"Pigmy" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... to a still lower plane before he fell asleep that night. Even if he had one of them, he would probably never have a whole row, graduated from a pigmy to a mammoth, to hang on a wire across the front window, after the manner of the rich, and dazzle the outer world into envy. The mood was but slightly chastened when he remembered, as he now did, that on last Christmas ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... apparent that in the face of such a wind all the pigmy appliances that the populace could bring to act upon such a mass of combustion would be unavailing. As much as could burn that night was burnt, while some of that which would not burn crumbled and fell as a formless heap, whence new flames towered up, and inclined to the north-east so far ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... sun mounted above it. Everywhere men marvelled at it, but of all those who saw it none could have marvelled more than those sailors, habitual watchers of the stars, who far away at sea had heard nothing of its advent and saw it now rise like a pigmy moon and climb zenithward and hang overhead and sink westward with the passing ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... soft pathway of the sandhills are pigmy figures of men that move about or sit squatting as if on the watch; and small as they are, low down in the hollows and far away, this wonderful silver moon reveals even their slightest gestures; for their white robes and black cloaks stand sharply out against the monotonous ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... disproportionate and outrageous in the idea of the distant objects dwindling and growing dwarfish, the closer objects swelling enormous and intolerable. There is something frantic in the notion that one's own father by walking a little way can be changed by a blast of magic to a pigmy. There is something farcical in the fancy that Nature keeps one's uncle in an infinite number of sizes, according to where he is to stand. All soldiers in retreat turn into tin soldiers; all bears in rout into toy bears; as if on the ultimate horizon of the ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... King Arthur, very fond of stiff punch, but scorning "vulgar sips of brandy, gin, and rum." She is the enemy of Tom Thumb, and opposes his marriage with her daughter Huncamunca; but when Noodle announces that the red cow has devoured the pigmy giant-queller, she kills the messenger for his ill-tidings, and is herself killed by Frizaletta. Queen Dollalolla is jealous of the giantess Glundalca, at whom his majesty casts "sheep's eyes."—Tom Thumb, by Fielding the novelist (1730), altered ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama, Vol 1 - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook • The Rev. E. Cobham Brewer, LL.D.
... creatures. Their scent is as keen as an animal's; they are agile as monkeys, and make off to hide in the hollow trunks of trees, or bury themselves in the decaying vegetation until danger is past. Poor pigmy! What place will he occupy in the ...
— Through Five Republics on Horseback • G. Whitfield Ray
... birds, insect-like, and among insects, bird-like, his path untraceable, his home unseen? An image of airy motion, yet it sometimes seems as if there were nothing joyous in him. He seems like some exiled pigmy prince, banished, but still regal, and doomed to wings. Did gems turn to flowers, flowers to feathers, in that long-past dynasty of the Humming-Birds? It is strange to come upon his tiny nest, in some gray and tangled ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, Number 59, September, 1862 • Various
... to show at once the theory on which it was founded for the absurdity it was. Instead of walking on together in simple equality, in mutual honour and devotion, each helping the other to be better still, to have the woman, large and noble, come cowering after her pigmy lord, as if he were the god of her life, instead of a Satan doing his best to damn her to his own meanness!—it is a contrast that needs no argument! Not the less if the woman be married to such a man, will ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... the whole question of the succession of species vividly before one's mind; and I found in South America great pieces of tesselated armour exactly like, but on a magnificent scale, that covering the pigmy armadillo; I had found great teeth like those of the living sloth, and bones like those of the cavy. An analogous succession of allied forms had been previously observed in Australia. Here then we see the prevalence, as if by descent, in time as in space, of the ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin
... down and looked below at the house—a doll's house; at the toy corrals and tiny sheds and stables. Slim, walking down the hill, was a mere pigmy—a short, waddling insect. At least, to a girl unused to gazing from a height, each object seemed absurdly small. Flying U coulee stretched away to the west, with a silver ribbon drawn carelessly through it with many a twist and loop, fringed with a tender green ...
— Chip, of the Flying U • B. M. Bower
... gates of eloquence to sing of these. Such periods, Such epic melodies, As holds the utterance of the earlier gods, The lords of song, one needs To sing the praise of these! No feeble music, tinklings frail of glass; No penny trumpetings; twitterings of brass, The moment's effort, shak'n from pigmy bells, Ephemeral drops from small Pierian wells, With which the Age relieves a barren hour. But such large music, such melodious power, As have our cataracts, Pouring the iron facts, The giant acts Of these: such song as have our rock-ridged deep And mountain ...
— An Ode • Madison J. Cawein
... the weird but less unpleasant calls of the Himalayan streaked laughing-thrushes. Even the sounds of the night are different. The chuckles and cackles of the spotted owlets no longer fill the welkin; the silence of the darkness is broken in the mountains by the low monotonous whistle of the pigmy-collared owlet. ...
— Birds of the Indian Hills • Douglas Dewar
... I grew to realise facts, to see men and women as they are, not as they appear! Sometimes the bare word 'reality' fills me with such loathing for this paltry world, with its pigmy minds and soulless bodies, that I can hardly control my contempt. I pull myself together, and pray for a new set of nerves, a stronger heart, and a better flow of healthy blood ...
— When the Birds Begin to Sing • Winifred Graham
... the foundation of fifteen generations of Kami, whose birth seems to have been essential to the "making of the land," though their names afford no clue to the functions discharged by them. From over sea, seated in a gourd and wearing a robe of wren's feathers, there comes a pigmy, Sukuna Hikona, who proves to be one of fifteen hundred children begotten by the Kami of the original trinity. Skilled in the arts of healing sickness and averting calamities from men or animals, this pigmy renders invaluable aid to the Great-Name Possessor. But the ...
— A History of the Japanese People - From the Earliest Times to the End of the Meiji Era • Frank Brinkley and Dairoku Kikuchi
... Alps, when veil'd in misty shroud, Some men seem kings, through mists of ignorance; Must we have darkness, then, and cloud on cloud, To give our hills and pigmy kings a chance? Must we conspire to curse the humbling light, Lest some one, at whose feet our fathers bow'd, Should suddenly appear, full length, in sight, Scaring to laughter the adoring crowd? Oh, no! God send us light!—Who loses ...
— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education
... an idea of greatness. We must have a standard to measure by, and that standard must be in ourselves. An ignorant peasant cannot know that Bacon is so wise. To duly appreciate genius, you must have genius; a pigmy cannot measure the strength of a giant. The faculty that reads and admires, is the green undeveloped state of the faculty that ...
