"Spiny" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... themselves seem to be asleep, there is occasionally a sweet music heard, too soft for even the listening ear to catch by day. Every breath of summer wind that steals through the pine-forests wakes this music as it goes. The stiff spiny leaves of the fir and pine vibrate with the breeze, like the strings of a musical instrument, so that every breath of the night-wind, in a Norwegian forest, wakens a myriad of tiny harps; and this ...
— Feats on the Fiord - The third book in "The Playfellow" • Harriet Martineau
... greenish, spiny larvae of the saw-fly feed on the tender leaves in spring. Spray with Paris green or arsenate of lead, or ...
— Manual of Gardening (Second Edition) • L. H. Bailey
... large; and there are the freshwater crabs. There are the little shrimps and the big hump-backed fellows, or prawns; there are the 'crangons' or squillae; and the big lobsters and the crawfish or 'langoustes', their spiny cousins. We read about their beady eyes, which turn every way; about their big rough antennae and the smaller, smoother pair between; the great teeth, or mandibles; the carapace with its projecting rostrum, ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... four-footed creature now existent on Dunk Island is the so-called porcupine (spiny ant-eater or echidna). An animal which possesses some of the features of the hedgehog of old England, and resembles in others that distinctly Australian paradox, the platypus, which has a mouth which it cannot open—a mere tube through which the tongue is thrust, which in the production of ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... agreement, and the two scouts ran at full apeed along the narrow ribbon of grass between the prickly, spiny bushes. ...
— The Wolf Patrol - A Tale of Baden-Powell's Boy Scouts • John Finnemore
... was prepared with what he called a spoke for Jimmy's wheel. Incidentally it would be a nasty one for Lucy, and none the worse for that. He considered that she was getting out of hand, and that Urquhart might be a nuisance because such a spiny customer to tackle. But he had a little plan, and chuckled over it a good deal when ...
— Love and Lucy • Maurice Henry Hewlett
... pulled the snorkel from his mouth, and gritted, "Swim away. Let him use you for a target. I'm going to get that son of a spiny sea walrus." ...
— The Wailing Octopus • Harold Leland Goodwin
... half a mind to drown myself then; but an odd wish to see the whole adventure out, a queer, impersonal, spectacular interest in myself, restrained me. I stretched my limbs, sore and painful from the pricks of the spiny plants, and stared around me at the trees; and, so suddenly that it seemed to jump out of the green tracery about it, my eyes lit upon a black face watching me. I saw that it was the simian creature who had met ...
— The Island of Doctor Moreau • H. G. Wells
... him back in kind. "Yes, and the funk you were in for fear Spiny Tatlow 'ud see us, ...
— Australia Felix • Henry Handel Richardson
... constant, if fertile, is therefore impossible to decide. Berberis ilicifolia is considered as a hybrid between the European barberry (B. vulgaris) and the cultivated shrub Mahonia aquifolia. The latter has pinnate leaves, the former undivided ones. The hybrid has undivided leaves which are more spiny than those of the European parent, and which are not deciduous like them, but persist during the winter, a peculiarity inherited from the Mahonia. As far as I [271] have been able to ascertain, this hybrid ...
— Species and Varieties, Their Origin by Mutation • Hugo DeVries
... most important species of the dozen which make up its genus. Though slow in growth, it shoots up a magnificent stem, to the height sometimes of eighty feet, the summit of which is covered with a graceful crown of pinnated leaves. The trunk is exceedingly rough and spiny; the flower spathes, which appear in the axils of the leaves, are woody, and contain branched spadices with many flowers; more than 11,000 have been counted on a single male spadix. As the flowers are dioecious, it is necessary to impregnate the female ...
— Scientific American, Volume XXXVI., No. 8, February 24, 1877 • Various
... the higher naturalists. Cuvier, with not a few of the ichthyologists who preceded him, arranged the fishes into two distinct series,—the Cartilaginous and Osseous; and these last he mainly divided into the hard or spiny-finned fishes, and the soft or joint-finned fishes. He placed the sturgeon in his Cartilaginous series; while in his soft-finned order he found a place for the Polypterus of the Nile and the Lepidosteus of the Ohio and St. Lawrence. But the arrangement, though it seemed at the time one ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... at the crowds with green and seemingly sleepy eyes; but at moments they raised their giant heads, and breathed through wheezing nostrils the exhalations of the multitude, licking their jaws the while with spiny tongues. ...
— Quo Vadis - A Narrative of the Time of Nero • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... singing flame. A twig of finger size will be furred to the thickness of one's wrist by pink five-petaled bloom, so close that only the blunt-faced wild bees find their way in it. In this latitude late frosts cut off the hope of fruit too often for the wild almond to multiply greatly, but the spiny, tap-rooted shrubs are ...
— The Land Of Little Rain • Mary Hunter Austin
... you hurt?" Amy was crying over and over, as, regardless of the stiff manzanita and the spiny deer brush, she tore her ...
— The Rules of the Game • Stewart Edward White
... these baboons thus acted in concert. Mr. Wallace (41. 'The Malay Archipelago,' vol. i. 1869, p. 87.) on three occasions saw female orangs, accompanied by their young, "breaking off branches and the great spiny fruit of the Durian tree, with every appearance of rage; causing such a shower of missiles as effectually kept us from approaching too near the tree." As I have repeatedly seen, a chimpanzee will throw any object at hand at a person who offends him; and the ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... more difficult. Every hollow, every earth hummock and sagebush had to be used as cover. The hunter wriggled through the grass flat on his face, pushing himself along for perhaps a quarter of a mile by his toes and fingers, heedless of the spiny cactus. When near enough to the huge, unconscious quarry the hunter began firing, still keeping himself carefully concealed. If the smoke was blown away by the wind, and if the buffaloes caught no glimpse ...
