"Mastodon" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... this produced many worms. The worms were then collected and scattered again. They matured into infants and these were then collected and scattered and became full-grown Dakotas. The bones of the mastodon, the Dakotas think, are the bones of Unktehees, and they preserve them with the greatest care in the medicine-bag." Neill's Hist. Minn., p. 55. The Unktehees and the Thunder-birds are perpetually at war. There are ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... grocers, and thereby becomes only five or six times more easily traced;—then, when he has acquired his specific, he administers duly to his enemy, or near kinsman, a dose of arsenic which would make a mammoth or mastodon burst, and which, without rhyme or reason, makes his victim utter groans which alarm the entire neighborhood. Then arrive a crowd of policemen and constables. They fetch a doctor, who opens the dead body, and collects from the entrails and stomach a quantity of arsenic ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... a comely brute, Compared with Satan camel,—trunk and all, His floppy ears, and his inconsequent tail. He's stolid, but at least a gentleman. It doesn't hurt my pride to valet him, And bring his shaving-water. He's a lord. Only the bluest blood that has come down Through generations from the mastodon Could carry off that tail with dignity, That tail and trunk. He cannot look absurd, For all the monkey tricks you put him through, Your paper hoops and popguns. He just makes His masters look ridiculous, when his pomp's Butchered to make a bumpkin's ...
— Georgian Poetry 1913-15 • Edited by E. M. (Sir Edward Howard Marsh)
... your opportunity, then," said Mr. Punch, taking his seat and inspecting the programme, "for I observe that the gentleman who is to appear next is described as a 'Mastodon Mirth-moving Mome.'" ...
— Punch Among the Planets • Various
... This unique order of hoofed mammals, of which the elephant is the sole survivor, began, so far as known, in the Eocene, in Egypt, with a piglike ancestor the size of a small horse, with cheek teeth like the Mastodon's, but wanting both trunk and tusks. A proboscidian came next with four short tusks, and in the Miocene there followed a Mastodon (Fig. 346) armed with two pairs of long, straight tusks on ...
— The Elements of Geology • William Harmon Norton
... given us any trouble is that old mastodon. If he comes around again, I'm going to take a skillet and ...
— Project Mastodon • Clifford Donald Simak
... 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 clubs instead of mashies in their ...
— By Advice of Counsel • Arthur Train
... controlling the output, was suddenly shown to control actually less than fifty per cent of it. Its efforts to amend or repeal the hardy old law of Supply and Demand had simply met with the indifferent success that has marked all such efforts since the first attempted corner in stone hatchets, or mastodon tusks, or whatever it may have been. In the language of one of its newspaper critics, the "Trust" had been "founded on misconception and prompted along lines of self-destruction. Its fundamental principles were the restriction of product, the increase of price, and the ...
— The Spenders - A Tale of the Third Generation • Harry Leon Wilson
... take the style of those heroic times? For nature brings not back the mastodon, Nor we ...
— Genesis A - Translated from the Old English • Anonymous
... etc. The armor must have weighed two hundred pounds and the sword alone one hundred. Barnum listened, and gazed in silence at the horse-armor, large enough for an elephant, and a pot called "Guy's porridge-pot," which could have held seventy gallons, but when the old man produced the ribs of a mastodon which he declared had belonged to a huge dun cow, which had done much injury to many persons before being slain by the dauntless Guy, he drew a long breath, and feelingly congratulated the old porter on his ability ...
— A Unique Story of a Marvellous Career. Life of Hon. Phineas T. • Joel Benton
... perfect? There was a time when huge bird-like reptiles were the lords of creation, and after these had been "sealed within the iron hills" there came successive dynasties of mammals; and as the iguanodon gave place to the great Eocene marsupials, as the mastodon and the sabre-toothed lion have long since vanished from the scene, so may not Man by and by disappear to make way for some higher creature, and so on forever? In such case, why should we regard Man as in any ...
