiary formations at the mouth of the Thames, and having floated about there in as great profusion as here, till buried deep in the silt and mud that now forms the island of Sheppey.* [Bowerbank "On the Fossil Fruits and Seeds of the Isle of Sheppey," and Lyell's "Elements of Geology," 3rd ed. ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... change in all but God! Mysterious nature! thrice mysterious state Of body, soul, and spirit! Man is awed, But triumphs in his littleness. A mote, He specks the eye of the age and turns to dust, And is the sport of centuries. We note More surely nature's ever-changing fate; Her fossil records tell how she ...
— Hesperus - and Other Poems and Lyrics • Charles Sangster
... was the custom to hang up in churches any fossil bones that might be discovered; the people regard them as the bones ...
— Pan Tadeusz • Adam Mickiewicz
... As surgeon in the Army Medical Department from 1848 to 1873, he utilized his opportunities for the study of natural history in India and Kashmir, in Egypt, Malta, Gibraltar and Canada. His observations on the fossil vertebrata of the Maltese Islands led him eventually to give special study to fossil elephants, on which he became an acknowledged authority. In 1872 he was elected F.R.S. In 1873 he was chosen professor of zoology in the Royal ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... E. Raymond Hall and Dr. Robert W. Wilson for their permission to examine this material and for critical comments and advice on the manuscript. The drawings were made by Miss Lucy Remple. The specimens are a part of the collection of fossil vertebrates formerly belonging to the California Institute of Technology, but now the property of the Los Angeles County Museum. The specimens had been lent by the late Professor Chester Stock to Professor Hall and Dr. Wilson for study ...
— Pleistocene Pocket Gophers From San Josecito Cave, Nuevo Leon, Mexico • Robert J. Russell
... that he should come to Brisbane and take a more important position. It was when this patronage was declined that the Premier (dropping for a moment into that bushman's jargon which came naturally to him) said, irritably, that Louis Bachelor was a "old fossil who didn't know when he'd got his dover in the dough," which, being interpreted into the slang of the old world, means, his knife into the official loaf. But the fossil went on as before, known by name to the merest handful of people in ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... Iceland, and 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
... approvingly observing aloud that Mr F.'s Aunt had a great deal of spirit. 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 challenge ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens
... bombardment of that atmosphere by high-velocity particles, and several other factors, the information on the radioactivity of the specimens meant nothing. There was also the likelihood that the carbon in the various polymer resins came from oil or coal, and fossil carbon is ...
— Dead Giveaway • Gordon Randall Garrett
... Old Hickory, who was more or less busy at the time, had tried to shunt him off. "Go on, you old fossil," he told him. "You never could play a mashie-niblick, and I'll bet twenty-five you can't now. You always top 'em. Couldn't loft over a bow-legged turtle, much less a six foot bunker. Yes, it's a bet. Twenty-five even. But you'll have to prove ...
— Torchy As A Pa • Sewell Ford
... works, the selection of which displayed no small taste and judgment. On the opposite side of the room was a fine cabinet of minerals and shells. In one corner stood a number of curious relics of the aboriginal Caribs, such as bows and arrows, etc., together with interesting fossil remains. On the tops of the book-cases and mineral stand, were birds of rare species, procured from the South American Continent. The centre table was ornamented with shells, specimens of petrifactions, and elegantly bound books. The remainder of the furniture of the room was costly ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society
... and as easily overcome by keen-witted human foes like "Jack the Giant-killer." It may be that traditions of pre- historic peoples have sometimes given birth to legends of giants. Another source of stories concerning them has been the discovery of huge fossil bones, such as those of the mammoth or mastodon, which were formerly supposed to be bones of gigantic men. The ogres, who sometimes figure in folk tales, are giants with a taste for human flesh. They recall the cannibals of ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... 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
... unfortunate fellow traveller had sacrificed his life to the pursuit, the writer was able to collect, a permanent place in the botanic system has been given by Dr. Lindley. Much importance has been added to the work, by the researches and discoveries which Professor Owen has made, with regard to the fossil remains; and the few particulars gleaned relative to existing animals have enabled Mr. Ogilby to introduce several interesting novelties to the attention of zoologists. To these gentlemen, and also to Professor Faraday, Mr. MacLeay, and other scientific friends, the warmest acknowledgments of the ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 1 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell
... 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 world will go far to catching ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... man, who is a bit of a geologist, pooh-poohed my Roman relic theory, and said it was clear to the meanest intellect (in which category he seemed to be grieved that he could not conscientiously include mine) that the thing the boy had found was the fossil of a whale; and he pointed out to us various evidences proving that it must have belonged to the ...
