"Tadpole" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of Mavis the elder girls were not entirely in sympathy with the new movement. They considered the Pioneers exhibited signs of swollen head, and nicknamed their society the 'Tadpole Club,' declaring its members to be still in that elementary stage of their development. They made very merry at their expense, and poked fun at Merle for having ...
— Monitress Merle • Angela Brazil
... erected a signal station, called the Vigia, which, at the instant I saw it, was telegraphing to some craft out at sea. As for the city, to assume our friend Mr Bang's mode of description, it was shaped like a tadpole, the body representing the city, and the suburb the tail; or a stewpan, the city and its fortifications being the pan, while the handle, tending obliquely towards us, was the Raval, or long street, extending Savannahward, without the walls. ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... then to make his tenure of office secure by conciliating the favour of the king. The entire revolution which much of his policy underwent in order to effect this object bears too close a resemblance to the sudden and inexplicable changes of front habitual to placemen of the Tadpole stamp to be altogether pleasant to contemplate in a politician of pure aims and lofty ambition. Humiliating is not too strong a term to apply to a letter in which he expresses his desire to "efface the past by every action of his life," in order that he ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... young tadpole, some pond or ditch was his home, for he was an aquatic animal; but now that he is full-grown he has passed into another way of living: he breathes, or rather swallows air, and must, as he swims about with his beautifully webbed ...
— Twilight And Dawn • Caroline Pridham
... snatching a bridle and running up the orchard, where old Tadpole had been left in case of emergency. I clapped a side-saddle on his back, a hat on my head, jumped on just as I was, and galloped for my life in the direction of Bimbalong, seven miles distant. I eased my horse a little going up Flea Creek pinch, but with this delay reached my destination ...
— My Brilliant Career • Miles Franklin
... to spare, But gasping for breath he could only respond By pointing—be pointed, alas! |TO THE POND|. 'Twas e'en so; poor dear Knight, with his "specs" and his hat, He'd gone poking his nose into this and to that; When close to the side of the bank, he espied An uncommon fine tadpole, remarkably fat! He stooped;—and he thought her His own;—he had caught her! Got hold of her tail—and to land almost brought her, When—he plumped head and heels ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... When Razzle-dazzle starts to think, give him a chance," said Happy Mather. "Who asked your opinion? You're nothing but a tadpole, anyhow." ...
— Skippy Bedelle - His Sentimental Progress From the Urchin to the Complete - Man of the World • Owen Johnson
... hungry. By and by some foolish tadpoles came wriggling along. 'I'll just try catching one of them for practice. Maybe they are good to eat,' thought Mr. Heron, and just as before darted his head and great bill downward and caught a tadpole. ...
— Mother West Wind "How" Stories • Thornton W. Burgess
... on white paper a very black spot about half an inch in diameter, with a tail about an inch in length, so as to resemble a tadpole, as in Plate II.; look steadfastly for a minute on the center of this spot, and, on moving the eye a little, the figure of the tadpole will be seen on the white part of the paper; which figure of the tadpole will appear more luminous than the other part of the white ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... that are twenty centimeters high, have cylindrical, conical summits, and weigh two pounds each. In the top part of this enormous head, inside big cavities separated by cartilage, you'll find 300 to 400 kilograms of that valuable oil called "spermaceti." The sperm whale is an awkward animal, more tadpole than fish, as Professor Frdol has noted. It's poorly constructed, being "defective," so to speak, over the whole left side of its frame, with good eyesight only in its ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... among lovers of Nature know why a frog has no tail! The reason-is simply that it used that organ up when it was in want. In early life, as a jolly tadpole, it had a flourishing tail to swim with, and gills for breathing water, and an infantile mouth for taking vegetable nourishment. But when it began to draw near to frog's estate, serious changes were required ...
— Concerning Animals and Other Matters • E.H. Aitken, (AKA Edward Hamilton)
... a Tadpole and I was a Fish, In the Paleozoic time, And side by side on the ebbing tide, We sprawled through the ooze and slime, Or skittered with many a caudal flip Through the depths of the Cambrian fen— My heart was rife with the joy of life, For I ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 4 (of 4) • Various
... are members. The Zoological Society are fortunate enough to possess specimens of both the black and white axolotl. This creature, which is a native of Mexico, has a strange life-history not unlike that of the frog. It has a sort of tadpole stage of existence, in which it is furnished with a collar of gills and lives in the water. After a while it loses its gills, and its tail and legs grow much less fish-like. There is a kind of lizard ...
— Little Folks (Septemeber 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... clear, they sent a snooper in first. It was a robot, looking slightly like a short-tailed tadpole, six feet long by three feet at the thickest. It transmitted a view of the tunnel as it went slowly in; the air, it found, was breathable, and there were no harmful radiations or other dangers. According to the plans, there should be a big room at the other end, slightly curved, a hundred feet ...
