"Prehistoric" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... given us vague stories of the origin and history of the tribes. It is only in this folk-lore—proved often on patient investigation to be of historic value—that we can find some threads to guide us through the labyrinth of mystery to which we come in the prehistoric {113} times of Canada. Popular tradition tells us that the Hurons and Iroquois, branches of the same family, speaking dialects of one common language, were living at one time in villages not far ...
— Canada • J. G. Bourinot
... tells us in his interesting volume, "Prehistoric Man," that "there was not, so far as we are aware, any carnivorous ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Eleventh Annual Meeting - Washington, D. C. October 7 AND 8, 1920 • Various
... is Magic against Magic As Garry Connell Bluffs for His Life with a Prehistoric Savage in the Heart of ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various
... harbours that pleased me like sonnets; and, with the unconsciousness of the predestined, I ticketed my performance "Treasure Island." I am told there are people who do not care for maps, and find it hard to believe. The names, the shapes of the woodlands, the courses of the roads and rivers, the prehistoric footsteps of man still distinctly traceable up hill and down dale, the mills and the ruins, the ponds and the ferries, perhaps the Standing Stone or the Druidic Circle on the heath; here is an inexhaustible fund ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... said that in the vast tundra regions of Northern Siberia the frozen soil had dissolved into a bottomless slough, from whose depths uprose prehistoric mammoths, their long hair matted with mud, and their curved tusks of ivory gleaming like trumpets over the field of their resurrection. The dispatch concluded with a heart-rending account of the loss of a large party of ivory hunters, who, having ventured too ...
— The Second Deluge • Garrett P. Serviss
... imprisoned in a suspensory bandage,—what is this prepuce? Whence, why, where, and whither? At times, Nature, as if impatient of the slow march of gradual evolution, and exasperated at this persistent and useless as well as dangerous relic of a far-distant prehistoric age, takes things in her own hands and induces a sloughing to take place, which rids it of its annoyance. In the far-off land of Ur, among the mountainous regions of Kurdistan, something over six thousand years ago, the fathers of the Hebrew ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... antiquity carved on their smooth surfaces, the barrows and lynchetts or terraces, and the vast green earth-works crowning their summit. Up here on the turf, even with the lark singing his shrill music in the blue heavens, you are with the prehistoric dead, yourself for the time one of that innumerable, unsubstantial multitude, invisible in the sun, so that the sheep travelling as they graze, and the shepherd following them, pass through their ranks without ...
— A Shepherd's Life • W. H. Hudson
... dry ravines, or wadys, which pierce the hills that bound the valley of the Nile, I have found numerous specimens of flint axes of the type of St. Acheul, which have been adjudged to be true palolithic implements by some of the most eminent cultivators of prehistoric science."[1] ...
— Ragnarok: The Age of Fire and Gravel • Ignatius Donnelly
... I exclaimed. "He'd love you; he's not a bit more like a prize-fighter than he is like a Professor, he's more like a sort of prehistoric man in blue trousers and ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley
... of resource which circumvented every kind of obstacle to make me what I am—a vertebrate, breathing, walking, thinking entity, capable of some creative expression of my own—will probably not fall short now that I have immediate use for it. Of what I get from the past, prehistoric and historic, perhaps the most subtle distillation is the fact that so far is the life-principle from balking at need, need is essential to its activity. Where there is no need it seems to be quiescent; where there is something to be met, ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King
... Tarentum and Brundisium was also famous, and at the former place were considerable dye-works. These two towns acquired importance in very early times owing to the excellence of their harbours. Traces of a prehistoric population of the stone and early bronze age are to be found all over Calabria. Especially noticeable are the menhirs (pietre fitte) and the round tower-like specchie or truddhi, which are found ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... Limpopo and Sabia rivers. It should be mentioned that the name of the "black but comely" queen was Sabia, which may or may not be a coincidence, but it is certainly true that the rivers of this district have produced gold from prehistoric times ...
— Getting Gold • J. C. F. Johnson
... astronomical discoveries had been made, untold ages before those to which our earliest historical records extend. For example, the observation of the apparent movement of the sun, and the discrimination between the planets and the fixed stars, are both to be classed among the discoveries of prehistoric ages. Nor is it to be said that these achievements related to matters of an obvious character. Ancient astronomy may seem very elementary to those of the present day who have been familiar from childhood with ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... led us forward toward a long, dark shadow that transformed itself into a temple wall as we drew closer, and in a moment we were once more groping our way downward amid prehistoric foundation stones, with bats flitting past us and a horrible feeling possessing me, at least, that the worst was yet ...
— Caves of Terror • Talbot Mundy
... he had been a man of ambition, a man of promise. He'd even found his Dream. An Easterner had helped him to that foolishness; an -ologist from a university who expected to find prehistoric bones and ...
— Winner Take All • Larry Evans
... they by no means prejudge the question, as to what the physical condition of the globe may have been before our chapters of its history begin, in what may be called (with that licence which is implied in the often-used term "prehistoric epoch") "pre-geologic time." The views indicated, in fact, are not only quite consistent with the hypothesis, that, in the still earlier period referred to, the condition of our world was very different; but they may be held by some to necessitate that hypothesis. The physical ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... on Newton's great law of universal gravitation led to the conclusion that the inclination of the earth's equator to the plane of her orbit (the obliquity of the ecliptic) has been diminishing slowly since prehistoric times; and this fact has been confirmed by Egyptian and Chinese observations on the length of the shadow of a vertical pillar, made thousands of years before the Christian ...