— The Destiny of Man - Viewed in the Light of His Origin • John Fiske
... contemporaneity of men like ourselves with the great edentate and pachydermatous mammals, which were the most characteristic creatures of the American fauna. The prehistoric inhabitants of North America were familiar with the mastodon, those of South America with the glyptodon, the shell of which on occasion served as a roof to the dwelling of primeval reran, which dwelling was often but a den hollowed out of the ground. As in Europe, the early inhabitants of America had to contend ...
— Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples • The Marquis de Nadaillac
... where we keep our inflammable beasts. That big, sleeping creature that looks like a mastodon lizard is the dragon that your friend St. George, of London, got the best of, and sent here with his compliments. I'll give the beast a prod and let you ...
— Olympian Nights • John Kendrick Bangs
... bags, and presents. Jim was in one of those fur-bags that babies use in the East. Everything we were about to forget the last minute got shoved into that bag with Jim, and it surely began to look as if we had brought a young and very lumpy mastodon into ...
— An American Idyll - The Life of Carleton H. Parker • Cornelia Stratton Parker
... life by the woodman's ax, which hacked those jagged girdles around their huge trunks. Standing there leafless, rigid, and gray, they remind us, in their branching nakedness, of the antlered elk, and in their gigantic unsightliness of the monstrous mastodon, that thing of grisly bone which, as a thing of life, no son of Adam ever beheld. Hard by stands an enormous oak, whose main bough, scathed and deadened by lightning, is thrust from out its ragged green robe like the extended, ...
— Burl • Morrison Heady
... extinct, species were common to pre-glacial and post-glacial times. In like manner there is reason to suppose that in North America much of the ancient mammalian fauna, together with nearly all the invertebrata, lived through the ages of intense cold. That in the United States the Mastodon giganteus was very abundant after the drift period, is evident from the fact that entire skeletons of this animal are met with in bogs and lacustrine deposits occupying hollows in the glacial drift. They sometimes occur in the bottom even of small ponds recently drained by the agriculturist for ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell
... naturalist, Cuvier, was able to reconstruct the whole anatomy of an animal merely through examining the structure of a tooth or the fragment of a bone. Applying to the German historian the method which Cuvier applied to the antediluvian mastodon, we can reduce the whole complex political philosophy of Treitschke from a few fundamental principles which he follows with a single mind, and which the Prussian State has applied with an equally relentless consistency both in its internal and in ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... base of the cliffs for a considerable distance. The ground was rolling and tree-dotted and covered with grazing animals, alone, in pairs and in herds—a motley aggregation of the modern and extinct herbivore of the world. A huge woolly mastodon stood swaying to and fro in the shade of a giant fern—a mighty bull with enormous upcurving tusks. Near him grazed an aurochs bull with a cow and a calf, close beside a lone rhinoceros asleep in a dust-hole. Deer, antelope, bison, ...
— The People that Time Forgot • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... gave the psychometrist a minute piece of the enamel of the tooth of a mastodon, which had been found thirty feet below the surface of the earth. The psychometrist had not the slightest knowledge of the character of the tiny flake of enamel handed her, but nevertheless reported: "My impression is that it is a ...
— Clairvoyance and Occult Powers • Swami Panchadasi
... there?" (She looked at me curiously, but with none of the mournful speculativeness of a soul struggling against the dimness of its own vision.) "To me it is articulate happiness—nothing more abstruse. Yes, I have seen a mastodon; and I was as glad to happen on the beast as a naturalist is glad to find a missing link in a chain of evidence. From the moment, I knew myself quite clearly to be the recovered heir to ...
— At a Winter's Fire • Bernard Edward J. Capes
... cat, is the natural enemy of the elk, which, by the by, has become almost as rare an animal on the western continent as the mastodon or mammoth. As soon as he comes up with the elk, he leaps upon him, and fastens upon his neck, about which he twists his long tail, and then cuts his jugular. The elk has no means of shunning this disaster, but by ...