— Our Friend John Burroughs • Clara Barrus
... severity what ills may come, When we've dismissed and to our lodging gone, Must give us pain. There's the respect That makes the patience of a teacher's life. For who would bear the thousand plagues of a school,— The girlish giggle, the tyro's awkwardness, The pigmy pedant's vanity, the mischief, The sneer, the laugh, the pouting insolence, With all the hum-drum clatter of a school, When he himself might his quietus make With a bare hickory? Who would willing bear To groan and sweat under a noisy life, But that the dread of something ...
— The Olden Time Series, Vol. 5: Some Strange and Curious Punishments • Henry M. Brooks
... grounds and buildings were of surpassing magnitude and splendor. Interesting but simple features were the village of States, the Nations' tabernacles, lying almost under the guns of the facsimile battleship Illinois, and the pigmy caravels, Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria, named and modelled after those that bore Columbus to the New World. These, like their originals, had fared from Spain across the Atlantic, and then had come by the St, Lawrence and the Lakes, without portage, ...
— History of the United States, Volume 5 • E. Benjamin Andrews
... he were in a fair way to be a Royalist poet with a pension and the Cross of the Legion of Honor, he would be an optimist, and journalism offers starting-points by the hundred. Journalism is the giant catapult set in motion by pigmy hatreds. Have you any wish to marry after this? Vernou has none of the milk of human kindness in him, it is all turned to gall; and he is emphatically the Journalist, a tiger with two hands that tears everything to pieces, as if his ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... than seven feet, or seven and a half, or, it might be, eight, "but the men were, for the most part, about nine feet high, and very often more." Lieutenant Cumming, he said, being but six feet two, appeared a mere pigmy among them. But it seems, that, in after-times, on some one's questioning this diminutive lieutenant as to the actual size of these enormous goblins, the veteran frankly confessed, that, "had it been anywhere else but in Patagonia, he ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... by all the Court, and that the monarch, who led the Dauphin by the hand, vainly endeavoured to induce him to jump across a little stream which ran beside their path, Henry became so enraged by his cowardice and obstinacy that he raised him in his arms to dip him into the pigmy current, a punishment which was, however, averted by the entreaties of his mother; and the King reluctantly consented that he should suffer nothing more than the mortification of being compelled to exchange her care for that of his governess, Madame de Montglat. ...
— The Life of Marie de Medicis, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Julia Pardoe
... "differs not only from the Pigmy of Tyson and from the Orang of Tulpius by its peculiar colour and its long toes, but also by its whole external form. Its arms, its hands, and its feet are longer, while the thumbs, on the contrary, are much shorter, and the great toes much smaller in proportion." ...
— Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature • Thomas H. Huxley
... looms as large as a mountain before us. An insect does not see things as they are but as they seem to it. Growth in intelligence necessitates a truer appreciation of proportions and relations. The pigmy also sees little but himself, but years and experience leave behind them wisdom. The civilized races have all risen from barbarism and savagery—that is, from a state of imperfect thinking as well as of imperfect loving and choosing. Experience ...
— The Ascent of the Soul • Amory H. Bradford
... old and unearthly. I, Lucy Snowe, plead guiltless of that curse, an overheated and discursive imagination; but whenever, opening a room-door, I found her seated in a corner alone, her head in her pigmy hand, that room seemed to me ...
— Villette • Charlotte Bronte
... Roaring Dick, like a demon incarnate, threw himself into the work. Forty men attacked the jam at a dozen places, encouraging the movement, twisting aside the timbers that threatened to lock anew, directing pigmy-like the titanic forces into the channel of their efficiency. Roaring like wild cattle the logs swept by, at first slowly, then with the railroad rush of the curbed freshet. Men were everywhere, taking chances, like cowboys before the stampeded ...
— Blazed Trail Stories - and Stories of the Wild Life • Stewart Edward White
... song was well finished, Mr Cumming came up with the tobacco, and I could not but smile at the astonishment which I saw expressed in his countenance, upon perceiving himself, though six feet two inches high, become at once a pigmy among giants; for these people may indeed more properly be called giants than tall men. Of the few among us who are full six feet high, scarcely any are broad and muscular in proportion to their stature, but look rather like men of the common ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 12 • Robert Kerr
... the purple clover cultivated by farmers, is the Dodder (Cuscuta trifolii), a destructive vegetable parasite which strangles the plants in a crafty fashion, and which goes by the name of "hellweed," or "devil's guts." It lies in ambush like a pigmy field octopus, with deadly suckers for draining the sap of its victims. These it mats together in its wiry, sinuous coils, and chokes relentlessly by the acre. Nevertheless, the petty garotter— like a toad, "ugly ...
— Herbal Simples Approved for Modern Uses of Cure • William Thomas Fernie
... secure of an entrance, did you only know the "Open sesame." Between and behind the doors, alternating with flying-buttresses, are a series of deep-niched windows, set with grotesque statues, varying from the pigmy to the colossal size, representing demons rather than saints, though some of the figures are costumed in the style of religious ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... as defiance in her voice—scorn because he stood before her so silently; scorn because the fierce torrent of her anger had flowed unchecked. She had only to stand up to him, it seemed, and like the giant of the fable he dwindled to a pigmy. She was no longer hurt by his passivity. She ...
— The Odds - And Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... country in "Gulliver's Travels," inhabited by giants, each as tall "as an ordinary spire-steeple"; properly a native of the country, in comparison with whom Gulliver was a pigmy "not half so big as a round little worm plucked from the ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... no time for man to war against man. The powers of heaven were loose, and in all their fury. The wind howled, the sea raged, the thunder stunned, and the lightning blinded. The Eternal was present in all his majesty; yet pigmy mortals were contending. But Captain M—- was unmoved, unawed, unchecked; and the men, stimulated by his example, and careless of everything, heeded not ...
— The King's Own • Captain Frederick Marryat
... of the endless plan, To splendid wrath he must be wrought By pigmy creeds presumptuous man Sends ...
— Poems of Progress • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... said farewell to the Casco and to Captain Otis, and our next adventure was made in changed conditions. Passage was taken for myself, my wife, Mr. Osbourne, and my China boy, Ah Fu, on a pigmy trading schooner, the Equator, Captain Dennis Reid; and on a certain bright June day in 1889, adorned in the Hawaiian fashion with the garlands of departure, we drew out of port and bore with a fair ...
— In the South Seas • Robert Louis Stevenson
... conjure up the ideal soldier of his imagination, still the same figure, complete in feature, gesture, gauntlet, saber, boot, spur, observant eye and commanding voice, will stalk with majestic port upon the mental vision. He seemed the superior of all superiors, and major-generals shrunk into pigmy corporals in comparison with him. In every faculty of body, mind, heart, and soul he was built after a large pattern. His virtues were large and his vices were not small. As Lincoln said of Seward, he could swear magnificently. His nature was versatile, and full of contradictions; ...
