"Fossil" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Mr. Waterhouse learnt that Mr. Burtt, whose station* is only a few miles distant, in opening these springs discovered some fossil bones, casts of which were forwarded to Professor Owen, who pronounced them to be the remains of a gigantic extinct marsupial, named Diprotodon Australis. (* Hergott Springs were only discovered and named by Stuart three years before, yet we now find a ...
— Explorations in Australia, The Journals of John McDouall Stuart • John McDouall Stuart
... printer has to work fast, and if he does not recognise a word he is very likely to turn it into something he does understand. Thus the title of a paper in the Philosophical Transactions was curiously changed in an advertisement, and the Calamites, a species of fossil plants of the coal measures, with but slight change appeared as "The True Fructification of Calamities.'' This is a blunder pretty sure to be made, and within a few days of writing this, the author has seen a reference to "Notes on some Pennsylvanian ...
— Literary Blunders • Henry B. Wheatley
... the depths! Silurian gastropods, strange Devonian fishes, enormous Triassic reptiles, the rich and varied shells of the Jurassic, the dinosaurs and primitive birds of Cretaceous, the little early horses of Eocene, and Miocene's camels and mastodons mingling their fossil remnants in a democracy of ruin to defy the ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard
... the suns were "fictions of mythological astronomy, modified either by obscure reminiscences of some great revolution suffered by our planet, or by physical hypotheses, suggested by the sight of marine petrifactions and fossil remains,"[216-1] while the Abbe Brasseur, in his late works on ancient Mexico, interprets them as exaggerated references to historical events. As no solution can be accepted not equally applicable to the same myth as it appears in Yucatan, Peru, and the hunting tribes, and to the exactly ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... again. "Count Alfieri, sir," he said, "has doubtless explained to you the necessity that obliges me to be so private in receiving my friends; and now perhaps you will join these gentlemen in examining some rare fossil fish newly sent me from the ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton
... no, I didn't," he admitted. "I had intended to, but you see—Dear me, dear me, I hope you will feel that I did right. You see, our paleontological department had been hoping to fit out an expedition to the Wyoming fossil fields, but it was lamentably short of funds, appropriations—ah—and so on. Hambridge and I were talking of the matter. A very adequate man indeed, Hambridge. Possibly you've read some of his writings. ...
— Galusha the Magnificent • Joseph C. Lincoln
... his companions went fossil-hunting, and stayed so long as to excite their compunction, and quicken their steps when they at length detached themselves from the ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... truth in that; but did you think the old-fashioned family doctor was extinct, a fossil ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... why we no longer have so many grand old men is that we no longer have so many old men. Instead we have numbers of octogenarian sportsmen like the late Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, who have not yet been caught by the arch-reactionary fossil-collector, Senility. This is a fair omen for the future of progress. "If only the leaders of the world's thought and emotion," writes Bourne in "Youth," "can, by caring for the physical basis, keep themselves ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... to his waist, and whose face is furrowed by a thousand storms; Anthony Jenkinson by name, the great Asiatic traveller, who is discoursing to the Christ-church virtuoso of reindeer sledges and Siberian steppes, and of the fossil ivory, plain proof of Noah's flood, which the Tungoos dig from the ice-cliffs of the Arctic sea. Next to him is Christopher Carlile, Walsingham's son-in-law (as Sidney also is now), a valiant captain, afterwards general of the soldiery in Drake's triumphant West Indian raid ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... "thoughts that wander through eternity." Symbol was his native tongue, his first form of speech—as, indeed, it is his last—whereby he was able to say what else he could not have uttered. Such is the fact, and even the language in which we state it is "a dictionary of faded metaphors," the fossil poetry ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton
... fossil word. It lies just at the foot of the Wrekin, and the hill which takes that name in English must have been pronounced by the old Celtic inhabitants much like Uricon: for of course the awkward initial letter has only become silent in these later lazy centuries. The Romans turned it into Uriconium; ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... as you know, has become a citizen of the United States, has had the Cuvierian prize awarded to him for his great work on fossil fishes—an honour approved by every lover of science. This distinguished writer says, in his latest publications on fossil zoology, that the number of fossil fishes distributed over the globe is more than 25,000 species; of mammifera, over 3000; reptiles, over 4000; shells, more than ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 439 - Volume 17, New Series, May 29, 1852 • Various
... quite an old fossil," dowager lady Chia observed. "I'm no good whatever. My eyesight is dim; my ears are deaf, my memory is gone. I can't even recollect any of you, old family connections. When therefore any of our relations come on a visit, I don't see them for fear lest I should be ridiculed. ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... suggest they are both relapses into ancestral channels and the one drags the other along with it. When I see a thing like this, I want to hew it in pieces. Agag, Mr. Heard; Agag. I must have another look at this specimen; one does not see such a sight every day. He is a living fossil—post-pleistocene." ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas
... matured thought and fearless inquiry, mythology has been the ever-recurrent subject of anxious wonder and careful study. The ancient philosophers, who could pass by the petrified shells on mountain-tops and the fossil trees buried in their quarries without ever asking the question how they came to be there, or what they signified, were ever ready with doubts and surmises when they came to listen to ancient stories of their gods and heroes. And, more curious still, ...
— Chips From A German Workshop, Vol. V. • F. Max Mueller
... he went back to work, he found the fossil of some jellyfish that hadn't eaten the right things in the right combinations, but a little later, he found four nodules, one after another, and two of them were sunstones; four or five chunks later, ...