— Three Men in a Boa • Jerome K. Jerome
... very boundary of the tropics, where they are found side by side with the Dwarf Palm of Florida. But in the region of the true Palms the Pine is wanting. It is worthy of remark, however, that in the fossil vegetation of the Eocene world these two vegetable tribes are found associated. This fact, it seems to me, should be attributed to the mixing of the mountain Pines with the Palms of the sea-level, during that revulsion of Nature by which they were hurled into the same chaotic ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... 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
... cheaper price than the higher, and the hour of full intellectual emancipation comes only when the student has learned to serve—to turn the whole freshness and sharpness of his intellect on any needful theme of the hour; it may be the scale of a fossil fish, or the annual movement of a glacier, the disclosures of the spectrum, or the secrets of the arrow-headed tongue. All great explorers have been largely their own teachers, and each young scholar ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... you are unduly influenced by the counsels, the representations, the menaces, of certain fossil politicians ...
— The Life of Abraham Lincoln • Henry Ketcham
... in which it lies, is rich in amber, which the agitated waters cast upon the shores in large quantities annually,—a process which has been going on for three or four centuries. We all know that amber is a hardened fossil resin produced by an extinct species of pine; so that it is evident that where these waters now ebb and flow there were once flourishing forests of amber-producing pines. These were doubtless gradually submerged by the encroachment of the sea, or suddenly engulfed by some grand volcanic action ...
— Foot-prints of Travel - or, Journeyings in Many Lands • Maturin M. Ballou
... emotions—mingled, because although a fragment, it is so vast, and in parts so finished, and because it may be regarded as at once an early production of his genius, and its latest legacy to the world. It seems a large fossil relic—imperfect and magnificent—newly dug up, and with the fresh earth and the old dim subsoil meeting and ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Vol. 2, No. 8, January, 1851 • Various
... animals which have been obtained in China by foreigners have been purchased in apothecary shops. If a Chinaman discovers a fossil bed he guards it zealously for it represents an actual gold mine to him. The bones are ground into a fine powder, mixed with an acid, and a phosphate obtained which in reality has a certain value as a tonic. When a considerable amount of faith and Chinese superstition ...
— Camps and Trails in China - A Narrative of Exploration, Adventure, and Sport in Little-Known China • Roy Chapman Andrews and Yvette Borup Andrews
... This fossil greatness finds a rival in another house, wealthier, though of less ancient lineage. Husband and wife spend a couple of months of every winter in Paris, bringing back with them its frivolous tone and short-lived contemporary crazes. ...
— The Deserted Woman • Honore de Balzac
... duck, do you want to drink? Well, then, drink!—Here are two places," he cried. "Come, major, toss me the little woman and follow yourself. Leave that old fossil, who'll ...
— Adieu • Honore de Balzac
... his companions went fossil-hunting, and stayed so long as to excite their compunction, and quicken their steps when they at length detached themselves from the ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the suns were "fictions of mythological astronomy, modified either by obscure reminiscences of some great revolution suffered by our planet, or by physical hypotheses, suggested by the sight of marine petrifactions and fossil remains,"[216-1] while the Abbe Brasseur, in his late works on ancient Mexico, interprets them as exaggerated references to historical events. As no solution can be accepted not equally applicable to the same myth as it appears ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... of life. The good man Mussard, a real philosopher in practice, lived without care, in a very pleasant house which he himself had built in a very pretty garden, laid out with his own hands. In digging the terraces of this garden he found fossil shells, and in such great quantities that his lively imagination saw nothing but shells in nature. He really thought the universe was composed of shells and the remains of shells, and that the whole earth was only the sand of these in different stratae. His attention ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... did. I know Otis Harvey—or used to. I'd send him a wire, and he'd understand it was a ground-hog case with me. That's exactly what I told this British fossil company here." ...
— The Day's Work, Volume 1 • Rudyard Kipling
... specimen of a fossil. It is a piece of a palm-leaf, ... which was found in a stratum of Siberian rock.... Thus one must become in order to endure the ice-storms. Then one is not harmed. But your brother! In him lived yet the whole murmuring, singing palm-forest.... ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... "That's what that old fool of a mick down at the station told me. How the devil does the company happen to have such an old fossil on ...
