"Primitive" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... very young science. We have learned something of primitive men through certain remains preserved and discovered by chance. A recent accident, a trench, a landslip, a drought may effect a new discovery any day. Who knows what is still under ground? The finds are already innumerable. But these ...
— History Of Ancient Civilization • Charles Seignobos
... and deep, her lips are parted as though I could crush them with an infinity of wonder and discovery. O God! It is love again, love that I thought was lost! They have often smiled upon me when I spoke of God, and muttered about my foolish, primitive superstitions. But they are gone, and I am left who believe in God, and surely there is purpose ...
— The Coming of the Ice • G. Peyton Wertenbaker
... did not invent prisons, but inherited them from an unmeasured past. It is a primitive device. The mother locks up her naughty child in the closet or ties its leg to the bed-post. Society does the same with its naughty children, though with one difference—the mother still loves her child. She, following the example ...
— The Subterranean Brotherhood • Julian Hawthorne
... which are previous to the accomplishment of a great man. His memory was large and tenacious, yet, by a curious felicity, chiefly susceptible of the finest impressions it received from the best authors he read, which it always preserved in their primitive strength and ...
— Lives of the Poets, Vol. 1 • Samuel Johnson
... candidate with the absolute majority is then elected. We propose to consider the different ways in which elimination might be made. We assume, in the first place, that each elector has cast an advance vote—i.e., that he has placed all the candidates in order of preference. The most primitive method is to eliminate at each successive count the candidate who has least first preferences. This is the method adopted in the Hare system, and we have already shown that it is very defective; in fact, it is no improvement at all. The eliminated candidate might be most ...
— Proportional Representation Applied To Party Government • T. R. Ashworth and H. P. C. Ashworth
... in the 2nd century; derived its name from an enthusiast in Phrygia named Montanus, who insisted on the permanency of the spiritual gifts vouchsafed to the primitive Church, and a return to the severe discipline of life ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... Selwyn, Wilberforce, and Wordsworth, Whittingham, Kerfoot, and Brown, in defence of the faith. It is with deep sorrow that we remember that the Church of Rome has separated herself from the teaching of the primitive Church by additions to the faith once delivered to the saints, and by claiming for its Bishop prerogatives which belong only to the Divine Head of the Church While we honor the devotion and zeal of her missionary heroes, and rejoice at the good works of multitudes ...
— Five Sermons • H.B. Whipple
... loam; some parts coated with a beautiful crystallization of salt, a quarter to half an inch thick. This seems to be more particularly the case below the Maricopa villages and toward the Rio Salado. The cotton, of which I procured specimens, though cultivated by the Indians in the most primitive manner, exhibited a texture not unlike the celebrated Sea Island cotton. Its fibre is exceedingly soft and silky, but not of the longest staple. Large tracts of land on the Gila and in other portions of this district, ...
— Memoir of the Proposed Territory of Arizona • Sylvester Mowry
... the argument was nought,) or their credulity in receiving such reasoning as Divine? Really, I fear there is some reason for admitting as true what Celsus maliciously says of the simplicity of the Primitive Christians, if Paul could with impunity feed his "spiritual babes" with such pap ...
— The Grounds of Christianity Examined by Comparing The New Testament with the Old • George Bethune English
... she was ascending the stairs along with Professor Braddock. At once he reflected there would be trouble, since he was in the house with Lucy, and lacked the necessary chaperon which Braddock's primitive Anglo-Saxon instincts ...
— The Green Mummy • Fergus Hume
... or rather with the hyaenas,—for there are no true wolves in Zululand,—the author can only say that they seem to him of a sort that might well have been mythically connected with the names of those heroes. Similar beliefs and traditions are common in the records of primitive peoples. The club "Watcher of the Fords," or, to give its Zulu name, U-nothlola-mazibuko, is an historical weapon, chronicled by Bishop Callaway. It was once owned by a certain Undhlebekazizwa. He was an arbitrary person, for "no matter what was discussed in our village, he would bring it to a conclusion ...
— Nada the Lily • H. Rider Haggard
... simple a mode of expression. That an increase of the quantity of money raises prices, and a diminution lowers them, is the most elementary proposition in the theory of currency, and without it we should have no key to any of the others. In any state of things, however, except the simple and primitive one which we have supposed, the proposition is only true, ...
— Principles Of Political Economy • John Stuart Mill
... perfervid imaginations. The electorate, the masses, are not so swayed. The Canadian people, essentially British no matter what their origins, are mainly, like all English-speaking democracies, of straight, primitive, uncomplicated emotions, and of essentially conservative mind. They "plug" along. The hour and the day hold their attention. It is given to the necessary private works of the moment, as to the necessary public conduct of ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... like those of our own well-known song, are known to every Chinese school-boy, and with hundreds, even thousands, of other similar songs, which used to be daily quoted as precedents by the statesmen of that primitive period in their political intercourse with each other, were later pruned, purified, and collated by Confucius, until at last they received classical rank in the "Book of Odes" or the "Classic of Poetry," containing a mere tenth ...