— History of Astronomy • George Forbes
... quartered over the ground like some unwieldy prehistoric reptile. Houck knew that if he lost his footing he was done for. Once, as the cluster of fighters swung downhill, the outlaw found himself close to the edge of the group. He got his arms free and tried to beat off those clinging to him. ...
— The Fighting Edge • William MacLeod Raine
... Famous in prehistoric lore, Not only for his weight and strength But for his intellectual length. You will observe by these remains The creature had two sets of brains— One in his head (the usual place), The other at his spinal base. Thus he could reason ...
— A line-o'-verse or two • Bert Leston Taylor
... races have split up these Negrito populations, which formerly occupied a continuous area, and mixing with them, have profoundly altered them. The present condition of things is the final result of strifes and mixtures, the most ancient of which may be referred back to prehistoric times." The invasions above mentioned having in the past driven many of the races from the mainland to the islands, and those which remained on the continent having undergone greater modification by crossing with taller and alien races, we may expect to find the ...
— A Philological Essay Concerning the Pygmies of the Ancients • Edward Tyson
... ago there was a club of college undergraduates which called itself the Lost Digamma. The digamma, I am informed, is a letter that was lost in prehistoric times from the Greek alphabet. A prudent alphabet would have offered a reward at once and would have beaten up the bushes all about, but evidently these remedies were neglected. As the years went on the other letters ...
— Chimney-Pot Papers • Charles S. Brooks
... man went out into the woods in America to try and see if he could live like the prehistoric men used to do; that is to say, he took nothing with him in the way of food or equipment or even clothing—he went just as he was, and started out to make his own living as best he could. Of course the first thing he had to do was to make some sort of ...
— Scouting For Girls, Official Handbook of the Girl Scouts • Girl Scouts
... my betters admired Miss Cushman—terribly out of the picture and the frame we should to-day pronounce her, I fear—as the Nancy of Oliver Twist: as far away this must have been as the lifetime of the prehistoric "Park," to which it was just within my knowledge that my elders went for opera, to come back on us sounding those rich old Italian names, Bosio and Badiali, Ronconi and Steffanone, I am not sure I have them quite ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... compass, the faces looking forward, the arms half extended on either side, with the hands raised to a level with the shoulders. They wear around their loins skirts of red sunlight, adorned with sunbeams. They have ear pendants, bracelets, and armlets, blue and red (of turquoise and coral), the prehistoric and emblematic jewels of the Navajo. Their forearms and legs are black, showing in each a zigzag mark to represent lightning on the surface of the black rain clouds. In the north god these colors are, for artistic reasons, ...
— The Mountain Chant, A Navajo Ceremony • Washington Matthews
... superficial area of Asia. They found no trace of the great monsters that had been so numerous on the mainland, though there were plenty of smaller and gentle-looking creatures, among them animals whose build was much like that of the prehistoric horse, with undeveloped toes on each side of the hoof, which in the modern terrestrial horse have disappeared, the hoof being in reality but ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor
... things which would have been highly unnecessary if I had been permitted to carry out my intention fully, and restore man to his prehistoric simplicity," interrupted Tsin-Su-Hoang. "For that reason, when the voice of the assemblage expresses itself, it must be understood that it represents in no measure ...
— The Wallet of Kai Lung • Ernest Bramah
... of expression. The result is very ingenious, but just because it is such a skillful mosaic of Georgian 'rubber-stamp' phrases, it must ever fall short of true art." Mr. Moe is correct. We have, in fact, heard this very criticism reiterated by various authorities ever since those prehistoric days when we began to lisp in numbers. Yet somehow we perversely continue to "mosaic" along in the same old way! But then, we have never claimed to possess "true art"; we are merely a metrical mechanic. ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... of narration at its source. Besides, Renmark had an objectionable habit of tracing the recital to its origin; it annoyed Yates to tell a modern yarn, and then discover that Aristophanes, or some other prehistoric poacher on the good things men were to say, had forestalled him by a thousand years or so. When a man is quick to see the point of your stories, and laughs heartily at them, you are apt to form a high opinion of his good sense, and ...
— In the Midst of Alarms • Robert Barr
... its tottering arches and broken columns, its lonely walls looking as if bitten by prehistoric monsters that must haunt this ancient coast, the soft pastel colors the great fire had given as sole compensation for all it had taken, the grotesque twisted masses of steel and the aged gray hills that had looked down on so many fires, had appealed powerfully to his ...
— The Avalanche • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... skulk in hiding; All the rivers and the brooklets Have subdued their wild, free rolling. Ancient mounds and Aztec relics, Mural signs and hieroglyphics, Toltec remnants and weird mummies, All the arts and queer devices Of a prehistoric people, Have entombed their sylvan phantoms, In an everlasting Lethe. Now the woods and plains are surveys, Of distinctive tracts and precincts, Now the wide, primeval limits Bound neat villages and districts. There are Bryantsville and Fitchport, ...