— Little Fuzzy • Henry Beam Piper
... strange story? so utterly unlike anything which we see now;—so utterly unlike anything which we ought to see now? And yet it may have been good in its time. It looks out on us from the dim ages, like the fossil bone of some old monster cropping out of a quarry. But the old monster was good in his place and time. God made him and had need of him. It may be that God made those three poor monks, and ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... flint spears from the Island of Cozumel. Next follow fossil shells, collected by Mrs. Alice Le Plongeon from an excavation at Chichen-Itza, which may be useful in a ...
— The Mayas, the Sources of Their History / Dr. Le Plongeon in Yucatan, His Account of Discoveries • Stephen Salisbury, Jr.
... the egg we find that they have teeth in their mouth before the bill is formed. When the fact was first discovered, the real intermediate form between the lizard and the bird was not known. It was afterwards discovered at Solenhofen in a fossil impression from the Jurassic period. This was the archeopteryx, which had feathers like a real bird and yet had teeth in its mouth like the lizard when it lived on earth. The instance is instructive in two ways. In the first place it shows that we were quite justified ...
— Socialism: Positive and Negative • Robert Rives La Monte
... into that new region, connected with a highway across the isthmus of Panama, no one can calculate. The experiment along the shores of Chili and Peru has already commenced; and the cheap rate at which fossil fuel can be had has proved a great facility. Under circumstances so peculiarly propitious, to what an extent, then, may not steam navigation be carried on the smooth expanse of the Southern ocean? If there are ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... the groups of reptiles that gave rise to mammals is preserved in the fossil record, but the musculature of these reptiles has been lost forever. Nevertheless, a reasonably accurate picture of the morphology and the spatial relationships of the muscles of many of these extinct ...
— The Adductor Muscles of the Jaw In Some Primitive Reptiles • Richard C. Fox
... egg, and on questioning him was informed that many such were to be found in the interior of the island. The largest of these eggs would hold two gallons. The volume equals that of 135 hen's eggs. Some doubts were at first entertained as to the nature of the animal to which the fossil bones belonged; but M. St Hilliare—a competent judge in such matters—has pronounced them to be those of a bird to which he has ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... said Jack Barnes suddenly, "I've done nothing and am not afraid to be arrested. I'm going to give myself up." Of course there was a storm of protest and a flow of tears, but the culprit was firm. "Tell the old fossil that if he'll guarantee safety ...
— The Daughter of Anderson Crow • George Barr McCutcheon
... should result in the overthrow of the Bible. They seem, somehow, to be fully persuaded that the inspired word of God has no inherent power to stand alone,—that it has fallen among thieves and robbers,—is being pelted with fossil coprolites, suffocated with fire-mist and primitive gases, or beaten over the head with the shank-bones of Silurian monsters, and is bawling aloud for assistance. Therefore, not stopping to dress, they dash out into the public notice without hat or coat, in such unclothed ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 6, Issue 35, September, 1860 • Various
... parallel in life or fiction. Nevertheless, such is the fortunate recuperative faculty of boyhood that day after day I would forget the horrors of that hour, and be happy in climbing over the decayed chalk acclivities of Whitby, picking up the fossil shells that nestle there. Yonder on my table, as I write, lies a coiled ammonite found there; it had been there ten thousand years or ages before I detached it from its bed, and, for aught I know, my remotest ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... of the Tertiary period monkeys must have been very abundant and very varied, yet it is but rarely that their fossil remains are found. This, however, is not difficult to explain. The deposits in which mammalian remains most abound are those formed in lakes or in caverns. In the former the bodies of large numbers of terrestrial animals were annually deposited, owing to their having been caught by floods in ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 344, August 5, 1882 • Various
... very rude of you to call me a fossil when I am only approaching that stage. Oh! I am glad to see you. I /am/ glad!" and she gave me ...
— The Ancient Allan • H. Rider Haggard
... a fossil tipsy-cake The sponge each morn appeared; The bath, if plenished over-night, Was frozen ere the morning light, And more that frigid water-ache Than unwashed days I feared, Now while the milder zephyrs ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100., Jan. 24, 1891. • Various
... rows of "brownstone fronts" in New York city are mostly of Portland stone, though in many cases the walls are chiefly of brick covered with thin layers of the stone. The old red sandstone of the Connecticut valley is distinguished in geology for the discovery of gigantic fossil footprints of birds, first noticed in the Portland quarries in 1802. Some of these footprints measured ten to sixteen inches, and they were from four to six feet apart. The sandstone of Belleville, N.J., has also extensive use and reputation. Trinity Church in New York ...
— Scientific American Supplement No. 360, November 25, 1882 • Various
... eyes, a long nose, and forehead and chin carved out of granite. On his head a flat "wide-awake" hat, on his bent back a white jacket. When he speaks, his mouth moves sideways first; there's always a spot of dried blood on his lip; when he smiles a tooth-stump appears like an ancient fossil. He talks slowly, stopping to spit now and then; every day of his life he gets up at half-past three. Now, mounted on the high iron seat (a crumpled sack for saddle), he rides like some old charioteer, a Hercules with great ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors
... in awe and wonder before the fossil skeleton of the Megatherium, and the savants struggle to unveil its past, while the equally great and marvelous Rhinoceros indicus is being rushed into oblivion. We marvel at the fossil shell of the gigantic turtle called Collosochelys atlas, while the last living representatives ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday
... thank Professor E. Raymond Hall and Dr. Robert W. Wilson for their permission to examine this material and for critical comments and advice on the manuscript. The drawings were made by Miss Lucy Remple. The specimens are a part of the collection of fossil vertebrates formerly belonging to the California Institute of Technology, but now the property of the Los Angeles County Museum. The specimens had been lent by the late Professor Chester Stock to Professor Hall and Dr. Wilson for study and report. All measurements ...