— Ancient China Simplified • Edward Harper Parker
... of the Upanishads, that is about 600 B.C., we trace three clear currents in Indian religion which have persisted until the present day. The first is ritual. This became extraordinarily complicated but retained its primitive and magical character. The object of an ancient Indian sacrifice was partly to please the gods but still more to coerce them by certain acts and formulae[6]. Secondly all Hindus lay stress on asceticism and self-mortification, as a means of purifying ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... is—in a woman's eyes," she admitted fearlessly. "We are all more or less primitive and—and, well, 'Stone-Agey,' let us say, in the last analysis; at least, women are." And then: "You don't know ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde
... same name; so now, here, the ways of these two men, and the things they had in the house, were all very nearly the same as in Europe. It was not at all like going to China or Japan, where everything that one sees is strange. I was, indeed, at once struck with the primitive character of their appliances, for they seemed to be some five or six hundred years behind Europe in their inventions; but this is the case in ...
— Erewhon • Samuel Butler
... most drastic instances of a woman's devotion to husband, and mother love for children driving her back to the forest of her ancestors, and making her sacrifice all that her race had gained for her during thousands of years. Thus the most natural and primitive instincts of the human race will prevail against all our arts, science ...
— Skookum Chuck Fables - Bits of History, Through the Microscope • Skookum Chuck (pseud for R.D. Cumming)
... I will call the HAPLOID, must have been the primitive generation in all organisms; it might also persist as the only generation. Every sexual differentiation in organisms, which occurred in the course of phylogenetic development, was followed by fertilisation and therefore by the creation of a diploid ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... a block of firwood, was turning merrily under a jet of water carefully conducted to it from a neighbouring fall. David went down on hands and knees to examine it. He made some little alteration in the primitive machinery of it, his fingers touching it lightly and neatly, and then, delighted with the success of it, he called Louie to ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... he leaves the sweet-potato for his Chinese and his Moro neighbors. On every street the sour-smelling copra (cocoanut meat) can be seen spread out upon a mat to dry. The cattle are fed on the long rice-grass (the palay), or on the unhusked rice (sacate). A primitive trades-unionism exists among the Filipinos; every trade, such as the carpenters' or the musicians', having its respective maestro, with whom arrangements for the labor and the pay are always made. The native jewelers are very clever, fashioning the silver pesos into ornaments for bolos, ...
— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert
... we went down to the beach to bathe. The trees along the shore were occupied by immense crowds of exemplary sea-fowl, whose regular and primitive habits of life had sent them to roost at this early hour. Notwithstanding their webbed feet, they managed to perch securely among the branches, many of which were so heavily freighted, that they bent almost to ...
— The Island Home • Richard Archer
... paused. Here he says that we must wait, that no revelation can reveal what we are incapable of understanding, that only by the slow process of evolution can we attain to any understanding of the mystery we have sought to solve by our futile and primitive hypotheses. ...
— The Wonder • J. D. Beresford
... a fatalist impossibility, for the laws of arithmetic have preceded her, and there still remains, as it were, an atmosphere of proud rigidity. Melancholy or passionate she preserves the reflected lines of a primitive rusticity, which clings to the homotones in despite of their artificial origin." But all this will be in the days to come when the flat keyboard will be superseded by a Janko many-banked clavier contrivance, when Mr. Krehbiel's oriental srootis are in use and Mr. Apthorp's nullitonic ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... explained to them. And this astonishment, although it may seem so, is not a point that can be neglected, for it proves that, in the first and simple state of our knowledge, we believe we directly perceive objects as they are. Now, if we, the cultured class, have, for the most part,[5] abandoned this primitive belief, we have only done so on certain implicit conditions, of which we must take cognisance. This is what I shall now demonstrate as ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... declaration to the collected representation of Europe and America, have affected some degree of moderation, or, at least, have observed a guarded silence with regard to their temper and their views. No such thing: they were in haste to declare the principles which are spun into the primitive staple of their frame. They were afraid that a moment's doubt should exist about them. In their very infancy they were in haste to put their hand on their infernal altar, and to swear the same immortal hatred to England which was ...
— The Works of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Vol. VI. (of 12) • Edmund Burke
... choice anecdotes of scandal, for in those primitive times the simple folk were either too stupid or too good-natured to pull each other's characters to pieces; 20 nor can I furnish any whimsical anecdotes of brag—how one lady cheated or another bounced into ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell
... the country were, besides its inaccessibility, its picturesqueness and its productiveness. The former of these two qualities seems to have possessed but little attraction for man in his primitive condition. Beauties of nature are rarely sung of by early poets; and it appears to require an educated eye to appreciate them. But productiveness is a quality the advantages of which can be perceived by all. The eyes ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... "the cruel sea." No doubt the hollowed tree trunk, and the coracle of osiers and skins, had long before this made their trial trips on river and lake. Then came the first ventures in the shallow sea-margins, and at last a primitive naval architect built up planked bulwarks round his hollowed tree trunk, and stiffened them with ribs of bent branches, and the first ship ...
— Famous Sea Fights - From Salamis to Tsu-Shima • John Richard Hale
... rapid travelling down the Elk River brought our party into the Athabasca Lake—sometimes called the "Lake of the Hills." This is another of those great bodies of fresh water that lie between the primitive rocks of the "Barren Grounds," and the more fertile limestone deposit upon the west. It is nearly two hundred miles long from west to east, and it is only fifteen miles in breadth, but in some places it is so narrow and full of islands that it looks more like ...
— Popular Adventure Tales • Mayne Reid
... heard the noise of a primitive conveyance behind him. It was a telega. Curiously primitive, the telega is four-wheeled, with two planks thrown crudely across the axle-trees. Rouletabille gave the man who was seated in it thee roubles, and jumped into the planks beside him, ...