— The Cosmic Computer • Henry Beam Piper
... upon the habits, movements, and structures, including adaptive features of aquatic animals, as crayfish, mussel, tadpole, etc. (See pp. 285-6.) ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Nature Study • Ontario Ministry of Education
... here are a lot of black creatures, lively enough when you stir them up; I suppose they must be tadpoles." Tadpoles, Jack, unquestionably, but are they the young of the toad or the frog? Let me see. Well, it is not easy to say which in their present stage, a tadpole is so like a tadpole, whether the young of frog or toad. If you had found the eggs, which you might have done earlier in the year, there would have been no difficulty in saying whether they belonged to a toad or a frog; for the toad lays its black eggs imbedded in a long clear jelly-like ...
— Country Walks of a Naturalist with His Children • W. Houghton
... it. They know, too, that while in history-building a fact is better than a presumption, it doesn't take a presumption long to bloom into a fact when they have the handling of it. They know by old experience that when they get hold of a presumption-tadpole he is not going to stay tadpole in their history-tank; no, they know how to develop him into the giant four-legged bullfrog of fact, and make him sit up on his hams, and puff out his chin, and look important and insolent and come-to-stay; and assert his genuine simon-pure authenticity ...
— Is Shakespeare Dead? - from my Autobiography • Mark Twain
... Caecilians, for in them the head moves freely on the neck and they creep on short imperfect legs. But the Lizard is clothed with scales, while the body of the Salamander is naked, and the young of the former is complete when hatched, while the Tadpole born from the Salamander has a life of its own to live, with certain changes to pass through before it assumes its mature condition; during the early part of its life it is even destitute of legs, and has ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... great shock to her. She paddled along shore quite near them for a while, trying to be resigned to it. And then she waddled out on the grassy bank, and fed them with some newts, and a tadpole, and a few blue-bottle flies, and a snail, and several other delicacies, which they seemed to enjoy quite as much as if they had been young ducks. And then Quackalina, seeing them quite happy, struck out for the very middle of the pond. She ...
— Solomon Crow's Christmas Pockets and Other Tales • Ruth McEnery Stuart
... bird-nesting, in one of the lanes near our school. I had flung down my books at the foot of the tree before climbing it. Just as I laid hands on the nest, in which there were four eggs, I heard voices below, and looking down, observed Turner, Tiddler, and Tadpole passing. ...
— The Thorogood Family • R.M. Ballantyne
... time a perfect leg.[903] Thus, that portion of the leg which had {377} been cut off, neither more nor less, would be reproduced. If the tail or leg of a young animal had been cut off, a young tail or leg would have been reproduced, as actually occurs with the amputated tail of the tadpole; for gemmules of all the units which compose the tail are diffused throughout the body at all ages. But during the adult state the gemmules of the larval tail would remain dormant, for they would not meet ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... erect and challenging, this miserable human tadpole, usurping the throne of Lais and crowned with the worship of such ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... the 1st D.C. Vols., composed as it was of a cloud of independent companies—thirty-five, or thereabout, in all, I think—all made up of men from everywhere, largely in the tadpole stage of Unionism, and all sworn in for service in the District, not to go beyond the District. Early in May they were organized into eight battalions of four or five companies each, commanded by lieutenant-colonels, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 3, September 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... man became a "tout" it was because he had to. Old horsemen will tell you that Schwalliger—no one knew where he got the name—was rolling and tumbling about the track at Bennings when he was still so short in stature that he got the name of the "tadpole." Naturally, he came to know much of horses, grew up with them, in fact, and having no wealthy father or mother to indulge him in his taste or help him use his knowledge, he did the next best thing and used his special education for himself in the humble ...
— The heart of happy hollow - A collection of stories • Paul Laurence Dunbar
... delay on the part of Roland, who was somewhat averse to plunging with Edith up to the saddle-girths in mire, drew from him a very unmannerly, though not the less hearty execration on the delicacy of "them thar persons who," as he expressed it, "stumped at a mud-hole as skearily as if every tadpole in it war ...
— Nick of the Woods • Robert M. Bird
... spawn of toads is very small, as regards the size of the individual eggs, compared with the size of the full-grown animal. Nothing would be easier than for a piece of spawn or a tiny tadpole to be washed into some hole in a mine or cave, where there was sufficient water for its developement, and where the trickling drops brought down minute objects of food, enough to keep up its simple existence. A toad brought up under ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... meaning officially attached to the word "vivisection," the teacher would be debarred from showing the circulation in a frog's foot or in a tadpole's tail; he must not show an animalcule, uncomfortably fixed under the microscope, nor prick his own finger for the sake of obtaining a drop of living blood. The living particles which float in that liquid undoubtedly feel ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... make quick work. The Rebellion is an unborn tadpole. Let us not fall into the delusion of mistaking a local commotion for a revolution. A strong active pull together will do our work in thirty days. We have only to send a column of twenty-five thousand ...