— Traditions of the North American Indians, Vol. 3 (of 3) • James Athearn Jones
... that from the earliest ages one man has asked another such questions as these: "Which is the nearest way home?" "Which is the easiest or pleasantest way?" "How can we find a way that will enable us to dodge the mastodon and the plesiosaurus?" "How can we get there without ever crossing the track of the enemy?" All these are elementary route problems, and they can be turned into good puzzles by the introduction of some conditions that complicate matters. A variety of such complications will ...
— Amusements in Mathematics • Henry Ernest Dudeney
... intend to let mere hunger conflict with our desire for exploration," was Emma Dean's firm reminder. "Given a chance, we may find something wonderful. We may dig the prehistoric mastodon from some snug corner where he burrowed several thousand years ...
— Grace Harlowe's Problem • Jessie Graham Flower
... of all morality can be expressed by the words Left—or Right. 'Shall I take the path to the right, when my child is being threatened with death by a pterodactyl, or shall I take the path to the left when a mastodon is threatening to put a foot ...
— The Pools of Silence • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... a little pensively Miss Emily wrapped the old mastodon up in a white cloth. "I believe I'll take him home with me. People are always asking to buy him, and it's hard ...
— The Tin Soldier • Temple Bailey
... or rather the new American spirit that issued from the war, which finally assured these poets and critics that mythology and legend were, so far as America was concerned, as dead as the mastodon, and that life itself was the only vitally interesting subject of poetry. Edmund Clarence Stedman (1833-1908), after writing many "finished" poems that were praised and forgotten, manfully acknowledged that he had been following the wrong trail ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... clay kettles. In other portions of this wide slope of territory, a species of antique bricks have been disinterred.[13] It is in this general area, and in strata of a similar age, that gigantic bones, tusks and teeth of the mastodon, and other extinct quadrupeds, have been so profusely found within a few years, particularly ...
— Incentives to the Study of the Ancient Period of American History • Henry R. Schoolcraft
... has a definite length of life, so have species a definite duration. No one I think can have marvelled more at the extinction of species, than I have done. When I found in La Plata the tooth of a horse embedded with the remains of Mastodon, Megatherium, Toxodon, and other extinct monsters, which all co-existed with still living shells at a very late geological period, I was filled with astonishment; for seeing that the horse, since its introduction ...
— On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection • Charles Darwin
... a song of the soul, Oh, sleeper, snore! Whistle me, wheeze me, grunkle and grunt, gurgle and snort me a Virile stave! Snore till the Cosmos shakes! On the wings of a snore I fly backward a billion years, and grasp the mastodon and I tear him limb from limb, And with his thigh hone I heat the dinosaur to death, for I am Virile! Snore! Snore! Snore! Snore, O struggling and troubled and squirming and suffering and choking and purple-faced ...
— Hermione and Her Little Group of Serious Thinkers • Don Marquis
... to have discovered in Missouri the fossil remains of a bogged mastodon, which had been killed precisely in this way by human contemporaries. (See Lubbock, Preh. ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... quadruped, he has lived in trees as a monkey, he has inhabited caves with the wolf and the bear, he has roamed the forests and plains as a savage, he has survived without fire or clothes or weapons or tools, he has lived with the mastodon and all the saurian monsters, he has held his own against great odds, he has survived the long battles of the land and the sea, he weathered the ice-sheet that overrode both hemispheres, he has seen many forms become extinct. In the historic period he has survived plague and pestilence, ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... Omnipotence, and the sweet spring came bursting upward from the fragrant earth, and light and flowers came together to welcome the birthday of the glad and glorious gift. Here, many a century back, the giant mastodon trod the earth into deep hollows, as he moved upon his sounding path. Then came another time. In the hollow of the three hills, the Indian raised his bark wigwam, and the smoke of his council fire curled up like a mist-wreath in the forest. Here the red man filled the wild ...