— Pleistocene Pocket Gophers From San Josecito Cave, Nuevo Leon, Mexico • Robert J. Russell
... statement could not be gainsaid. God's truth must agree, whether discovered by looking within upon the soul or without upon the world. A truth written upon the human heart to-day in its full play of emotions or passions, cannot be at any real variance even with a truth written upon a fossil whose poor life was gone millions of years ago. And this being so, it would also seem a truth irrefragable; that the search for each of these kind of truths must be followed out in its own lines, by its own methods, to its own results, without any interference from investigators along other ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various
... century, no information respecting the dodo was obtained, and some authors have gone so far as to pretend that it never existed; but amongst a great mass of satisfactory evidence in favour of the recent existence of this species, we may mention that an assemblage of fossil bones were recently discovered, under a bed of lava, in the Isle of France, and sent to the Paris museum by M. Desjardins. They almost all belonged to a large living species of land-tortoise, called Testudu Indica, but amongst them were the head, sternum, and humerus of the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 19, No. 531, Saturday, January 28, 1832. • Various
... similar plant abounding in the tertiary formations at the mouth of the Thames, and having floated about there in as great profusion as here, till buried deep in the silt and mud that now forms the island of Sheppey.* [Bowerbank "On the Fossil Fruits and Seeds of the Isle of Sheppey," and Lyell's "Elements of Geology," 3rd ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker
... and more extensive curvature than those of the Elephas Indicus. Some have been found which describe a circle, but the curve being oblique, they thus clear the head, and point outward, downward, and backward. The numerous fossil tusks of the mammoth which have been discovered and recorded may be ranged under two averages of size, the larger ones at nine feet and a half, the smaller at five feet and a half in length. The writer has elsewhere assigned reasons for the probability of the latter ...
— The Tree-Dwellers • Katharine Elizabeth Dopp
... value in agriculture, we should not need the latter. It is quite indifferent for our purpose whether we supply the ammonia (the source of nitrogen) in the form of urine, or in that of a salt derived from coal-tar; whether we derive the phosphate of lime from bones, apatite, or fossil excrements ...
— Familiar Letters of Chemistry • Justus Liebig
... Dickens—says they are the real social chronicles. He's a profound student of history, and the history of the present interests him just as much—he has those Balkans under a microscope; and collects all the data on every important strike here and elsewhere. And yet where women are concerned he is a fossil. An American fossil—worst sort. Some of the young ones are just as bad...I'll have to give in. I can't break his heart. ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... of coal lost by radiation from that uncovered pipe. If the coal costs $4 per ton, the radiation from this 100 feet of pipe will amount to $95.87. From the same pipe covered with Wm. Berkefield's fossil meal composition, 32/100-inch thick, the most powerful inorganic non-heat conductor used as a covering at the time these investigations were made, there was radiated 24,109 kilo. cent. heat-units one foot one hour, or ...
— The American Architect and Building News, Vol. 27, No. 733, January 11, 1890 • Various
... as we have said, experienced in a perceptible manner all the effects of different causes of degeneration. Only it should be remarked in regard to these greater species, such as the elephant and hippopotamus, that in comparing their fossil remains with the existing forms we find the earlier ones to have been larger. Nature was then in the full vigour of her youth, and the interior heat of the earth gave to her productions all the force and all the extent of which ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... my return I received orders instructing me to accompany Professor Marsh on a fossil-hunting expedition into the rough lands of the Big Horn Basin. The party was to consist of a number of scientists besides Professor Marsh, together with twenty-five students from Yale, which institution was ...
— An Autobiography of Buffalo Bill (Colonel W. F. Cody) • Buffalo Bill (William Frederick Cody)
... universal, was Cree, into which every half-breed in common talk lapsed, sooner or later, with undisguised delight. It was his mother tongue, copious enough to express his every thought and emotion, and its soft accents, particularly in the mouth of woman, are certainly very musical. Emerson's phrase, "fossil poetry," might be applied to our Indian languages, in which a single stretched-out word does duty for ...
— Through the Mackenzie Basin - A Narrative of the Athabasca and Peace River Treaty Expedition of 1899 • Charles Mair
... regards the individual. What may be the aeon of the whole species is utterly unknown. Amongst birds, one species at least has become extinct in our own generation: its aeon was accomplished. So of all the fossil species in zoology, which Palaeontology has revealed. Nothing, in short, throughout universal nature, can for a moment be conceived to have been resigned to accident for its normal aeon. All periods and dates ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... According to the first of these hypotheses, living beings, such as now exist, have existed from all eternity upon this earth. We tested that hypothesis by the circumstantial evidence, as I called it, which is furnished by the fossil remains contained in the earth's crust, and we found that it was obviously untenable. I then proceeded to consider the second hypothesis, which I termed the Miltonic hypothesis, not because it is of any particular consequence to me whether John Milton seriously entertained it or not, but because ...
— American Addresses, with a Lecture on the Study of Biology • Tomas Henry Huxley
... were huge fissures on the hillside, and displacements of the red soil, resembling more the chaos of some primary elemental upheaval than the work of man; while, half-way down, a long flume straddled its narrow body and disproportionate legs over the chasm, like an enormous fossil of some forgotten antediluvian. At every step smaller ditches crossed the road, hiding in their sallow depths unlovely streams that crept away to a clandestine union with the great yellow torrent below, and here and there were the ruins of some cabin with the chimney alone left intact ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... that he could find a fossil specimen of every generation (hundreds of thousands of generations), from ABFI, etc., up to A; then, as each generation would only differ from the preceding as offspring from parents, he would be unable at any point to distinguish a species; at most, he would observe a slightly ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... Fossil geology occupied much of the time and attention of the great philosopher and statesman, Jefferson, and he was rewarded by the discovery of the megatherium. The mastodon, exhumed in 1801, from the marl pits of New York, by Charles Wilson Peale, has proved ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... earth turned up; a workman's tin mug stuck and roasted and hardened into what looks like solid rock—a fossil, as though it ...