— The Song of Lancaster, Kentucky - to the statesmen, soldiers, and citizens of Garrard County. • Eugenia Dunlap Potts
... resenting government carried through by persons impelled solely by the most purely primitive and disinterested of motives. An ingenuous county politician, fresh from his native wilds, works for it through sheer prehistoric affection and neighbourliness; an old black man—out of a story-book—forges a powerful link of evidence for mere faithful love's sake; a man who is a minister of the gospel, a gentleman and above reproach, gives to its service all his interest, ...
— In Connection with the De Willoughby Claim • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... reconstruct, work, and fight such an important element in the new social machinery as a railway system. Such a business, in the next European war, will be hastily entrusted to some haphazard incapables drafted from one or other of the two prehistoric arms.... I do not see how this condition of affairs can be anything but transitory. There may be several wars between European powers, prepared and organized to accept the old conventions, bloody, vast, distressful encounters that may still leave the art of war essentially unmodified, but sooner ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... establishment that was promised in the spring. They were frequently away, but at home life ran fairly regularly. In the morning Henry went to the business, and his sandwich—a relic this of some prehistoric craving—was always cut by her own hand. He did not rely upon the sandwich for lunch, but liked to have it by him in case he grew hungry at eleven. When he had gone, there was the house to look after, and the servants to humanize, and ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... with names and dates, thus formulating, as annals, what was really the theogony and mythology of their country. The error of the mediaeval historians is shared by the not wiser moderns. In the generations of the gods we seem to see prehistoric racial divisions and large branches of the Aryan family, an error which results from a neglect of the bardic literature, and a consequently misdirected ...
— Early Bardic Literature, Ireland • Standish O'Grady
... making a plan for archeological field work in 1895, that the prehistoric cliff houses, cave dwellings, and ruined pueblos of Arizona afforded valuable opportunities for research, and past experience induced me to turn my steps more especially to the northern and northeastern parts of the territory.[1] ...
— Archeological Expedition to Arizona in 1895 • Jesse Walter Fewkes
... mark the western edge of the high plateau one will notice a chain of lakes, from Nyasa in the south through Tanganyika and Kivu to Lake Albert in the north. In prehistoric time some convulsion of nature broke the African continent all along its spine, and formed this system of lakes. Another break occurs on the high plateau, from Portuguese East Africa in the south to British East Africa in the north, ...
— World's War Events, Volume III • Various
... could establish the fact that this jar was made by a prehistoric race, we should then have four generations in this lovely valley:-the amiable Pre-Historic people (whose gentle descendants were probably killed by the Spaniards in the West Indies); the Red Indians; the ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... been drawn from that great class of tradition preserved by historic peoples in historic times, and yet unmistakably pointing to prehistoric culture. We have been able to show the methods to be adopted for, and the results of, disengaging the myth which has gravitated to the historic person or place from the historic facts which have become ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme
... these asylums, and that thousands more in America know no other homes, but move from one hotel to another, while the same outlay would procure them cosy, cheerful dwellings, it does seem as if these modern Arabs, Holmes's "Folding Bed-ouins," were gradually returning to prehistoric habits and would end by eating ...
— Worldly Ways and Byways • Eliot Gregory
... saurian and reptilian shapes Amphibious and pelagic, swim and crawl, Cleaving the waters with tremendous strokes, Writhing with foul contortions in disport, Splashing and laving in the thermal seas Of the remote and prehistoric past; Thou who hast seen them fail and pass away Shalt also shine when ...
— Mountain idylls, and Other Poems • Alfred Castner King
... increasing revelation of the imagination, the exactness, the thoroughness, and the great progressive plans of God. Evolution has become a spiritual formula. The scientist looks out over the earth and sky and sun and star. Against his little years are meted out vast prehistoric spans; against his mastery of a few forms of life, stands Life itself. Back of all, there looms up the great Figure of the Originator of life, and of the forms of life; the Maker and Ruler of them all. Each scientific fact helps exegesis and evidence. Each new ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... Organ in St. George's Hall, Liverpool, Eng. . . . Frontispiece Prehistoric Double Flutes The Wind-chest; Front View. The Wind-chest; Side View. The Pneumatic Lever Nomenclature of Organ Keyboard Portrait of Moitessier Tubular Pneumatic Action The First Electric Organ Ever Built The Electro-Pneumatic Lever ...
— The Recent Revolution in Organ Building - Being an Account of Modern Developments • George Laing Miller
... knowledge which the Homeric critic should have at his command, only philology, archaeology, and anthropology can be called "sciences"; and they are not exact sciences: they are but skirmishing advances towards the true solution of problems prehistoric ...
— Homer and His Age • Andrew Lang
... new troops, who have arrived too late, are doing their best to find some more of this silver by digging up gardens and breaking down houses. Marchese P——, of the Italians, who always pretends that he has been a mining engineer in some prehistoric period of his existence, calls it "working over ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale
... idols, and rough fetish stones, in which Pausanias found the most ancient relics of Hellenic theology. This is a proof of their antiquity and a presumption in favour of their freedom from foreign influence. Most of these things were survivals from that dimly remembered prehistoric age in which the Greeks, not yet gathered into city states, lived in villages or kraals, or pueblos, as we should translate (Greek text omitted), if we were speaking of African or American tribes. In that stage the early Greeks must ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... connection with this very mountain that we first conceived the idea of making the ascent of Ararat. Here and there, on some of the most prominent peaks, we could distinguish little mounds of earth, the ruined watch-towers of the prehistoric Hittites. ...
