"Reptilian" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... outline of sail in Fig. 3, and now considering it as a jib of one of our own sailing vessels, slightly exaggerate the loops at the edge, and draw curved lines from them to the opposite point, Fig. 4; and I have a reptilian or dragon's wing, which would, with some ramification of the supporting ribs, become a bat's or moth's; that is to say, an extension of membrane between the ribs (as in an umbrella), which will catch the wind, and flutter ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin
... is a menace to society," said Robert Cairn. "When I meet the reptilian glance of those black eyes of his and reflect upon what the man has attempted—what he has done—my blood boils. It is tragically funny to think that in our new wisdom we have abolished the only laws that could have touched him! He could not have existed ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer
... somehow reptilian odor. It was the stench of jungle, dead and rotting. It was much, much worse than the smell of ...
— Operation Terror • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... as a heavier sound came near. A grayish bulk charged directly across his path. It was monstrous, semi-reptilian, with wings arched sinuously along its spine as it half reared toward him. Latham fell back against a tree bole and stood motionless, staring into glittering feral eyes. The beast coughed raucously and went thrashing back into the ...
— One Purple Hope! • Henry Hasse
... come across a single land mammal—sea mammals swarm in these waters—not even of the batrachian or reptilian kinds. A few insects only—butterflies or others—and even these did not fly, for before they could use their wings, the atmospheric currents carried the tiny bodies away to the ...
— An Antarctic Mystery • Jules Verne
... of the Supreme Council of the Mureess rose solemnly and inclined their heads in his direction. They were tall bipeds of vaguely reptilian ancestry, most of their height being body. They stood on short powerful legs, terminating in flippered feet, and their long arms were flanged to the second elbow with a rubbery fin. Only four opposed fingers ...
— Join Our Gang? • Sterling E. Lanier
... early gong-stroke of the following day Kai Lung was finally brought up for judgment in accordance with the venomous scheme of the reptilian Ming-shu. In order to obscure their guilty plans all justice-loving persons were excluded from the court, so that when the story-teller was led in by a single guard he saw before him only the two whose enmity he faced, and one who ...
— Kai Lung's Golden Hours • Ernest Bramah
... the most important are species belonging to the genera Megalichthys and Rhizodus, comprising large fishes, with rhomboidal scales, unsymmetrical ("heterocercal") tails, and powerful conical teeth. These fishes are sometimes said to be "sauroid," from their presenting some Reptilian features in their organisation, and they must have been the scourges of the Carboniferous seas. The remains of Placoid fishes in the Carboniferous strata are very numerous, but consist wholly of teeth and ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... ophiology, ophiolatry, ophiophagous, ophiography, herpetology, ophidian, ophiologic, ophiomorphous, herpetologist, herpetotomy, herpetotomist, ophiologist, ophiomancy, echidna, echidnine, fang, uraeus, serpentry, reptilian, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... temperate climes lizards lie torpid and buried all winter; some species of the tropic deserts sleep peacefully all summer. Their anatomy includes no means for the continuous introduction and expulsion of air; reptilian lungs are little more than closed sacs, ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... a snake story for one of the Sunday issues of the Globe-Democrat, which apparently delighted in regaling its readers with most astounding concoctions of this kind, and the snake he was drawing was most disturbingly vital and reptilian, beady-eyed, with distended jaws, extended ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser
... rookery of pterodactyls. There were hundreds of them congregated within view. All the bottom area round the water-edge was alive with their young ones, and with hideous mothers brooding upon their leathery, yellowish eggs. From this crawling flapping mass of obscene reptilian life came the shocking clamor which filled the air and the mephitic, horrible, musty odor which turned us sick. But above, perched each upon its own stone, tall, gray, and withered, more like dead and dried specimens than actual living creatures, sat the horrible males, absolutely ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... clean-shaven, pale, and ascetic-looking, retaining something of the professor in his features. His shoulders are rounded from much study, and his face protrudes forward, and is forever slowly oscillating from side to side in a curiously reptilian fashion. He peered at me with great ...
— Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... work were: first, the remodeling of the classification of the whole type of fishes, fossil and living, and especially the separation of the Ganoids from all other fishes, under the rank of a distinct order; second, the recognition of those combinations of reptilian and bird-like characters in the earlier geological fishes, which led the author to call them prophetic types; and third, his discovery of an analogy between the embryological phases of the higher present fishes and the gradual introduction of the whole ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... him stricken, shrivelled, almost reptilian in her red-eyed, motionless misery. Only her eyes moved in her wrinkled, brown face, and reflected the candle standing on the mantelpiece above his head. She sat with her hands crooked over one another ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... an experienced man toward the chance visitor, and the willingness to defer to the gentleman from Up the Bank, brought his expression unconsciously to the cold, rough woodenness of blank insensitiveness—the malignance of a snapping turtle, to mention a medium reptilian face. A whim, and the necessity of delay, led Doss to suggest that they take a look up the Obion River as a likely hiding place. Of course, Doss knew best, and they quit the tumbling Mississippi for the quiet wooded aisle of the ...
— The River Prophet • Raymond S. Spears
... the English to Belgium. It is therefore assumed that the migration of species westward having been the work of time, there was not sufficient lapse of ages to complete the fusion of the continental and British reptilian fauna, before France was separated from England ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell
... five scientific memoirs, amongst them his classification of birds and "Remarks upon Archaeopteryx Lithographica" ("Proceedings of the Royal Society" 16 1868 pages 243-248). This creature, a bird with reptilian characters, was a suggestive object from which to popularise some of the far-reaching results of his many years' labour upon the morphology of both birds and reptiles. Thus it led to a lecture at the Royal Institution, on February 7, "On ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... informed at the Zoological Gardens that an official of a large hospital in the neighbourhood was sent there yesterday to enquire how soon it would be safe for the convalescent patients to resume their daily airing in the Park, as to the probabilities of further lethal reptilian monsters lurking within ...
— The Confessions of a Caricaturist, Vol 2 (of 2) • Harry Furniss
... at rather than saw a hideous head rolling from side to side at the end of a long and sinuous neck, and writhing, reptilian coils lashing the rock at the edge of the water, like the tentacles of an octopus, only many times larger. The body itself was larger than that of any animal I had ever seen, and blacker ...
— Under the Andes • Rex Stout
... the little reptilian eyes. 'He knows where there is a treasure in gold equal in our money to three hundred ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... asserted, most frequently by superficial observers, however, that the reptilian psychos is exceedingly low; this is a popular error, for many reptiles give evidence, on occasions, of a, comparatively speaking, high degree of intelligence. Especially is this true in regard to their memory ...
— The Dawn of Reason - or, Mental Traits in the Lower Animals • James Weir
... long-term, dragging toil—a steady pushing at a soggy, unresisting, yet heavy mass. And full concentration was imperative if anything was to be accomplished. The reptilian minds were as unstable as they were empty and would slip away unless firmly held. He stared motionlessly at his crystal, willing the huge reptiles to turn—to waddle back to the safe grasslands of the estate, far ...
— The Weakling • Everett B. Cole
... again. But this is not a world of free freights. One pays according to an iron schedule—for every strength the balanced weakness; for every high a corresponding low; for every fictitious god-like moment an equivalent time in reptilian slime. For every feat of telescoping long days and weeks of life into mad magnificent instants, one must pay with shortened life, and, oft-times, with savage ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London
... of a species Talbot had never before laid eyes on. The bird stood on the crumbling rim of the mining shaft and regarded him with golden eyes. Its body was as large as that of a buzzard, and its head had a flat, reptilian look, unpleasant to see. Nor was that the only odd thing. The feathers glittered metallically, like blued copper, and a streak of ...
— The Seed of the Toc-Toc Birds • Francis Flagg
... Pellucidar succeeded in overthrowing the mighty Mahars, the dominant race of reptilian monsters, and their fierce, gorilla-like soldiery, ...
— Pellucidar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... just dozing off when the fat lady up the aisle let out a scream. A huge reptilian head had materialized out of nowhere and was hanging in air, peering about uncertainly. A scaly green body followed, four feet away, complete with long razor talons, heavy hind legs, and a whiplash tail with a needle at the end. For a moment the creature floated upside down, legs ...
— PRoblem • Alan Edward Nourse
... population spread over the earth. From one of these early reptiles the birds were evolved. Geology furnishes the missing link between the bird and the reptile in the Archaeopteryx, a bird with teeth, claws on its wings, and a reptilian tail. From another primitive reptile the important group of the mammals was evolved. We find what seem to be the transitional types in the rocks of South Africa. The scales gave way to tufts of hair, the heart evolved a fourth chamber, and ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various |
