"Tadpole" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... vanishes like a baseless vision. Man is sui generis, sole and exclusive in organization, without pre-existing type or affinity to other species; and his alleged recent metamorphosis from a monkey, and his first and far more distant one from a snail or a tadpole, are paradoxes only ...
— An Expository Outline of the "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation" • Anonymous
... readin' an' it don't seem fittin' that she should be shut up in this little place where only a few of us have the right kind of spectacles to see her through. Most of the folks just allow it's Mis' Everidge's way, and would as soon think of tryin' to imitate her as a tadpole ...
— A Beautiful Possibility • Edith Ferguson Black
... Division on the right. We along with the 7th H.L.I. were the leading battalions. As Queant and Pronville were found to be unoccupied the barrage was cancelled and these places were occupied without a fight and a section of the Hindenburg Line near Tadpole Copse was held. This line was held until the 7th when we were relieved and went into a bivouac area near St. Leger. The day we came out we got heavily shelled with gas and had a number of casualties. We had a good rest at St. Leger, where the ingenuity of the man was tested ...
— The Fifth Battalion Highland Light Infantry in the War 1914-1918 • F.L. Morrison
... white paper a very black spot about half an inch in diameter, with a tail about an inch in length, so as to resemble a tadpole, as in Plate II.; look steadfastly for a minute on the center of this spot, and, on moving the eye a little, the figure of the tadpole will be seen on the white part of the paper; which figure of the tadpole will appear more luminous than the ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... dog-faced baboon, or any other monster which has sensation, is a measure of all things; then while we were reverencing him as a god he might have produced a magnificent effect by expounding to us that he was no wiser than a tadpole. For if truth is only sensation, and one man's discernment is as good as another's, and every man is his own judge, and everything that he judges is right and true, then {90} what need of Protagoras to be our instructor at a high figure; and why ...
— A Short History of Greek Philosophy • John Marshall
... floor. He tried to fall on his knees before me, but the rope was so short that he was able to go only part of the way down, and presented a most ludicrous appearance, with his toes scraping the icy floor and his arms thrown out as if he were paddling like a tadpole. "Oh, have mercy upon me, sir," he said, "and help me get out of this dreadful place. If you go to the hole and call up it's you, they will pull me up; but if they get you out first they will never think of me. I am a poor pauper, sir, but I never ...
— My Terminal Moraine - 1892 • Frank E. Stockton
... say so?" said the wagtail, who had not the least idea what a tadpole was, unless it was the pole the gardener used to pull the weeds out of the pond ...
— Featherland - How the Birds lived at Greenlawn • George Manville Fenn
... enormous aquatic animal mentioned by Job. Some suppose it to have been the whale, but that distinguished ichthyologer, Dr. Jordan, of Stanford University, maintains with considerable heat that it was a species of gigantic Tadpole (Thaddeus Polandensis) or Polliwig—Maria pseudo-hirsuta. For an exhaustive description and history of the Tadpole consult the famous monograph of Jane Potter, Thaddeus ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... was saying that your authority—' ventured to observe Mr. Tadpole, emboldened by the presence of a duke, his patron, to struggle against the despotism of a Rigby, ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... tads," he went on coolly, waving his hand at the gathered group, "is a skate who teases this little girl. And you older boys are skates for letting the little ones do it, the whole pack of you—and I'm going to spank any little tadpole who does it hereafter, and I'm going to punch the head off any big one who allows it. It's got to stop NOW!" And as Hale dragged him off he added to the mountain boy, "and I'm going to begin with you whenever you say the word." ...
— The Trail of the Lonesome Pine • John Fox, Jr.
... he was well and happy, and went on talking. "Did you know that I was once a tadpole just like those little ...
— Buttercup Gold and Other Stories • Ellen Robena Field
... fellows grow! no longer a slim little fish, but quite a portly tadpole with rounded body and long tail, but still with no expression in his blunt-nosed face, and only two black-looking pits where the eyes are ...
— The Stories Mother Nature Told Her Children • Jane Andrews
... or so, a tadpole comes out of the egg. There are swarms of them wriggling about the water, with heads and bodies and tails, but no legs. In about six weeks more the legs begin to grow, and gradually the tadpole changes into a frog. See what a number of young ...
— Woodside - or, Look, Listen, and Learn. • Caroline Hadley
... respiration that manifest alteration. In its earliest form the young batrachian, living in the water, breathes as a fish does by gills, either free and projecting as in the water-newt, or partially covered by integument as in the tadpole. But the gills disappear as the lungs gradually become developed: the duration of the process being on an average one hundred days from the time the eggs were first deposited. After this important change, the true batrachian ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent
... little more than a month from the time the eggs are laid. During this change a pair of lungs is developed, so that the toads breathe air as human beings do. The eggs of toads and frogs may be collected in the spring in ponds, and this remarkable change from the egg through the tadpole stage to the adult form may be observed in a simple home aquarium. Toads' eggs may be distinguished from those of frogs by the fact that toads' eggs are laid in strings, while frogs' ...
