"Amphibian" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... of the Lampreys exhibits curious points of resemblance with that of the Amphibia, which are absent in the Sharks and Rays. Of the development of the Ganoidei we have unfortunately no knowledge, but their brains and their reproductive organs are more amphibian than are ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... carrying the otter, hanging by a string tied to its yellow paws, webbed like those of a palmiped. He cast upon his four superiors sitting at table, and also upon Sibilet, that look of mingled distrust and servility which serves as a veil to the thoughts of the peasantry; then he brandished his amphibian ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... excursion on the bottom of the sea for October 12, 1898. His strange amphibian craft, the Argonaut, about which we had been hearing so many marvels, lay off the pier at Atlantic Highlands. Before we were near enough to make out her hulk, we saw a great black letter A, framed of heavy gas-pipe, rising forty feet above the water. A ...
— Aircraft and Submarines - The Story of the Invention, Development, and Present-Day - Uses of War's Newest Weapons • Willis J. Abbot
... protested, as he placed the small dark-red amphibian on the palm, where it crinkled up and ...
— The Danger Mark • Robert W. Chambers
... feet under the influence of a heavy southwest storm. On flat coasts we are familiar with the wide frontier of salt marshes, that witness the border warfare of land and sea, alternate invasion and retreat. In low-shored estuaries like those of northern Brittany and northwestern Alaska, this amphibian girdle of the land expands to a width of four miles, while on precipitous coasts of tideless sea basins it contracts to a few inches. Hence this boundary zone changes with every impulse of the mobile sea and with every varying configuration of the shore. ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... Rappahannock; but the same storm which dashed the thick drops against her windows also filled the river to overflowing, and the brave troopers, recalled, had to swim their horses in returning. Lane was among these, and his humorous account of the affair was signed, "Your loyal amphibian!" ...
— An Original Belle • E. P. Roe
... will-power on brain-discipline when a slighter effort in a different direction would produce consequences more felicitous. A man whom fate had pitched into a canal might accomplish miracles in the way of rendering himself amphibian; he might stagger the world by the spectacle of his philosophy under amazing difficulties; people might pay sixpence a head to come and see him; but he would be less of a nincompoop if he climbed out and arranged to live definitely ...
— The Human Machine • E. Arnold Bennett
... advances, and the young amphibian ranges the waters, the terror of his insect contemporaries, not only are the nutritious particles supplied by its prey, by the addition of which to its frame, growth takes place, laid down, each in its proper spot, and in such due proportion ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... longer journey across the Atlantic from England to America there is more time to get one's sea-legs, and on the last day or two passengers begin to enjoy the sea journey. But this is quite enough of the sea for any one but an amphibian. The three weeks journey from America to Australia gets decidedly monotonous, and long before sighting Sydney Heads and entering the world's "pearl of ports" every one has had his fill of the sea. But lengthen that journey by three and you have had enough ...
— "Over There" with the Australians • R. Hugh Knyvett
... Copperfield Dickens transferred the dreams and the events of his childhood to an alien setting. In Great Expectations he invents a fictitious story in harmony with scenes in which he delighted to retrace his childish memories. Again, the amphibian creatures which he lightly sketches in Great Expectations, and more elaborately in Our Mutual Friend, had first impressed themselves on his imagination as he rambled, a tiny, eager-eyed boy, about the dockyards and waterside alleys of Chatham, or made trips to Sheerness with "Mr. Micawber", ...
— Dickens-Land • J. A. Nicklin
... amazement seemed Sudden to ask us: "Is this also Man? This plunging, volant, land-amphibian What Plato mused and Paracelsus dreamed? Reply!" And piercing us with ancient scan, The shrill, primeval hawk gazed ...
— The Little Book of Modern Verse • Jessie B. Rittenhouse
... All the women lose their heads over him. He always spends something like a hundred thousand francs a year, and no creature can discover that he has an acre of land or a single dividend warrant. The typical knight errant of our salons, our boudoirs, our boulevards, an amphibian half-way between a man and a woman—Maxime de Trailles is a singular being, fit for anything, and good for nothing, quite as capable of perpetrating a benefit as of planning a crime; sometimes base, sometimes noble, more often bespattered with mire than ...
— Gobseck • Honore de Balzac
... of breathing air, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the terrestrial legs were originally evolved from some type of fishes' fins by the use of the fins for terrestrial locomotion. Yet neither the amphibian larva nor the embryo of higher Vertebrates develops anything closely similar to a fin. There is no gradual change of a fin-like limb into a leg, but the leg develops directly from a simple bud of tissue. The larva of the Urodela is probably more primitive than the tadpole of ...
