"Carnivorous" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... not a plant will produce seeds. I cannot here give the details which I have collected and elsewhere published on this curious subject; but to show how singular the laws are which determine the reproduction of animals under confinement, I may mention that carnivorous animals, even from the tropics, breed in this country pretty freely under confinement, with the exception of the plantigrades or bear family, which seldom produce young; whereas, carnivorous birds, with the rarest exception, hardly ever lay fertile eggs. Many exotic plants have pollen utterly ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... disease. I'm in the best of health. I have no fads. I neither nibble nuts like a squirrel, nor grapes like a bird—I care nothing for all this jargon about pepsins and proteids and all the rest of it. I'm not a vegetarian, but a carnivorous animal; I drink when I'm thirsty, and I decidedly prefer my ...
— The Explorer • W. Somerset Maugham
... interfering with each other's field of action, and all supremely illustrative of conditions resulting from absolute equality, free-and-equalness, communalism, socialism carried to the (forgive me!) anth power. The Army Ants are carnivorous, predatory, militant nomads; the Termites are vegetarian scavengers, sedentary, negative and provincial; the Attas, or leaf-cutting ants, are vegetarians, active and dominant, and in many ways the most ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... feeders, because they are possessed of no means of seizing prey. It is also evident, having no other use for their fore-legs than to support their bodies, that they have no occasion for a shoulder so vigorously organised as that of carnivorous animals; owing to which they have no clavicles, and their shoulder-blades are proportionally narrow. Having also no occasion to turn their forearms, their radius is joined by ossification to the ulna, or is at least articulated by gynglymus with the humerus. ...
— Delineations of the Ox Tribe • George Vasey
... up if her lancet swerves and hits the wrong spot. Let us look impossibility boldly in the face and admit that she succeeds. I then see the offspring, which have no recollection of the fortunate event save through the belly—and then we are postulating that the digestion of the carnivorous larva leaves a trace in the memory of the honey-sipping insect—I see the offspring, I say, obliged to wait at long intervals for that inspired double thrust and obliged to succeed each time under pain of death for them ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre
... just look at the teeth of all these skulls and you will see that they are worn—even these young skulls which have not developed the wisdom teeth have the molars half worn away. The canine teeth are almost rudimentary in these skulls—in the carnivorous races of men they are very large. The condition of these teeth could only be produced by such a diet. If the Cliff Dweller had subsisted to any extent on meat or had eaten his grain cooked, he would not have worn the teeth one-quarter as much at the age of these younger ...
— How to Become Rich - A Treatise on Phrenology, Choice of Professions and Matrimony • William Windsor
... hands and eyes in horror at our carnivorous propensities, to which she clearly attributed the disappearance of Lorna, I could scarce help laughing, even after that sad story. For though it is said at the present day, and will doubtless be said hereafter, that the Doones had devoured a ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore
... out Nance Pete; and she snatched him up bodily, and held him out to the elephant. I believe my own pang at that moment to have been general. I forgot that elephants are not carnivorous, and shuddered back, under the expectation of seeing Davie devoured, hide and hair. But Nance had the address to stiffen the little arm, and my lord took the cookie, still clutched in the despairing hand, and passed on. Then Davie wiped his eyes, after peeping ...
— Meadow Grass - Tales of New England Life • Alice Brown
... adopted this division, and the best contemporary British authority, Dr. Latham, also makes three groups, although he varies somewhat in details from Cuvier. In accordance with the nomenclature of Latham, the Eskimo may be spoken of as Hyperborean Mongolidae of essentially carnivorous and ichthyophagous habits, who have not yet emerged from ...
— The First Landing on Wrangel Island - With Some Remarks on the Northern Inhabitants • Irving C. Rosse
... Claude Bernard has demonstrated the community which exists between animals and vegetables—phenomena of movement, of sensibility, of production of heat, of respiration, of digestion even, for there are the Drosera and kindred carnivorous plants. Iron cures chlorosis in vegetables as well as in animals, and chloroform and ether render both insensible. There resemblances are more striking still between animals. After Baudrimont, insects are, in presence of alcohols, chloroform, and irrespirable gases, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 303 - October 22, 1881 • Various
... Sharks as the Squalidae family, and they are, upon the whole, as unpleasant a family as a Squalid Castaway would desire to meet with in a Squall. They are all carnivorous, cartilaginous, and cantankerous. No fish culturist, from St. ANTHONY to SETH GREEN, has thought it worth while to take them in hand, with the view of reforming them, and their Vices are as objectionable ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 17, July 23, 1870 • Various
... works upon another. We can please the palate through the eye. There is some undoubted connection between these senses. If you doubt it, suck a lemon in front of a German band and watch the result. The sight of meat causes the saliva to run from the mouths of the carnivorous animals at the Zoo. This is often noticeable in the case of a dog watching people eat, and it is an old saying, "It makes one's mouth water to look at it." In the case of endeavouring to induce a change of living in grown-up persons, such as husband or children, there is perhaps ...