— The Three Brides, Love in a Cottage, and Other Tales • Francis A. Durivage
... arts. Perhaps no one has made the observation yet. It is certainly among the records of my brain, but I may possibly have put it there myself. If so, I make it now, for the possibilities of originality are getting scarce and will soon disappear from the face of the earth as completely as the mastodon. The present application of the saying is to the people of Goa, who, while they carry through the world patronymics which breathe of conquest and discovery, devote their energies rather to the violin and the art of cookery. The caviller may object to the application of the words "fine ...
— Behind the Bungalow • EHA
... come to look for them they are not there. Geology knows nothing about them. It has plenty of distinct, well-defined species—trilobites, and ammonites, and echinoderms, palms, ferns, firs, and mosses, all sorts of quadrupeds from a mouse to a mastodon, and all just as clean-cut and well-defined as the species of existing animals. Mr. Darwin can not find his connecting links between the species, which ought to have been a hundred times more plentiful than the species they connected. These ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... with the protruding tusk, corresponds perfectly to the formation of the lower jaw and teeth in the Manatee. Some resemblance of the Dinotherium to the Mastodon suggested a comparison with that animal as the next step in the investigation, when it was found that at the edge of the lower jaw of the latter there was a pit with a small projecting tooth, also corresponding exactly in its position to the tusk in the Dinotherium. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... chalk, where they occur individually, bear the same relation to the two families (the Lepidosteus and Polypterus) which inhabit the American rivers and the Nile, as our present elephants and tapirs do to the Mastodon and Anaplotheriun of the ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... in very limited areas which they evidently inhabited at one period. M. Albert Gaudry found, in the deposits of a mountain stream at Pikermi in Greece, an abundance of large mammalia such as are nowhere to be found living together at the present time. Among them were two species of Mastodon, two different rhinoceroses, a gigantic wild boar, a camel and a giraffe larger than those now living, several monkeys, carnivora ranging from martens and civets to lions and hyaenas of the largest size, numerous antelopes of at least five distinct genera, and besides these many forms altogether ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... often longed to come upon Some giant spoor and dog the track till I ran to earth a mastodon, A dinosaur, a pterodactyl; But I supposed my natal date— However distantly I view it— Was several thousand years too late To give me ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, July 8, 1914 • Various
... Pellucidar, why, just try it, and you will not wonder that I was glad of the company of this first dog—this living replica of the fierce and now extinct hyaenodon of the outer crust that hunted in savage packs the great elk across the snows of southern France, in the days when the mastodon roamed at will over the broad continent of which the British Isles were then a part, and perchance left his footprints and his bones in the sands ...
— Pellucidar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... Red Crag contains the ear-bones of Whales, the teeth of Sharks and Rays, and remains of the Mastodon, Rhinoceros, ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... Calmet, in his great works on the Bible, accepted it as late as the beginning of the eighteenth century, believing the mastodon's bones exhibited by Mazurier to be those of King Teutobocus, and holding them valuable testimony to the existence of the giants mentioned in Scripture and of the early inhabitants of the earth overwhelmed ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... that is not a bird; that no transition between the ungulates and the carnivora is possible; that the proboscideae are not a final but a transitory type, dying out gradually—our elephants and similar forms will disappear as the mastodon did. ...
— Creation and Its Records • B.H. Baden-Powell
... it has been established that, on our own continent, the oldest discoverable civilization was one in which rude stone implements were used, and man lived contemporaneously with the megatherium and the mastodon. Then polished and worked stone implements came into use; and after the lapse of ages, copper. The researches of our antiquaries have rendered it probable that America is as ancient, as an inhabited continent, as Europe. Evidences have been brought to light, leading ...