— Scouting For Girls, Official Handbook of the Girl Scouts • Girl Scouts
... from his forefathers, and common to all labourers on the land, that just as in the world of plants and animals nothing ceases to exist, but continually changes its form, the manure into grain, the grain into a food, the tadpole into a frog, the caterpillar into a butterfly, the acorn into an oak, so man also does not perish, but only undergoes a change. He believed in this, and therefore always looked death straight in the face, and bravely bore ...
— Resurrection • Count Leo Tolstoy
... they passed under a horizontal bough they sometimes saw objects like large tadpoles lodged diametrically across it, which Giles explained to be pheasants there at roost; and they sometimes heard the report of a gun, which reminded him that others knew what those tadpole shapes represented as ...
— The Woodlanders • Thomas Hardy
... averse to plunging with Edith up to the saddle-girths in mire, drew from him a very unmannerly, though not the less hearty execration on the delicacy of "them thar persons who," as he expressed it, "stumped at a mud-hole as skearily as if every tadpole in it war ...
— Nick of the Woods • Robert M. Bird
... spawn of toads is very small, as regards the size of the individual eggs, compared with the size of the full-grown animal. Nothing would be easier than for a piece of spawn or a tiny tadpole to be washed into some hole in a mine or cave, where there was sufficient water for its developement, and where the trickling drops brought down minute objects of food, enough to keep up its simple existence. A toad brought up under ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... you were born curious, Venning, otherwise you would have made an excellent companion for a studious man. 'Why do I wish to understand Arabic?' Why do you stand on one leg watching a tadpole shed its tail." ...
— In Search of the Okapi - A Story of Adventure in Central Africa • Ernest Glanville
... uses, to illustrate this law, the familiar example of the frog. The mother frog lays her eggs in the water. In due course a new little frog develops from each of these eggs. But the object that develops from them is altogether different from the adult frog. This object is the familiar fish-like tadpole. It finally loses its tail, develops legs, and becomes a frog. Doctor Boelsche discusses ...
— Socialism: Positive and Negative • Robert Rives La Monte
... the pictures in question. Yes; the faces were ugly: Millais' "Mariana" was a piece of idolatrous Papistry, and there was a mistake in the perspective. Collins' "Convent Thoughts"—more Popery; but very careful—"the tadpole too small for its age"; but what studies of plants! And there was his own "Alisma Plantago," which he had been drawing for "Stones of Venice" (vol. i., plate 7) and describing: "The lines through its body, which are of peculiar beauty, mark the different ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... over running the nation, As plenty as frogs in a Dutch inundation; No shelter from Barons, from Earls no protection, And tadpole young Lords too in every direction,— Things created in haste just to make a Court list of, Two legs and a coronet all they consist of! The prospect's quite frightful, and what Sir George Rose (My particular friend) says is ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... Nigel saw the brown little fellow shooting about like a galvanised tadpole, with a small ...
— Blown to Bits - or, The Lonely Man of Rakata • Robert Michael Ballantyne
... are,) we should think he might consider his education completed, and his head would even then be as great a wonder as that of the schoolmaster in the "Deserted Village." In the same way, a man might have seen a horse, (if only a clothes-horse,) a dog, a cat, and a tadpole, and yet never have seen the elephant,—a most blame-worthy neglect of opportunities. But let us apply Mr. Choate's syllogistic process to the list of this extraordinary nameless person's acquirements. The Republican Party do not know any of these ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 10, August, 1858 • Various
... sure of, especially if as many false things are told about them, as are told about me; but when I was a tadpole in the pond, that old hag of an owl was still hooting away, in the treetops, scaring children, as in ages gone. She is older than I. Go and see her. If age makes wise, she is the wisest ...
— Welsh Fairy Tales • William Elliot Griffis
... time, that no developmental stage of a higher animal is precisely similar to the adult condition of any lower animal. It is quite correct to say that a frog passes through the condition of a fish, inasmuch as at one period of its life the tadpole has all the characters of a fish, and if it went no further, would have to be grouped among fishes. But it is equally true that a tadpole is very ...
— Note on the Resemblances and Differences in the Structure and the Development of Brain in Man and the Apes • Thomas Henry Huxley
... tenure of office secure by conciliating the favour of the king. The entire revolution which much of his policy underwent in order to effect this object bears too close a resemblance to the sudden and inexplicable changes of front habitual to placemen of the Tadpole stamp to be altogether pleasant to contemplate in a politician of pure aims and lofty ambition. Humiliating is not too strong a term to apply to a letter in which he expresses his desire to "efface the past ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... something like a lizard, but it has a flat tail made for swimming. What curious little feet and legs! Now, though the newt has four legs, it lays eggs; and to guard them from injury, wraps them up in the leaves of water plants, with its four paws. When the young newt is hatched, it is very like a tadpole. It is like a fish, for it breathes through gills; but as it increases in size the gills go away and the front legs appear, and then the hind ones. In a frog-tadpole the hind legs appear first, and ...