— Cassell's Vegetarian Cookery - A Manual Of Cheap And Wholesome Diet • A. G. Payne
... carcass—the rabid creatures swarmed round it like bees in a beehive. And right in among those sharks was Queequeg; who often pushed them aside with his floundering feet. A thing altogether incredible were it not that attracted by such prey as a dead whale, the otherwise miscellaneously carnivorous shark will seldom touch a man. Nevertheless, it may well be believed that since they have such a ravenous finger in the pie, it is deemed but wise to look sharp to them. Accordingly, besides the monkey-rope, with ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... stocks of Peru claimed descent, and they revered and offered sacrifice to their totemic ancestors.(1) Garcilasso adds, what is almost incredible, that the Indians tamely permitted themselves to be eaten by their totems, when these were carnivorous animals. They did this with the less reluctance as they were cannibals, and accustomed to breed children for the purposes of the cuisine from captive women taken in war.(2) Among the huacas or idols, ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... human enemies the two men were menaced by peril from wild beasts as well. Panthers prowled among the hills, great Himalayan bears, a blow from the paw of one of which would crack a man's skull, wandered on the jungle-clad slopes and, though not carnivorous, were always ready to attack human beings. Herds of wild elephants, which had scaled the mountains into Bhutan at the beginning of the Monsoon to reach the northern face of the Himalayas and escape ...
— The Jungle Girl • Gordon Casserly
... the Chinese badger (M. chinensis) occur in eastern Asia; and another (M. anacuma) is found in Japan. The American badger (Taxidea americana) ranges over the greater part of the United States, and in habits closely resembles the European species, but seems to be more carnivorous. When badgers were more abundant than they now are, their skins, dressed with the hair attached, were commonly used for pistol furniture. They are now chiefly valued for the hair, that of the European badger being used in the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... of density may throw light on the different behavior of gases and fluids and solids, but can it throw any light on the question of why a horse is a horse, and a dog a dog? or why one is an herbivorous feeder, and the other a carnivorous? ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... Men and carnivorous fish fall upon them, opening great furrows of destruction in their midst: but the breaches are closed instantly and the living bank continues on its way, growing denser every moment, as though defying death. The more their enemies destroy them, ...
— Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) - A Novel • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... of Wackford Squeers under twelve months, who were then and there assembled, like a lot of little fat porkers. It was, in truth, a sight to whet the appetite of an "annexed" Fiji Islander, or any other carnivorous animal. My correct card specified eighty "entries;" but, although the exhibition only opened at two o'clock, and I was there within an hour after, I found the numbers up to 100 quite full. The ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... course of many years that the digestive organs of the animals on which we were experimenting were gradually becoming accustomed to a vegetable diet. We continued the work, extending it to one class of animals after another, until in time all carnivorous instincts disappeared." ...
— Daybreak: A Romance of an Old World • James Cowan
... old Roman character. When Eumenes, king of Pergamus, visited Rome after the war with Antiochus, and was received with honor by the Senate, and splendidly entertained by the nobles, Cato was indignant at the respect paid to the monarch, refused to go near him, and declared that "kings were naturally carnivorous animals." He had an antipathy to physicians, because they were mostly Greeks, and therefore unfit to be trusted with Roman lives. He loudly cautioned his eldest son against them, and dispensed with their attendance. ...
— A Smaller History of Rome • William Smith and Eugene Lawrence
... the table yet," she added, in a tone of kindly menace. She was as good as her word, and exercised rather a stricter discipline at dinner than was agreeable to the convalescent, regulating his meat and wine according to ladylike ideas, which are somewhat binding on carnivorous man. But she was so kindly about it, and Alice aided and abetted with such bashful prettiness, that Farnham felt he could endure starvation with such accessories. Yet he was not wholly at ease. He had hoped, in the long hours of his confinement, to find the lady of his love kinder in ...
— The Bread-winners - A Social Study • John Hay
... bottle, wet one's whistle. purvey &c 637. Adj. eatable, edible, esculent^, comestible, alimentary; cereal, cibarious^; dietetic; culinary; nutritive, nutritious; gastric; succulent; potable, potulent^; bibulous. omnivorous, carnivorous, herbivorous, granivorous, graminivorous, phytivorous; ichthyivorous; omophagic, omophagous; pantophagous, phytophagous, xylophagous. Phr. across the walnuts and the wine [Tennyson]; blessed hour of our dinners! [O. Meredith]; now good digestion wait ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... thing is the art of eating in these carnivorous larvae supplied with a single victim, which they have to spend a fortnight in consuming, on the express condition of not killing it until the very end! Could our physiological science, of which, with good reason, we are so proud, describe, without blundering, the method ...
— More Hunting Wasps • J. Henri Fabre
... going to feed on fresh meat, while all the rest were eating such awful stuff as Yankee pork and salt horse. The very sight of the two sides of the heifer suspended at the flagstaff was an unendurable insult and mockery to the carnivorous whalers, and an incitement to larceny. Davy Fermaner was steering one of the boats, and he exclaimed: "There, they are flashing the fresh meat to us. They would look foolish if ...