— The Secret of the Night • Gaston Leroux
... romantic part of the Bay of Quinte, called the "Long Reach," at the head of which stands the beautiful town of Picton, I will give you a few reminiscences of Northport. It is a most quiet and primitive village, and one might ...
— Life in the Clearings versus the Bush • Susanna Moodie
... In their primitive state, they are perfectly white; they have six little feet, three on each side, and a small head, in which I could perceive no eyes, after a minute investigation with a microscope. In this state they supply the ...
— Observations Upon The Windward Coast Of Africa • Joseph Corry
... instinct of possession was rising in Reardon. Esther suddenly meant more to him than she had in all this time when she had been meaning a great deal. Alston Choate had power to rouse this primitive rage in him, but he could always conquer it by reasoning that Alston wouldn't take her if he could get her. There were too many inherited reserves in Alston. Actually, Reardon thought, Alston wouldn't really want a ...
— The Prisoner • Alice Brown
... insists that there is plenty of room on his knee. Off we go! It is a long third-class coach, and already five or six musical instruments have struck up. We smoke and sing at the same time; we quarrel and make love—the latter in somewhat primitive fashion; we roll about with the rolling of the train; we nod into ...
— The Nether World • George Gissing
... perfect apse; and occupying therein, during the course of the service, very nearly the same position which the figure of Christ does in that of the Cathedral of Pisa. But I nevertheless believe that the Scotch congregation are perfectly right, and have restored the real arrangement of the primitive churches. The Chevalier Bunsen informed me very lately, that, in all the early basilicas he has examined, the lateral pulpits are of more recent date than the rest of the building; that he knows of none placed in the position which they now occupy, both in the basilicas ...
— The Stones of Venice, Volume II (of 3) • John Ruskin
... upon to play the missionary of science, knowing as he did that all such efforts would be but wasted breath. This want of intellectual sympathy did not prevent the best understanding from existing between himself and these rangers of the desert. The primitive life which he led amongst them for so many months, the kindly hospitality which he invariably experienced at their hands during the excursions made and the visits he paid to different Bedouin tribes in the intervals of recreation which he was compelled to allow ...
— Chaldea - From the Earliest Times to the Rise of Assyria • Znade A. Ragozin
... Jules exults in the facility with which the artist, in any realm of art, manipulates his implements and his materials. His especial enthusiasm is for marble, which he has come to regard as an original, primitive substance, containing in itself all other substances. It may be made to seem as light and clear as air, as brilliant as diamonds. Sometimes as his chisel strikes, it seems to be metal. Again it seems to be actual flesh and blood. At moments ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... purple violets peeped up through the overgrown grass, and a rusty tin can, memento of some prehistoric fisherman perhaps, lay near the shore. Not even the geometrical perfection of the island detracted from its primitive and rugged beauty. ...
— Pee-Wee Harris Adrift • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... in an almost dormant state until the next season, rarely receiving any news from the great outer world, or troubling their heads about the affairs which concern the rest of mankind. Those whom we met had in all probability not seen a stranger for a year. They are an honest, primitive people, decently but very coarsely clad in rough woolen garments manufactured by themselves, and shaped much in the European style. On their feet they wear moccasins made of sheepskin. Whenever we met these pack-trains in any convenient place, the drivers ...
— The Land of Thor • J. Ross Browne
... the wheel of which they had tied a red cotton handkerchief, and counting off its revolutions. They built a dugout in the red hillside, one of those cave dwellings whose inmates so often reverted to primitive conditions. Their water they got from the lagoons where the buffalo drank, and their slender stock of provisions was always at the mercy of bands of roving Indians. For thirty years my aunt had not been further than fifty miles ...
— The Troll Garden and Selected Stories • Willa Cather
... threw a few sticks upon the hot coals. As the flames leaped up they illuminated the ground for some distance around. They brought into clear relief the line made by the Indian upon the sand. This primitive symbol arrested his attention, and a sudden fancy entered his mind. Picking up a small stick, he wrote in the sand on the south of the line the word "King," and on the north "Jean." These he compared ...
— The King's Arrow - A Tale of the United Empire Loyalists • H. A. Cody
... belief, more especially those which coincided with the Greco-Roman superstitions of the time, such as the literal prediction of future events, the meaning of dreams, the significance of omens.[2] These ideas, handed down from primitive Israel, had lived on among the masses of the people, though discarded by the learned teachers, and Josephus, finding them in vogue among his masters, readily professed acceptance ...
— Josephus • Norman Bentwich
... history and its singular scenic beauty, appeared to have little influence on his genius. In fact, locality seemed not to color the work of his imagination. His closing years were spent in Somoa, a South Sea Island paradise, in which he reveled in the primitive conditions of life and recovered much of his early zest in physical life. Yet his best work in those last years dealt not with the palm-fringed atolls of the Pacific, but with the bleak Scotch moors which refused him a home. In his letters he dwells on the curious obsession ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... exterior I am a Child of Nature. I love the simple, the primitive. I would live as a Wild Thing if I ...
— The Dude Wrangler • Caroline Lockhart
... The rather primitive arrangements of the background provided for the play called for a girl to stand behind each tree in the formal garden scene as support. In her admiration of Betty, Bobby had unconsciously edged after her to keep her in sight, and the startled audience saw the heroine being persistently ...
— Betty Gordon at Boarding School - The Treasure of Indian Chasm • Alice Emerson
... Platte under a jury rudder. We talked of wrecks, of short rations and of heroism—or at least of what the newspapers would have called heroism at sea—a manifestation of virtues quite different from the heroism of primitive times. And now and then falling silent all together we gazed at ...