— Ernest Bracebridge - School Days • William H. G. Kingston
... they are larvae. There is, I believe, in Nature no instance of a transition by this species of metamorphosis from a more perfect to a less perfect animal. The tadpole has a resemblance to a fish before it becomes a frog; the caterpillar and the maggot gain not only more perfect powers of motion on the earth in their new state, but acquire organs by which they inhabit a new element. This animal, I dare say, is much larger than we now see ...
— Consolations in Travel - or, the Last Days of a Philosopher • Humphrey Davy
... this to deter men from matrimony, but to warn them from a miscalculation which may mar their happiness. Flirtation is a very fine thing, but it's only a state of transition after all. The tadpole existence of the lover would be great fun, if one was never to become a frog under the hands of the parson. I say all this dispassionately and advisedly. Like the poet of my country, for many years ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 2 (of 2) • Charles Lever
... famous swimmer, having been used to the water from the time he was a tadpole. And now he swam so fast, with the help of the current, that he reached the river by the ...
— The Tale of Ferdinand Frog • Arthur Scott Bailey
... the treatment is not Spanish. The more one studies the conception and the workmanship the more striking it grows in originality and daring. Mullgardt has succeeded in putting into architecture the spirit that inspired Langdon Smith's poem 'Evolution,' beginning 'When you were a tadpole and I was a fish.' In the chaotic feeling that the court gives there is a subtle suggestiveness. The whole evolution of man is intimated here from the time when he lived among the seaweed and the fish and the lobsters and the turtles and the crabs. Even the straight vertical lines used in the ...
— The City of Domes • John D. Barry
... of life's unfolding powers constitutes a religious program. For even those primitive instincts which pass and perish often stir into consciousness and operation other more noble functions or are transmuted into recognized virtues. Popularly speaking, the tadpole's tail becomes his legs. Success in suppressing the precivilized qualities of the boy results in a "zestless automaton" that is something less than a man. Everything that characterizes the boy, however bothersome and unpromising ...
— The Minister and the Boy • Allan Hoben
... Razzle-dazzle starts to think, give him a chance," said Happy Mather. "Who asked your opinion? You're nothing but a tadpole, anyhow." ...
— Skippy Bedelle - His Sentimental Progress From the Urchin to the Complete - Man of the World • Owen Johnson
... boys ran different ways to find them; and all sorts of dreadful suggestions were being made when shouts of laughter were heard from the beach, and the truants appeared, proudly dragging in Harry's little wagon a dead devil-fish, as the natives call that ugly thing which looks like a magnified tadpole—all head ...
— Jack and Jill • Louisa May Alcott
... a great shock to her. She paddled along shore quite near them for a while, trying to be resigned to it. And then she waddled out on the grassy bank, and fed them with some newts, and a tadpole, and a few blue-bottle flies, and a snail, and several other delicacies, which they seemed to enjoy quite as much as if they had been young ducks. And then Quackalina, seeing them quite happy, struck out for the very ...
— Solomon Crow's Christmas Pockets and Other Tales • Ruth McEnery Stuart
... a bridle and running up the orchard, where old Tadpole had been left in case of emergency. I clapped a side-saddle on his back, a hat on my head, jumped on just as I was, and galloped for my life in the direction of Bimbalong, seven miles distant. I eased my horse a little going up Flea Creek pinch, but with this delay reached my destination ...
— My Brilliant Career • Miles Franklin
... features of King James's translation of the Bible are derived from Tyndale's version. 3. St. Paul, the apostle, was beheaded in the reign of Nero. 4. A fool's bolt is soon shot. 5. The tadpole, or polliwog, becomes a frog. 6. An idle brain is the devil's workshop. 7. Mahomet, or Mohammed, was born in the year 569 and died in 632. 8. They ...
— Higher Lessons in English • Alonzo Reed and Brainerd Kellogg
... queer organization, the 1st D.C. Vols., composed as it was of a cloud of independent companies—thirty-five, or thereabout, in all, I think—all made up of men from everywhere, largely in the tadpole stage of Unionism, and all sworn in for service in the District, not to go beyond the District. Early in May they were organized into eight battalions of four or five companies each, commanded by lieutenant-colonels, majors, or the senior captains. Nearly every company occupied ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 3, September 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... He dropped like manna, out of the skies, or, rather, he emerged like a tadpole out of the mud. But there's something odd about him and I've a floaty idea he's a refugee from justice and that some day one of the Mounties will come riding up to my shack-door and lead my farm-help away ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... which the newt and the axolotl are members. The Zoological Society are fortunate enough to possess specimens of both the black and white axolotl. This creature, which is a native of Mexico, has a strange life-history not unlike that of the frog. It has a sort of tadpole stage of existence, in which it is furnished with a collar of gills and lives in the water. After a while it loses its gills, and its tail and legs grow much less fish-like. There is a kind of lizard ...