— The Book of the Bush • George Dunderdale
... his nostrils the breath of life, to call the eel into a new existence, with a knowledge of the treatment he had undergone, and he found that the instinctive disposition which man has in common with other carnivorous animals, which inclines him to cruelty, was not the sole cause of his torments; but that men did not attend to consider whether the sufferings of such insignificant creatures could be lessened: that eels were not the only sufferers; that lobsters and other shell fish were put ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... by violently striking the ground with its feet, causing the peculiar sound so often noticed at their first jump. The animal is fond of pursuing a beaten path in the woods, and is often snared at such places. Its enemies, beside man, are the lynx, and other carnivorous animals, hawks, owls, and even ...
— Camp Life in the Woods and the Tricks of Trapping and Trap Making • William Hamilton Gibson
... Vultures: Pope is more accurate than the poet he translates, for Homer writes "a prey to dogs and to all kinds of birds. But all kinds of birds are not carnivorous. ...
— The Iliad of Homer • Homer
... evolution theories, as taken, not from any occult source, but from the ordinary scientific manual accessible to all—from the hypothesis of the latest variation in the habits of species—say, the acquisition of carnivorous habits by the New Zealand parrot, for instance—to the farthest glimpses backwards into Space and Eternity afforded by the "Fire Mist" doctrine, it will be apparent that they all rest on one basis. That basis is, ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... the table the flashing implements of carving held in askance for stroke, her lips lifted to a smile and a simulation of interest for display of further carnivorous appetites, Mrs. Kaufman passed her nod from one to ...
— Gaslight Sonatas • Fannie Hurst
... it, is most agreeable and sweet to fishes. Swine also prefer to wash in vile filth rather than in pure clean water. Furthermore, some 56 animals eat grass and some eat herbs; some live in the woods, others eat seeds; some are carnivorous, and others lactivorous; some enjoy putrified food, and others fresh food; some raw food and others that which is prepared by cooking; and in general that which is agreeable to some is disagreeable and fatal to ...
— Sextus Empiricus and Greek Scepticism • Mary Mills Patrick
... in Gades once did keep, (Unlike their gentle race) carnivorous sheep, The triple monster slain, amidst his rocks He left to birds a prey, and seiz'd his flocks, Which by Eurystheus' order brought away He unto Argos safely ...
— The Twelve Labours of Hercules, Son of Jupiter & Alcmena • Anonymous
... not of a nature to leave any very visible traces of their existence on such bodies as chalk or mud. Then again, look at land animals; it is, as I have said, a very uncommon thing to find a land animal entire after death. Insects and other carnivorous animals very speedily pull them to pieces, putrefaction takes place, and so, out of the hundreds of thousands that are known to die every year, it is the rarest thing in the world to see one imbedded in such a way that its remains would be preserved for a lengthened period. Not ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... THE FOOD OF FISHES, this is almost universally found in their own element. They are mostly carnivorous, though they seize upon almost anything that comes in their way: they even devour their own offspring, and manifest a particular predilection for all living creatures. Those, to which Nature has meted out mouths of the greatest capacity, would ...
— The Book of Household Management • Mrs. Isabella Beeton
... man is a carnivorous production, And must have meals, at least one meal a day; He cannot live, like woodcocks, upon suction, But, like the shark and tiger, must have prey; Although his anatomical construction Bears vegetables, in a grumbling way, Your labouring people think, beyond all question, Beef, veal, and ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 6 • Lord Byron
... couple of weeks at a time; it is a kind of duck, for it has a duck-bill and four webbed paddles; it is a fish and quadruped together, for in the water it swims with the paddles and on shore it paws itself across country with them; it is a kind of seal, for it has a seal's fur; it is carnivorous, herbivorous, insectivorous, and vermifuginous, for it eats fish and grass and butterflies, and in the season digs worms out of the mud and devours them; it is clearly a bird, for it lays eggs, and hatches them; it is clearly a mammal, for it nurses ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... sorts, but eventually an impasse would be reached when greater mobility would endanger nutrition. If the roots withdrew from the soil, the vine would die—unless, he agreed slowly, echoing her shudder, the vine solved the dilemma by becoming again a carnivorous strangler. Nature made unaccountable blunders and sometimes found strange remedies, turning a blessing for one species into ...
— The Short Life • Francis Donovan
... free-thinker, in ethics a Christian; Orator apt at the rhine-stone rhythm of Ingersoll. Carnivorous, avenger, believer and pagan. Continent, promiscuous, changeable, treacherous, vain, Proud, with the pride that makes struggle a thing for laughter; With heart cored out by the worm of theatric despair. Wearing the coat of indifference to hide the shame of defeat; I, child of ...