— The Victim - A romance of the Real Jefferson Davis • Thomas Dixon
... of a one-eyed tadpole, Billy," he said. "That's Miss Minerva's beau. He's been loving her more 'n a million years. My mama says he ain't never going to marry nobody a tall 'thout he can get Miss Minerva, and Miss Minerva she just turns up her ...
— Miss Minerva and William Green Hill • Frances Boyd Calhoun
... Mr Tadpole that you shall stand for the old borough. With the government in our hands, as I had anticipated at the general election, success I think was certain: under the circumstances which we must encounter, the struggle will be more severe, but I think we shall do ...
— Sybil - or the Two Nations • Benjamin Disraeli
... surprising, in the midst of our Museums and Scientific Schools, how little we yet know of the common things before our eyes. Our savans still confess their inability to discriminate with certainty the egg or tadpole of a frog from that of a toad; and it is strange that these hopping creatures, which seem so unlike, should coincide so nearly in their juvenile career, while the tritons and salamanders, which border so closely on each other in their maturer state as sometimes to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 • Various
... What curious little feet and legs! Now, though the newt has four legs, it lays eggs; and to guard them from injury, wraps them up in the leaves of water plants, with its four paws. When the young newt is hatched, it is very like a tadpole. It is like a fish, for it breathes through gills; but as it increases in size the gills go away and the front legs appear, and then the hind ones. In a frog-tadpole the hind legs appear first, and then ...
— Ernest Bracebridge - School Days • William H. G. Kingston
... some dead grass out of it, plunged the frog in, and began to scrub it—began to scrub the frog in the oozy contents of that tub, when the poor amphibian had been soaking in spring-water ever since it was a tadpole! ...
— Roof and Meadow • Dallas Lore Sharp
... bad," said Bill, furiously. "Here we've had all the worry and trouble of fightin' puddin'-thieves night and day, and, on top of it all, here's this Tooralooral tadpole of a Mayor shovin' his nose into the business and arrestin' our Puddin' without ...
— The Magic Pudding • Norman Lindsay
... Spanish. The more one studies the conception and the workmanship the more striking it grows in originality and daring. Mullgardt has succeeded in putting into architecture the spirit that inspired Langdon Smith's poem 'Evolution,' beginning 'When you were a tadpole and I was a fish.' In the chaotic feeling that the court gives there is a subtle suggestiveness. The whole evolution of man is intimated here from the time when he lived among the seaweed and the fish and the lobsters and ...
— The City of Domes • John D. Barry
... through a magnifying glass. They had apparently a round head with side gills through which they breathed, and a long tail. After a time tiny legs appeared under what might pass as the chin. Then the body grew longer and another pair of legs made their appearance. Finally the tail was absorbed and the tadpole's transformation into a frog was complete. All this did not take place for many months, however, but through the summer the Club watched the little wrigglers carefully and thought that they could see a ...
— Ethel Morton's Enterprise • Mabell S.C. Smith
... life's unfolding powers constitutes a religious program. For even those primitive instincts which pass and perish often stir into consciousness and operation other more noble functions or are transmuted into recognized virtues. Popularly speaking, the tadpole's tail becomes his legs. Success in suppressing the precivilized qualities of the boy results in a "zestless automaton" that is something less than a man. Everything that characterizes the boy, however bothersome and unpromising it may seem, is to be considered with reference to a developing ...
— The Minister and the Boy • Allan Hoben
... during this discussion of her recent culinary experiments, was indicative of the change that was slowly taking place in her point of view. The Careys had a large sense of humor, from mother down as far as Peter, who was still in the tadpole stage of it. They chaffed one another on all occasions, for the most part courteously and with entire good nature. Leigh Hunt speaks of the anxiety of certain persons to keep their minds quiet lest any motion be clumsy, and Julia's concern had been of ...
— Mother Carey's Chickens • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... between a mermaid and a tadpole?" asked another in a loud voice, and without a pause continued, "Why, one drops its tail and the other holds onto it. Ha, ha! Ho, ...
— The Sea Fairies • L. Frank Baum
... when he is a tadpole, is sprinkled all over with very fine spots, which look like gold-dust, while the ...