— A Diary Without Dates • Enid Bagnold
... plausible objection is that raised by Darwin when he said that there were no fossil remains of instincts. And, if there were, O master, what would they teach us? Not very much more than what we learn from the instincts of to-day. Does not the geologist make the erstwhile carcases live anew in our minds in the light of the world as we see it? With nothing but analogy to guide them, ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre
... remembered our Fatherland. There was on board an American sea-captain, of Norwegian birth, as I afterwards found, who would gladly have joined us. The other passengers were three Norwegians, three fossil Englishmen, two snobbish do., and some jolly, good-natured, free-and-easy youths, bound to Norway, with dogs, guns, rods, ...
— Northern Travel - Summer and Winter Pictures of Sweden, Denmark and Lapland • Bayard Taylor
... carvings in wood and ivory, historical collections, the useful arts, and biological sciences. Its work in the department of paleontology is particularly noteworthy as it has extended the boundaries of knowledge through its many explorations in the western fossil fields. The success of the Museum is largely due to the energy and erudition of Dr. W. J. Holland, its amiable director. In the music-hall, a symphony orchestra is maintained, and free recitals are given on the great organ ...
— A Short History of Pittsburgh • Samuel Harden Church
... and proclaim any kind of religion or of no religion. But in both, the advance guard of the Christian Church, which seeks to apply Christ's teachings more rigidly to individual and social life, has to face obloquy, ostracism, misrepresentation, from the world and the fossil church, for not serving their gods, nor worshipping the golden image which they have set up. Martyrs will be needed and persecutors will exist till ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... face was pale, and there was a curious look about her whole figure. It seemed as if shrinking from something, twisting itself rigidly, as a fossil tree might shrink in a wind that ...
— Jane Field - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... themselves, there are two considerations which present enormous force from an antecedent point of view. The first is that organic forms are only then recognised as species when intermediate forms are absent. If the intermediate forms are actually living, or admit of being found in the fossil state, naturalists forthwith regard the whole series as varieties, and name all the members of it as belonging to the same species. Consequently it becomes obvious that naturalists, in their work of naming species, ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... are you?" he cried; and he looked about the place, up and down, but to all appearances, he was in a cul de sac, whose walls were dotted with the fossil stems of pentacrinites, over which stalagmitic petrifaction had gradually formed, looking as if dirty water had run over the walls in places, and hardened in the ...
— The Black Tor - A Tale of the Reign of James the First • George Manville Fenn
... varied are the forms of Nature. If, from the mastodon and the fossil mammoth, to which Buffon attributes five or six times the bulk and size of the elephant, we descend to those animalculae, of which Leuwenhoek estimates that a thousand millions of them would not occupy the place of an ordinary ...
— Willis the Pilot • Paul Adrien
... fossil animals which have been obtained in China by foreigners have been purchased in apothecary shops. If a Chinaman discovers a fossil bed he guards it zealously for it represents an actual gold mine to him. The bones are ground into a fine powder, mixed with an acid, and a phosphate obtained which in ...
— Camps and Trails in China - A Narrative of Exploration, Adventure, and Sport in Little-Known China • Roy Chapman Andrews and Yvette Borup Andrews
... in the mass, David, and no one living can do it better. I am like most women, I think: I deal with the individual. That is all the difference. When do the Annerses go out to the fossil-beds?" ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde
... accordingly. But the odour of camphor was unmistakable. In the universal decay this volatile substance had chanced to survive, perhaps through many thousands of centuries. It reminded me of a sepia painting I had once seen done from the ink of a fossil Belemnite that must have perished and become fossilized millions of years ago. I was about to throw it away, but I remembered that it was inflammable and burned with a good bright flame—was, in fact, an excellent candle—and I put it in my pocket. I found no explosives, however, nor any ...
— The Time Machine • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... men began to find fossil remains of animals in the rocks, a severe shock was given to the prevailing doctrine of the recent creation of the earth. The adherents of the old theology made strenuous efforts to explain away this unwelcome circumstance. The shells found had been dropped by pilgrims on their way to ...
— Man And His Ancestor - A Study In Evolution • Charles Morris
... as they played knuckle-bones on the beach, his enjoyment of the cool breeze which swept through his villa even in summer or of the cool plash of water from the fountain in the peristyle, his curiosity about the big fossil bones dug up in the island which he sent to Rome to be placed in the galleries of his house on the Palatine, his fun in quizzing the pedants who followed him by Greek verses of his own making. But in the midst of ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... start at once. . .In proportion to my previous anxiety is my pleasure in the prospect of going to Paris, now that I am better fitted to present myself there as I could wish. I have collected for my fossil fishes all the materials I still desired to obtain from the museums of Carlsruhe, Heidelberg, and Strasbourg, and have extended my knowledge of geology sufficiently to join, without embarrassment at least, in conversation upon the more recent researches in that ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... grisly skeletons; and, though the stately passages were paved with white marble, and led into rooms which would easily have accommodated crowds of guests, he went into no society save that of savants as old and fossil-like as himself; in other words, he was an old bachelor who lived entirely for his profession and the study of the great masters by the interpretation of a genuine old Stradivari. Yet the old professor had a memory; he recalled the time when he had been young who now was old—the time when ...