— Falk • Joseph Conrad
... was so thoroughly a colonist, and had so little idea of anything but primitive hospitality, that he had had no notion of writing beforehand to announce his coming, and accident had delayed the letters by which Norman and Meta had announced their decision of sending home their eldest ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... wife was so eminently one of a species that she fitted into all the generalizations on the sex. But he had regarded this generalization as merely typical of the triumph of tradition over experience. Maternity was no doubt the supreme function of primitive woman, the one end to which her whole organism tended; but the law of increasing complexity had operated in both sexes, and he had not seriously supposed that, outside the world of Christmas fiction and anecdotic art, such truisms had any special hold ...
— The Descent of Man and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... The emergence from the primitive condition was slow because the few of us who did show our heads were beaten down and told we did not know. It has required many college women (from some 50,000 college women graduates) to build and run houses and families successfully, here one and there another, until the barrel of ...
— Euthenics, the science of controllable environment • Ellen H. Richards
... distance,—if he could push, he could knock. Perhaps a rather larger collection of such instances is desirable, still, these cases illustrate our theory. That theory certainly does drive the cold calm psychical researcher back upon the primitive explanation: 'A ghaist's a ghaist for a' that!' We must come to this, we must relapse into savage and superstitious psychology, if once we admit a 'phantasmogenetic agency.' But science is in quest of ...
— Cock Lane and Common-Sense • Andrew Lang
... glance at him reveals the origin of his sobriquet. Amid the rawness and roughness of everything in the bush, its primitive society included, the figure of Dandy Jack stands out in strong relief. Contrasted with the unkempt, slovenly, ragged, and dirty bushmen with whom he mostly comes in contact, he is the very essence of foppery. ...
— Brighter Britain! (Volume 1 of 2) - or Settler and Maori in Northern New Zealand • William Delisle Hay
... prejudice. Indeed, only this week, a former pastor of that church, Rev. J.B. Silcox, now of the East Oakland Church, told me that a similar anniversary held in that same Tabernacle a year ago, had melted down all prejudice. Indeed, it is now, as in the days of the primitive Christians: wheresoever it is seen that people of the despised classes have received the Holy Ghost, that is the end of caste distinction. "Forasmuch, then, as God gave them the like gift as He did unto us who had believed ...
— The American Missionary — Vol. 44, No. 4, April, 1890 • Various
... fashionable disciples seeking to reach heaven on "flowery beds of ease," and who embrace religion with the understanding that they are to be allowed no inconsiderable latitude. This is doubtless the reason why Jansenism, which wished to renew the austere principles of primitive Christianity, obtained no general influence at the Parisian court. The monkish precepts of early Christianity could only suit men of the temper of those who first embraced it. They were adapted for persons who were abject, bilious, and discontented, who, deprived of luxury, power, ...
— Letters to Eugenia - or, a Preservative Against Religious Prejudices • Baron d'Holbach
... giovani di tromba marina is a name given to those youths who go trumpeting about everywhere the favours accorded them by women; but the tromba marina is a stringed (not a wind) instrument, a sort of primitive ...
— The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio • Giovanni Boccaccio
... Greek revolt of 1770.[26] He himself had grown up amidst vivid echoes of the Cretan Rebellion of 1866. While contact with the frock-coated world of {134} modern Europe during the latter period of his career had clothed him with a statesman's proper external circumstance, it had not eradicated the primitive instincts implanted in him by heredity and fostered by environment. Sedition was in his blood, which perhaps explains the flair—the almost uncanny flair—he had ...
— Greece and the Allies 1914-1922 • G. F. Abbott
... and, until they become Christianized, we cannot hope or wish that they should forget the only faith which they have to raise them above the earth they tread. Their religion is corrupted to the core; but in its primitive type, after which its worshippers will sometimes even yet aspire, it is not destitute of a high spirituality that would seek to assimilate and unite men's souls to the Great Being, whom they reverence as the maker, maintainer, and changer ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - April 1843 • Various
... beside them. The fire, flashing on the livid face of Morales, who, crouched in his blanket, looked like a tiger about to spring—the soldiers, some warming their hands at the blaze, some lying rolled in their sarapes, and others devouring their primitive supper—together with the Indian women bringing them hot tortillas from the huts—the whole had a curious and picturesque effect. As for us, we also rolled ourselves in our mangas, and lay down in our barn, but ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... last twenty-four hours had been too rapid and unexpected for him to preserve his usual clear feeling of mastery; and he had, besides, to reckon with the first complete surprise of his senses. His way of life had excluded him from all contact with the subtler feminine influences, and the primitive side of the relation left his imagination untouched. He was therefore the more assailable by those refined forms of the ancient spell that lurk in delicacy of feeling interpreted by loveliness of face. By his own choice he had cut himself off from all ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... and had begun to stare. She half apprehended that fact, but she was in the presence of the irresistible. In the presence of the irresistible the conventional is a crazy structure swept away with very little creaking of its timbers on the flood. When we feel its power we are immediately primitive creatures, flying anywhere in space, indifferent to nakedness. And after trimming ourselves for it, the sage asks your permission to add, it will be the thing we are most certain some day to feel. Had not she trimmed ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... and the Prejudice and Ignorance of the Unlearned on the other. And this is what is plainly confess'd by the Practice of most contending Parties amongst the Professors of Christianity; who constantly make their Appeals to the earliest Writers of the Primitive Christian Church, and use all means to bring them over to their own Side; which is an evident Concession that they value their Authority, and look upon them as the most competent Judges of their Controversies. Now, if ...