— Spoon River Anthology • Edgar Lee Masters
... not inhabit caves; therefore gophers were brought into the cavern probably by birds of prey, the remains of which were common in the deposits (Miller, 1943:152-156), or conceivably by carnivorous mammals. Since most of the raptorial predators that would prey on pocket gophers do not have a wide hunting territory, it is likely that the gophers were taken within a short distance of the cave. The presence of the genus Heterogeomys in the deposits ...
— Pleistocene Pocket Gophers From San Josecito Cave, Nuevo Leon, Mexico • Robert J. Russell
... calot tree was, too, much in evidence. It is a carnivorous plant of about the bigness of a large sage-brush such as dots our western plains. Each branch ends in a set of strong jaws, which have been known to drag down and devour large and formidable beasts ...
— Warlord of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... a carnivorous animal. This none but greengrocers will dispute. That he was formerly less vegetarian in his diet than at present, is clear from the fact that market-gardening increases in the ratio of civilization. So we may safely assume that at some remote period Man subsisted ...
— The Fiend's Delight • Dod Grile
... had paused, crouching suddenly like a carnivorous beast, balked of its prey. There of a truth was the pavilion, but on the steps three men were standing, talking volubly and in whispers. Two of these men carried stable lanterns, and were obviously guiding their companion up to ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... diversity of form of these old reptiles we have generally no adequate conception. The forms now living are but feeble remnants. There were huge sea-serpents, and forms like our present crocodiles, but far more powerful. Others apparently resembled in form and habit the herbivorous and carnivorous mammals of to-day. Others strode or leaped on two legs. And still others flew like bats or birds. They were terrible forms, with coats of mail and powerful jaws and teeth. And they were active and swift. When ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... beare on a Sand beech, I went out with one man Geo. Drewyer & Killed the bear, which was verry large and a turrible looking animal, which we found verry hard to kill we Shot ten Balls into him before we killed him, & 5 of those Balls through his lights This animal is the largest of the Carnivorous kind I ever Saw we had nothing that could way him, I think his weight may be Stated at 500 pounds, he measured 8 feet 71/2 In. from his nose to the extremity of the Toe, 5 feet 101/2 in. arround the breast, 1 ...
— The Journals of Lewis and Clark • Meriwether Lewis et al
... a few yards, as they receded inward, when he lost sight of them in the gloom. Also he became aware of a curious charnel-house kind of stench that now and then issued from the cavern. It was just the kind of odour that one would expect to meet with in the den of a carnivorous beast, and Phil peered keenly into the darkness, more than half-expecting to see the shining eyes of a jaguar or puma glaring at him when his own eyes had become accustomed to the subdued light of the place. But no such sight greeted him, only, as he stood, ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... heath-mutton is to that of St James's-market; which in fact, is neither lamb nor mutton, but something betwixt the two, gorged in the rank fens of Lincoln and Essex, pale, coarse, and frowzy — As for the pork, it is an abominable carnivorous animal, fed with horse-flesh and distillers' grains; and the poultry is all rotten, in consequence of a fever, occasioned by the infamous practice of sewing up the gut, that they may be the sooner fattened in coops, in consequence ...
— The Expedition of Humphry Clinker • Tobias Smollett
... round—I will not say round carrion or a carcass, for Mr Chuzzlewit is quite the contrary—but round their prey; their prey; to rifle and despoil; gorging their voracious maws, and staining their offensive beaks, with every description of carnivorous enjoyment!' ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... strange what a distance the smell of burned bones and scraps will be carried to the noses of carnivorous beasts. A hunter in the woods better not burn such refuse unless he wants to draw dangerous game about him. It may be a wild opinion, but I haven't a doubt that the odor of those bones drew wolves twenty-five miles off to ...
— The Youth's Companion - Volume LII, Number 11, Thursday, March 13, 1879 • Various
... works are raised, the engineers are eager to propagate the thorny opuntia, and promote its growth, as they are careful to keep crocodiles in the ditches of fortified places. In regions where organized nature is so powerful and active, man summons as auxiliaries in his defence the carnivorous reptile, and the plant with its formidable armour ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... you? Villa Khismet. Anybody will show you the way. You, Denis," he added, "you disappoint me. You look like a boy who is fond of flowers. And yet you have never been to see my cannas, which are the finest in the kingdom, to say nothing of myself, who am also something of a flower. A carnivorous orchid, ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... and Dr. Richard Watson, whose ideas had the very greatest weight among the English Dissenters, and even among leading thinkers in the Established Church, held firmly to this theory; so that not until, in our own time, geology revealed the remains of vast multitudes of carnivorous creatures, many of them with half-digested remains of other animals in their stomachs, all extinct long ages before the appearance of man upon earth, was a victory won by science over theology in ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... cave. He seated himself grimly at the opening to wait for daybreak. He was not easy in his mind. There had been two Tubes to the Fifth-Dimension world. One had been made by Jacaro for his gunmen. That was now held by the men of the Golden City, as was proved by carnivorous lizards and the Death Mist that had come down it. The other was now blown up or, worse, in the hands of the Ragged Men. In any case Tommy and Evelyn were isolated upon a strange planet in a strange universe. To fall into the hands of the Ragged Men was to die horribly, and the Golden City would ...