— Stories By English Authors: Germany • Various
... bewildered by the ways of Philistia's adepts in starch and fetters, and bewildered in particular to note that a mummy, so generally esteemed a kindly and well-meaning fossil, appeared quite honestly to believe that all literature came out of the beer-cellar of Paff, or Pfaff, or had some similarly Teutonic sponsor; and that handball was the best training for literary ...
— Taboo - A Legend Retold from the Dirghic of Saevius Nicanor, with - Prolegomena, Notes, and a Preliminary Memoir • James Branch Cabell
... given individual or species may come to an end; species may be exterminated, but we know of no instance of individuals coming into existence except by the process of reproduction or generation from pre-existing individuals. Further, we know from the evidence of fossil remains that the animals existing in former periods were very different from those existing now, and that many of the existing forms, such as man, mammals, birds, bony fishes, can only be traced back in the succession of stratified rocks to the ...
— Hormones and Heredity • J. T. Cunningham
... an exact contrast. A learned Pharisee, conscious of a power that would one day place the highest dignities at his disposal, he was a man of great and manifold possessions. A curious and interesting inventory of his goods has been preserved like a fossil in the Scriptures (Phil. iii. 5, 6). These things he highly valued and fondly loved; but another and opposing love came against them, and the strong man succumbed to the stronger. "What things were gain to me, these I counted loss for Christ:" ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... neck. The Tenderfoot and I stood on the log and heaved while Wes stood on the shore and pushed. Suddenly it occurred to me that if Tunemah made up his silly mind to come, he would probably do it all at once, in which case the Tenderfoot and I would have about as much show for life as fossil formations. I didn't say anything about it to the Tenderfoot, but I hitched my six-shooter around to the front, resolved to find out how good I was at wing-shooting horses. But Tunemah declared he would die for his convictions. "All right," said we, "die then," with ...
— The Mountains • Stewart Edward White
... with dark green. Of the ancient city one could see the sunburnt tower of the Capitol, the black cypresses of the Palatine, and the ruins of the palace of Septimius Severus, suggesting the white osseous carcase of some fossil monster, left there by a flood. In front, was enthroned the modern city with the long, renovated buildings of the Quirinal, whose yellow walls stood forth with wondrous crudity amidst the vigorous crests of the garden trees. And to right and left on the Viminal, beyond the palace, the ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... leaves and seeds together, so a ripening experience comes indifferently to various manifestations, some barren and without further function, others fit to carry the parent experience over into another mind, and give it a new embodiment there. Expressiveness in the former case is dead, like that of a fossil; in the latter it is living and efficacious, recreating its original. The first is idle ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... volumes, that they left the Colonization Society hopeless at the North. It dares never show its face before the people, and only lingers in some few nooks of sectarian pride, so secluded from the influence of present ideas as to be almost fossil in their character. ...
— American Eloquence, Volume II. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1896) • Various
... Professor Kolliker remarks that the absence of transitional forms in the fossil world, though not necessarily fatal to Darwin's views, ...
— Criticisms on "The Origin of Species" - From 'The Natural History Review', 1864 • Thomas H. Huxley
... ceases to live; or it is no longer an animal. It falls and reverts altogether to the element of matter. The processes of decomposition and incorporation are longer, or shorter, according to circumstances; and these fossil remains of which your writers say so much, are merely cases that have met with accidental obstacles to their final decomposition. As respects our two species, a very cursory examination of their qualities ought to convince any candid mind of the truth of our philosophy. ...
— The Monikins • J. Fenimore Cooper
... geology to which he had devoted a large share of his attention. But even in his works we look in vain for a satisfactory treatise on the mountain-rocks of Palestine, on the geognostic formation of that interesting part of Western Asia, or on the fossil treasures which its strata are understood to envelop. We are therefore reduced to the necessity of collecting from various authors, belonging to different countries and successive ages, the scattered notices which appear ...
— Palestine or the Holy Land - From the Earliest Period to the Present Time • Michael Russell
... young man, who is a bit of a geologist, pooh-poohed my Roman relic theory, and said it was clear to the meanest intellect (in which category he seemed to be grieved that he could not conscientiously include mine) that the thing the boy had found was the fossil of a whale; and he pointed out to us various evidences proving that it must have belonged ...
— Three Men in a Boa • Jerome K. Jerome
... says Uncle Jack, whimsically. "I haven't the advantage of being a girl with a brother and a baker's dozen of beaux in bell buttons and gray. I'm only an old fossil of a 'cit,' with a scamp of a nephew and that limited conception of the delights of West Point which one can derive from running up there every time that versatile youngster gets into a new scrape. You'll admit my opportunities ...
— Starlight Ranch - and Other Stories of Army Life on the Frontier • Charles King
... in the Japanese character even if they understood English. That was what he chiefly used the Chinese ink for. But he also used to copy the inscriptions from these things." Here Stephen lifted from the mantelpiece what looked like a fossil Bath bun, but was actually a clay tablet covered with minute ...
— The Mystery of 31 New Inn • R. Austin Freeman
... scattered with lavish prodigality over land and sea;—but what is the living wealth of that Fauna as compared to the winged words which fill the air with unceasing music! What are the scanty relics of fossil plants and animals, compared to the storehouse of what we call the dead languages! How then can we explain it that for centuries and centuries, while collecting beasts, and birds, and fishes, and insects, while studying their forms, ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... Quatrefages has recently spoken before the Academy of Sciences in Paris, and we extract from his discourse on "Fossil Man and Savages" some notes reported in the Journal d'Hygiene: "It is in Oceanica and above all in Melanesia and in Polynesia where I have looked for examples of savage races. I have scarcely spoken of the Malays except to bring to the surface the features which distinguish them among ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 421, January 26, 1884 • Various
... therefore probably an inhabitant of fresh water; fourth and fifthly, portions of vertebrae, limbs, ribs, and other bones of two rodents; sixthly, bones of the extremities of some great megatheroid quadruped. (See "Fossil Mammalia" page 109 by Professor Owen, in the "Zoology of the Voyage of the 'Beagle';" and Catalogue page 36 of Fossil Remains in Museum of Royal College of Surgeons.) The number of the remains of rodents gives to this collection a peculiar ...