— The Improvement of Human Reason - Exhibited in the Life of Hai Ebn Yokdhan • Ibn Tufail
... for purposes of communication with the Dipsey. The necessary wire would have been too heavy, and his messages could not have been kept secret. In fact, this telegraphic communication between Sardis and the submarine vessel was almost as primitive as that in use in the latter ...
— The Great Stone of Sardis • Frank R. Stockton
... [Footnote: Internat. Zeitschr, f. Arztl. Psychoanalyse, 1913. Translated and republished by Dr. Ernest Jones in S. Ferenczi, Contributions to Psychoanalysis, Ch. VIII, Stages in the Development of the Sense of Reality.] the child more easily than the adult, the primitive or arrested mind more readily than the mature. As it first appears in the child, consciousness seems to be an unmanageable mixture of sensations. The child has no sense of time, and almost none of space, it reaches for the chandelier with the ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... lust of the flesh, the lust of the eye, and the pride of life; become a substitute for the Creator, in his search, for happiness. As a consequence, the unregenerate man knows but "in part" respecting the primitive and constitutional necessities of his being. He is feeding them with a false and unhealthy food, and in this way manages to stifle for a season their true and deep cravings. But this cannot last forever. When a man dies and goes ...
— Sermons to the Natural Man • William G.T. Shedd
... Whitman may be there is a primitive elemental force about him. He is so full of hardiness and of the joy of life. He looks at all nature in the delighted, admiring way in which the old Greeks and the primitive poets did. He exults so in the red blood ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather
... from the primitive Ape, He first dropped his tail, and took on a new shape. But Cricketing Man, born to trundle and swipe, Reversion displays to the earlier type; For a cricketing team, when beginning to fail, Always loses its "form," and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 103, August 13, 1892 • Various
... The river, very wide at that point, was shaded by willow-trees to some extent along its banks, immediately in front of the Academy of St. Mark's, and beyond it to a considerable distance on either hand. The town itself was an old-fashioned, primitive village rather than burgh, quaintly built, and little adorned by modern taste or improvement; but the air was fine and elastic, the water unexceptionable, and bathing and boating were among our privileged amusements. Among ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... kip to the dollar in a matter of weeks. Now that the currency has stabilized, however, the government seems content to let the current situation persist, despite limited government revenue and foreign exchange reserves. A landlocked country with a primitive infrastructure, Laos has no railroads, a rudimentary road system, and limited external and internal telecommunications. Electricity is available in only a few urban areas. Subsistence agriculture accounts for half of GDP and provides 80% of total employment. For the ...
— The 2001 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... 539; Crespin, ubi supra, fols. 100, 101.—Historians have noticed the remarkable points of similarity this report presents to that made by the younger Pliny to the Emperor Trajan regarding the primitive Christians. Plinii Epistolae, x. ...
— The Rise of the Hugenots, Vol. 1 (of 2) • Henry Martyn Baird
... ejaculations of delight, fear, or wonder of primitive man at the phenomena of nature—in his imaginative efforts to explain the mystery of power behind light, darkness, the seasons, storm, calm—lie the beginnings of poetry; and religion grows from the same seed—the desire of the finite to lay hold on the ...
— The World's Best Poetry — Volume 10 • Various
... American Indian. The brilliant and strikingly designed Navajo blankets may be used for both rugs and couch covers, or hung up as wall-ornaments. Moqui basketware serves equally well for useful purposes, such as scrap-baskets, and for ornamentation. The pottery of the Pueblo Indians, being naive and primitive in design, is much more intimate and therefore appropriate than the Japanese bric-a-brac which ...
— Practical Suggestions for Mother and Housewife • Marion Mills Miller
... the great rug stretched over the doorway, and, led by their hunger, the prisoners all sat down round the dish "like this," to use Mrs Chumley's words—this being tailor fashion, or cross-legged a la Turcque; and then, in very primitive fashion, the supper of poor stringy fowl and ill-cooked ...
— Yussuf the Guide - The Mountain Bandits; Strange Adventure in Asia Minor • George Manville Fenn
... This attenuated appearance of the rural holdings strikes the stranger forcibly as he travels through the province of Quebec even at this day, and denotes a condition which prevailed in England also in the most primitive days of agriculture. The system had some justification, however, in the necessity which each peasant felt of having access to the St. Lawrence, the most convenient, and, for nearly a hundred years, the only highway to the city of Quebec. Moreover, it enabled the ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... the Irish ballads relating to Fion (the Fingal of MacPherson), there occurs, as in the primitive poetry of most nations, a cycle of heroes, each of whom has some distinguishing attribute; upon these qualities, and the adventures of those possessing them, many proverbs are formed, which are still current ...
— The Proverbs of Scotland • Alexander Hislop
... beloved, men of learning, goodness, genius, and charm. But could they resist the truth that lucidity would have been fatal to it? The movers of all those questions about apostolical succession, church patristic authority, primitive usage, postures, vestments—questions so passionately debated, and on which he would not seek to cast ridicule—did not they all begin by taking for granted something no longer possible or receivable, build on this basis as if it were indubitably solid, and fail to see that their basis not ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 360, November 25, 1882 • Various
... the direction of her gaze. At the corner of the alley there was a shop wherein a man sat rounding a stick of wood with a primitive lathe. He made the lathe revolve by working a stringed bow with his right hand, while his left hand worked the chisel and his right foot directed it. His limbs were making three different motions with ...