— Friends and Helpers • Sarah J. Eddy
... "Under the microscope, the germ of, say, tetanus is a minute bar with spore at the end like the head of a tadpole. Of what ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... respiration that manifest alteration. In its earliest form the young batrachian, living in the water, breathes as a fish does by gills, either free and projecting as in the water-newt, or partially covered by integument as in the tadpole. But the gills disappear as the lungs gradually become developed: the duration of the process being on an average one hundred days from the time the eggs were first deposited. After this important change, the true batrachian is incapable any longer of living continuously ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent
... says that function precedes structure? Are not the potentials dependent upon the variation which has determined this function? I am speaking now in the broadest possible terms and not confining myself to the cerebrum. Do we not find it in the tadpole who is prepared for breathing not because he wants to breathe, but because he is going to have a new kind of breathing apparatus and the duck who takes to the water because he has the ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... then—if that young man did n't go him one better 'n' say as he believed in tadpoles himself. Luther Law was flat agin' tadpoles, but Rufus never let up till he got him to admit that if the Lord could make a man out of a monkey He could make him out of a tadpole, too. 'N' then, when he'd got him so far, what do you think, Mrs. Lathrop,—what do you think!—Mrs. Macy said as Mrs. Kitts said as Mrs. Grummel said if that young man did n't look right square into Luther's face 'n' say as to his order o' thinkin' it wasn't what we'd come from ...
— Susan Clegg and Her Neighbors' Affairs • Anne Warner
... content to visit him now and then, to arouse him, and then leave him to disincarnate his vertebral outward phase into chlorophyll or lifeless stone. To muse upon his courtship or emotions was impossible. His life had a feeling of sphinx-like duration—Gawain as a tadpole was unthinkable. He seemed ageless, unreal, wonderfully beautiful, and ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... extremities, instead of standing on their legs, and breathing by gills, instead of taking the free air of heaven into the lungs made to receive it. Of course we never try to keep young souls in the tadpole state, for fear they should get a pair or two of legs by-and-by and jump out of the pool where they have been bred and fed! ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... blunder still worse. She takes an egg which we suppose is going to turn into a frog, and she brings out of it a tadpole—neither fish, flesh nor fowl nor anything else. After a while the tadpole gets legs and has a long tail; it must lose that tail in order to become a frog. A benevolent zoologist one day started in to help the tadpole by snipping off the tadpole's tail; ...
— Parent and Child Vol. III., Child Study and Training • Mosiah Hall
... known that the tadpole acts the same part with fish that ants do with birds; and that through the agency of this little reptile, perfect skeletons, even of the smallest fishes may be obtained. To produce this, it is but necessary to suspend the fish by threads attached ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 19. Issue 539 - 24 Mar 1832 • Various
... was long and flowing. But if his shoulders were broad the rest of his body was not in the same proportion—for he narrowed as he descended, his hips being very small, and his legs as thin as those of a goat. His real name was Todpoole, but the people invariably called him Tadpole, and he certainly in appearance somewhat reminded you of one. He was a facetious little fellow, and, it was said, very ...
— Poor Jack • Frederick Marryat
... green appearance. Only that I seemed quite fit to go to heaven, and Lorna. For in my sick distracted mind (stirred with many tossings), like the bead in the spread of frog-spawn carried by the current, hung the black and central essence of my future life. A life without Lorna; a tadpole life. All stupid head; ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... became a living soul." Nay—thunders Science—put away such childish superstition, smite such traditionary idols; man was first made after the similitude of a marine ascidian, and once swam as a tadpole ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... the pattern of our own brief span of life. In a few cases in the familiar life about us we see the evolutionary process abridged, and transformations like those of unrecorded time take place before our eyes, as when the tadpole becomes the frog or the grub becomes the butterfly. These rapid changes are analogous to those which in the depths of geologic time have evolved the bird from the fish or the reptile, or the seal and the manatee from a fourfooted land animal. Our common ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... and away to other climes, they continued to swim in monotonous circles until they died. In other words, the failure is a man who dwells in muddy atmosphere all his days, who is content to remain a tadpole and who never attempts to take advantage of any opportunity. He becomes unclean, so to speak. And that is what we mean by this chapter heading "Cleanliness of Body and Mind." It was not intended to point out the proper way to keep our faces and hands clean, or as a ...
— Laugh and Live • Douglas Fairbanks
... will lead to self-activity and initiative, to ingenuity and aggressiveness. If tadpoles are reared in jars of different sizes, the growth and size of each will vary with the size of the vessel, the smallest jar growing the smallest tadpole, and the largest jar the largest tadpole. It is fighting against the laws of fate to attempt to rear strong personalities in a "flat" or even in a fifty-foot lot. They need the range of the prairies, the hills, and the woods. Shakespeare was born and brought up in one of the richest ...
— Rural Life and the Rural School • Joseph Kennedy
... lays an egg, which egg becomes a tadpole; the tadpole, after more or fewer intermediate ...
— Life and Habit • Samuel Butler
... the tadpole said, when he his tail dropped off." Weary of the growing distrust they saw, after my remittances began to fall off, and heartily sick of the Gerrymandering about them, of the usurers and money-changers ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 110, December, 1866 - A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics • Various |