— The Nation in a Nutshell • George Makepeace Towle
... Early Express, All Seasons, Premium Flat Dutch, Louisville Drumhead, Danish Round Winter or Baldhead, Stone Mason Marblehead, Hollander Carrots.—Chantenay, Half Long Scarlet, Early Scarlet Short Horn, Danvers Half Long Orange, Mastodon White Intermediate, Large White Belgian Cauliflower.—Early London or Dutch Celery.—Golden Self-Blanching, French, Golden Heart or Golden Dwarf, Sandringham Dwarf White, Golden Rose or Rose-Ribbed Paris Corn Salad.—Large Seeded, Improved Green Cabbaging Cucumbers.—Cumberland, ...
— New York at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, St. Louis 1904 - Report of the New York State Commission • DeLancey M. Ellis
... have been thinking of such huge creatures as the megatherium and mastodon, but his words seem to limit the extinction of species to the denizens of a hot climate which had turned colder. It is not at all likely that Buffon meant this, as the passage quoted at p. 146 of this work will suffice to show. ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... transformations, of remoulding and steeping in new dyes. Matter-of-fact objects, clear-cut during the day, assume fantastic shapes; a bush may appear a crouching mountain cat; a rock may masquerade as a mastodon. This is an hour of uncertainties. And doubtings and questionings and uncertainties were other shadow shapes thronging the demesnes of two men's souls. Silence and dim dusk without, dim dusk ...
— The Desert Valley • Jackson Gregory
... bacteria and gigantic worms that formerly inhabited the earth. Such an aggregation of actual, living Silurian monsters, any one of which would make a man a fortune to-day, if it could be kept on ice and exhibited for one season only. You could take a full grown mastodon to-day, and with no calliope, no lithographs, no bearded lady, no clown with four pillows in his pantaloons and no iron-jawed woman, you could go across this continent and successfully compete with ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... the Philadelphia Institute expedition in the Bad Lands under Professor Cope, hunting mastodon bones, and I overheard him say, his own self, that any plantigrade circumflex vertebrate bacterium that hadn't wings and was uncertain was a reptile. Well, then, has this dog any wings? No. Is he a plantigrade circumflex vertebrate ...
— A Horse's Tale • Mark Twain
... Horsa; I am of the ancient heroes, even legendary to them. I have bearded and bitten the frozen seas, and, aforetime of that, ere ever the ice-ages came to be, I have dripped my shoulders in reindeer gore, slain the mastodon and the sabre-tooth, scratched the record of my prowess on the walls of deep- buried caves—ay, and suckled she-wolves side by side with my brother- cubs, the scars of whose fangs ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... moment on the probable condition of distinguished authors, lions of the loudest roar, if the number of autograph-hunters were to increase beyond what it is at present. Is it not to be feared that they will yet exterminate the whole race, that the great lion literary, like the mastodon, will become extinct? Or, perhaps, by taming him down to a mere producer of autographs, his habits will change so entirely that he will no longer be the same animal, no longer bear a comparison with the lion of the past. On the other ...
— The Lumley Autograph • Susan Fenimore Cooper
... a flash of light, I saw great Nature working out her plan; Through all her shapes, from mastodon to mite, Forever groping, testing, passing on To find at last the shape and ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume I. (of X.) • Various
... float the mighty ichthyosaurus, the megalosaurus, in company with the gigantic plesiosaurus! Upon whose sloping shores disport the enormous mastodon, the ...
— The Lost City • Joseph E. Badger, Jr.
... roughness of a Russian barin all the coarseness of a Dutch sailor." Such in brief suggestion was Peter I. of Russia, half-savage, half-sovereign, the strangest jumble of contradictions who has ever worn the Imperial purple—"a huge mastodon, whose moral perceptions were ...
— Love affairs of the Courts of Europe • Thornton Hall
... been out of London, but when he takes a holiday spends it in hanging about Tweedy's, and observing that unlovely place of business from the outside. The dust, if not the iron, of Tweedy's has entered into his soul; and Tweedy's young men know him as "the Mastodon." He is a thin, bald septuagenarian, with sloping shoulders, and a habit of regarding the pavement when he walks, so that he seems to steer his way by instinct rather than sight. In general he keeps silence while eating his chop; and on this occasion there was something unnatural in his utterance, ...