— The Broken Road • A. E. W. Mason
... with primitive manners some very extraordinary cases of bucolic love at first sight are recorded—love that did not follow the law of pounds, shillings, and pence. At an ordination in Hopkinton, New Hampshire, a country bumpkin ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... middle ages, has become very marked in certain subjects, and has given rise to a variety in which this defect has become hereditary. Such is the origin of the breed of bulldogs. The latter were originally as large as the mastiffs. Carried to Spain under Philip II., they have there preserved their primitive characters, but the bulldogs remaining in England have continued to degenerate, so that now the largest are scarcely half the size of the Spanish bulldog, and the small ones attain hardly the size ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 803, May 23, 1891 • Various
... as the "Knights of the Teutonic Order." While Southern and Western Germany was passing, with the rest of Western Europe, through the transition between mediaeval and modern Europe, what is now North-Eastern Germany was still in a wholly primitive stage of development, and the Knights of the Teutonic Order, with crusading fervour, were spreading Christianity and German "culture" by force of arms, converting or repelling the Slavonic population and settling German colonists in the territory thus ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,
... our desires, to encounter the fatigues and dangers of such a voyage, which (free from all motives for personal ambition, for which in our situation there is very little temptation) nothing but a zeal almost primitive would lead him to do, much the more endears him to us. He is indeed a tried servant of the Church, and bears about him in a degree the marks of a Confessor." [Footnote: That Leaming was the first choice of the clergy at Woodbury has been questioned. But three things ...
— Report Of Commemorative Services With The Sermons And Addresses At The Seabury Centenary, 1883-1885. • Diocese Of Connecticut
... the West Point, which also went into service on the Charleston and Hamburg Railroad, and then built for the newly finished Mohawk and Hudson (the first link in the New York Central Lines) the historic De Witt Clinton. This primitive locomotive and the cars it drew may be seen today in the Grand Central Station ...
— The Age of Invention - A Chronicle of Mechanical Conquest, Book, 37 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Holland Thompson
... short epistles from the pen of Gen. WASHINGTON, and we will close this chapter. These we take from the "Papers of Washington by Sparks." George Washington, justly styled the "father of his country," was a great and good man—a primitive Know Nothing—a praying Protestant—and withal, the man who was "first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen." Here are the ...
— Americanism Contrasted with Foreignism, Romanism, and Bogus Democracy in the Light of Reason, History, and Scripture; • William Gannaway Brownlow
... by going down to Jamestown, twice a year, to buy such necessaries of civilized life as the wilderness could not furnish, and to hear news from any ship that might have come in from the old country; and above all, to take a holiday among civilized pleasure-seekers—for such existed even in the primitive settlement ...
— Cruel As The Grave • Mrs. Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... Poverty, sharing her sour milk and her rough caresses! These thoughts passed through Hemerlingue's mind like a flash of lightning. Almost instinctively he let his heavy hand fall into the one which the Nabob was holding out to him. Something of the primitive animal was roused in them, something stronger than their enmity, and these two men, each of whom for ten years had been trying to bring the other to ruin and disgrace, fell to ...
— The Nabob • Alphonse Daudet
... spoke, two men, holding in their hands hollow bamboos with coals of fire concealed within, which they kept aglow meanwhile by waving them up and down rapidly in the air, laid these primitive matches to the base of a great pyramidal pile of wood and palm-leaves, ready prepared beforehand in the yard of the temple. In a second, the dry fuel, catching the sparks instantly, blazed up to heaven with a wild outburst of ...
— The Great Taboo • Grant Allen
... canal-taverns established a wide reputation for good cheer, and boatmen contrived to be overtaken by night in their vicinity. Sometimes fifteen or twenty boats would be detained at one of these favorite resorts, and a jolly crowd fraternized in the primitive bar-room. The temperance sentiment had not yet taken a firm hold in New England. "Flip" was the high-toned beverage of those days; but "black-strap," a compound of rum and molasses, sold at three cents a glass, was the particular "vanity" of ...
— The Bay State Monthly, Volume II. No. 2, November, 1884 • Various
... music, he thought it would be only a sinless deviation if he did, so he goes likewise. The captain, therefore, takes an early dinner with us at five o'clock. Alas! to what changes am I doomed,—that was the tea hour at the manse of Garnock. Oh, when shall I revisit the primitive simplicities of my native scenes again! But neither time nor distance, my dear Bell, can change the affection with which I ...
— The Ayrshire Legatees • John Galt
... innocently within the mind, it would appear. The dash is a haven reached that would not be greeted if it stood out in words. Could we live without ourselves letting our animal do our thinking for us legibly? We live with ourselves agreeably so long as his projects are phrased in his primitive tongue, even though we have clearly apprehended what he means, and though we sufficiently well understand the whither of our destination under his guidance. No counsel can be saner than that the heart ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... "Primitive people are inured to hardships, and besides, they have methods of their own. They can make fire—" "So can I," retorted Tish. "Any fool can make a fire with a rubbing-stick. It's been done ...
— Tish, The Chronicle of Her Escapades and Excursions • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... of all those who have devoted their attention to the task has been to reduce the weight of the Umbrella without, at the same time, diminishing its strength. In its primitive form the ribs were formed of whalebone, which possessed very grave inconveniences; in the first place, it was cumbersome to a degree, lost its elasticity after any continuous exposure to rain, and if dried without very great care, was extremely liable to crack. In the ...