— South American Geology - also: - Title: Geological Observations On South America • Charles Darwin
... wilds, maybe you might give me some kind of a job here so that my wife can't drag me off to that house party. I feel it in my very bones that old Hiram Leatherby will be there and he ALWAYS singles me out to talk about his fossil collection!" ...
— Tom Swift and His Giant Telescope • Victor Appleton
... days of creation were interpreted as periods of twenty-four hours each and the universality of the Noachian deluge was accepted by everybody, it would have been something like a miracle if he had at once fathomed the true meaning of the shark's teeth, elephant's bones, and other fossil remains which came under his notice. His idea was that all these things were mere concretions "generated by fermentation in the spots where they were found," as he very quaintly and even absurdly put it. ...
— Science and Morals and Other Essays • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle
... have examined. All I repeat is, that none of the coals which have come under my notice have enabled me to observe such a difference. But, according to Principal Dawson, who has so sedulously examined the fossil remains of plants in North America, it is otherwise with the vast accumulations of coal in ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... and persistent, and their appeals were undoubtedly effective. When Seward was defeated many an anti-slavery man poured out his tears over the result, while deploring or denouncing the conservatism of old fossil Whiggery, which thus sacrificed the ablest man in the party, and the real hero of its principles. Time, however, led these men to reconsider their estimate both of Seward and Lincoln, and convinced them that the action of the convention, after all, was for the best. On the second ballot ...
— Political Recollections - 1840 to 1872 • George W. Julian
... been found in great abundance in the greensand formation, in the crag of the eastern counties, and in the chalk formation of the southern counties. These coprolites are rounded nodules, and are composed of the fossil excrements and remains of ancient animals. They are found in large quantities in Cambridgeshire, and were discovered by Dr Buckland many years ago. The history of their discovery is not a little curious. The manurial properties of road-scrapings in parts of Cambridgeshire were noticed, ...
— Manures and the principles of manuring • Charles Morton Aikman
... the tribes of the Vril-ya there is considerable commercial interchange. I may here observe, that their money currency does not consist of the precious metals, which are too common among them for that purpose. The smaller coins in ordinary use are manufactured from a peculiar fossil shell, the comparatively scarce remnant of some very early deluge, or other convulsion of nature, by which a species has become extinct. It is minute, and flat as an oyster, and takes a jewel-like polish. This coinage circulates among all the tribes of the Vril-ya. ...
— The Coming Race • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... can't!" I found myself saying over and over. I must have said other things before, but I don't remember them. "You can't! it is impossible. You! marry an old fossil like me! Oh, Frances, are ...
— Kent Knowles: Quahaug • Joseph C. Lincoln
... in 1791 repaired to Freyburg, to profit by the instructions of the celebrated Werner; and, when there, he devoted himself, with the characteristic ardour of his disposition, to make himself master of geology and botany, and prosecuted in an especial manner the study of the fossil remains of plants in the rocks around that place. In 1792, he published at Berlin a learned treatise, entitled Specimen Florae, Friebergensis Subterraniae; which procured for him such celebrity, that he was soon after appointed director-general of the mines in the principalities of ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... Devonian period was the time of the origin of Amphibians. In other cases the geologist utilises the fossils in his attempt to work out the order of the strata when these have been much disarranged. For the simpler fossil forms of any type must be older than those that are more complex. There is no vicious circle here, for the general succession of strata is clear, and it is quite certain that there were fishes before there were amphibians, and amphibians before ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... furnished by fossil remains is by all odds the strongest evidence we have in favor of ...
— The Church, the Schools and Evolution • J. E. (Judson Eber) Conant
... boys left this museum, they went to another and saw a wonderful collection of fossil animals, skeletons, birds, minerals, precious stones, and other natural specimens, but as they were not learned men, they could only walk about and stare, enjoy the little knowledge of natural history they possessed, and wish with ...
— Hans Brinker - or The Silver Skates • Mary Mapes Dodge
... Farwell. "That's what that old fool of a mick down at the station told me. How the devil does the company happen to have such an old fossil on the job?" ...
— Desert Conquest - or, Precious Waters • A. M. Chisholm
... friendly to the human race. Religions, laws, sciences, arts, theories, and histories, instead of passing Ariel-like into the elements when their task is done, are made perpetual prisoners in the alcoves of dreary libraries. They have a fossil immortality, surviving themselves in covers, as poems have survived minstrels. The memory of man is made omni-capacious; its burden increases with every generation; not even the ignorance and stolidity of the past are allowed the final ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... muscular system is actually dissolved in its connections; and some recent experts suggest that it is a reminiscence of the fact that the ancestors of the metamorphosing insects were addicted to internal parasitism in their youth. It is one of the problems of the future. At present we have no fossil pupa-remains (though we have one caterpillar) to guide us. We must leave these fascinating but difficult problems of insect life, and glance at the evolution ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... "Fossil history has no doubt still some obscure passages; and these have been partially adverted to. Fuci, the earliest vegetable fossils as yet detected, are not, it has been remarked, the lowest forms of aquatic vegetation; neither ...