— Hunting the Grisly and Other Sketches • Theodore Roosevelt
... shall say.—I lay by the hot white sand-dunes. . Small yellow flowers, sapless and squat and spiny, Stared at the sky. And silently there above us Day after day, beyond our dreams and knowledge, Presences swept, and over us streamed their shadows, Swift and blue, or dark. . . . What did they mean? What sinister threat of power? What hint of beauty? Prelude to what ...
— The House of Dust - A Symphony • Conrad Aiken
... rubbing against his leg, pricking it through his anklets. Kay looked down. A lady porcupine, with tiny new quills, was showing recognition, even affection, if such a spiny beast could be said ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various
... the glad joyous spring, returned. The leaf-buds, wrapped within their gummy and downy cases, began to unfold; the dark green pines, spruce, and balsams began to shoot out fresh spiny leaves, like tassels, from the ends of every bough, giving out the most refreshing fragrance; the crimson buds of the young hazels, and the scarlet blossoms of the soft maple, enlivened the edges of the streams; the bright ...
— Lady Mary and her Nurse • Catharine Parr Traill
... (Dracaena Draco Linn., Palma canariensis Tourn.), which an Irish traveller called a 'dragon-palm,' owed its vulgar name to the fancy that the fruit contained the perfect figure of a standing dragon with gaping mouth and long neck, spiny back and crocodile's tail. It is a quaint tree of which any ingenious carpenter could make a model. The young trunk is somewhat like that of the Oreodoxa regia, or an asparagus immensely magnified; but it frequently grows larger above than below. At first it bears only bristly, ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... trammelled fast, Was yet dragged forward by the circling rein Which either hand directed; nor they quenched The frenzy of their flight before each trace, Wheel-spoke and splinter of the woful car, Each boulder-stone, sharp stub and spiny shell, Huge fish-bone wrecked and wreathed amid the sands On that detested beach, was bright with blood And morsels of his flesh; then fell the steeds Head foremost, crashing in their mooned fronts, 60 Shivering ...
— Men and Women • Robert Browning
... rode all day over an uninteresting country. I am tired of repeating the epithets barren and sterile. These words, however, as commonly used, are comparative; I have always applied them to the plains of Patagonia, which can boast of spiny bushes and some tufts of grass; and this is absolute fertility, as compared with Northern Chile. Here again, there are not many spaces of two hundred yards square, where some little bush, cactus or lichen, may not be ...
— A Naturalist's Voyage Round the World - The Voyage Of The Beagle • Charles Darwin
... great to comprehend all at once. So with Bill's mind. He saw the yellow and black fur grow toward the rock. It seemed to ooze around it and then up and over the top of it. Bill saw, when it reached the top of the rock, that it dropped a spiny tendril to the ground. Like a root, the tendril buried itself into the earth below the jutting rock, and slowly the rock was covered with ...
— The Day of the Dog • Anderson Horne
... acuminated[obs3]; pointed; tapering; conical, pyramidal; mucronate[obs3], mucronated[obs3]; spindle shaped, needle shaped; spiked, spiky, ensiform[obs3], peaked, salient; cusped, cuspidate, cuspidated[obs3]; cornute[obs3], cornuted[obs3], cornicultate[obs3]; prickly; spiny, spinous[obs3], spicular; thorny, bristling, muricated[obs3], pectinated[obs3], studded, thistly, briary[obs3]; craggy &c. (rough) 256; snaggy, digitated[obs3], two-edged, fusiform[Microb]; dentiform[obs3], denticulated; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... FIGURE 1.4. Five spiny or grooved cells, with edges joined, from the outer skin (epidermis): one of them (b) ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.1. • Ernst Haeckel
... neck with a row of ovals; the shoulder with a true herring-bone band; a vine with spiny leaves around the body. ...
— Illustrated Catalogue Of The Collections Obtained From The Indians Of New Mexico And Arizona In 1879 • James Stevenson
... case, and gives the idea of what we regard the typical marking of the capillitium in A. oerstedtii. Externally the species resembles somewhat A. nodulosa, and the network of the capillitium is also suggestive of that form; the spiny capillitium is unique. ...
— The North American Slime-Moulds • Thomas H. (Thomas Huston) MacBride
... of the Palinuridiae seems to be very peculiar. Claus found in the ova of the Spiny Lobster (Palinurus), embryos with a completely segmented body, but wanting the appendages of the tail, abdomen, and last two segments of the middle-body; they possess a single median and considerably compound ...
— Facts and Arguments for Darwin • Fritz Muller
... from the surfaces of the gills by falling downward and out from the crevices between. The same is true with the shelving fungi on trees, etc., where the spores readily fall out from the pores of the honey-combed surface or from between the teeth of those sorts with a spiny under surface. If the caps were so arranged that the fruiting surface came to be on the upper side, the larger number of the spores would lodge in the crevices between the extensions of the fruiting surface. Singularly, this position ...
— Studies of American Fungi. Mushrooms, Edible, Poisonous, etc. • George Francis Atkinson |