— The Fifth-Dimension Tube • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... little more intelligence. He lived in a hostile environment, the prey of all manner of fierce life. He had no inventions nor artifices. His natural efficiency for food-getting was, say, 1. He did not even till the soil. With his natural efficiency of 1, he fought off his carnivorous enemies and got himself food and shelter. He must have done all this, else he would not have multiplied and spread over the earth and sent his progeny down, generation by generation, to become even ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... did very little execution on the inhabitants, yet, by famine, they destroyed eighteen thousand out of two and twenty. The dead being too numerous for the living to bury, became food for vermin and carnivorous birds. Many taking their coffins into the church yard, laid down in them, and breathed their last. Their diet had long been what the minds of those in plenty shudder at; even human flesh entrails, dung, and the most loathsome things, became at last the only food ...
— Fox's Book of Martyrs - Or A History of the Lives, Sufferings, and Triumphant - Deaths of the Primitive Protestant Martyrs • John Fox
... gives out no scent upon its track until it is sufficiently grown to make good running, and instinct teaches the mother that this wise provision of nature to preserve the helpless little quadruped from the ravages of wolves, panthers, and other carnivorous beasts, will be defeated if she remains with it, as her tracks can not be concealed. She therefore hides her fawn in the grass, where it is almost impossible to see it, even when very near it, goes off to some neighboring thicket ...
— The Prairie Traveler - A Hand-book for Overland Expeditions • Randolph Marcy
... making a great impression; a large man, with a large head, and a very landed manner; knowing enough to torment his fellow-creatures, not to instruct them; the ridicule of young ladies, and the natural butt and target of wit. It is easy to talk of carnivorous animals and beasts of prey; but does such a man, who lays waste a whole civilized party of beings by prosing, reflect upon the joy he spoils and the misery he creates in the course of his life, and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... the hurry habit may also be laid the excessive use of flesh foods. Carnivorous animals bolt their food. Frugivorous animals, to which class the human race properly belongs, eat slowly. But when, through the perversions of civilized life, frugivorous man is forced to eat as fast as ...
— How to Live - Rules for Healthful Living Based on Modern Science • Irving Fisher and Eugene Fisk
... canine teeth in the adult would seem to indicate a carnivorous propensity; but in no state save that of domestication do they manifest it. At first they reject flesh, but easily acquire a fondness for it. The canines are early developed, and evidently designed ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various
... here breaks off, at the moment when Pallil, whose help against the dragon had been invoked, begins to speak. Let us hope we shall recover the continuation of the narrative and learn what became of this carnivorous monster. ...
— Legends Of Babylon And Egypt - In Relation To Hebrew Tradition • Leonard W. King
... of strange voices that seemed to come from the courtyard. Putting the point of his nose out of the kennel, he saw four little beasts with dark fur, that looked like cats, standing consulting together. But they were not cats; they were polecats—carnivorous little animals, especially greedy for eggs and young chickens. One of the polecats, leaving his companions, came to the opening of the kennel and said in a ...
— Pinocchio - The Tale of a Puppet • C. Collodi
... livid complexion, and deep-set black eyes, dressed like a cook, standing squarely on very bandy legs, was alarming to behold, for in his countenance all the features predominated that are most typical of the carnivorous beast. ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac
... feel quite sure belonged to one of those domestic breeds which have all been derived from the wild rabbit of Europe known to zoologists as Lepus Cuniculus. The island was a favourable spot for the rabbits, for there do not appear to have been any carnivorous beasts or birds to harry them, nor were there other land mammals competing with them for food; and, as a result, we are told that they had so far increased and multiplied in forty years as to be described as "innumerable." In four and a half centuries ...
— Science and Morals and Other Essays • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle
... were reasonably close to human stature and appearance, allowing for the fact that their ancestry had been canine instead of simian. They had, of course, longer and narrower jaws than we have, and definitely carnivorous teeth. ...
— Lone Star Planet • Henry Beam Piper and John Joseph McGuire
... an allotment of stenographers and clerks. She had an assistant, too; at least, she confiscated him from the press department—one Leon Greenberg, a young night student from New York University, with an enormous profile rendered positively carnivorous of thrust by his struggle up from First Street and Avenue A, which is mire with ...
— Star-Dust • Fannie Hurst
... curious collection of insects in a special box. In this collection figured, among others, some specimens of those new staphylins, species of carnivorous coleopters, whose eyes are placed above the head, and which, till then, seemed to be peculiar to New Caledonia. A certain venomous spider, the "katipo," of the Maoris, whose bite is often fatal to the natives, had been very highly recommended ...