— An Expository Outline of the "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation" • Anonymous
... than even the light and shade, and they are always interesting as the means by which Nature carries light into her shadows, and shade into her lights, an art of which we shall have more to say hereafter, in speaking of composition. Fig. 5. is a rough sketch of a fossil sea-urchin, in which the projections of the shell are of black flint, coming through a chalky surface. These projections form dark spots in the light; and their sides, rising out of the shadow, form smaller whitish spots in the dark. You may take ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... bones of extinct quadrupeds, likewise found in that country. M. Brongniart also, who examined the place himself, mentions the recent accumulation which occurs at St. Hospice, about sixty feet above the present level of the sea, as containing marine shells in a scarcely fossil state (a peine fossiles) and he describes the mass in which they occur, as belonging to a formation still more recent than the upper marine beds of the ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia] [Volume 2 of 2] • Phillip Parker King
... Horner's pie. I looked for a department of Fish, with your lordship's name at the head of it; but I did not find it. It would be a fine department. It would divide itself naturally into three classes—living fish, fossil fish, ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... drank two bottles of soda water, I strolled into the town. As I was sauntering along leisurely enough, I heard my name pronounced behind me. I turned, and saw Sir Willoughby Townshend, an old baronet of an antediluvian age—a fossil witness of the wonders of England, before the deluge of French manners swept away ancient customs, and created, out of the wrecks of what had been, a new order of things, and a ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the size of a bean out of a pill-box. "So far as I am a judge this human bone is the analogue of the one which you hold in your hand. That will give you some idea of the size of the creature. You will observe from the cartilage that this is no fossil specimen, but recent. What ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... were sharp as famine; and into this mimicry of a vehicle the murderer was to be sent to the Potomac river, while the man he had murdered was moving in state across the mourning continent. The old negro geared up his wagon by means of a set of fossil harness, and when it was backed to Garrett's porch, they laid within it the discolored corpse. The corpse was tied with ropes around the legs and made fast to the wagon sides. Harold's legs were tied to stirrups, and he was placed in the ...
— The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth • George Alfred Townsend
... imaginary ruins of medieval cities with forts and dungeons, pepper-box turrets, and machicolated towers. And in truth these Bad Lands are an immense ossuary where lie bleaching in the sun myriads of fragments of pachyderms, chelonians, and even, some would have us believe, fossil men, overwhelmed by unknown ...
— Rubur the Conqueror • Jules Verne
... are unduly influenced by the counsels, the representations and the menaces of certain fossil politicians from the Border Slave States, knowing as you do, that the loyal citizens of these States do not expect that Slavery shall be upheld, to ...
— The Southerner - A Romance of the Real Lincoln • Thomas Dixon
... an interesting and delightful nature lesson that is a little out of the ordinary, get, if you can, a fossil fern. If you are in the city, doubtless you can get one from the museum, or, better yet, you may find that among your pupils there is someone who has such a specimen carefully treasured away. In some localities ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... kingdoms, from the slate, which lies lowest of the fourth order, to the most recent beds of the tertiary, and to so much of the diluvium as has been examined in the old continent. And although in the isolated case of the diluvium at New-York, no fossil remains have been found, we are yet unprepared to admit this as more than an exception, and are inclined to think that the remains of the mastodon, for instance, must be diluvian, or pre-diluvian. In this opinion, however, we know that we are opposed by high authority, and therefore do not express ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... importance, but into the discussion of which I do not, at present, propose to enter. It is enough that such a view of the relations of extinct to living beings has been propounded, to lead us to inquire, with anxiety, how far the recent discoveries of human remains in a fossil state bear out, ...
— On Some Fossil Remains of Man • Thomas H. Huxley
... the Odes of Pindar dedicated to George the Fourth. The literary historian must rove in other hunting grounds. He is the geologist of literature, whose study lies among the buried strata of forgotten generations, among the fossil remnants of the past. The great men with whom he must deal are the great men who are no longer great—mammoths and ichthyosauri kindly preserved to us, among the siftings of so many epochs, by the impartial benignity ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... educated to the medical profession. As surgeon in the Army Medical Department from 1848 to 1873, he utilized his opportunities for the study of natural history in India and Kashmir, in Egypt, Malta, Gibraltar and Canada. His observations on the fossil vertebrata of the Maltese Islands led him eventually to give special study to fossil elephants, on which he became an acknowledged authority. In 1872 he was elected F.R.S. In 1873 he was chosen professor of zoology in the Royal College ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... of years ago some natives in Southern India were engaged in making an excavation under the superintendence of an English officer, when they discovered the remains of one of the largest fossil turtles ever found. They had penetrated the soil for several feet, when their implements struck against a hard substance which was at first supposed to be solid rock, but a bar sank through it, showing it to be either bone or wood. The earth being ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, October 1885 • Various
... the Doctor began again quite suddenly, "that's his speciality—folklore, occultism, all that flummery. If you knocked at his door with the original Sleeping Beauty on your arm he'd only fuss round her with cushions and hope that she'd had a good night. Found a seed once—chipped it out of an old fossil, and grew it in a pot in his study. About the most dilapidated weed you ever saw. Talked about it as if he had re-discovered the Elixir of Life. Even if he didn't say anything in actually so many words, there was the way he went about. That of itself was enough to have ...
— Malvina of Brittany • Jerome K. Jerome
... limp in a moment. One hand dropped by her side, the other rested on a fossil on the mantel-shelf, and she stared down into the ...