— Little Folks (Septemeber 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... hungry. By and by some foolish tadpoles came wriggling along. 'I'll just try catching one of them for practice. Maybe they are good to eat,' thought Mr. Heron, and just as before darted his head and great bill downward and caught a tadpole. ...
— Mother West Wind "How" Stories • Thornton W. Burgess
... vertebrates. In accordance with this view there would be also some probability in favour of regarding the collar nerve-tube of the Enteropneusta as the equivalent of the cerebral vesicle only of Amphioxus and the Ascidian tadpole, and also of the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... about 1/600 of an inch in length. Those of reptiles are very much larger. One of the remarkable features of these minute elements is their peculiar movements. While alive, the filamentous tail is in constant action in a manner strongly resembling the movements of the caudal appendage of a tadpole. This wonderful property led the earlier observers to believe that they were true animalcula. But they are not to be regarded as such, though one can scarcely make himself believe otherwise while watching their lively evolutions, ...
— Plain Facts for Old and Young • John Harvey Kellogg
... hours more little black buds grow out on each side of the head, and these soon become branched. They are the future gills. At this time you will notice slight movements within this glassy cradle; and soon after this the young frog, or tadpole, as we must call him now, escapes; that is to say, as soon as he leaves his cradle he becomes a tadpole. At first he does nothing but hang on to bits of weed, or the broken remains of the covering of ...
— Chatterbox, 1906 • Various
... bad," said Bill, furiously. "Here we've had all the worry and trouble of fightin' puddin'-thieves night and day, and, on top of it all, here's this Tooralooral tadpole of a Mayor shovin' his nose into the business and arrestin' our Puddin' without rhyme ...
— The Magic Pudding • Norman Lindsay
... sitting on a very low chair at a very high table, consequently my left arm feels as though it was restraining an apparent tendency on the part of the table to set at nought the established laws of gravity. How is the old Tadpole, the wily banker, the impecunious toiler among heaps of gold? Tell him to prig a few thousand pound notes, and wrap himself up in them all but his head, that will do for the port light, and labelled "wrong side up, with care," and get himself ...
— Canada for Gentlemen • James Seton Cockburn
... Mavis the elder girls were not entirely in sympathy with the new movement. They considered the Pioneers exhibited signs of swollen head, and nicknamed their society the 'Tadpole Club,' declaring its members to be still in that elementary stage of their development. They made very merry at their expense, and poked fun at Merle ...
— Monitress Merle • Angela Brazil
... And other changes had come while he lay and waited in the gravel. The embryonic fin which had made his tail so like a paddle was gone, the true dorsal and caudal and anal fins had taken their proper shape, and he looked a little less like a tadpole and a little more like a fish. He was stronger than he had been at first, and he was losing his dread of the sunlight; and so at last he left the gravel-bed, to seek his rightful place in the ...
— Forest Neighbors - Life Stories of Wild Animals • William Davenport Hulbert
... de rose; Why is dey all so crazy to be sumfin else dat grows? Jess stick to de place yo're planted, and do de bes yo knows; Be de sunflower or de daisy, de melon or de rose. Don't be what yo ain't, jess yo be what yo is, If yo am not what yo are den yo is not what you is, If yo're jess a little tadpole, don't yo try to be de frog; If yo are de tail, don't yo try to wag de dawg. Pass de plate if yo can't exhawt and preach; If yo're jess a little pebble, don't yo try to be de beach; When a man is what he isn't, den he isn't what he is, An' as sure as I'm talking, ...
— It Can Be Done - Poems of Inspiration • Joseph Morris
... with one of its forepaws, to the great admiration of the two children, who were sitting on the floor beside it. It was an artful-looking kitten, all black, with a very large head and a very small body. It reminded Owen of a tadpole. ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... two pounds. It is in the upper part of this enormous head, in great cavities divided by cartilages, that is to be found from six to eight hundred pounds of that precious oil called spermaceti. The cachalot is a disagreeable creature, more tadpole than fish, according to Fredol's description. It is badly formed, the whole of its left side being (if we may say it), a "failure," and being only able to see with its right eye. But the formidable troop was nearing us. They had seen the whales and were preparing to attack them. One could ...
— Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea • Jules Verne
... One by one its meagre parcel of inhabitants packed up and moved away, as the summer waned and fall approached. Town lots were no longer salable, traffic ceased, a deadly lethargy fell upon the place once more, the "Weekly Telegraph" faded into an early grave, the wary tadpole returned from exile, the bullfrog resumed his ancient song, the tranquil turtle sunned his back upon bank and log and drowsed his grateful life away as in the old sweet days ...
— The Gilded Age, Part 4. • Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and Charles Dudley Warner
... the delight of my early childhood, is still a sight whereof my old eyes never tire. What animation in that verdant world! On the warm mud of the edges, the frog's little tadpole basks and frisks in its black legions; down in the water, the orange-bellied newt steers his way slowly with the broad rudder of his flat tail; among the reeds are stationed the flotillas of the caddis worms, half protruding from ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... of color plates and nearly three hundred half-tones from photographs from life by the author. The wonderful transformation of the tadpole is ...
— A Mother's List of Books for Children • Gertrude Weld Arnold
... acquaintance he said: "She is a woman who has never had the first tadpole wriggle of an idea," adding, "She has a mind as clean and white and flat as a plate: there are no eminences in it." Lady Butcher tells of a picnic-party on Box Hill at which Meredith was one of the company. "After our ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... shows that the rudimentary and perfect pistils are essentially alike in nature. An animal may possess various parts in a perfect state, and yet they may in one sense be rudimentary, for they are useless: thus the tadpole of the common salamander or water-newt, as Mr. G.H. Lewes remarks, "has gills, and passes its existence in the water; but the Salamandra atra, which lives high up among the mountains, brings forth ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... "Close by the side Of the bank he espied An uncommon fine tadpole, remarkably fat; He stooped, and he thought her his own, he had caught her, Got hold of her tail, and to land almost brought her, When, he plumped head and heels into fifteen feet water," and the shadow Sir Thomas ducked suddenly into the pond, and a very real splashing was heard, ...
— Patty Fairfield • Carolyn Wells
... youth, boy, lad, stripling, youngster, youngun, younker^, callant^, whipster^, whippersnapper, whiffet [U.S.], schoolboy, hobbledehoy, hopeful, cadet, minor, master. scion; sap, seedling; tendril, olive branch, nestling, chicken, larva, chrysalis, tadpole, whelp, cub, pullet, fry, callow; codlin, codling; foetus, calf, colt, pup, foal, kitten; lamb, lambkin^; aurelia^, caterpillar, cocoon, nymph, nympha^, orphan, pupa, staddle^. girl; lass, lassie; wench, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... broad the rest of his body was not in the same proportion—for he narrowed as he descended, his hips being very small, and his legs as thin as those of a goat. His real name was Todpoole, but the people invariably called him Tadpole, and he certainly in appearance somewhat reminded you of one. He was a facetious little fellow, and, it was said, very clever in ...
— Poor Jack • Frederick Marryat
... spiritual larvae, sculling about in the dark by the aid of their caudal extremities, instead of standing on their legs, and breathing by gills, instead of taking the free air of heaven into the lungs made to receive it. Of course we never try to keep young souls in the tadpole state, for fear they should get a pair or two of legs by-and-by and jump out of the pool where they have been bred and fed! ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859 • Various
... seemed quite fit to go to heaven, and Lorna. For in my sick distracted mind (stirred with many tossings), like the bead in the spread of frog-spawn carried by the current, hung the black and central essence of my future life. A life without Lorna; a tadpole life. All stupid head; ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... are real "connecting-links"' between the Fish and the Reptiles. Passing over the many queer forms which serve as links between the two families, we have but to consider our common frog's history for a striking example. The Tadpole has gills, has no limbs, uses its tail like a fish's fin, eats plants, etc. Passing through several interesting stages the Tadpole reaches a stage in which it is a frog with a tail—then it sheds its tail and is a full fledged Frog, with four legs; web-feet; no tail; and ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... St. Cleeve's bedroom faced the west, and nothing would satisfy him but that his bed should be so pulled round as to give him a view of the low sky, in which the as yet minute tadpole of fire was recognizable. The mere sight of it seemed to lend him sufficient resolution to complete his own cure forthwith. His only fear now was lest, from some unexpected cause or other, the comet would vanish before he could get to ...
— Two on a Tower • Thomas Hardy
... fiend, in the form of a tadpole with hairy arms and legs like a monkey's, as he ran up with four bundles of faggots, "we are doing the very best we can for your discomfort. But you damned have no consideration for us, and do not remember that we are on our feet day and night, waiting upon ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... goggle eyes. The Bishop was most frightful of all. His horse was prancing and swaying wildly, and the Bishop's transformed features were diabolic. His whole profile had altered, seemed black and shapeless as the face of a tadpole. The amazing truth burst upon Bleak. Chuff and his paraders were wearing gas-masks. These were what they had carried in their knapsacks. Indomitable ...
— In the Sweet Dry and Dry • Christopher Morley
... — lit. 'tadpole characters.' They were, it is said, the original forms devised by Ts'ang-chieh, with large heads and fine tails, like the creature from which they were named. See the notes to the preface to the Shu-ching in 'The Thirteen Classics.' 2 զw. 3 yV. See the preface ...
— THE CHINESE CLASSICS (PROLEGOMENA) • James Legge
... Froggie was a young tadpole, some pond or ditch was his home, for he was an aquatic animal; but now that he is full-grown he has passed into another way of living: he breathes, or rather swallows air, and must, as he swims about with his beautifully webbed feet, come to the surface of the water now and ...