— The County Regiment • Dudley Landon Vaill
... is enough of itself to arouse enthusiasm, whatever the object of the gathering may be. Ten thousand human beings, more or less, swarming on the floor, clustering on the walls, rising tier above tier, until in dim distance the pigmy throng seems soaring up into the very heavens, is a tremendous, a solemn, a heart-stirring sight, suggestive—I write with reverence—of the Judgment Day. And when such an assembly is convened for the purpose of considering matters of urgent ...
— Personal Reminiscences in Book Making - and Some Short Stories • R.M. Ballantyne
... intensely blue, pointed across the plain of snow. A small, black, energetic figure came out from among the firs and ran forward where the longest shadow pointed. It looked absurdly tiny and anxious; futile, in its pigmy haste, across the exquisite stillness. Joan, lying so still, was acquiescent; this little striving thing rebelled. It came forward steadily, following Joan's uneven tracks, stamping them down firmly to make a solid ...
— The Branding Iron • Katharine Newlin Burt
... mothers, Gentile or Mormon, who carried little children. The beauty of the season, the cloudless sun, gilded these few peaceful days. Susannah compared her child with other children, marvelled at the baby intercourse he held with them, at the likes and dislikes displayed among these pigmy associates; and the other mothers had like sources of interest in ...
— The Mormon Prophet • Lily Dougall
... the Child among his new-born blisses, A four year's Darling of a pigmy size! See, where mid work of his own hand he lies, Fretted by sallies of his Mother's kisses, With light upon him from his Father's eyes! See, at his feet, some little plan or chart, 90 Some fragment from his dream of human life, Shap'd by himself with newly-learned art; A ...
— Poems In Two Volumes, Vol. 2 • William Wordsworth
... directions into the vast silence that seemed to engulf them. Every evening the squads returned, desert-stained and weary, to their rest under the lonesome stars. Every morning the sun broke fiercely up from the long level of the eastward plain to pour its hot strength down upon these pigmy creatures, who dared to invade the territory over which he had, for so many ages, held undisputed dominion. Every evening the sun plunged fiercely down behind the purple wall of mountains that shut in the Basin on the west, as if to gather strength ...
— The Winning of Barbara Worth • Harold B Wright
... and Mrs. Catherine, and the feelings which they entertained for each other. The woman loved him, that was the fact. And, as we have shown in the previous chapter how John Hayes, a mean-spirited fellow as ever breathed, in respect of all other passions a pigmy, was in the passion of love a giant, and followed Mrs. Catherine with a furious longing which might seem at the first to be foreign to his nature; in the like manner, and playing at cross-purposes, Mrs. Hall had become smitten of the Captain; and, as he said truly, only liked him the better ...
— Catherine: A Story • William Makepeace Thackeray
... likeness, as when from a portrait we apprehend the original; by composition, as when, by compounding a horse and man, we acquire the image of a Centaur; by augmentation, as in the image of a Cyclops; or by diminution, as in that of a pigmy. Judgment is employed either in determining, concerning particular things, or concerning general propositions. In judging of things we make use of some one of our senses, as a common criterion or measure of apprehension, ...
— Ancient and Modern Celebrated Freethinkers - Reprinted From an English Work, Entitled "Half-Hours With - The Freethinkers." • Charles Bradlaugh, A. Collins, and J. Watts
... Lookout Mountain to the scene of the "Battle in the Clouds," and I could almost evoke the presence of General Joe Hooker, with his once grand proportions and noble mien, so deservedly famed as The Hero of Lookout Mountain. I afterward ascended another hill, which, although a pigmy in comparison with the Leviathan Lookout, would, in the monotony of our prairie country, be ranked as a mountain. It was upon its top were constructed the government water works, and upon which my brother William was employed for two years, occupying as a residence during ...
— The World As I Have Found It - Sequel to Incidents in the Life of a Blind Girl • Mary L. Day Arms
... dewy grasslands where late the frost hath shone, And lo, what elfin cities are these we come upon! What pigmy domes and thatches, what Arab caravan, What downy-roofed pagodas that have known no touch of man! Are these the oldtime meadows? Yes, the wildgrape scents the air; The breath of ripened orchards still is incense everywhere; Yet do these dawn-encampments ...
— The Second Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... like a man an' a gentleman. An' he's toed it ever since. An' I can tell you that the pictures he's paintin' now with his tongue for them poor blind boys to see is bigger an' better than any pictures he could have painted with—with his pigmy paints if he worked on 'em for a thousand years. An' it's YOU that's done it for him, jest ...
— Dawn • Eleanor H. Porter
... colour. It is enough to make a man throw away canvas and brushes into the bottomless precipices, enough to make one weep with despair at his utter and absolute impotence. Nature is God, Anna, and the greatest artist of us all a pigmy. When I think of those ateliers of ours, the art jargon, the decadents with their flamboyant talk I long for a two-edged sword and a minute of Divinity. ...
— Anna the Adventuress • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... were busied here and there, bulking grotesquely as they moved about the fire, seeming disheveled demons of the pit. Like some master imp torturing a pigmy over the flames, old Ben York was kneeling close beside the blaze, holding to the coals a hickory stick, which served as spit for the roasting of a squirrel. The brilliance shone full on the frowsy gray ...
— Heart of the Blue Ridge • Waldron Baily
... Vinland, and the Saga, while giving no definite cause for this failure upon failure, seems to show that even the trifling annoyance of the Skraelings was enough to turn the scale. Natural difficulties were so immense, men were so few, that a pigmy enemy had all the power of the last straw in a load, the odd man in a council. The actual resistance of American natives to European colonists was never very serious in any part of the continent, but the distance from the starting-point and the difficulties of life in the new country were ...
— Prince Henry the Navigator, the Hero of Portugal and of Modern Discovery, 1394-1460 A.D. • C. Raymond Beazley
... the Child among his new-born blisses, A six years' darling of a pigmy size! See, where 'mid work of his own hand he lies, Fretted by sallies of his mother's kisses, With light upon him from his father's eyes! See, at his feet, some little plan or chart, Some fragment from his dream of human life, Shaped by himself with newly-learned art; A wedding or a ...
— The Golden Treasury - Of the Best Songs and Lyrical Poems in the English Language • Various
... native strength none of her earlier authors equal Juvenal and Tacitus; none certainly exceed them. But they are the last barriers that stem the tide. After them the flood has already rushed in, and before long comes the collapse. In Suetonius and Florus we already see the pioneers of a pigmy race; in Gellius, Fronto, and Apuleius, they are present in all their uncouth dwarfishness. Meanwhile the clamours of the world for guidance grow louder and louder, and there is no one great enough or bold enough to respond to them. ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... of the gale, too, and the angry hiss of the storm-lashed waters, contributed their quota to the feeling of awe with which we looked abroad from our pigmy ark. ...
— For Treasure Bound • Harry Collingwood
... talked Assyrian, and Nebuchadnezzar loomed above the desert beyond. His statue filled the perspective. With one broad hand he overturned Jerusalem; with another he swept a nation into captivity, leaving in derision a pigmy for King of Solitude behind, and, blowing the Jews into Babylon, there retained them until it occurred to Cyrus to ...
— Mary Magdalen • Edgar Saltus
... of Kratu, Samnati, brought forth the sixty thousand Valakhilyas, pigmy sages, no bigger than a joint of the thumb, chaste, pious, resplendent as the rays of the Sun." WILSON'S ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... Western meadowlark ringing over the hills and meadows. The wise, and rather murderous, magpie goes chattering about. Here and there the quiet bluebird is seen. The kingfisher is in his appointed place. Long-crested jays, Clarke's crows, and pigmy nuthatches are plentiful, and the wild note of the chickadee is heard on every hand. Above the altitude of eight thousand feet you may hear, in June, the marvelous melody of Audubon's ...
— Wild Life on the Rockies • Enos A. Mills
... the God in whom you Churchmen and the millions of lay-folk who recognise you as Divinely-appointed teachers believe, should have commanded, 'Let the universe exist,' and have been obeyed, or that the stupendous pigmy Man should have dared to say, 'Let there be God,' ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... Platte was a muddy stream, and with its low banks, scattered flat sand-bars, and pigmy islands, a melancholy river, straggling through the centre of vast prairies, and only saved from being impossible to find with the naked eye by its sentinel trees standing at long distances from each other, on ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... every breast; the power is everywhere,—in every brain. The giant and the pigmy are alike active in seeking out and finding out many inventions. And in this very universality of effort and result we discover another guaranty of the great future. The river of Progress multiplies its tributaries ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... his feet, with a pair of binoculars in his hand and the little Malay Serang at his elbow, like an old giant attended by a wizened pigmy, was taking her over the shallow water of ...
— End of the Tether • Joseph Conrad
... Christian ventured another, winning himself this time. The game fluctuated, but the average was in Wildeve's favour. Both men became so absorbed in the game that they took no heed of anything but the pigmy objects immediately beneath their eyes, the flat stone, the open lantern, the dice, and the few illuminated fern-leaves which lay under the light, were the ...
— The Return of the Native • Thomas Hardy
... doth speake in me: He is prepar'd, and reason to he should, This apish and vnmannerly approach, This harness'd Maske, and vnaduised Reuell, This vn-heard sawcinesse and boyish Troopes, The King doth smile at, and is well prepar'd To whip this dwarfish warre, this Pigmy Armes From out the circle of his Territories. That hand which had the strength, euen at your dore, To cudgell you, and make you take the hatch, To diue like Buckets in concealed Welles, To crowch in litter of your stable plankes, To lye like pawnes, lock'd vp in ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... Max, who recognized him instantly from many newspaper portraits he had seen—and the photograph in Sanda's bag. It was Richard Stanton, poseur and adventurer, his enemies said, follower and namesake of Richard Burton: first white man to enter Thibet; discoverer of a pigmy tribe in Central Africa, and—the ...
— A Soldier of the Legion • C. N. Williamson
... why he understood all at once that a creature had come into his world, a pigmy in size, yet more to be dreaded than any foe he had ever known, was a miracle which nature alone could explain. It was a hearkening back in the age-dimmed mental fabric of Thor's race to the earliest days of man—man, first of all, with the club; man with the spear hardened in fire; man with ...
— The Grizzly King • James Oliver Curwood
... remained true to a few points. One of them is antagonism to orthodoxy. It was an old cry of the German skeptics, "Away with orthodoxy. It fetters us to forms and creeds, makes us blind devotees to system, converts us into bigots, and dwarfs reason into an invisible pigmy." Yet we frequently meet with language of similar import in the present day. If we did not know its authorship we could easily tell the ecclesiastical fountain whence it flows. "The implications of false and shallow reasoning," says an American Unitarian ...
— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst
... Swainson hawk, short-winged hawk, broad-winged hawk, Mexican black hawk, Mexican goshawk, sparrow-hawk, barn-owl, long-eared owl, short-eared owl, great gray owl, barred owl, western owl, Richardson owl, screech-owl, snowy owl, hawk-owl, burrowing owl, pigmy owl and elf owl—live mostly on destructive mammals, insects, frogs and snakes, but they eat some birds and some of them occasionally catch poultry. Young ones do much more harm than the full-grown ones, probably because they find poultry ...
— Checking the Waste - A Study in Conservation • Mary Huston Gregory
... animals reigned in the earth, they had killed all the people but a girl and her little brother, and these two were living in fear, in an out-of-the-way place. The boy was a perfect little pigmy, and never grew beyond the size of a mere infant; but the girl increased with her years, so that the task of providing food and shelter fell wholly upon her. She went out daily to get wood for the lodge-fire, ...
— The Indian Fairy Book - From the Original Legends • Cornelius Mathews
... far from being salient, its horizontal section is concave. The sea, rolling direct from the shores of North America, has in fact eaten a chasm into the middle of a hill, and the giant, embayed and unobtrusive, stands in the rear of pigmy supporters. Not least singularly, neither hill, chasm, nor precipice has a name. On this account I will call the precipice the Cliff ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy
... idealized by the socialistic fools and shallow-pates—this degeneracy and dwarfing of man to an absolutely gregarious animal (or as they call it, to a man of "free society"), this brutalizing of man into a pigmy with equal rights and claims, is undoubtedly POSSIBLE! He who has thought out this possibility to its ultimate conclusion knows ANOTHER loathing unknown to the rest of mankind—and perhaps also ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... Western Union first understood that a competitor had entered their field. Promptly organizing the American Speaking Telephone Company, the Western Union, with all its wealth and prestige, proceeded to destroy this insolent pigmy. Its methods of attack were unscrupulous and underhanded, the least discreditable one being the use of its political influence to prevent communities from giving franchises to the Bell Company. But this corporation mainly relied for success upon the wholesale manner in ...
— The Age of Big Business - Volume 39 in The Chronicles of America Series • Burton J. Hendrick
... in another minute the man and the bear were dancing opposite each other. It was a weird and uncanny sight, the grotesque dwarf, with his face flushed and his hair on end, capering about and kicking with his pigmy legs, and the bear with uncouth waddles waltzing round and round, its movements every now and again being accelerated by a judicious dig in the ribs from Pepin's stick. Bastien Lagrange fiddled away as if for dear life, and the old dame, her face beaming with pride and admiration, ...
— The Rising of the Red Man - A Romance of the Louis Riel Rebellion • John Mackie
... representative in Greater New York, seemed a pigmy. The acoustics of the silent hall carried his soft voice up to us. "I would be afraid of drugs. Will we use force? It ...
— Wandl the Invader • Raymond King Cummings
... commission at Paris called forth surprise and gratitude in the United States and smoothed the way for a renewal of commercial relations with the mother country. At the same time they gave genuine anxiety to European diplomats. "This federal republic is born a pigmy," wrote the Spanish ambassador to his royal master. "A day will come when it will be a giant; even a colossus formidable to these countries. Liberty of conscience and the facility for establishing a new population on immense ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard
... the lofty temperamental Upper Fall, the Lower Fall appears a smug and steady pigmy. In such company, for both are always seen together, it is hard to realize that the Lower Fall is twice the height of Niagara. Comparing Yosemite's three most conspicuous features, these gigantic falls seem to appeal even more to the imagination than to the sense of beauty. El Capitan, ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard
... not easy to describe. When one talked all the rest chimed in with little whispering echoes, to support the assertion; and yet they did not seem to interrupt. They were to me living wonders, so perfectly unspotted from the world, so earnest in their pigmy money-making, and so thoroughly united, I felt consumed with curiosity as to their inner life. They must sometimes put by the quilting and the ...
— Idle Hour Stories • Eugenia Dunlap Potts
... had been great and rare, just as I find myself now pigmy and vulgar by the standard of some past ages, wherein, if no other better qualities concurred, it was ordinary and common to see a man moderate in his revenges, gentle in resenting injuries, religious of his word, neither double nor supple, nor accommodating his faith ...
— The Essays of Montaigne, Complete • Michel de Montaigne
... prepar'd; and reason too he should: This apish and unmannerly approach, This harness'd masque and unadvised revel This unhair'd sauciness and boyish troops, The king doth smile at; and is well prepar'd To whip this dwarfish war, these pigmy arms, From out the circle of his territories. That hand which had the strength, even at your door, To cudgel you, and make you take the hatch; To dive, like buckets, in concealed wells; To crouch in litter ...
— King John • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... complete circle. The little steamer Maid of the Mist was coming up, riding the waves, dashed here and there by conflicting currents, but resolutely steaming on—such is the audacity of man—and poking her venturesome nose into the boiling foam under the Horseshoe. On the deck are pigmy passengers in oil-skin suits, clumsy figures, like arctic explorers. The boat tosses about like a chip, it hesitates and quivers, and then, slowly swinging, darts away down the current, fleeing from the wrath of the waters, and pursued by ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... could have guessed from her manner the turbulence of Sally's emotions. Pleasure, relief, self-confidence struggled within her. She felt an enormous creature surveying a pigmy world; and yet, mechanically, she resumed her sewing at the point where she had left it. The other girls all turned inquisitive faces in her direction. Was it the sack? A row? A rise? Nothing at all? Sally was a baffling ...
— Coquette • Frank Swinnerton
... a spanking wife at Portsmouth Gates, A pigmy at Goree. An orange-tawny up the Straits, A black at St. Lucie. Thus whatsomedever course I bend ...
— The Ladies - A Shining Constellation of Wit and Beauty • E. Barrington
... turn the humanising tastes and desires it has engendered; the affectionate friendships to which it has given rise; the amount of vanity and prejudice it has dispelled. The golden calf they worship at Boston is a pigmy compared with the giant effigies set up in other parts of that vast counting-house which lies beyond the Atlantic; and the almighty dollar sinks into something comparatively insignificant, amidst a ...
— American Notes for General Circulation • Charles Dickens
... him with amazement at the revelation of volcanic passions which slumbered beneath his pigmy form. For the moment, too, he was swept from his feet by the rush of emotion. And again his eye rested on the smiling face of Nan looking at him from the ivory miniature on ...
— The Root of Evil • Thomas Dixon
... never sleep? Sure hasty-pudding is thy chiefest dish, With bullock's liver, or some stinking fish: Garbage, ox-cheeks, and tripes, do feast thy brain, Which nobly pays this tribute back again. With daisy-roots thy dwarfish Muse is fed, A giant's body with a pigmy's head. Canst thou not find, among thy numerous race Of kindred, one to tell thee that thy plays Are laught at by the pit, box, galleries, nay, stage? Think on't a while, and thou wilt quickly find Thy body ...
— English Satires • Various
... the pigmy clever To the stupid giant said: Things are not of highest value Which do highest rear their head; The sluggish horse is nothing better Than the donkey ...
— Little Engel - a ballad with a series of epigrams from the Persian - - - Translator: George Borrow • Thomas J. Wise
... seemed all to disappear. He had strolled back to my hearthrug, wishing, I have no doubt now, to be able to exclaim suddenly that it was too late for the pint of beer for which he hadn't the money, and to curse his luck; and the pigmy quality of his colossusship ...
— Widdershins • Oliver Onions
... upon the raging sea: then he mutters, "What an awful sight! how madly grand with briny light!" How sublimely terrific are the elements here combined to wage war against the craft he thought safe from their thunders! She is but a pigmy in their devouring sweep, a feeble prey at their mercy. The starboard wheel rumbles as it turns far out of water; the larboard is buried in a deep sea the ship careens into. Through the fierce drear he sees the black funnel vomiting its fiery vapour high aloft; he ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams
... his imperial throne, So distant, O ye gods! from every one, The royal virtues are like many a star, From this our pigmy system rather far: Whose light, though flying ever since creation, Has not yet pitched upon our nation. [Footnote: Such was the sublime opinion of the Dutch ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... glance, to divine her errand and run on it before she had spoken it; to watch, follow, adore her; became the business of his life. Meanwhile, as is the way often, his idol had idols of her own, and never thought of or suspected the admiration of her little pigmy adorer. ...
— The History of Henry Esmond, Esq. • W. M. Thackeray
... "not a step further! See, see!" There, at the foot of a large tree, with its tail coiled round an upper branch, its body circling the trunk, was a huge python. Our uncle's pet, compared to it, was a mere pigmy. It was pressing with its enormous body a large pig, which, with its huge mouth wide open, it was preparing to swallow. So eager was it that it did not observe us. We stood transfixed with a feeling akin ...
— In the Eastern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... the greatest stage of all time, and on it placed a lot of little figures, "pigmy minds"—all save one, and he the nearest great, an unworldly person summoned from a cloister, with the vision of genius and the practical incapacity of one who has run away from life, hating men but loving all mankind, eloquent but inarticulate in a large way, incapable of true ...
— The Mirrors of Washington • Anonymous
... like your monumental oak from your pigmy acorn, there grew up a great feud between the families of the two girls, and like a poison the plague of the quarrel spread to Florence, and in a twinkling men were divided against each other in ...
— The God of Love • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... would have dimmed any manly spectator's eyes with tears, and racked his ribs apart with laughter at the same time. But Raymond was great in humorous portrayal only. In that he was superb, he was wonderful—in a word, great; in all things else he was a pigmy of the pigmies. ...
— Chapters from My Autobiography • Mark Twain
... end of the west addition up to Oak and Fell streets, along Octavia. There one puny engine puffed a single stream of water upon the burning mass, but its efforts were like the stabbing of a pigmy at a giant. ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... the course of the day did I see men in any numbers, and that was when at 3 p.m. the French were detected massing for a counter-attack on the south side of the river. It was doomed to be still-born. As they left their trenches, distant pigmy figures in horizon blue, apparently plodding slowly across the ground, they were lashed by an intensive barrage and the little figures were obliterated in a series of spouting ...
— The Diary of a U-boat Commander • Anon
... believe his eyes. For the child was sitting in the middle of the prettiest plaything in the world. It was a tiny farm, covering perhaps a quarter of an acre, with minute barns and yards and stables, and pigmy livestock in the little pastures, and hand-high crops in the little meadows; and smoke came from the tiny chimney of the farmhouse, and Lionel was drawing water from a well in a bucket the size of a thimble. And all the colors were so bright and painted that ...
— Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard • Eleanor Farjeon
... instead of the philosophic term God) can be enjoyed as well as obeyed. He paints life at its darkest and then tells the babe unborn to take the leap in the dark. That is heroic; and to my instinct at least Schopenhauer looks like a pigmy beside his pupil. But it is the heroism of a morbid and almost asphyxiated age. It is awful to think that this world which so many poets have praised has even for a time been depicted as a man-trap into which we may just have the manhood to jump. Think of all those ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... wrong. But banish'd thence on Wednesday night, By Jove you can do nothing right. I hear (perhaps the story false is,) From Almacks, that he never waltzes With Lady Anne or Lady Biddy, Twirling till he's in Love, or giddy. The girl a pigmy, he a giant, His cravat stiff, her corset pliant. There, while some jaded couple stops, The rest go round like humming tops. Each in the circle with its neighbour Sharing alternate rest and labour; While many a gentle chaperon As the fair Dervises spin on, Sighs with regret that she ...
— Real Life In London, Volumes I. and II. • Pierce Egan
... will order the Milbrook to Lisbon with the letters from hence by the next Levant wind, and from thence to Spithead. The Pigmy will return to you with the first English mail ...
— Memoirs and Correspondence of Admiral Lord de Saumarez. Vol II • Sir John Ross
... felucco and two more gunboats which came to their aid, which were only allowed to escape when the English ammunition was nearly exhausted, the Speedy having discharged fourteen hundred shot. On the 3rd of July, the pigmy vessel, after hard fighting, had to surrender to three French line-of-battle ships. It was on that occasion that their senior officer, Captain Palliere, declined to accept the sword of "an officer," ...
— The Life of Thomas, Lord Cochrane, Tenth Earl of Dundonald, Vol. II • Thomas Lord Cochrane
... living interest is found in these old, dusty, leather-bound volumes, which is not in the inscriptions and not, alas, in the printed words. They are the chosen home of a race of pigmy spiderlings who love musty theology with an affection found in no one else nowadays. In these dingy homes they live and rear their hideous little progeny: for in the cold light of a microscope these tiny brown book-dwellers are not beautiful; they are flat, crab-like, goggle-eyed, hairy; ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... all things vanish away—their bodily structure into the general substance; the very memory of them into that great gulf and abysm of past thoughts. Ah! 'tis on a tiny space of earth thou art creeping through life—a pigmy soul carrying a dead ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... pleased him, a passage there which showed how perfectly the critic had mistaken the scope of his poetic philosophy, and exclaiming, with the most perfect naivete, how mortifying it was for men of original and profound genius to be misconceived and misrepresented by pigmy whipper-snapper ...
— Jasmin: Barber, Poet, Philanthropist • Samuel Smiles
... the land. With shouts the Trojans, rushing from afar, Proclaim their motions, and provoke the war So when inclement winters vex the plain With piercing frosts, or thick-descending rain, To warmer seas the cranes embodied fly,(108) With noise, and order, through the midway sky; To pigmy nations wounds and death they bring, And all the war descends upon the wing, But silent, breathing rage, resolved and skill'd(109) By mutual aids to fix a doubtful field, Swift march the Greeks: the rapid dust around Darkening ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... open well-grassed river flats, lightly timbered, and separated by small spurs of ridges running into them. A chain of small lagoons was passed at 12 miles, teeming with black duck, teal, wood duck, and pigmy geese, whilst pigeons and other birds were frequent in the open timber, a sure indication of good country. At 13 miles a small creek was crossed, and another at 18, and after having made a good stage of 25 miles the party again camped on the ...
— The Overland Expedition of The Messrs. Jardine • Frank Jardine and Alexander Jardine
... shepherdesses, tending pigs, with boats sailing in the air, and houses built in the clouds, and sundry other ingenious Dutch fantasies. The beaux distinguished themselves by their adroitness in replenishing this pot from a huge copper tea-kettle, which would have made the pigmy macaronies of these degenerate days sweat merely to look at it. To sweeten the beverage, a lump of sugar was laid beside each cup, and the company alternately nibbled and sipped with great decorum; until an improvement was introduced by ...
— Knickerbocker's History of New York, Complete • Washington Irving
... It was at the full and made glorious patterns of light through the forest. Little voices of the night which he had not heard until now began to thrill and quiver under the soft light. It was as though the North Woods were filled with a secret, pigmy people who were moon worshippers; as though now they greeted their goddess with an ...
— Wolf Breed • Jackson Gregory
... and entered upon a wilderness of small trees. The vegetation has not, however, yet improved in proportion to our nearness to Soudan; for this dwarf forest of tholukh and various other trees cannot be compared to the splendid desert vegetation in the Aheer valleys; these are pigmy mimosas in comparison with those of Aheer. The surface of the ground is now undulating sand and red earth, and every trace of stone has almost disappeared; the soil is also covered with karengia and other herbs, all dry and sapless. We seem to be traversing a limitless ...
— Narrative of a Mission to Central Africa Performed in the Years 1850-51, Volume 2 • James Richardson
... the Indian's side. It was not that he was so glad to see a real Patagonian, by whom he looked a perfect pigmy— a Patagonian who might have almost rivaled the Emperor Maximii, and that Congo negro seen by the learned Van der Brock, both eight feet high; but he caught up Spanish phrases from the Indian and studied ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne
... advanced, to meet each other in deadly conflict, the Trojans marched with noisy shouts, like the clamor of the cranes, when they fly to the streams of Oceanus, in the early morning, screaming, and bringing death and destruction to the Pigmy men; but the Achaieans came on in silence, breathing ...
— The Children's Hour, Volume 3 (of 10) • Various
... common sized bridegroom compelled, before a room-full of company, to request his Titan of a bride to be seated, that he might greet her with the holy kiss of wedded love! On the other hand, it was by no means unusual to represent the heroine as a mere pigmy; so that the lovers whose destinies we were interested in, might be represented by the following lines from an old sea-song, which, for the benefit of musical readers I beg leave to observe, is generally "said or sung" to the tune of ...
— An Old Sailor's Yarns • Nathaniel Ames
... haunts of men to shame and sorrow fly, And, on the verge of death, learn how to die! Vain exhortation! wash the Ethiop white, Discharge the leopard's spots, turn day to night, Control the course of Nature, bid the deep Hush at thy pigmy voice her waves to sleep— Perform things passing strange, yet own thy art Too weak to work a change in such a heart; 440 That Envy, which was woven in the frame At first, will to the last remain the same. Reason may droop, may die; but Envy's ...
— Poetical Works • Charles Churchill
... paroxysms of pleasure or rage. It was the amusement of my relatives and of the domestics to play upon this irritable temperament. I was moved to tears, tickled to laughter, provoked to fury, for the entertainment of company, who were amused by such a tempest of mighty passion in a pigmy frame. They little thought, or perhaps little heeded the dangerous sensibilities they were fostering. I thus became a little creature of passion, before reason was developed. In a short time I grew too ...
— Tales of a Traveller • Washington Irving
... just landed from America. It must have been an enormous tree when it stood in its native soil, at its full height, and with all its branches. I gazed at it with admiration; it seemed like one of the gigantic obelisks which are now and then brought from Egypt to shame the pigmy monuments of Europe; and, in fact, these vast aboriginal trees, that have sheltered the Indians before the intrusion of the white men, are the monuments and antiquities ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume V (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... had received information that Don Pepe, the very rascal whose acquaintance we made on the coast of Africa, and who is now settled at Havannah, was fitting out a large and powerful craft, calculated to give a little pigmy, like ...
— The Three Lieutenants • W.H.G. Kingston
... lives of him. But there is something left for her yet to do. She has no more comprehended magnum Erasmum, than any other pigmy comprehends a ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade
... man who has just been crowned at Moscow at an expense of some millions, and whose emblem of authority is ornamented with rubies as large as eggs and ablaze with 2,564 costly diamonds—while half his people are feeding on fetid offal—is a weak-faced pigmy who would probably be peddling Russia's favorite drunk promoter over a pine bar had he not chanced to be born in the purple. Having been spawned in a royal bed—perchance the same in which his great gran'dame Catherine was wont to receive her paramours—he becomes the most powerful of princes— ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... badger is smaller; in the mink being with us a much stouter animal than its Scandinavian and Russian kinsman, while the reverse is true of our sable or pine marten. No one can say why the European red deer should be a pigmy compared to its giant brother, the American wapiti; why the Old World elk should average smaller in size than the almost indistinguishable New World moose; and yet the bison of Lithuania and the Caucasus be on the whole larger and more formidable than its American cousin. In the same way ...
— Hunting the Grisly and Other Sketches • Theodore Roosevelt
... can, that part of it." While as for Stoddard, he was beginning to understand a great deal. "But these curious creatures?" he said, indicating the whispering, pigmy host that filled the cavern. ...
— Astounding Stories, July, 1931 • Various
... is a deep forest which stretches back and back in a dense and chaotic tangle of strangled sapling and parasitic weed to the edge of the Pigmy forest. No man—white or brown or black—has explored the depth of the Forbidden Forest, for here the wild beasts have their lairs and rear their young; and here are mosquito in dense clouds. Moreover, and this is important, a certain potent ghost named Bim-bi stalks restlessly from ...
— Bones - Being Further Adventures in Mr. Commissioner Sanders' Country • Edgar Wallace
... that can exhibit his experiment here in its real significance, excepting that one which he himself builds for us; for it is the vast lonely heath, and the Man, the pigmy man, on it—and the KING, the pigmy king, on it;—it is all the wild roar of elemental nature, and the tempest in that 'little world of man,' that have to measure their forces, that have to be brought into continuous and persevering contest. It is not Gloster only, who sees in that storm ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... The pigmy antelope inhabits some parts of Africa, and, in size, corresponds with the small deer of Ceylon. I never saw so beautiful a little creature, appearing more like a fable than a reality. Their tiny black horns are but slightly curved ...
— Anecdotes of the Habits and Instinct of Animals • R. Lee
... Some of us at once started for a large lagoon that we had passed in the morning, and creeping up through the long grass, found its surface quite covered with water-fowl of every description, from the black swan to the beautiful pigmy goose. A volley, fired at a concerted signal, strewed the surface of the lake with the dead and wounded, and we were compelled to stand idly on the bank until the wind wafted the game ashore, for at the report of the guns two or three heavy ...
— Australian Search Party • Charles Henry Eden
... mouth, and flashing eye, He roars. All creatures hide or fly,— Such mortal terror at The work of one poor gnat! With constant change of his attack, The snout now stinging, now the back, And now the chambers of the nose; The pigmy fly no mercy shows. The lion's rage was at its height; His viewless foe now laugh'd outright, When on his battle-ground he saw, That every savage tooth and claw Had got its proper beauty By doing bloody duty; Himself, ...
— The Fables of La Fontaine - A New Edition, With Notes • Jean de La Fontaine
... the Gazette; but, as the letter was written by Captain Elliot himself, you will not see there, that he with half the number of Thurot's crew, boarded the latter's vessel. Thurot was killed, and his pigmy navy all taken and carried into the Isle of Man. It is an entertaining episode; but think what would have happened, if the whole of the plan had taken place -it the destined time. The negligence of the Duke of Bedford's administration has appeared so gross, that one may believe his very ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... of the physical types has shown that each group considered is made up of heterogeneous elements. Pigmy blood is everywhere evident, but aside from this there is a well-marked brachycephalic and a dolichocephalic element. With the latter is a greater tendency than with the first for the face to be angular; the cheek bones are more outstanding, while there is a greater ...
— The Tinguian - Social, Religious, and Economic Life of a Philippine Tribe • Fay-Cooper Cole
... farm-house, across the river?" says a brave pigmy of a chap in navy uniform. "That is head-quarters for Secession. They were going to take the School from us, Sir, and the frigate; but we've got ahead of 'em, now you and the Massachusetts boys have come down,"—and he twinkled all over with delight. "We can't study any more. We are ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 7, No. 44, June, 1861 • Various
... about thirty feet high, in which are cut the steps of a not very solid staircase, forms here the curtain of the esplanade which carries the pigmy fort. The house of the commandant consists of a couple of huts placed in a square, and the soldiers occupy an oblong building a hundred feet away, at the ...
— Eight Hundred Leagues on the Amazon • Jules Verne
... after the bond and slavery of frost, there are bustlings, strainings, united thrusts, and pulls-all-together, in comparison with which the powerful tugs of cranes and pulleys in a noisy city are but pigmy efforts. ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... kite, the honey-buzzard, the marsh-harrier, the sparrow-hawk, owls of two kinds (Ketupa ceylonensis and Athene meridionalis), the grey shrike (Lanius excubitor), the common cormorant, the pigmy cormorant (Graeculus pygmaeus), numerous seagulls, as the Adriatic gull (Larus melanocephalus), Andonieri's gull, the herring-gull, the Red-Sea-gull (Larus ichthyo-aetos), and others; the gull-billed tern ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... perhaps of the bulk of the rhinoceros, crawled along the plains of South America. They have become creatures of the past, and their places have been taken by others of a similarly curious formation, of which even the giant armadillo, when compared to them, is a mere pigmy. These creatures abound in all parts of the continent, from Paraguay to Venezuela; but, incased as they are in coats of complete armour, and running so quickly, and so rapidly digging into the earth, they can rarely be overtaken ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... animals reigned in the earth, they had killed all but a girl, and her little brother, and these two were living in fear and seclusion. The boy was a perfect pigmy, and never grew beyond the stature of a small infant, but the girl increased with her years, so that the labor of providing food and lodging devolved wholly on her. She went out daily to get wood for their lodge-fire, and took ...
— The Myth of Hiawatha, and Other Oral Legends, Mythologic and Allegoric, of the North American Indians • Henry R. Schoolcraft
... as the tall Chestnuts, and, mightiest of the branching wood, Jove's Aesculus, and oaks, oracular Deemed by the Greeks of old. With some sprouts forth A forest of dense suckers from the root, As elms and cherries; so, too, a pigmy plant, Beneath its mother's mighty shade upshoots The bay-tree of Parnassus. Such the modes Nature imparted first; hence all the race Of forest-trees and shrubs and sacred groves Springs into verdure. Other means there are, Which use ...
— The Georgics • Virgil
... been forgotten. And, as he gazed at it, he half thought himself an actor in a fairy portal [tale?]; and would not have been surprised—at least, he would have taken it with the composure of a dream—if the mimic portal had unclosed, and a form of pigmy majesty had appeared within, beckoning him to enter and find the revelation of what had so long perplexed him. The key of the cabinet was in the lock, and knowing that it was not now the receptacle of anything in the shape of family papers, he threw it open; and there appeared ...
— Sketches and Studies • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... James the Second, in Prussia during the Seven Years' War, in the American colonies and the United States, in Portugal, in Greece, in various republics of Central and South America, even the assignats of the French Revolution—seem pigmy frauds in comparison with the present vast inundation of ...
— The Paper Moneys of Europe - Their Moral and Economic Significance • Francis W. Hirst
... arrangement of plot when I commenced a work of fiction, and often finish a chapter without having the slightest idea of what materials the ensuing one is to be constructed. At times I feel so tired that I throw down the pen in despair; but t is soon taken up again, and, like a pigmy Ant, it seems to have imbibed fresh vigour from ...
— Newton Forster • Frederick Marryat
... With a fine saw I form them into little boards and then smooth them with a sharp case knife, but the London veneering-mills would turn them out fit for immediate use, without any necessity for more than a touch of fine glass-paper. Some of my pigmy boards are two feet long by three and a half inches wide, which is more than sufficient for our purpose, and to me they have proved a vast acquisition. The natives call them 'Kirilimow,' the latter syllable signifying root"—TEMPLETON, ...
— Ceylon; an Account of the Island Physical, Historical, and • James Emerson Tennent
... heroically threw themselves into a task that no artist could possibly master. They approached their gigantic subjects with correspondingly large canvases, without ever giving the essential element, of their huge motives, namely, a certain feeling of scale, of monumentality, as compared to the pigmy size of the human figure. Really great pictures of the Yellowstone, the Grand Caon, and the lofty mountain-tops still remain to be painted. The daring and courage of these men has benefited our art very much in a technical sense. ...
— The Galleries of the Exposition • Eugen Neuhaus
... Nothing was more evidently mortifying to her, than the procrastination of her malice; nor could she bear to think that a fierceness so gigantic and uncontrollable should show itself in nothing more terrific than the pigmy spite of a chambermaid. For myself, I had been accustomed to the warfare of formidable adversaries, and the encounter of alarming dangers; and what I saw of her spleen had not power ...
— Caleb Williams - Things As They Are • William Godwin
... bignesse twice as great. I saw the negro boy. What the other monster should be he hath forgotten to relate; and these papers came to my hand since his death, which, otherwise, in my often conferences, I might have learned. Perhaps he meaneth the Pigmy ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... suffering land—it was the all-powerful minister, the curse of Spain, the butcher of the noble Torrijos and his unhappy companions, whom he, the insignificant student, had cast down from his high state! The giant had succumbed before the pigmy; the virtual ruler of the kingdom had fallen by the agency of one whom, a day previously, he might with impunity have annihilated. Events so extraordinary and of such rapid occurrence, were hard to ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... hundred and eighteen pupils; and five colleges, with seven hundred and eighteen students; to which last classes of institutions seven hundred and twenty thousand dollars have been given; and the whole appropriations for education estimated at two and a half millions of dollars! What a pigmy to this is Virginia become, with a population almost equal to that of New York! And whence this difference? From the difference their rulers set on the value of knowledge, and the prosperity it produces. But still, if a pigmy, let her do what a pigmy ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... Braddock household was not included in the general staff, being a mere appendage of the Professor himself. This was a dwarfish, misshapen Kanaka, a pigmy in height, but a giant in breadth, with short, thick legs, and long, powerful arms. He had a large head, and a somewhat handsome face, with melancholy black eyes and a fine set of white teeth. Like most Polynesians, his ...
— The Green Mummy • Fergus Hume |