— Across Asia on a Bicycle • Thomas Gaskell Allen and William Lewis Sachtleben
... Americana, who searched for this already rare volume; and many were proud to get it, at last, at ten, fifteen and even twenty times its original price. It will always be a standard—the most photographic story yet printed of the life of the prehistoric Americans. ...
— The Delight Makers • Adolf Bandelier
... do many other eminent scientists, that nuts were a staple in the diet of primitive man. Professor Elliot, of Oxford University, in his work, "Prehistoric Man," calls attention to the fact that in the early ages of his long career, man was not a flesh eater; and the famous Professor Ami, editor of the Ethnological History of North America, and other paleontologists, hold that man began the use of meat only after the glacial period had destroyed ...
— Northern Nut Growers Report of the Proceedings at the Twenty-First Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association
... leaning skies Far off they see a dull dark cloud arise. The hunter's instinct in each heart is stirred, Beholding there in one stupendous herd A hundred thousand buffaloes. Oh great Unwieldy proof of Nature's cruder state, Rough remnant of a prehistoric day, Thou, with the red man, too, ...
— Custer, and Other Poems. • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... In the centre stands a bronze statue of Louis XIV as a Roman conqueror, by Coysevox, which once stood on the Place de Greve before the old Hotel de Ville. The museum, which contains a collection,[233] historic and prehistoric, relating to the city of Paris, is especially rich in objects, all carefully labelled, illustrating the great Revolution, and is of profound interest to students of that period: the second floor is devoted to the last siege of Paris. From the museum ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... through a regular maze of crooked passages, and Myra saw that Cojuelo's mountain lair was a strange freak of nature, probably the result of a volcanic upheaval or an earthquake in some prehistoric age. It was a series of caves connected with fissures, a sort of ...
— Bandit Love • Juanita Savage
... Beekman's friend, Prof. Abelard Samothrace, of Columbia University, probably would have admitted that just as the two had lived in the same house—albeit at different levels—on Fifth Avenue, so their forebears at some prehistoric period had, likely as not, occupied the same cave and had in company waded on frosty mornings the ice-skimmed swamps of Mittel Europa in pursuit of the cave bear, the mastodon and the woolly rhinoceros, and for afternoon relaxation had made up twosomes for hunting wives with stone ...
— By Advice of Counsel • Arthur Train
... laughed. "If I were a little more romantic, I might run away with her myself. What a tremendous jar that would give Bland's exasperating complacency. I believe he's a hang-over from that prehistoric time when men didn't believe that any woman had a soul—that a woman was something in which a man acquired a definite property right merely by ...
— The Hidden Places • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... has been our round so far. We now turn westward along the south of the Vaal. Farm burning goes merrily on, and our course through the country is marked as in prehistoric ages, by pillars of smoke by day and fire by night. We usually burn from six to a dozen farms a day; these being about all that in this sparsely-inhabited country we encounter. I do not gather that any special reason or cause is alleged ...
— With Rimington • L. March Phillipps
... news to be got in a place like this; we never go out, except on the run, and there seems absolutely no society. The local doctor came out yesterday, in a prehistoric motor, but I found him very uninteresting. Of course, one has no ideas in common with these Bush people. Where the 'Charm of the Bush' comes in is more than I can see—I much prefer Town on a Saturday morning to all Billabong ...
— Mates at Billabong • Mary Grant Bruce
... felled to provide timber props for the mine-workings of Devon and Cornwall. Whether this took place in Celtic times, when the trade with Phoenicia was at its height, or subsequently—in which case it is strange there is no historical record of so remarkable a fact—or whether those prehistoric peoples who built huge camps and erected mighty monoliths were yet capable of so stupendous a feat as felling the timber of sixty thousand acres, and carting it over roadless country, is at least open to question. There is another theory, that the Romans ...
— Lynton and Lynmouth - A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland • John Presland
... measure, having probably never known anything so prosaic as a spirit-level and a square. We began on the large room—that is to say, the old kitchen, which was to be the new living-room, and in a very little while had the prehistoric pantry and sink ripped out and the big hole patched in the plaster, for our boss carpenter was a gifted ...
— Dwellers in Arcady - The Story of an Abandoned Farm • Albert Bigelow Paine
... together as we came up to the chatting attendants. But Raffles must needs interrupt them to ask the way to the Prehistoric Saloon. ...
— Raffles - Further Adventures of the Amateur Cracksman • E. W. Hornung
... "Don't you remember reading how, in the arctic regions, they have found the bodies of prehistoric elephants and mastodons encased in blocks of ice, where they have been for centuries. The meat is perfectly preserved because of the cold. And what of the grains of wheat they find in the coffins of Egyptian mummies? Some of that is three thousand years old, yet it grows when they plant it, ...
— Lost on the Moon - or In Quest Of The Field of Diamonds • Roy Rockwood
... into you? I can't for the life of me see what is so entertaining in that prehistoric book." "Oh, go way. Don't bother me," was the surly reply. But I wouldn't be put off that way. Quickly I snatched the book from his grasp and threw it out ...
— The Scientific American Boy - The Camp at Willow Clump Island • A. Russell Bond
... he appears to receive as indubitable. This would not, so far as I can see, make the slightest difference in the so-called dignity of mankind. If man had a prehensile tail, it would not detract from his worth. I myself have little doubt that there were men with tails in prehistoric or even in historic times. I go still farther and declare that if ever there should be an ape who can form ideas and words, he would ipso facto be a man. I have therefore no prejudices such as the advocates of the simian theory like to attribute to us. What I and those ...