— Desert Conquest - or, Precious Waters • A. M. Chisholm
... long ages of the Tertiary period monkeys must have been very abundant and very varied, yet it is but rarely that their fossil remains are found. This, however, is not difficult to explain. The deposits in which mammalian remains most abound are those formed in lakes or in caverns. In the former the bodies of large numbers of terrestrial ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 344, August 5, 1882 • Various
... agree in two points: they are all unstratified. They differ totally from the shales and sandstones in this respect, and instead of splitting up readily into thin flakes, they break up into irregular lumpy masses. And they all contain a very peculiar vegetable fossil called Stigmaria. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 447, July 26, 1884 • Various
... narrative doubt not its veracity. There be much in Nature that we wot not of, and many strange countries to explore. The monsters who roamed the earth in ancient times, as their fossil bones attest, are still to be seen in those regions hitherto unvisited by white men, and in the fathomless depths of uncharted seas ...
— Adventures in Southern Seas - A Tale of the Sixteenth Century • George Forbes
... are found 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 ...
— The First Book of Farming • Charles L. Goodrich
... 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 ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... 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 ...
— Jane Field - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... ears those of an ox;" but some have no ears, the organ of hearing being said to be in the horns, or the creature "hears through its horns." These various properties are supposed to indicate the "fossil remnants of primitive worship of many animals." The small dragon is like the silk caterpillar. The large dragon fills the Heaven and the earth. Before the dragon, sometimes suspended from his neck, is a pearl. This represents the sun. There are azure, scaly, horned, hornless, winged, ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... look settled once more on his little, square face and the talk ceased. But the fight was on. Day after day, week after week, he had me guessing—through all the living quadrupeds—through all the fossil forms—through many that the Lord did not make, but might have made, had Adam only known enough Greek and Latin to give them names. Gently, persistently, he kept me guessing as the far-off day drew near, though long since my only question had been—What breed? August came finally, ...
— The Hills of Hingham • Dallas Lore Sharp
... bowed again. "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
... author of Fossil Chess adds "In the same work may be found some account of the paintings on the tombs at Beni Hassan, presumably the oldest in Egypt, dating from the time of Osirtasen I, twenty centuries before the Christian era, ...
— Chess History and Reminiscences • H. E. Bird
... fallen into an error which recent discoveries place in a singularly clear light. They say that the argument they are dealing with would lead to leaving the earth to the brutes without human inhabitants. But the recent discoveries in Fossil Osteology have proved that the earth, for ages before the last 5,000 or 6,000 years, was left to the lower animals; nay, that in a still earlier period of its existence no animal life at all was maintained upon its surface. So that, ...
— The Fallen Star; and, A Dissertation on the Origin of Evil • E. L. Bulwer; and, Lord Brougham
... 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
... Dr. Leid of Philadelphia, and published by the Smithsonian Institute, we are assured that there once lived in these bad lands, turtles six feet square, and alligators, compared with which the present squatter sovereigns of the territory are lovely and refined. The fossil remains of these ancient inhabitants still encumber the earth of that region, and make it unpleasant to view with an agricultural eye; but here and there the general desolation is relieved by a fertile valley, with a running ...
— Humorous Masterpieces from American Literature • Various
... maintained the equally fanciful idea that the consolidation of all strata—clays, sandstones, conglomerates, limestones and even rock-salt—must be ascribed to the action of heat, and that even the formation of chalk-flints and the silicification of fossil wood were due to the ...
— The Coming of Evolution - The Story of a Great Revolution in Science • John W. (John Wesley) Judd
... 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
... and all the inner boughs and leaves have disappeared, yet there hang here and there fossil leaves, also in mid-air; they appear to have been petrified, without method or selection, by what we call the caprices of nature; they hang in the path which the boughs and twigs would have taken, and they seem to indicate ...
— God the Known and God the Unknown • Samuel Butler
... M. Brongniart also, who examined the place himself, mentions the recent accumulation which occurs at St. Hospice, about sixty feet above the present level of the sea, as containing marine shells in a scarcely fossil state (a peine fossiles) and he describes the mass in which they occur, as belonging to a formation still more recent than the upper marine beds of the ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia] [Volume 2 of 2] • Phillip Parker King
... called. As for the fried fish, it resembles coarse red sand-paper; and you would sooner think of purchasing a penny-worth to polish the handle of a cricket bat or racket, than of trying its qualities in any other way. The "black puddings" resemble great fossil ammonites, cut up lengthwise. What the "faggots" are made of, which form such a popular dish in this neighbourhood, we have yet to learn. We have heard rumours of chopped lights, liver, suet, and onions as being the components of these dusky dainties; but he must ...
— Dickens' London • Francis Miltoun
... if we knew each individual term in the ancestral series of each of its members. Thus we do not yet know whether the peculiar antler of the distinctively American deer, of the genus Mazama, is derived from an American source or took its origin in the old world, for the fossil antlers known as Anoglochis, from the Pliocene of Europe, are quite suggestive of the Mazama style, but as nothing is known of the other skeletal details of Anoglochis, any such connection must at present be purely speculative, but the element of doubt ...
— American Big Game in Its Haunts • Various
... prevalence, as if by descent, in time as in space, of the same types in the same areas; and in neither case does the similarity of the conditions by any means seem sufficient to account for the similarity of the forms of life. It is notorious that the fossil remains of closely consecutive formations are closely allied in structure, and we can at once understand the fact if they are likewise closely allied by descent. The succession of the many distinct species of the same genus throughout the long series of geological formations ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Vol. I. • Charles Darwin
... over till you get them to the right shape, with the same gradations which they have in Nature. And this is really more likely to be done well, if you have to fight your way through a little confusion in the sketch, than if you have an accurately traced outline. For instance, having sketched the fossil sea-urchin at a, in Fig. 5, whose form, though irregular, required more care in following than that of a common stone, I was going to draw it also under another effect; reflected light bringing its dark side out from the background: but when I had laid on the first ...
— The Elements of Drawing - In Three Letters to Beginners • John Ruskin
... 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 is a technical ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Fourteenth Annual Meeting • Various
... Captain Bonneville's company first looked upon the lake from near the mouth of the Ogden River, in 1833. His name has been given to a great fossil lake, whose shore line may now be seen throughout the neighbouring valleys, and of which the Great Salt Lake is ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... that man is not depraved? You do not cut a man open to find his sins. You do not boil him until he gives forth the unmistakable green fumes of depravity. How could physical science find any traces of a moral fall? What traces did the writer expect to find? Did he expect to find a fossil Eve with a fossil apple inside her? Did he suppose that the ages would have spared for him a complete skeleton of Adam attached to a slightly faded fig-leaf? The whole paragraph which I have quoted is simply a series of inconsequent sentences, all quite ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... mud becomes hardened and solidified, the shells of these animals are preserved and firmly imbedded in the limestone or sandstone which is being thus formed. You may see in the galleries of the Museum up stairs specimens of limestones in which such fossil remains of existing animals are imbedded. There are some specimens in which turtles' eggs have been imbedded in calcareous sand, and before the sun had hatched the young turtles, they became covered over with calcareous mud, and thus have ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... the ice begins to thaw, new mines or deposits of fossil ivory—a perfect treasure of mammoths' tusks—are discovered in the marsh-lands of Eastern Siberia. There are no mammoths now—unless we call elephants by that name; yet their remains have been found upon both continents. In the year 1799, the perfect skeleton of one of these ...
— Reading Made Easy for Foreigners - Third Reader • John L. Huelshof
... highest to the lowest—from a voice in legislation to a finger in Jack Horner's pie. I looked for a department of Fish, with your lordship's name at the head of it; but I did not find it. It would be a fine department. It would divide itself naturally into three classes—living fish, fossil fish, and fish in ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... Irish emigrants, are, in all probability, tokens of descent from this appallingly ancient people. The type appears occasionally in the Basque provinces, and on the Atlantic coast of Morocco, but nowhere else. Few civilised races inhabit the land where the fossil relics of their own lineal ancestors mark the furthest point of human occupancy; yet it would seem to be so with the true Irish. In what other way can this anomalous variety of the human race be accounted for? Ay, and beyond the earliest era noted by ethnography, ...
— Such is Life • Joseph Furphy
... in 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 covered with ...