— Umbrellas and their History • William Sangster
... all the dry and sandy places through which it passed. In some of the arid valleys they dug great pits twenty feet deep and more than an acre in extent, and, after carefully preparing the soil, planted grain or vegetables. Their method of ploughing was primitive indeed. Six or eight men were attached by ropes to a strong stake, to which was fastened a horizontal piece of wood upon which the ploughman might set his foot to force the sharp point into the earth as it was dragged along, ...
— The Red True Story Book • Various
... thus organised on primitive and Christian lines was to be a spectacle and an example to the world. Selwyn did not read his Bible or his Fathers with the interest of a mere student. In the background of his thought lay the Socialist and Chartist movement, which ...
— A History of the English Church in New Zealand • Henry Thomas Purchas
... dining, which exactly suits us. It is a continental fashion which we never cease commending. Then at six we have coffee, and rolls of milk, made of milk, I mean, and at nine our supper (call it supper, if you please) of roast chestnuts and grapes. So you see how primitive we are, and how I forget to praise the eggs at breakfast. The worst of Pisa is, or would be to some persons, that, socially speaking, it has its dullnesses; it is not lively like Florence, not in that way. But we do not want society, we shun ...
— A Letter Book - Selected with an Introduction on the History and Art of Letter-Writing • George Saintsbury
... solid, glutinous masses, of which his common saying is, "Man eat dis, he no die,"—which a facetious traveller who was obliged to subsist on it interpreted to mean, "Dis no kill you, nothing will." In short, it requires the stomach of a wild animal or of a savage to digest this primitive form of bread, and of course more or less attention in all civilized modes of bread-making is given to producing lightness. By lightness is meant simply that the particles are to be separated from each other by little holes or air-cells, and all the different ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 86, December, 1864 • Various
... companion's questions. Both were gay and light-hearted. On such occasions men lose the superficial, worldly distinctions; they become human beings working together for a common end. Simpson, the employer, and Defago the employed, among these primitive forces, were simply—two men, the "guider" and the "guided." Superior knowledge, of course, assumed control, and the younger man fell without a second thought into the quasi-subordinate position. He never dreamed of objecting when Defago dropped the "Mr.," and addressed ...
— The Wendigo • Algernon Blackwood
... astonished and shocked at the habits of the people, in going about without clothes, and in bathing in public and at their house doors, they passed a law prohibiting these customs in towns. In the country, however, the more primitive customs are still in force, and every dwelling has its half-open bath-house, whilst the people do as they like ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey
... we cannot be both idle and at ease. An inner voice tells us we are in the wrong if we are idle. If man could find a state in which he felt that though idle he was fulfilling his duty, he would have found one of the conditions of man's primitive blessedness. And such a state of obligatory and irreproachable idleness is the lot of a whole class—the military. The chief attraction of military service has consisted and will consist in this compulsory ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... hips defiantly. And Janet, gazing after her, grew hot with indignation and apprehension. Her relations with Ditmar were suspected, after all, made the subject of the kind of comment indulged in, sotto voce, by Lottie Myers and her friends at the luncheon hour. She felt a mad, primitive desire to run after the girl, to spring upon and strangle her and compel her to speak what was in her mind and then retract it; and the motor impulse, inhibited, caused a sensation of sickness, of unhappiness and degradation as ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... paltriness it seemed to him he could not endure. And a feverish little flame of impatience began to glow within him that was not to be extinguished for many months. However when, pick in hand, he actually began with the others to break the road, a sudden elation swept over him. After all, primitive as this work might be, it was empire building of the most fundamental sort. And, in spite of his anxieties and impatience, Roger did his share of the road ...
— The Forbidden Trail • Honore Willsie
... Thomas Seccombe, speaks of his 'genuine lyric fire, a poetic energy, and above all an intensity remote from his contemporaries and suggestive (as Cimabue in his antique and primitive manner is suggestive of Giotto and Angelico) of Shelley ...
— The Rowley Poems • Thomas Chatterton
... are apt to have strange effects on the traveller. Perhaps it is the blood-mist that hangs always over the Balkan plains and glens which gets into the head and intoxicates one: perhaps it is the call to the wild in us from the primitive human nature of the Balkan peoples. Whatever the reason, it is a common thing for the unemotional English traveller to go to the Balkans as a tourist and return as a passionate enthusiast for some Balkan Peninsula nationality. ...
— Bulgaria • Frank Fox
... and sanctified air.—Warm devotions is no equivocal mark of warm passions; besides, I know it is a fact, (of which I have proofs in hand, which I will tell you by word of mouth) that our learned and holy prude is exceedingly disposed to use the means, supposed in the primitive command, let what will come of the end. The curate indeed is very filthy.—Such a red, spungy (sic), warty nose! Such a squint!—In short, he is ugly beyond expression; and, what ought naturally to render him peculiarly ...
— Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M—y W—y M—e • Lady Mary Wortley Montague
... authority of the priest. The wives of many rich bankers have tried to do something to improve the condition of Hebrew women by founding aid societies, primary schools, and normal schools. The Bulgarian women of the country enjoy an agricultural and pastoral life, and those of the city are simple and primitive in their habits and customs. But little has been done for woman's instruction, though some worthy attempts have been made to establish schools. The hope of the regeneration of the Oriental woman lies in the influence of Greek civilization. The emancipation of the ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... a 'prentice, my boy, in the primitive stage, And you itch, like a boy, to confess: When you know a bit more of the arts of the age You will probably talk a ...
— The Battle of the Bays • Owen Seaman
... he is determined, Pa," she answered. "But perhaps Mr. Brice would like to see a little of the place before he goes. It is very primitive," she explained, "not much like yours in ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... distance from the open space, but could see and understand, observing this action, raised a loud and unanimous cheering, which continued for some time after Mr. Adams had mastered the difficulty.] And in performing this act, I call upon you to join me in fervent supplication to Him from whom that primitive injunction came, that he would follow with his blessing, this joint effort of our great community, to perform his will in the subjugation of the earth for the improvement of the condition of man—that he would make it one of his chosen instruments for the preservation, ...
— Life and Public Services of John Quincy Adams - Sixth President of the Unied States • William H. Seward
... the ego is paramount, and all things are described, much more largely than among cultured peoples, with reference to the describer and the position which he occupies—Self and Here, and, if need be, Now and Thus, are the fundamental elements of primitive conception and description, and these elements are implied and exemplified, rather than expressed, in thought and utterance. Accordingly there is a notable paucity in names, especially for themselves, among the Indian tribes, ...
— The Siouan Indians • W. J. McGee
... in blue nankeen trimmed with black plush, sword-belts of leather with silver buckles, coats gayly braided, and silk caps edged with fur and three ribbons fluttering behind. Brown-skinned Afghans, too, might have been seen. Arabs, having the primitive type of the beautiful Semitic races; and Turcomans, with eyes which looked as if they had lost the pupil,—all enrolled under the Emir's flag, the flag of incendiaries ...
— Michael Strogoff - or, The Courier of the Czar • Jules Verne
... in this legend of a primitive, superstitious people, from an ethnological view of its details, than would be suspected at first. The story of the sacrifice and the medicine-man wrapping himself in the bloody hide of the buffalo, the use of the pine as fuel, and the prostration of the multitude, while communion ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... brilliant as our polar star, above the clouds which now surround it. It would subsist in all its power, if it were exercised by men who comprehended the holy duties it imposed on them. Everything connected with this primitive law, with this noble image of patriarchal government, would yet exist, if each member of the great social family would contemplate from a just point of view his own condition, and carry out the consequences ...
— International Miscellany of Literature, Art and Science, Vol. 1, - No. 3, Oct. 1, 1850 • Various
... of Comparative Ethnology, or through an investigation into the customs, traditions, and mythoses of extant races in the various stages of development, have been discovered the beginnings of the religious idea and the mental qualities which among primitive races prompted worship, so, also, through extinct tongues and the symbolism used in religious rites and ceremonies, many of the processes have been unearthed whereby the original and beautiful conceptions of the Deity, and the worship inspired by the operations ...
— The God-Idea of the Ancients - or Sex in Religion • Eliza Burt Gamble
... Primitive man's struggle for existence was so very severe that his limited sagacity was fully occupied in obtaining food and shelter; many thousands of years must have passed away before he evolved any idea of weapons other than stones and clubs. When he arrived at a psychical acuteness that ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... Church, that the use of Exorcisme, (that is to say, of ejection of Devills by Conjuration) is thereupon built; and (though rarely and faintly practised) is not yet totally given over. That there were many Daemoniaques in the Primitive Church, and few Mad-men, and other such singular diseases; whereas in these times we hear of, and see many Mad-men, and few Daemoniaques, proceeds not from the change of Nature; but of Names. But ...
— Leviathan • Thomas Hobbes
... admiration may be here, and our hearts elsewhere. And so from all this glory and splendor I turn back to the old homestead, amid the high mountain valleys of Africa; to the primitive, simple shepherd-life; to my beloved mother, to you and to all our dear ones. This gorgeous, gilded room fades away, and I see the leaning hills, the trickling streams, the deep gorges where our woolly thousands graze; and I hear once ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... to its greatest extent in America in the college yells, which may be regarded as a development of the primitive war-cry; this custom has no real analogue at English schools and universities, but the New Zealand football team in 1907 familiarized English crowds at their matches with a similar sort of war-cry adopted from the Maoris. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... festivals, or anniversary celebrations, he preferred those which, like the harvest-home or feast of the vintagers, whilst they sanctioned a total carelessness and dismissal of public anxieties, were at the same time colored by the innocent gaiety which belongs to rural and to primitive manners. In person this emperor was tall and dignified (statura elevata decorus;) but latterly he stooped; to remedy which defect, that he might discharge his public part with the more decorum, he wore ...
— The Caesars • Thomas de Quincey
... of a rope in his hand, and quickly secured the vessel. As he did so a faint light was seen proceeding toward them, and they heard the steps of a half dozen men advancing on the sounding planks. It was the watch, and the light shone from a primitive lantern with sides of horn ...
— The Panchronicon • Harold Steele Mackaye
... his hat flapped up against the wind the moonshine caught at shaggy brows, a cruelly arched nose, thin, straight lips, and a forward-thrusting jaw. It seemed as if nature had hewn him roughly and designed him for a primitive age where he could fight his ...
— Riders of the Silences • Max Brand
... Scott Elliot has hit upon a good idea in this attempt to set forth the life of the primitive savage. On the whole, too, he has carried it out well and faithfully.... We can recommend the book ...
— Astronomy of To-day - A Popular Introduction in Non-Technical Language • Cecil G. Dolmage |