— The Silesian Horseherd - Questions of the Hour • Friedrich Max Mueller
... which he had depicted he is capable of representing with brush and pencil as faithfully as with his pen. He had it in him to be not only a writer, but an excellent draughtsman, and even a great painter. He has reproduced in water-colour, with loving care, the decorations of the specimens of prehistoric pottery which his excavations have revealed, and which he has endeavoured to reconstruct, with all the science of an archaeologist. He has displayed the same skill in water-colour in that astonishing iconography, in which he has detailed, with marvellous accuracy, all the peculiarities ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... Vienna, and in my time this minister was John Lothrop Motley, the historian. He was removed, later, by that Johnson administration which followed Lincoln's so forgottenly that I name it with a sense of something almost prehistoric. Among its worst errors was the attempted discredit of a man who had given lustre to our name by his work, and who was an ardent patriot as well as accomplished scholar. He visited Venice during my first year, which was the darkest period of the civil war, and ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... aren't!" blazed Commander Samuel Bryant (Electronics). "We've spent six solid weeks looking for something that simply is not there. All they've got is the prehistoric Whitworth system and that's all it is. Nothing else. Detectors—hell! I tell you I can see better by moonlight than the very best they can do. With everything they've got you couldn't detect a woman in ...
— Masters of Space • Edward Elmer Smith
... that antiqua pulchritudo of which Augustine spoke, who do long for the old feasts and formalities of the childhood of the world. William Morris and his followers showed how much brighter were the dark ages than the age of Manchester. Mr. W. B. Yeats frames his steps in prehistoric dances, but no man knows and joins his voice to forgotten choruses that no one but he can hear. Mr. George Moore collects every fragment of Irish paganism that the forgetfulness of the Catholic Church has left or possibly her wisdom preserved. There are ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... they suffered much from chronic dyspepsia, due in part, at least, no doubt, to the monotony of their food, their life, their interests. One could hardly believe one was still in the nineteenth century; these people had the calm, the local seclusion of the prehistoric epoch. For them, Europe did not exist; they knew it merely as a place where settlers came from. What the Czar intended, what the Kaiser designed, never disturbed their rest. A sick ox, a rattling tile on the roof, meant more ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... within narrow limits. On the contrary, they present a wonderfully broad panorama of Russian life, and attain to a universality which has been reached by no other Russian writer save Pushkin and Count L. N. Tolstoy. There are plays from prehistoric, mythical times, and historical plays, which deal with prominent epochs in the life of the nation. A great favorite, partly because of its pictures of old Russian customs, is "The Voevoda" or "The Dream on the Volga" (1865). "Vasilisa ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood
... Wandering tribes could not till and sow the fields. The origin of wheat furnished a legendary theme for many races, and mythology contained tales of wheat-gods favoring chosen peoples. Ancient China raised wheat twenty-seven centuries before Christ; grains of wheat had been found in prehistoric ruins; the dwellers along the Nile were not blind to the fertility of the valley. In the days of the Pharaohs the old river annually inundated its low banks, enriching the soil of vast areas, where soon a green-and-gold ocean of ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... dramatic situation. Figure, therefore, my chagrin when I discovered that the character of Vladimir Igorievich had been cut clean out of the text of the actual opera. I could much more easily have dispensed with the buffooneries of a couple of obscure players upon the goudok (or prehistoric hurdy-gurdy), who wasted more than enough of such time as could be ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, June 17, 1914 • Various
... of the special attention which, of late years, he has given to anthropology, he affirms that such evidence as exists is not only insufficient to support that hypothesis, but is contrary to it. "Every positive progress which we have made in the region of prehistoric anthropology has removed us further from the demonstration ...
— Freedom in Science and Teaching. - from the German of Ernst Haeckel • Ernst Haeckel
... was a landmark. The erosion of the ages had played strange tricks with the sandstone. The rocks rose like huge red toadstools or like prehistoric animals of vast size. One of them was known as the Three Bears, another as ...
— Man Size • William MacLeod Raine
... over from a prehistoric era," Frank Merrill explained, shaking with excitement. "No vulture or eagle or condor could be as big as that at this distance. At least I think so." He paused here, as one studying the problem in the scientific spirit. "Often in the Rockies I've confused a nearby chicken-hawk, ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... martyrdom of imagining that he had been superseded by Dicky Dod. On reflection, I thought it would be safer to start Mr. Mafferton on the usual lines, and I nerved myself to ask him whether he could tell me anything about the prehistoric ...
— A Voyage of Consolation - (being in the nature of a sequel to the experiences of 'An - American girl in London') • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... popularly known as "tanks." These destructive engines of warfare were from twenty to forty feet long and were painted a dull drab, or some unassuming color calculated to blend with the tones of the landscape. In a dim light they suggested the giant slugs of a prehistoric age. Sliding along the ground on caterpillar wheels, with armored cheeks on each side of the head, above which guns stuck out like the stalked eyes of land crabs, their first appearance in this sector may well have created consternation among the ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume VI (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... "Indeed," he added, talking on as if the subject interested him, and expressing himself with a certain donnish carefulness of speech that I found pleasant to listen to, "the Harvest Festival is undoubtedly a survival of the prehistoric worship of that Corn Goddess who, in classical times, was called Demeter and Ioulo and Ceres, but whose cult as an Earth-Mother and Corn-Spirit is of much greater antiquity. For there is no doubt that this Vegetation Spirit has been worshipped from the earliest times by agricultural peoples; ...
— Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith
... he writes, "is like a great museum of prehistoric fauna. The house roofs, denuded of tiles and the joists left naked, have tilted forward on to the sidewalks, so that they hang in mid-air like giant vertebrae.... One house only of the whole village of —— had ...
— Kings, Queens And Pawns - An American Woman at the Front • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... examples. The details, indeed, are quite different, and manifestly derived from indigenous sources. It may be, therefore, that the framework is merely a geometrical coincidence which could not well be avoided. The fact that the basis of pure Irish ornament is geometrical, and developed out of the prehistoric and barbarous art of the savages who preceded the Celts in Ireland; such art as is used on the carved shafts of spears, and oars, and staves of honour, and afterwards on stone crosses and metal-work, may account for the similarity of ideas in ornament developed by old Roman decorators ...
— Illuminated Manuscripts • John W. Bradley
... control of the cosmos, it takes the fun out of it. In prehistoric days a man who had to hunt animals or go hungry may often have gone hungry, but he was never bored by the sameness of his meals. A man who traveled on horseback often got to his destination late, but he was not troubled with ennui on the way. In ...
— Talents, Incorporated • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... thought better of you. I know that you look on the venerable Mr. Tranto as a back number, and I suspect that Mr. Tranto in his turn regards me as prehistoric; and yet you are so behind the times as to imagine that the first duty of modern Governments is to govern! My dear Rip van Winkle, wake up. The first duty of a Government is to live. It has no right ...
— The Title - A Comedy in Three Acts • Arnold Bennett
... according to certain ancient writers, arrows which had been extracted from a body without coming into contact with the earth and laid under sleepers, acted as a love-charm.[37] Among the peasantry of the north-east of Scotland the prehistoric weapons called celts went by the name of "thunderbolts" and were coveted as the sure bringers of success, always provided that they were not allowed ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer
... larger proportion of cases. The great majority of people, modern and ancient, civilised and uncivilised, use the right hand by preference. Even graphic representations on the sun-baked clay records of Assyria, and the drawings on rocks, tusks, and horns of animals of the flint-weapon men of prehistoric times show that man was then right-handed. There is a difference of opinion whether anthropoid apes use the right hand in preference to the left. Professor Cunningham, who made a special study of this subject, asserts ...
— The Brain and the Voice in Speech and Song • F. W. Mott
... that got in their way; blundering enormously and preposterously, and yet always coming out steadily planted on their feet; eating roast beef and plum-pudding; drinking rum in the tropics; singing 'God Save the King' and intoning Watts's hymns under the nose of ancient dynasties and prehistoric priesthoods; managing always to get their own way, to force a reluctant world to take note of them as a great if rather disagreeable fact, and making it probable that, in long ages to come, the English of 'Robinson Crusoe' will be the native language of inhabitants ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... gigantic size and weapons, the mammoths were frequently killed by prehistoric men. These men must have been very brave and determined to kill these huge and terribly armed beasts, with stone and rude wood ...
— Some Reminiscences of old Victoria • Edgar Fawcett
... sober seriousness pamphlets with titles, which Master Francis could hardly have bettered in jest, but who composed a pedigree of the Urquhart family nominatim up to Noah and Adam, and then improvised chimney pieces in Cromarty Castle, commemorating the prehistoric ancestors whom he had excogitated? Where are the great Bishops from Andrewes and Cosin onwards, and the lesser Theologians who wrangled, and the Latitudinarians who meditated, and the historians with Whitelocke at their ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... with an array of arguments philological, historical, topographical, and traditional. He claims to have established that the fairies of the Celtic and Teutonic races are neither more nor less than the prehistoric tribes whom they conquered and drove back, and whose lands they now possess. He identifies these mysterious beings with the Picts of Scotland, the Feinne of the Scottish Highlands and of Ireland, and the Finns and Lapps of Scandinavia. And he suggests that the Eskimo, the Ainos, and I know ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... authors as well as modern books on Greek life and thought." The lecturer frequently reads and comments upon selections from the ancient literature. At Brown University a course is given on Greek Civilization, including the following topics: I Topography of Greece, II Prehistoric Greece, III The Language, IV Early Greece (The Makers of Homer, Expansion of Greece, Tyrannies, The New Poetry, etc.), V The Transition Century, 600-500 B. C. ((a) Government and Political Life, (b) Literature, (c) art), VI The Classical Epoch, 500-338 ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... impelled our steps; crackling and rattling, our feet were trampling on the remains of prehistoric animals and interesting fossils, the possession of which is a matter of rivalry and contention between the museums of great cities. A thousand Cuviers could never have reconstructed the organic remains deposited in ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne
... Nile Valley, however, it is impossible to trace in Mesopotamia the initiatory stages of prehistoric culture based on the agricultural mode of life. What is generally called the "Dawn of History" is really the beginning of a later age of progress; it is necessary to account for the degree of civilization attained at the earliest ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... of the face, argues that beauty of line in the face is objective, and not a creation of fancy, since it is associated with the highest human functions, moral and social. He remarks on the contrast between the prehistoric man of Chancelade,—delicately made, with elegant face and high forehead,—who created the great Magdalenian civilization, and his seemingly much more powerful, but less beautiful, predecessor, the man of Spy, with enormous muscles and ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 4 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... the tinge of melodrama was not absent. When a sufficient number of rounds had been fired, the tribesmen, as if acting on half-understood instructions from some prehistoric manual, slung their rifles on their shoulders and came on. The fire from the fort did not stop them, though it broke their line. In a minute they were clutching at every hand-grip and foothold on the wall, and Andover with ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... ceremonial in use at the present day is that employed in some Sivaite temples. It consists in placing leaves on the linga and pouring holy water over it. These rites, which may be descended from prehistoric stone worship, are generally accompanied by the reading of a Purana. But the commonest form of temple ritual consists in treating the image or symbol as an honoured human being.[414] It is awakened, bathed, ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... the party which has accompanied Sir James on his voyage of inspection among the lighthouses are content to wait in the harbor of Lerwick for a favorable change in the weather, I am obstinately bent on leaving the comfortable shelter of the vessel to explore some inland ruin of prehistoric times, of which I never heard, and for which I care nothing. The movement is all I want; the ride will fill the hateful void of time. I go, in defiance of sound advice offered to me on all sides. The youngest member of our party catches ...