— The Mystery of 31 New Inn • R. Austin Freeman
... to which Mr. Darwin would bring us is, that all the various forms of vegetable and animal life with which the globe is now peopled, or of which we find the remains preserved in a fossil state in the great Earth-Museum around us, which the science of geology unlocks for our instruction, have come down by natural succession of descent from father to son,—"animals from at most four ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... seventeen feet they struck a thin streak of gravel, and in it coarse gold, testpans running as high as six and eight dollars. Unfortunately, this streak of gravel was not more than an inch thick. Beneath it was more muck, tangled with the trunks of ancient trees and containing fossil bones of forgotten monsters. But gold they had found—coarse gold; and what more likely than that the big deposit would be found on bed-rock? Down to bed-rock they would go, if it were forty feet away. They divided into two shifts, working day and night, on two shafts, and ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... to naturalists, answering to the descriptions of the "Sea-Serpent," it must be closely allied to the Plesiosaurus. The occurrence in the fresh waters of North America of a Fish, the Lepidosteus, which is closely allied to the fossil Fishes found with the Plesiosaurus in the Jurassic beds, renders such a ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... I believe, is the first example in which a State Government in our country has erected a museum for the exhibition of its natural resources, its mineral and rock, its plants and animals, living and fossil. And this seems to me the most appropriate spot in the country for placing the first geological hall erected by the Government; for the County of Albany was the district where the first geological survey was undertaken, on this side of the Atlantic, and, perhaps, the world. This was in 1820, and ...
— The Uses of Astronomy - An Oration Delivered at Albany on the 28th of July, 1856 • Edward Everett
... wretchedness of a cutting wind, he cursed Andrew with erudite elaboration. But when Andrew eventually landed, his dripping bathing-suit clinging close to his gigantic and bony figure, appearing to derisive eyes like the skin covered fossil of a prehistoric monster of a man, his bushy hair clotted, like ruddy seaweed, over his staring, ugly face, Bakkus forgot his woes and rolled on his back convulsed with vulgar but ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... hypothesis. Some facts may not be obtainable that are necessary to show the connection of others: as, for example, the hypothesis that all species of animals have arisen from earlier ones by some process of gradual change, can be only imperfectly verified by collecting the fossil remains of extinct species, because immense depths and expanses of fossiliferous strata have been destroyed. Or, again, the general state of culture may be such as to prevent men from tracing the consequences ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... belong to any known class of the animal kingdom. The philosopher dwelt on these animal ruins till he constructed numerous species which had disappeared from the globe. This sublime naturalist has ascertained and classified the fossil remains of animals whose existence can no longer be traced in the records of mankind. His own language bears testimony to the imagination which carried him on through a career so strange and wonderful. "It is a rational ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... cleansing quality, used to season flesh, fish, butter, &c., and other things that are to be kept. It is distinguished, with reference to the general sources from which it is most plentifully derived, into three different sorts, namely, fossil, or rock salt; sea, or marine salt; and spring salt, or that drawn from ...
— A Catechism of Familiar Things; Their History, and the Events Which Led to Their Discovery • Benziger Brothers
... there is," Wrayson interrupted. "Does that old fossil look like the sort to take such a creature about for nothing? Colonel, he doesn't know himself—where those securities are! He's brought that woman ...
— The Avenger • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... as famine; and into this mimicry of a vehicle the murderer was to be sent to the Potomac river, while the man he had murdered was moving in state across the mourning continent. The old negro geared up his wagon by means of a set of fossil harness, and when it was backed to Garrett's porch, they laid within it the discolored corpse. The corpse was tied with ropes around the legs and made fast to the wagon sides. Harold's legs were tied ...
— The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth • George Alfred Townsend
... papers send a funny book to an old fossil of a reviewer with no sense of humour?" I said, testily and waited for the next post. Well, it came; it brought three ...
— A Dominie in Doubt • A. S. Neill
... fishes, and the order to which they belong—that of the cartilaginous or gristly fishes. In all the orders of ancient animals there is an ascending gradation of character from first to last. Further, there is a succession from low to high types in fossil plants, from the earliest strata in which they are found to the highest. Several of the most important living species have left no record of themselves in any formation beyond what are, comparatively speaking, ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... privilege to their ancestors! That is an irrational interference with the liberty of the players which hardly anybody nowadays ventures to defend in principle, and which is only upheld in some half-hearted way (save in the case of that fossil anachronism, the Duke of Argyll) by supposed arguments of convenience. It won't last long now; there is talk in the committee of "mending or ending it." It shows the long-suffering nature of the poor blind players at this compulsory game of national football that they should ever for one moment ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen
... contrary to all 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
... 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 ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... the Spaniards attack three men and a boy who are ashore boiling the fossil pitch; kill one man, and carry off the boy. Raleigh, instead of going up to Port of Spain and demanding satisfaction, as he would have been justified in doing after this second attack, remains quietly where he is, expecting daily to be attacked by Spanish ...
— Sir Walter Raleigh and his Time from - "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... crushed; in all cases the distortion leads to the inference that the rock which 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 the distortion is such, as required ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... twenty-four coins from Carteia, whereas Florez (Medallas, Madrid, 1773) shows a total of only thirty-three. Amongst his antiquities there is a charming statuette of Minerva, a bronze miniature admirably finished. He has collected the rock fauna, especially the molluscs, fossil and modern. He is preparing an album of the Flora Calpensis. His birds' nests were lately sold to an Englishman. All these objects, of immense local interest, were offered by him at the lowest possible rate to the Military ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... migration was founded by Darwin, with the aid of the theory of evolution; and at the same time he advanced the true explanation of the remarkable relation or similarity of the living population in any locality to the fossil forms found in it. Moritz Wagner very ably developed his idea under the title of "the theory of migration." In my opinion, this famous traveller has rather over-estimated the value of his theory of migration ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.1. • Ernst Haeckel
... our own world. Much of the surface of the earth is 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
... at Oxford by 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 ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... all scientific nomenclature are thus, in fact, psychological deposits, which register the progressive advancement of human thought and knowledge in the world of mind, as the geological strata bear testimony to the progressive development of the material world. "Language," says Trench, "is fossil poetry, fossil history," and, we will add, fossil philosophy. Many a single word is a concentrated poem. The record of great social and national revolutions is embalmed in a single term.[857] And the history of ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... will you?" broke out Bluff, laughing. "Honest, now, I believe he expects to run across a few of those old fossil pirates, Blackbeard, ...
— The Outdoor Chums on the Gulf • Captain Quincy Allen
... 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
... Day, 1838, is a much pleasanter looking spot than Port Galant. The usual hydrographical surveys were there brought to a satisfactory issue by the officers under the direction of Dumoulin. A boat was despatched to Cape Remarkable, where Bougainville said he had seen fossil shells, which, however, turned out to be nothing but little pebbles ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne
... "thoughts that wander through 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
... "Anbar" pronounced "Ambar;" wherein I would derive "Ambrosia." Ambergris was long supposed to be a fossil, a vegetable which grew upon the sea-bottom or rose in springs; or a "substance produced in the water like naphtha or bitumen"(!): now it is known to be the egesta of a whale. It is found in lumps weighing several pounds ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... Jack, whimsically. "I haven't the advantage of being a girl with a brother and a baker's dozen of beaux in bell buttons and gray. I'm only an old fossil of a 'cit,' with a scamp of a nephew and that limited conception of the delights of West Point which one can derive from running up there every time that versatile youngster gets into a new scrape. You'll admit my opportunities have ...
— Starlight Ranch - and Other Stories of Army Life on the Frontier • Charles King
... structure of the baculum. I assign Tamias to the tribe Marmotini. I assign Eutamias to the tribe Callosciurini, but do so only tentatively because I have not, at first hand, studied the bacula of most of the Callosciurini. The fossil record is too incomplete to reveal the time when the two tribes diverged. The subgenera Eutamias and Neotamias are closely related. Indications are that the divergence of the two subgenera occurred, geologically, but a short time ago, possibly ...
— Genera and Subgenera of Chipmunks • John A. White
... chronicles. He's a profound student of history, and the history of the present interests him just as much—he has those Balkans under a microscope; and collects all the data on every important strike here and elsewhere. And yet where women are concerned he is a fossil. An American fossil—worst sort. Some of the young ones are just as bad...I'll have to give in. I can't break his heart. ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... Islands" and "South America"); other geological papers; Darwin settles at Down House, near Beckenham, 1842; appears at Oxford meeting of British Association, 1847; contributes chapter on Geology to Herschel's manual of Scientific Enquiry; publishes great works on recent and fossil cirripedia, 1851-4; receives Royal Medal of Royal Society, 1853, and Wollaston Medal of Geological ...
— Life of Charles Darwin • G. T. (George Thomas) Bettany |