— Dick Sand - A Captain at Fifteen • Jules Verne
... It may be remarked that our little aeronaut is very greedy of moisture, though abstemious in other respects. Its food is perhaps peculiar, and only found in the superior regions of the sky. Like the rest of its tribe, it is doubtless carnivorous, and may subserve some highly important purpose in the economy of Providence; such, for instance, as the destruction of that truly formidable, though almost microscopically minute insect, the Furia infernalis, whose wounds ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 339, Saturday, November 8, 1828. • Various
... animals, though not exclusively so. Carnivorous tendencies are displayed by many of them. They rob birds' nests of their eggs and young, they capture and devour snakes and other small animals. In zooelogical gardens monkeys are often observed to catch and eat mice. It is evident that many of them might readily become carnivorous to a large extent ...
— Man And His Ancestor - A Study In Evolution • Charles Morris
... himself an experiment station. On his own person he directly and practically tried out each idea ... his wife was also a convertee, slightly reluctant, to his tests ... and his son, perforce. Baxter actually kept a vegetarian dog. "Even carnivorous animals thrive better on a vegetarian diet." But the dog was no corroboration of his theory. It lacked gloss and shine to ...
— Tramping on Life - An Autobiographical Narrative • Harry Kemp
... table where the meat was laid out ready to feed them, and cut a hole in each piece of meat and put in a double handful of horseradish, and just then the feeder came along and began to throw the meat in the cages. Gee, but those carnivorous animals are bad enough even if you give them nice boiled sirloin steak, and they fight enough over it, at any time, but when they began to chew and tear the meat, and get horseradish hot from the griddle, they didn't do a thing. The audience thought the animals ...
— Peck's Bad Boy at the Circus • George W. Peck
... dandies should think this all fable, Mr. Tomkins most kindly produced, on the table, A sample of each of these species of creatures, Both tolerably human, in structure and features, Except that the Episcopus seems, Lord deliver us! To've been carnivorous as well as granivorous; And Tomkins, on searching its stomach, found there Large lumps, such as no modern stomach could bear, Of a substance called Tithe, upon which, as 'tis said, The whole Genus Clericum formerly fed; And which having lately himself ...
— The Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore • Thomas Moore et al
... devoured by wild beasts haunted me, though in truth I had little of this fate to fear. The only carnivorous beasts on the desert are wolves, but as game is abundant, and can be caught with ordinary exertion, they have no occasion to feed upon men. About midnight my fears were roused by my pony taking alarm at the approach of some wild beast. He snorted and pulled at his rope, and had it ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... we have not examined all ruminants, having omitted most giraffes, most deer, most oxen, etc., how do we know that the unexamined (say, some camels) are not exceptional? Camels are vicious enough to be carnivorous; and indeed it is said that Bactrian camels will eat flesh rather than starve, though of course their ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... with its square, powerful head and tiger-fanged jaws, and the tremendous, rending claws on its short forearms, was plainly of a different species from the great herb-eaters of the dinosaurian family. It was one of the smaller members of that terrible family of carnivorous dinosaurians which ruled the ancient cycad forests as the black-maned lion rules the Rhodesian jungles to-day. The massive iguanodon which fled before it so madly, though of fully thrice its bulk, had reason to fear it as the fat cow ...
— In the Morning of Time • Charles G. D. Roberts
... among animals, those which require the same kind of station, or food, or climate; those are the indirect opponents; the direct opponents are, of course, those which prey upon an animal or vegetable. The 'helpers' may also be regarded as direct and indirect: in the case of a carnivorous animal, for example, a particular herbaceous plant may in multiplying be an indirect helper, by enabling the herbivora on which the carnivore preys to get more food, and thus to nourish the carnivore more abundantly; the direct helper ...
— The Conditions Of Existence As Affecting The Perpetuation Of Living Beings • Thomas H. Huxley
... year from a long initiatory sojourn in Europe to lay siege to the tight little citadel of New York. "Of course if you and Regina invite her the thing is settled. Well, we need new blood and new money—and I hear she's still very good-looking," the carnivorous old ...
— The Age of Innocence • Edith Wharton
... lining of the tube by means of a pair of strong hooks at the posterior end of its soft defenceless abdomen. Their food appears for the most part to be of a vegetable nature. Some species, however, are alleged to be carnivorous, and a North American form of the genus Hydropsyche is said to spin around the mouth of its burrow a silken net for the capture of small animal organisms living in the water. Before passing into the pupal stage, the larva partially closes the orifice of the tube with ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... ideas—Yankeedom and the crocodile. They are worth the coupling. The crocodile is asleep. He does not sleep on both ears; he sleeps with one eye open; his jaws are also open. Rows of teeth appear, sharped, fanged, pointed, murderous, carnivorous, omnivorous. Some of the teeth are wanting: say a dozen. Who knocked those teeth out? A demon. What demon? Or perhaps an angel. What angel? The angel is secession: the demon is rebellion. ORMUZD and AHRIMAN: BALDUR and LOKI: the DEVIL and ...
— Mohun, or, The Last Days of Lee • John Esten Cooke
... the Sacramento. And all of these creatures, excepting the crows and magpies, fell before the unerring and unexpectedly useful blunderbuss of Captain Bunting, passed a temporary existence in the maw of the big iron pot, and eventually vanished into the carnivorous jaws of Ned ...
— The Golden Dream - Adventures in the Far West • R.M. Ballantyne
... universe and thou art its stay! Thou shall not, with all thy body, be reduced to the state of one who eateth of all things promiscuously. O thou of flames, the flame that is in thy viler parts shall alone eat of all things alike. The body of thine which eateth of flesh (being in the stomach of all carnivorous animals) shall also eat of all things promiscuously. And as every thing touched by the sun's rays becometh pure, so shall everything be pure that shall be burnt by thy flames. Thou art, O fire, the supreme energy ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... (Cercoleptes), found only in the Amazonian forests, is entirely arboreal, and has a long flexible tail like that of certain monkeys. Many other similar instances could be enumerated, but I will mention only the Geodephaga, or carnivorous ground beetles, a great proportion of whose genera and species in these forest regions are, by the structure of their feet, fitted to live exclusively on the branches and leaves ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... us enough. They tell us that the Grasshopper is an inveterate consumer of insects, especially of those which are not protected by too hard a cuirass; they are evidence of tastes which are highly carnivorous, but not exclusively so, like those of the Praying Mantis, who refuses everything except game. The butcher of the Cicadae is able to modify an excessively heating diet with vegetable fare. After meat and blood, sugary fruit-pulp; ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... is thought to be comparatively modern. The ancients appear to have been a carnivorous race: they gorged themselves with meat; while the modern man makes larger and larger use of fruits and vegetables, until this generation is doubtless better fed than any that has preceded it. The strawberry and the apple, and such vegetables as celery, ought ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... flesh of serpents and would quickly devour the largest. In the presence of Lorenze he seized a live cat with his teeth, eventrated it, sucked its blood, and ate it, leaving the bare skeleton only. In about thirty minutes he rejected the hairs in the manner of birds of prey and carnivorous animals. He also ate dogs in the same manner. On one occasion it was said that he swallowed a living eel without chewing it; but he had first bitten off its head. He ate almost instantly a dinner that had been prepared for 15 vigorous ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... enormous lizard—a land creature, also carnivorous. The pterodactyle was another lizard, but furnished with wings to pursue its prey in the air, and varying in size between a cormorant and a snipe. Crocodiles abounded, and some of these were herbivorous. ...
— Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation • Robert Chambers
... Rabindranath Tagore, the great Hindu, spoke as follows: "The political civilisation which has sprung from the soil of Europe and is overrunning the whole world, like some prolific weed, is based upon exclusiveness. It is always watchful to keep the aliens at bay or to exterminate them. It is carnivorous and cannibalistic in its tendencies, it feeds upon the resources of other peoples and tries to swallow their whole future. It is always afraid of other races achieving eminence, naming it as a peril, and tries to thwart ...
— The Forerunners • Romain Rolland
... judges in the seventeenth century who believed that witches ought to be burned and that the persons before them were witches, and yet would not burn them—evidently under the influence of vague half-realized feelings. I know a vegetarian who thinks that, as far as he can see, carnivorous habits are not bad for human health and actually tend to increase the happiness of the species of animals eaten—as the adoption of Swift's Modest Proposal would doubtless relieve the economic troubles of the human race, and yet feels clear that for him ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray
... something of a shock if I say that the bird that is selected for the comparison is not really the eagle, but one which, in our estimation, is of a very much lower order—viz. the carnivorous vulture. But a poetical emblem is not the less fitting, though, besides the points of resemblance, the thing which is so used has others less noble. Our modern repugnance to the vulture as feeding on carcasses was probably not felt by the singer of this song. What he brings into ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... formidable set of teeth suitable for his carnivorous diet. The Weddell, living on fish, has a more simple group, but these are liable to become very worn in old age, due to his habit of gnawing out holes in the ice for himself, so graphically displayed on Ponting's cinematograph. ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... he will not say so now, because his mouth, I trust, is hushed in death, and his body stretched to the four winds of heaven, to be torn to pieces by carnivorous birds. ...
— The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories • Mark Twain
... almost carnivorous. I am afraid that there are not many about here to satisfy her appetite. Your brother, Morris, the curate at Morton, and myself, if at my age I may creep into that honourable company, are the only single creatures within four miles, ...
— Stella Fregelius • H. Rider Haggard
... habits different. The wolf's natural voice is a loud howl, but when confined with dogs he will learn to bark. Although he is carnivorous, he will also eat vegetables, and when sickly he will nibble grass. In the chase, a pack of wolves will divide into parties, one following the trail of the quarry, the other endeavouring to intercept its retreat, exercising a considerable amount of strategy, a trait which is exhibited by many ...