— The Two Destinies • Wilkie Collins
... placer miners as chanced to hear of it lost no time in hitting the trail. They were familiar with high bars, prehistoric riverbeds, and they went as fast as their ...
— The Winds of Chance • Rex Beach
... earliest discoveries are indeed prehistoric. The great diurnal movement of the heavens, and the annual revolution of the sun, seem to have been known in times far more ancient than those to which any human monuments can be referred. The acuteness of the early observers enabled them to single out ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... welcomed with a graceful simplicity that made him feel at home. Immediately he fell under the spell of this man whose spirit enthused the small band of whites who were redeeming a people from their prehistoric lethargy. He was fit to lead; the sweep of line from temple through jaw bespoke an uncompromising force of character, but was gentled by the deep cleft of chin: something in the poise of head gave ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson
... is!" insisted Lett. "Everything digestible, no matter how unappetizing to a modern man, has been a part of the regular diet of some tribe of human savages! Even prehistoric Romans ate dormice cooked in honey! Why should the fact that a needed substance happens to be found ...
— The Hate Disease • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... of the island, at the very spot where, scientists averred, a meteorite had fallen in some prehistoric age, there stood a thick grove, chiefly of hemlock trees. Here on this night he paused. A strange inertness filled all nature. Not a whisper from the branches overhead, not a rustle from the dark mold underfoot. Moonlight in one place flecked the motionless leaves of an alder. Trunk and ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... of that work a chapter on 'History and Fable' was inserted because of its bearing on the author's general views 'regarding the elementary commixture of fable and fact in ages that may be called prehistoric.' In this chapter the author made a rapid survey of the 'kinship between history and fable,' tracing it through the times of myth and romance to the period of the historic novel. 'At their birth,' he says, ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall
... old town in the heart of the chateau country. The river Loire runs through it, and along the banks are the caves in some of which have been found the paintings made by prehistoric man picturing the beasts with which he struggled for supremacy in the dim dark ages. The same caves are many of them inhabited, and their owners may well look with scorn upon the chateaux and baronial castles of whose ...
— War in the Garden of Eden • Kermit Roosevelt
... quantity of dust which is transported in some countries. I cannot but think that Mr. Proctor has somewhat exaggerated ('Pleasant Ways in Science,' 1879, p. 379) the agency of dust in a humid country like Great Britain. James Geikie has given ('Prehistoric Europe,' 1880, p. 165) a full abstract of Richthofen's ...
— The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the action of worms with • Charles Darwin
... World during what has been designated the Stone Age. Any one who examines the abandoned site of an ancient Iroquois town will find there relics of precisely the same cast as those which are disinterred from the burial mounds and caves of prehistoric Europe,—implements of flint and bone, ornaments of shells, and fragments of rude pottery. Trusting to these evidences alone, he might suppose that the people who wrought them were of the humblest grade of intellect. But the testimony of historians, of travellers, ...
— Hiawatha and the Iroquois Confederation • Horatio Hale
... one so easily and so strangely find sea in the fields or fields in the sea. The great rivers seem not only to meet in the ocean, but barely to miss each other in the hills: the whole land, though low as a whole, leans towards the west in shouldering mountains; and a prehistoric tradition has taught it to look towards the sunset for islands yet dreamier than its own. The islanders are of a kind with their islands. Different as are the nations into which they are now divided, the Scots, the English, the Irish, the Welsh of the western uplands, ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton
... or vocation, is a source of endless pleasure to man, and as such, is as worthy of encouragement as is painting, music, or the collection of the bones of prehistoric animals. Breeding as an art has produced many forms of chickens that are entirely worthless as food producers, but this same group of poultry breeders, tempered to be sure by the demands of commercialism, have produced other breeds that are certainly superior for the various commercial ...
— The Dollar Hen • Milo M. Hastings
... "when it was dry land, a tribe of what you call prehistoric men lived here. They was pagans—sun worshippers, an' such. They built the stones in a circle as a kinder temple, same's them chaps you told me of that built Stonehenge. What? Ain't that ...