— Hormones and Heredity • J. T. Cunningham
... first, time to look at the boats lying on Bagley's wharf, their ominous porpoise-like appearance gave me a peculiar sensation. I had expected rough-water, but this was the first understanding I had that the journey was to be more or less amphibian. On a day when the waves on Lake Michigan were running high we took them out for trial. The crews were filled out by Bagley's men, our party not all being present, and with some reporters and a cargo of champagne ...
— The Romance of the Colorado River • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... My Star. The Flight of the Duchess. The Last Ride Together. By the Fireside. Prospice. Amphibian. James Lee's Wife. A Tale. Confessions. Respectability. Home-Thoughts from Abroad. Home-Thoughts from the Sea. Old Pictures in Florence. Pictor Ignotus. Andrea del Sarto. Fra Lippo Lippi. A Face. The Bishop orders his Tomb. A Toccata of Galuppi's. Abt Vogler. 'Touch ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... Redfins were fish, but mentally they had advanced a little beyond the usual tadpole train of reactions, reaching forward toward the varied activities of the future amphibian. One noticeable thing was their segregation, whether in the mica pools, or in two other smaller ones near by, in which I found them. Each held a pure culture of Redfins, and I found that this was no accident, but aided and enforced by the ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... He taught me diving and surfing until I was nearly as clever as he, and he was cleverer than the average Kanaka. I have seen him dive in fifteen fathoms, and he could stay down two minutes. He was an amphibian and a mountaineer. He could climb wherever a goat dared climb. He was afraid of nothing. He was on the wrecked Luga, and he swam thirty miles in thirty-six hours in a heavy sea. He could fight his way out through breaking combers that would batter you and me to a ...
— The House of Pride • Jack London
... the explanation of the erogenous nature of the anus, and the key to pedicatio, in an atavistic return to the very remote amphibian days when the anus was combined with the sexual parts in a common cloaca. But it is unnecessary to invoke any vestigial inheritance from a vastly remote past when we bear in mind that the innervation of these two adjoining regions is inevitably very closely ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 5 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... forward. The water that forced its way between his lips was fresh, he was vaguely aware, and even as he fought to hold his breath was aware too that the frog-men seemed in no way incommoded by the sudden transition into the water, their amphibian nature allowing them to stay under it far longer than ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, August 1930 • Various
... coco-nuts join lustily, the strain reverberates from the wet lands below, resounds through the forest, and is lost in the mellow distance of the tea-trees. And so the sound rises and falls, swells and dwindles away in chords and harmonies, until presently every amphibian is alert and tremulous with emotion and emulation. If an attempt is made to analyse the music, you may discover sounds sharp as those of the fife, deep and hollow as drum-beats, sonorous ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... he howled, exasperatedly. "You pin- headed old amphibian. If your sole and utter ambition is to get pneumonia and die, I don't know any way in which you can better achieve your purpose. Sit down in the corner there and drink this," he extracted from his case a little flask of brandy, "or ...
— A Fool There Was • Porter Emerson Browne
... mammal now differ very essentially from those of a reptile and of an amphibian because in their organization they represent the beginnings only of mammals, even as these represent only the beginnings of reptiles and amphibians, by how much more must they differ from those hypothetical single-celled amoebas ...
— At the Deathbed of Darwinism - A Series of Papers • Eberhard Dennert
... everything she meets: now she looks as though she would grind to bits the salambaw, insecure fishing apparatus which in their movements resemble skeletons of giants saluting an antediluvian tortoise; now she speeds straight toward the clumps of bamboo or against the amphibian structures, karihan, or wayside lunch-stands, which, amid gumamelas and other flowers, look like indecisive bathers who with their feet already in the water cannot bring themselves to make the final plunge; ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal
... one of the most significant periods in the earth's history. For it was the time of the establishment of flowering plants upon the earth and of terrestrial backboned animals. One would like to have been the discoverer of the Devonian foot-print of Thinopus, the first known Amphibian foot-print—an eloquent vestige of the third great invasion of the dry land. It was probably from a stock of Devonian lung-fishes that the first Amphibians sprang, but it was not till the next period ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... the ape-man urged the beast into the river, and with trunk held high Tantor forged steadily toward the opposite bank. Once an unwary crocodile attacked him but the sinuous trunk dove beneath the surface and grasping the amphibian about the middle dragged it to light and hurled it a hundred feet down stream. And so, in safety, they made the opposite shore, Korak perched high and dry above ...
— The Son of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... displayed his impatience at her tedious methods and his own superiority in the hastening of affairs. Thenceforth he must depend upon himself, and faster-swimming or faster-running men ceased to be bred. The one, half-amphibian, breasting the water with muscular arms, could not hope to overtake or escape an enemy who propelled a fire-hollowed tree trunk by means of a wooden paddle; nor could the other, trusting to his own nimbleness, ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London |