— Dogs and All About Them • Robert Leighton
... are numerous, but few of them carnivorous, and none of a size to endanger human life. The native dog is generally believed to be an importation, being deficient of the false uterus or pouch characterising all our other quadrupeds. He closely resembles the Chinese dog in form and appearance, being either of a reddish ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 10, No. 271, Saturday, September 1, 1827. • Various
... squirrel, and the rattling of his claws on the dry bark of the tree, his bushy tail curving far over his back, and his whole body seeming to be shaken by violent convulsions. Henry stared at him, thinking at first that he was threatened by some carnivorous prowler of the air, but, as he looked away, he caught a glimpse through the bushes of a moving brown figure and ...
— The Eyes of the Woods - A story of the Ancient Wilderness • Joseph A. Altsheler
... to know whether they are cannibals," continued the doctor. "The worst of it is, if we killed one we should be no wiser. You see, you couldn't tell whether he was carnivorous or herbivorous by his teeth.—Well, captain, no signs of ...
— Jack at Sea - All Work and no Play made him a Dull Boy • George Manville Fenn
... such as can be seen nowhere but on the racecourse or in the betting-club: the last trace of high thought has vanished, and, though the men may laugh and indulge in verbal horse-play, there is always something carnivorous about their aspect. They are sharp in a certain line, but true intelligence is rarely found among them. Strange to say, they are often generous with money if their sentimental side is fairly touched, but their very generosity ...
— The Ethics of Drink and Other Social Questions - Joints In Our Social Armour • James Runciman
... her task with a passive regularity. She scarcely knows the lighter shades of sentiments and expressions. She laughs or she weeps. No smiling. When she laughs, it is with a large display of the solid white teeth of a carnivorous animal; when she weeps, it is with the deep sobs of a beaten child. She is strong and patient like the ox, she runs like the horse, she resists cold, heat, and fatigue; her sleep is profound and without dreams. She ...
— Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day; Volume 1 • William Walton
... topic. "It was the one that came suddenly upon More while he was resting with Almah after his flight with the run-away bird. That I take to be the Megalosaurus. This animal was a monster of tremendous size and strength. Cuvier thought that it might have been seventy feet in length. It was carnivorous, and therefore more ferocious than the iguanodon, and more ready to attack. Its head was like that of a crocodile, its body massive like that of an elephant, yet larger; its tail was small, and it stood high on its legs, so that it could run with great speed. It was not covered with bony armor, but ...
— A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder • James De Mille
... camp had been formed, Finn truly was, to all appearances, a fearsome and terrifying creature. His snarls and growls waked fury in the breast of the irritable old tiger, who was not accustomed to hear threats or warnings from any of his neighbours, he being the only large carnivorous animal in the show, and, in consequence, he threw himself against the partition between Finn's cage and his own, snarling ferociously. This put the strength of centuries of hunting and fighting courage and fierceness into Finn's replies, and left ...
— Finn The Wolfhound • A. J. Dawson
... British Museum the following fossils:—Remains of three or four individuals of Megatherium; of three species of Glyptodon; of three individuals of the Mastodon Andium; of Macrauchenia; of a second species of Toxodon, different from T. Platensis; and lastly, of the Machairodus, a wonderful large carnivorous animal. M. d'Orbigny has lately received from the Recolate "Voyage" Pal. page 144), near Buenos Ayres, ...
— South American Geology - also: - Title: Geological Observations On South America • Charles Darwin
... Things, for He is the Order of Things Himself. Is there even in Him complete Freedom of Will, freedom to make a world other than this? One wishes, in a sense, to say so, but the horror of it! for then He is responsible for the cruelty of the ant-heap, the feeding of the carnivorous upon the vegetable eaters, the preying and persecution of the malevolent upon the kindly—and He could have made it all otherwise! With a Free Will He could have brought growth without pain, being omnipotent. Here we see God as a monster,—responsible for sweat shops and the Marne, in the ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... lover of gold is likely to range over, the miser hears and sees and feels and hugs and enjoys as he paddles with his lean hands among the sliding, shining, ringing, innocent-looking bits of yellow metal, toying with them as the lion-tamer handles the great carnivorous monster, whose might and whose terrors are child's play to the latent forces and power of harm-doing of the glittering counters played with in the great ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... deep and with a side chamber at the bottom. There she would have thrust him down the throat of the burrow, and then crawled in and laid an egg on the helpless beast, from which in time would have hatched the carnivorous wasp grub. Pepsis has many close allies among the wasps, all black or steely blue with smoky or dull-bronze wings, and they all use spiders, stung and paralyzed, to store their ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... St. George let us say, the mere abrupt appearance of the dragon's head (if of a proper ferocity) will be enough to explain that he intends to eat people; and it will not be necessary for the dragon to explain at length, with animated gestures and playful conversation, that his nature is carnivorous and that he has not merely dropped ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... proclivities for seizing our domestic poultry, and consequently many people will fire upon a hawk or an owl who would probably fire upon no other bird. By living close to man the sparrow is largely saved from the danger of capture by these carnivorous creatures, and this is the first and a very important element of the advantage to the sparrow of living near man. But there is the additional advantage that man scatters about him, in one way or another, a very considerable amount of waste food. I have suggested that the ...
— The Meaning of Evolution • Samuel Christian Schmucker |