— Kiddie the Scout • Robert Leighton
... thousand queer shapes, stood strata of chloritic sand, a pale yellow-green, and capping it rose the usual dull-brown carbonate of lime. Large fossil oysters lay in numbers about the base, suggesting a prehistoric feast of the Titans. Amongst them is the monstrous Tridacna (gigantea), which sometimes attains a growth of a yard and a half; one of these is used as a benitier at the church of Saint Sulpice, Paris. Amongst the layers were wavy bands of water-rolled crystals, ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... rather enquire whether apart from the diffusion of ideas which has taken place in historical times, there is any common substratum in the religious temperament of this area, any fund of primitive, or at least prehistoric ideas, shared by its inhabitants. Such common ideas will be deep-seated and not obvious, for it needs but little first-hand acquaintance with Asia to learn that all generalizations about the spirit of the ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... each other, and man carries about with him in babyhood many of them which may have been very useful to his prehistoric ancestors, but which only complicate things for him. Fear and curiosity urge opposite lines of conduct. Love of approbation and shyness are opposed. Love and pugnacity are apt to be at odds. So, gradually, as intelligence increases, the child refuses to allow ...
— Applied Psychology for Nurses • Mary F. Porter
... and climes men had worn figured silks and satins and brocades, had worn long gowns and lace-trimmed sleeves, jeweled bonnets and curls, but now the male had surrendered to the female his prehistoric right to the fanciful plumage. These war days were grown so austere that it began to seem wrong even for women to dress with much more than a masculine sobriety. But the occasion of this ball had removed the ban ...
— The Cup of Fury - A Novel of Cities and Shipyards • Rupert Hughes
... feminine view of the finish of drinking; publishers would fall over one another in their eagerness to secure the 'Memoirs of the Last Publican'; the Salvation Army would put the last drunkard in the British Museum as a prehistoric specimen; on the death of this National Hero, the Dean of Westminster would politely offer the Abbey for a memorial service, with no tickets ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... in perfect symmetry, and had the free bearing and light springiness befitting a mountaineer. He wore the toga as an official scarf, but was in his national garb of the loose trousers and short coat, and the gold torq round his neck had come to him from prehistoric ages. He had the short Roman sword in his belt, and carried in his hand a long hunting-spear, without which he seldom stirred abroad, as it served him both as alpenstock and as defence against the wolves and ...
— More Bywords • Charlotte M. Yonge
... jungle about three miles, to some old gold workings that date back beyond the written records of the State. So one day we drew our little launch close up under the bank of the river, and I sprang ashore, bent on seeing for myself the prehistoric remains. Contrary to the advice of the Chief Justice, I only took a heavy hunting-knife with me, and it was more for slashing away thorns ...
— Tales of the Malayan Coast - From Penang to the Philippines • Rounsevelle Wildman
... was the first form of amusement to emanate from prehistoric savagery, then racing must surely have come next. It may possibly have come first. However, we shall leave the "theorizin"' to be settled by the lips of the first mummy whose centuries-old tissues shall be roused to full ...
— Down the Mother Lode • Vivia Hemphill
... the undulating line winding in dizzy spiral about the stairways, Emily, at times, seemed to herself to be a vertebrate part of some long, forever-uncoiling monster, one of those prehistoric, seen-before-in-dreams affairs. She chose her figures knowingly, for she was studying ...
— Emmy Lou - Her Book and Heart • George Madden Martin
... first obtaining from them by purchase or treaty the title which they had acquired from the Government, and for which they rendered a valuable consideration. They claim that the date of the settlement of their tribe upon the land composing their old reservation is prehistoric; that they were all born there, and that their ancestors from generations back beyond their knowledge were born and lived upon its soil, and that they finally acquired a complete and perfect title from ...
— Messages and Papers of Rutherford B. Hayes - A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents • James D. Richardson
... people, and so on, are the so-called 'production of thousands of things by the Three.' This was the time when people lived in eaves or wandered in the wilderness, and knew not the use of fire. As it belongs to the remote past of the prehistoric age, previous to the reigns of the first three Emperors, the traditions handed down to us are neither clear nor certain. Many errors crept into them one generation after another, and consequently no one ...
— The Religion of the Samurai • Kaiten Nukariya
... magnificently with the dignity of the situation. But are we quite sure that the poor minister made the river rise? That is the question the tenant ought to consider. Was it the landlord's fault? I repeat that rivers will rise at times, generally at storm times. The Nile and the Tigris used to rise in prehistoric times. It is a way rivers have. I really think that it will be as well to say no more about it. Try to smooth down the ruffled feathers and forget. It may not have been his fault; and, anyhow, we shall be saying good-bye to a good many delightful experiences if ...
— Mushrooms on the Moor • Frank Boreham
... than is generally realized in its prehistoric monuments,—ancient Hindoo and Buddhist temples, and ruins of lofty pagodas from three to four hundred feet in height, dating many centuries previous to the appearance of Christ upon earth. What an unexplored field remains ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... strongest argument against the undertaking at that time was by oversight omitted from the document—the Greeks had no howitzers or mobile heavy artillery worth mentioning, and any ordnance of that class that we disposed of in the Mediterranean was of the prehistoric kind. The slip was of no great importance, however, because there never was the remotest chance of King Constantine, who was no mean judge of warlike problems, letting his country in for ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell |
