"Cocoon" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... entombed itself that it might emerge to the higher life of the butterfly. But we must not take from such a fact what suits our purpose, and leave a fatal weakness in our argument. The butterfly does, indeed, emerge from the coffin of the cocoon and the seemingly dead pupa. But it is only for a brief day of life. Then it lays its eggs and dies forever. It is born to no immortality, but to the most ephemeral life. The early Church; yea, the Jewish Church, found rational warrant for belief ...
— The Things Which Remain - An Address To Young Ministers • Daniel A. Goodsell
... certain species of moth mines leaves, and eating away the cellular structures, causes them to twist irregularly, and eventually spins on the spot a cocoon of green silk in which it undergoes metamorphosis. A local caterpillar, too, converts the tough harsh leaves of a fig-tree (FICUS FASCICULATA) into a close and perfect scroll by an elaborate system of haulage, spinning silken strands as required, having primarily rendered the leaf ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... the amputation of one of her limbs, fell to observing the people about her. The woman in front of her leaned against the pew and brought her broad, well-fed back close under Sylvia's eyes. It was covered with as many layers as a worm in a cocoon. There were beads on lace, the lace incrusted on other lace, chiffon, fish-net, a dimly seen filmy satin, cut in points, and, lower down, an invisible foundation of taffeta. Through the interstices there gleamed a revelation of ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield
... Really, that voice puts a new complexion on Miss Blood. I have a theory to reconstruct. I have been philosophizing her as a simple country girl. I must begin on an operatic novice. I liked the other better. It gave value to the black silk; as a singer she'll wear silk as habitually as a cocoon. She will have to take some stage name; translate Blood into Italian. We shall know her hereafter as La Sanguinelli; and when she comes to Boston we shall make our modest brags about going out to Europe with her. I don't ...
— The Lady of the Aroostook • W. D. Howells
... be candidly advertised. Even at a garden-party, where the guests of honor are two English subjects, the young women would be required to veil themselves up to the nose-tips and hide themselves within a veritable cocoon ...
— The Slim Princess • George Ade
... never had such a splendid time in her life, and the brightness of her cheeks catching the flame from her eyes bore out this statement. Marita, too, seemed to have "shook her cocoon," Jack said, his economy of language scarcely making up for the little difference in "shook" and "shaken." Certainly she managed to climb from one boat to another with remarkable alertness, while Bess, ...
— The Motor Girls on Crystal Bay - The Secret of the Red Oar • Margaret Penrose
... of the camera we may trace the life of nature even in forms which no human observation really finds in the outer world. Out there it may take weeks for the orchid to bud and blossom and fade; in the picture the process passes before us in a few seconds. We see how the caterpillar spins its cocoon and how it breaks it and how the butterfly unfolds its wings; and all which needed days and months goes on in a fraction of a minute. New interest for geography and botany and zooelogy has thus been aroused by these developments, undreamed of in the ...
— The Photoplay - A Psychological Study • Hugo Muensterberg
... expeditiously packed with them. Not far from my studio door is a small thicket of wild rose, which should alone be sufficient to account for all those victimized caterpillars. This species is a regular dependent on the rose, dwelling within its cocoon-like canopy of leaves, which are drawn together with a few silken webs, and in which it is commonly concealed by day. A little persuasion upon either end of its leafy case, however, soon brings the little tenant to view as he wriggles out, backward or forward, as the case may ...
— My Studio Neighbors • William Hamilton Gibson
... disembodied spirit which we call a butterfly, and they called by the name of ψυχη {psychê}, the Soul. They had a curious name (νεκυδαλλος {nekydallos}) for the pupa. It sounds like a 'little corpse' (νεκυς {nekys}); and like a little corpse within its shroud or coffin the pupa sleeps in its cocoon. A late poet describes the butterfly 'coming back from the grave to the light of day'; and certain of the Fathers of the Church, St. Basil in particular, point the moral accordingly, and draw a doubtless ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... of Brazil exhibit numerous beautiful examples of insect workmanship. Among others is the work of a caterpillar—a cocoon about the size of a sparrow's egg, woven in broad meshes of either buff or rose-coloured silk, and seen suspended from the tip of an outstanding leaf by a strong thread, five or six inches in length. It forms a conspicuous object hung thus in mid-air. The glossy threads with which it is knitted ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... danger. The larvae are ingeniously sorted as regards age and size, and are never mixed. The larvae period generally extends through a month, although often much longer, and in most species when the larvae pass into pupae they spin a cocoon of white or straw color, looking much like a shining pebble. Other larvae do not spin a cocoon, but spend the pupal state naked. When they mature they are carefully assisted from their shells by ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 822 - Volume XXXII, Number 822. Issue Date October 3, 1891 • Various
... the House except down the hall a snore—a glorious, triumphant note. A second time the gong took up its discordant march. Then from the cocoon on the bed a flash of legs and arms sprang out and into the waiting garments. There was a splash in the basin that spattered the water far and near, and Butsey, enveloped in a towel, rushed into his upper ...
— The Varmint • Owen Johnson
... plate is held in the other hand! There are also rolls and biscuits, pate de foie gras or lettuce and tomato sandwiches, the former made usually of split "dinner" rolls with pate between, or thin sandwiches rolled like a leaf in which a moth has built a cocoon. Ices are brought in a little later, when a number of persons have apparently finished their "first course." Ice cream is quite as fashionable as individual "ices." It is merely that caterers are less partial to it because it has ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... the silk-worm, wind themselves into a cocoon, and pass the dormant (chrysalis) state of their existence, and in a few days come out of their silken cases perfect winged insects or millers, and are soon ready to deposit their eggs, from which another crop ...
— A Manual or an Easy Method of Managing Bees • John M. Weeks
... apparatus consists of a small galvanometric helix, r, analogous to Thomson's siphon recorder, which is suspended from a cocoon fiber and capable of moving in an extremely powerful magnetic field, N S. This helix carries, as may be seen in Figs. 1, 3 and 4, a prolongation, v, at its lower end whose form is that of a prism, and which is arranged ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 508, September 26, 1885 • Various
... aromatic fire, rejuvenescent for a thousand years; and he cannot but take the phoenix for a miraculous type of his own soul springing, free and eternal, from the ashes of his corpse. Having watched the silkworm, as it wove its cocoon and lay down in its oblong grave apparently dead, until at length it struggles forth, glittering with rainbow colors, a winged moth, endowed with new faculties and living a new life in a new sphere, he conceives that so the human soul may, ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... implacable white face, with blazing eyes and jaws that worked ceaselessly at the loop of the string that was drawn round its neck. The effect, under the electrics, was that of a demon caterpillar wrathfully spinning its own cocoon. ...
— A Diversity of Creatures • Rudyard Kipling
... fed to swine. This done every day during their falling, which does not last a great while, will remedy the evil in two seasons. The worm that crawls from the fallen apple gets into crevices in rough bark, and spins his cocoon, in which he remains ...
— Soil Culture • J. H. Walden
... of splendid butterflies, with their brilliant tints. The two tables (8, 9) ranged next in order to those upon which the butterflies are distributed, are covered with varieties of the moth. Here are the silkworm moth and its cocoon as kept in Siberia; the ghost moth of our hop grounds; the hawk moth, the death's head moth, and ...
— How to See the British Museum in Four Visits • W. Blanchard Jerrold
... is one of Master Tit's ways—storing away provisions for a time of need. With his stout, conical beak he is able to break the shell of an acorn, peck a corn grain into swallowable bits, and tear open the toughest casing of a cocoon. He will even break the hard pits of the dogwood berry to secure the kernel within, the ground below often being strewn with the shell fragments. No danger of Parus bicolor coming to want or going to ...
— Our Bird Comrades • Leander S. (Leander Sylvester) Keyser
... cockchafer is here known only as the oak-web, and a smaller beetle as fern-web. It seems hard to guess why they should be named web (which in Anglo-Saxon means weaver), as they do not, I think, form any cocoon. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 75, April 5, 1851 • Various
... illustrious chemist had been striving to check the plague that was devastating the silkworm nurseries, and as he knew nothing of the subject which he proposed to study, not even understanding the constitution of the cocoon or the evolution of the silkworm, he sought out Fabre in order to obtain from his store of entomological wisdom the elementary ideas which he would find indispensable. Fabre has told us, in a moving page (4/20), ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... but morning or evening, in country or in town, well or ill, writing with his own pen or dictating to an amanuensis in the intervals of screaming-fits due to the torture of cramp in the stomach, Scott spun away at his imaginative web almost as evenly as a silkworm spins at its golden cocoon. Nor can I detect the slightest trace of any difference in quality between the stories, such as can be reasonably ascribed to comparative care or haste. There are differences, and even great differences, ...
— Sir Walter Scott - (English Men of Letters Series) • Richard H. Hutton
... the nurse had been standing with the quiet small packet which was the storm centre of preparation lying like a cocoon or a giant seed-pod against ...
— The Power and the Glory • Grace MacGowan Cooke |