— Twilight And Dawn • Caroline Pridham
... according to tradition, the philosopher bequeathed to posterity in rhythmical form and sententious brevity, this is notably recorded: "Humble yourselves, my descendants; the father of your race was a 'twat' (tadpole): exalt yourselves, my descendants, for it was the same Divine Thought which created your father that develops itself ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... not without interest here on account of the remarkable capacity which they show to adapt themselves to different surroundings. There are frogs, like the tree-frog of Martinique, and others in regions where water is scarce, which never pass through the tadpole stage; or, to be quite accurate, they lose the gills and tail in the egg, as higher land-animals do. On the other hand, there is a modern Amphibian, the axolotl of Mexico, which retains the gills ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... "Three!" in they all went head first. My such a splash as they did make! They upset old Grandfather Frog so that he fell off his lily pad. They frightened Mr. and Mrs. Trout so that they jumped right out of the water. Tiny Tadpole had such a scare that he hid way, way down in the mud with only the tip of his ...
— Old Mother West Wind • Thornton W. Burgess
... not on slippery partitions. I'm a civilised man. I keep thinking of old Albrecht and the Barbarossa.... I feel I want a wash and kind words and a quiet home. When I look at you, I KNOW I want a wash. Gott!"—he stifled a vehement yawn—"What a Cockney tadpole of ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... Nemertines and the rest—had put in an appearance, there were two main views on the subject, one upheld by Haeckel, Kowalevsky and others, to the effect that the proximate ancestor of Vertebrates was a form somewhat resembling the ascidian tadpole, the other supported principally by Dohrn and Semper that Vertebrates and Arthropods traced their descent to a common segmented annelid or pro-annelid ancestor. The former view is historically prior, and arose ...
— Form and Function - A Contribution to the History of Animal Morphology • E. S. (Edward Stuart) Russell
... brain of the average Christian and that of the average Jew—certainly in Europe—is about the difference between a tadpole's brain & an archbishop's. It is a marvelous race; by long odds the most marvelous race the world has ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... sizes, variously ornamented in red, black, and white. A very fine collection of meal or sacred pottery baskets was obtained. These are also of varied forms or types, some with handles, terraced and fluted edges or rims, usually decorated with figures of the tadpole and horned frog, and occasionally with the representation of the road runner, and frequently ...
— Illustrated Catalogue of the Collections Obtained from the Pueblos of New Mexico and Arizona in 1881 • James Stevenson
... patch of vivid sunshine, about six inches from a tangle of arrow-weed stems, a black tadpole lay basking. Light to him meant not only growth, but life. Whenever, with the slow wheeling of the sun, the shadow of a lily leaf moved over him, he wriggled impatiently aside, and settled down again on the brightest part of the mud. Most of the time he seemed ...
— The Watchers of the Trails - A Book of Animal Life • Charles G. D. Roberts
... said the dowager, with the indifference of a woman who has never had a child, and cannot conceive why a little sprawling tadpole in long clothes should make such a difference. "Yes, I suppose that's a novelty," she said, "to be mother of a bit of a thing like that naturally turns a girl's head. It is inconceivable the airs they give themselves, as ...
— Sir Tom • Mrs. Oliphant
... Byron, in the letter to Disraeli already quoted[26] (March 15th, 1820), held it up to scorn as the opinion of "a young person learning to write poetry and beginning by teaching the art. . . . The writer of this is a tadpole of the Lakes, a young disciple of the six or seven new schools, in which he has learned to write such lines and such sentiments as the above. He says 'easy were the task' of imitating Pope, or it may be of equalling him, I presume. I ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... head moves freely on the neck and they creep on short imperfect legs. But the Lizard is clothed with scales, while the body of the Salamander is naked, and the young of the former is complete when hatched, while the Tadpole born from the Salamander has a life of its own to live, with certain changes to pass through before it assumes its mature condition; during the early part of its life it is even destitute of legs, and has gills like the Fishes. Above the Lizards and Salamanders, ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 54, April, 1862 • Various
... to recapture Brer Tarrypin, who once was ours for a short while. Gissing (the juvenile and too enthusiastic dog) has to be kept away from the pond by repeated sticks thrown as far as possible in another direction; otherwise he insists on joining the tadpole search, and, poking his snout under water, attempts to bark at the same time, with much coughing ...
— Plum Pudding - Of Divers Ingredients, Discreetly Blended & Seasoned • Christopher Morley
... come down to the edge of the pond to look at the pink and white lotus. One summer day, as a little frog, hardly out of his tadpole state, with a small fragment of tail still left, sat basking on a huge round leaf, one monk ...
— Japanese Fairy World - Stories from the Wonder-Lore of Japan • William Elliot Griffis
... part of the contents of your father's book-shelves, were given by him to the College, and now are arranged, numbered, and registered in order for use, there is evidence that in 1858 he, with his needles and eyeglass, had dissected and carefully figured the so-called pronephros of the Frog's tadpole, in a manner which as to accuracy of detail anticipated later discovery. Again, in the early '80's, he had observed and recorded in a drawing the prae-pulmonary aortic arch of the Amphibian, at a period antedating the researches of Boas, which in connection with its ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley
... be generally known that the tadpole acts the same part with fish that ants do with birds; and that through the agency of this little reptile, perfect skeletons, even of the smallest fishes may be obtained. To produce this, it is but necessary to suspend the fish by threads attached to the head ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 19. Issue 539 - 24 Mar 1832 • Various
... all but those who were cos-ata-lu came up cor-sva-jo, or from the beginning. The egg from which they first developed into tadpole form was deposited, with millions of others, in one of the warm pools and with it a poisonous serum that the carnivora instinctively shunned. Down the warm stream from the pool floated the countless ...
— Out of Time's Abyss • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... pillow, and begin reading, leaning his head on his hand, and turning his back to the room. Soon, however, a noise of striving urchins arose, and muttered encouragements from the neighbouring boys of "Go it, Tadpole!" "Now, young Green!" "Haul away his blanket!" "Slipper him on the hands!" Young Green and little Hall, commonly called Tadpole, from his great black head and thin legs, slept side by side far away by the door, and were for ever playing one another tricks, ...
— Tom Brown's Schooldays • Thomas Hughes
... crescent moon of darkness swimming in its disc? or does the eye disclose a bright light from within, where his soul sits and enjoys bright day? Is he a point of admiration whose head is too heavy, or a quaver or crotchet that has lost his neighbors, and fallen out of the scale? Is he an aspiring Tadpole in search of an idea? What have been and what will be the fortunes of this our small Nigel (Nigellus)? Think of "Elia" having him sent up from the Goblin Valley, packed in wool, and finding him lively! how he and "Mary" would doat upon him, feeding him upon some celestial, unspeakable ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... life. Breathing normally by gills, as the result and reward of a continued effort carried on from generation to generation to inspire the air of heaven direct, they have slowly acquired the lung-function. In the young organism, true to the ancestral type, the gill still persists—as in the tadpole of the common frog. But as maturity approaches the true lung appears; the gill gradually transfers its task to the higher organ. It then becomes atrophied and disappears, and finally respiration in the adult is conducted by lungs alone.[80] ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... any pretensions can possibly do without one whom even his enemies acknowledge to be the only accurate and high-minded sporting writer in the world? Those who care (and I devoutly hope that Mr. J., whose brains equal those of a newly-born tadpole, will not be amongst the number) can see me at any moment on pronouncing the password, "mealy-mouth," in my old place, close to the space devoted to Royalty. Yes, I shall be there. In the meantime, I propose to treat of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 99., August 2, 1890. • Various
... "Shut up, you implicating tadpole! Wasn't I ordhered to hold convarse wid me prisoner? Spake win Ye're spoke ter and be civil, Or I'll jolt the teeth ...
— Tropic Days • E. J. Banfield
... writes a pose novel—at least I hope so for the sake of my self-respect. Most, after my fashion, burn the thing, or benevolent publishers lose it. It is an ill thing if by some accident the tadpole tale survives the tadpole stage. The authoress does the feminine equivalent, but I should judge either that she did it more abundantly or else that she burned less. Has she never swept past you with a scornful look, disdained you in all the pride of her beauty, rippled laughter ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... and covered with a gummy matter. The insect is caught, and the tongue returned with wonderful rapidity. The frog, when it is first hatched, has the constitution of a fish: it is purely aquatic; has a fish's heart, a fish's circulation, and a fish's gills. The tadpole swims as a fish does—by the movement, side-ways, of its tail. For the unassisted eye, and still more for the microscope, what spectacle can be more marvelous than the gradual process of change by which this tiny fish becomes a reptile? Legs bud; the fish-like gills dwindle by a vital ...
— Harper's New Monthly Magazine, Volume 2, No. 12, May, 1851. • Various
... your sign and seal, and it sits well upon you. I don't affect to despise birth and lineage, my dear. If I could not trace my ancestry back to the first tadpole who loafed his life away in the tropical forests of ...
— What Dreams May Come • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... Here are specimens of the tree frogs that can walk with their backs downwards on the most polished surfaces, and can slightly change their colour; the paradoxical frog from Surinam, which is larger as a tadpole than in its condition of maturity; the Brazilian horned toads; the American bull frogs; and the Brazilian pipa, the female of which deposits its eggs upon the back of the male, who carries them about till they burst from their shells; the repulsive siren of Carolina, which Mr. J.E. ...
— How to See the British Museum in Four Visits • W. Blanchard Jerrold
... and challenging, this miserable human tadpole, usurping the throne of Lais and crowned with the worship of such devotees ...
— Kimono • John Paris
... Tadpole began to weep and wail, For little Tommy Tadpole had lost his little tail; And his mother didn't know him as he wept upon a log, For he wasn't Tommy Tadpole, but Mr. ...
— A Book for Kids • C. J. (Clarence Michael James) Dennis
... absolute agin' monkeys, 'n' then—if that young man did n't go him one better 'n' say as he believed in tadpoles himself. Luther Law was flat agin' tadpoles, but Rufus never let up till he got him to admit that if the Lord could make a man out of a monkey He could make him out of a tadpole, too. 'N' then, when he'd got him so far, what do you think, Mrs. Lathrop,—what do you think!—Mrs. Macy said as Mrs. Kitts said as Mrs. Grummel said if that young man did n't look right square into Luther's face 'n' say as to his order o' thinkin' ...
— Susan Clegg and Her Neighbors' Affairs • Anne Warner
... Agassiz to the genera Leuciscus, Aspius, and Perca. The remains of frogs also, of extinct species, have been discovered in the paper-coal; and a complete series may be seen in the museum at Bonn, from the most imperfect state of the tadpole to that of the full-grown animal. With these a salamander, scarcely distinguishable from the recent species, has been found, and the remains ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell
... seated many moments, and had scarcely pushed off the shore of silence into a new sea of talk, when we were interrupted by the invasion of half a dozen dogs. They were of all sorts down to no sort. Mr. Skymer called one of them Tadpole—I suppose because he had the hugest tail, while his legs were not visible without being ...
— A Rough Shaking • George MacDonald
... male principle, or spermatozoa, is exactly like a little tadpole, and you no doubt recall that a tadpole has a minute tail, the movement of which enables it to swim around. So has the spermatozoa, and by the incessant movement of this microscopic tail they all move upward as soon as discharged by the male. I told you that God ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Vol 2 (of 4) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague
... the habits, movements, and structures, including adaptive features of aquatic animals, as crayfish, mussel, tadpole, etc. (See ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Nature Study • Ontario Ministry of Education
... stopped, sat down by his tub, pulled some dead grass out of it, plunged the frog in, and began to scrub it—began to scrub the frog in the oozy contents of that tub, when the poor amphibian had been soaking in spring-water ever since it was a tadpole! ...
— Roof and Meadow • Dallas Lore Sharp
... dug out of the ground by the women, or caught in the marshes, and used in every stage from the tadpole upwards. ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... moat, the bog. We heard the splash of the man's body below, and thought, at first, he was killed by the bursting of his rifle; but when his companion, who had leaped down to his assistance, helped him, reeking and muddy, from the dominions of the tadpole, and placed him, uninjured, though stunned, on his legs, we could not resist a burst of merriment at his countenance of unmitigated disgust, as the liquid filth oozed from the ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... hand of life ploughs another furrow across the egg, and we have now four cells. These divide into eight, sixteen, and so on far beyond human powers of numeration, until the beginnings of all the organs of the tadpole are formed. While we cannot, of course, follow this development, we can look at our egg every day and at last see the little wiggle heads or polliwogs (from pol and ...
— The Log of the Sun - A Chronicle of Nature's Year • William Beebe
... he to be such a fine swordsman?" I demanded fretfully. "Damn him! 'Tis no right of a little tadpole like him to be a great cut-throat. One could never have told from the look of him, and yet it simply teaches one to be always ...
— The O'Ruddy - A Romance • Stephen Crane
... of its journey the spermatozoon is endowed with some form of motile apparatus, and this frequently takes the form of a long flagellum, or whip-like process, by the lashing of which the little creature propels itself much as a tadpole with its tail. ...
— Mendelism - Third Edition • Reginald Crundall Punnett
... murderously, "that is what you are always figuring on. Debts don't mean anything to you, because you aren't worth a damn. But debts count with me. You owe me $40,000 on this bright idea of yours, and your leases aren't worth a tadpole in Tahoe." ...
— The Desert Fiddler • William H. Hamby
... newts and salamanders of the present day, we may say that they made among other acquisitions the following: true ventral lungs, a three-chambered heart, a movable tongue, a drum to the ear, and lids to the eyes. It is very interesting to find that though the tongue of the tadpole has some muscle-fibres in it, they are not strong enough to effect movement, recalling the tongue of fishes, which has not any muscles at all. Gradually, as the tadpole becomes a frog, the muscle-fibres grow in strength, ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... laughed. It was as though a curious little tadpole which he held under his glass should suddenly lift its tail and begin to ...
— The Story of an African Farm • (AKA Ralph Iron) Olive Schreiner
... that saint. It is well that in this quarrelsome world we quarrel furiously about tastes; since agreeing too closely about the objects to be liked and appropriated would breed much more fighting than is bred by disagreeing. That little human tadpole, which the old toad of a father would not suffer to stay ten minutes in his house, proved as welcome at the nunnery of St. Sebastian as she was odious elsewhere. The superior of the convent was aunt, by the mother's side, to the new-born stranger. She, therefore, ...
— Narrative And Miscellaneous Papers • Thomas De Quincey
... of Manhattan's queen regent so horrified Major Brent that his congested features assumed the expression of an alarmed tadpole. ...
— A Young Man in a Hurry - and Other Short Stories • Robert W. Chambers |