— Stories By English Authors: London • Various
... not reply. He did not know what to say. He glanced from face to face in the absent way of a man who has lost the power of thought and is seeking somewhere to find the thing that will start it going again. The face of Jim O'Brien, a Mastodon King and old-time comrade, caught his eyes. It was as a cue to him, seeming to rouse him to do what he would ...
— The Call of the Wild • Jack London
... atoms, and come face to face with the old puzzles of matter and mind. He should be able to trace in imagination the growth of stellar systems; the history of our own earth; the evolution of plant and animal life, from the first protoplasmic nuclei to the mammoth and mastodon; the emergence of man from brute hood into self-consciousness, his triumph over nature and the other animals, and his achievement of civilization. He should watch primitive man wrestling with problems as yet partly unsolved, see ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... the crockery, marched off in disgrace, and came back with a molasses-hogshead, or a wash-tub, or some such overgrown mastodon, to turn his ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... dead! If any ever really lived!" cried Cap, in a fury. "Heaven knows I am inclined to believe them to have been a fabulous race like that of the mastodon or the centaur! I certainly never saw a creature that deserved the name of man! The very first of your race was the meanest fellow that ever was heard of—ate the stolen apple and when found out laid one half of the blame on his wife and the other on his Maker—'The woman whom thou ...
— Capitola the Madcap • Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... side! This Captain Blake was a member of the Bristol Corporation, and a pleasant man, but his sword, worn by a short man, appeared prodigious!—Mr. C. said, "The sight of it was enough to set half a dozen poets scampering up Parnassus, as though hunted by a wild mastodon." ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... Ptush to our wild districts in search of a fresh hunting-ground for himself and his son, Prince Ptutt, brought about a very serious condition of affairs in respect to the mastodon, or what some persons refer to as the Antediluvians. This most distinguished personage, wearying of the affairs of state in his own land, gave over the reins of government for a while to his Grand Vizier, and on behalf of the Nimrodian Institution, ...
— The Autobiography of Methuselah • John Kendrick Bangs
... of Alexander's power, was a pretty little baton barely two feet long. Its staff was mastodon ivory, the paleontologists had determined. One end sported a solid ball of gold hardly as big as a fist; studded with rubies, but none set quite so close as to ...
— Zero Data • Charles Saphro
... in the British Museum, looking at the monstrous skeletons of the mastodon, megatherium and iguanodon, and conclude that all the great animals thirty feet long and eleven feet ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage
... pantechnicon went through them as a sword will go through a ghost, and Denry was still alive. The remainder of the journey was brief and violent, owing partly to a number of bags of cement, and partly to the propinquity of the canal basin. The pantechnicon jumped into the canal like a mastodon, ...
— The Card, A Story Of Adventure In The Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... tragedy which followed would have been worthy of the pen of any sporting and dramatic historian. I can only say that, being transacted in such objectionable proximity to myself, the thing was as impressive as any combat of mastodon and iguanodon could have been to ...
— Lords of the Housetops - Thirteen Cat Tales • Various
... and shyness; In vain the plutonic rocks send their old heat against my approach; In vain the mastodon retreats beneath his own powder'd bones; In vain objects stand leagues off, and assume manifold shapes; In vain the ocean settling in hollows, and ...
— Birds and Poets • John Burroughs
... little more to say of St. Louis, as the museum was the only public building we visited. The great curiosity there is the largest known specimen of the mastodon. It is almost entire from the tip of its nose to the tip of its tail, and measures ninety-six feet in length. We left St. Louis, and were glad to escape for a time at least out of a slave state. The "institution" was brought more prominently before us there than ...
— First Impressions of the New World - On Two Travellers from the Old in the Autumn of 1858 • Isabella Strange Trotter |