— Love and Mr. Lewisham • H. G. Wells
... rumoured at this time the discovery of the first known (?) fossil monkey, but its tail was missing. "Depend upon it, Daniel O'Conell's got hold of it!" said 'Adam' briskly.[15] Yule was very happy with Mr. Hamilton and his kind wife, but on his tutor's removal to Cambridge other arrangements became necessary, and in 1835 he ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... the blue bay held many fossil shells. Children sometimes strayed here and there with hammers, pounding out fossils from fallen pieces of the cliffs. On the extent of sands that bordered the cliffs and stretched up the coast between them and the breakers, old stumps that had been months ...
— Out of the Triangle • Mary E. Bamford
... orthodox christian does not forget. Neither does he learn. He neither advances nor recedes. He is a living fossil, imbedded in that rock called faith. He makes no effort to better his condition, because all his strength is exhausted in keeping other people from improving theirs. The supreme desire of his heart is to force ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... differences has been the welfare of the species. The variant forms on either side have survived while the constant forms have perished, so that the lines of demarcation between allied species have grown more and more distinct, and it is usually only by going back to fossil ages that we can supply the missing links of continuity. In the desperate struggle for existence no peculiarity, physical or psychical, however slight, has been too insignificant for natural selection to seize and enhance; and the myriad fantastic forms and hues of animal and vegetal life illustrate ...
— The Destiny of Man - Viewed in the Light of His Origin • John Fiske
... remaining property, with orders that everybody should return on the following day. At this height the temperature of the air was very delightful, the range at noon being only 79o. I spent the whole day specimen-hunting, and found the rocks were full of fossil shells. I killed a new snake or variety of Psammophis sibilans, and shot an interesting little antelope, Oreotragus saltatrix, the "klip-springer" of the Cape Colonist, as well as hyraxes and various small birds, which we ...
— What Led To The Discovery of the Source Of The Nile • John Hanning Speke
... would be impregnable, inasmuch as it is quite impossible to prove the contrary. If a man choose to maintain that a fossil oyster shell, in spite of its correspondence, down to every minutest particular, with that of an oyster fresh taken out of the sea, was never tenanted by a living oyster, but is a mineral concretion, there is no demonstrating his error. All that can be done is ...
— On the Method of Zadig - Essay #1 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... solitary explorations of Kentucky which have given him immortality—through the valley of the Kentucky and the Licking, and along the "Belle Riviere" (Ohio) as low as the falls. He visited the Big Bone Lick and examined the wonderful fossil remains of the mammoth found there. Along the great buffalo roads, worn several feet below the surface of the ground, which led to the Blue Licks, he saw with amazement and delight thousands of huge ...
— The Conquest of the Old Southwest • Archibald Henderson
... I believe, is the first example in which a State Government in our country has erected a museum for the exhibition of its natural resources, its mineral and rock, its plants and animals, living and fossil. And this seems to me the most appropriate spot in the country for placing the first geological hall erected by the Government; for the County of Albany was the district where the first geological survey was undertaken, on this side of the Atlantic, ...
— The Uses of Astronomy - An Oration Delivered at Albany on the 28th of July, 1856 • Edward Everett
... that Christian Science "is neither Christian nor science!" is to-day the fossil of wisdom- less wit, weakness, and superstition. "The fool hath said in his heart, There is no ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... Tutt was one of the very few friends of his father that he knew. And he held towards the old lawyer rather the same sort of patronizing attitude that he had had towards the old man. It would be a rotten dinner probably followed by a deadly dull evening with a snuffy old fossil who would tell him long-winded, rambling anecdotes of what New York had been like when there were wild ...
— By Advice of Counsel • Arthur Train
... festivals at Fleurs. All work ceases at noon; and by two, the people, dressed in holiday attire, muster at the trysting-spot, and march in a body to the castle, preceded by Tam Anderson, the duke's piper, a grave, old-fashioned man, in livery of green coat and black velvet breeches—a fossil specimen he of what the Border minstrel once was, when his art was in its prime. As Tam drones away on his bagpipe "Lumps o' Puddin'," and "Brose and Butter," they take their places at three long tables, covering a large court. Three hundred workpeople and their families are there; for ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... sweet-peas and passion-flowers. That's only one thing. Every time we go out to ride she gathers up from the wayside such a load of small rocks as makes the buggy-springs ache. We found a smooth round stone, yesterday, that looks so much like my head she declares it must be a fossil, and is bound to have it set over the front door instead of a monogram. We follow your lead in another direction; if we can't rise in the world without going up stairs for it, we'll try to cultivate the meek and ...
— Homes And How To Make Them • Eugene Gardner
... palaeontology (the study of fossil remains in the rocks). The surface of the earth underneath the top soil consists of layers of rock. Some of them are made up of lime deposits, others of the shells of shell-fish, others of sand-stone, others of dead trees of the forest ...
— Evolution - An Investigation and a Critique • Theodore Graebner
... strong. A specimen made of the bone of a fossil elephant is possessed by Senor A. Chavero, of Mexico. See Tezozomoc, Cronica Mexicana, cap. 55, and the note of Orozco y Berra to that passage in the Mexican edition. Also Sahagun, Hist. de Nueva Espana, Lib. VIII, cap. 20, who likewise describes most of the instruments ...
— Ancient Nahuatl Poetry - Brinton's Library of Aboriginal American Literature Number VII. • Daniel G. Brinton
... formation of these caves, I may add that I noticed, imbedded in a boulder of rock in the upper caves, two pieces of coral and several fossil marine shells, ...
— British Borneo - Sketches of Brunai, Sarawak, Labuan, and North Borneo • W. H. Treacher
... master. The lower intellect can buy at no cheaper price than the higher, and the hour of full intellectual emancipation comes only when the student has learned to serve—to turn the whole freshness and sharpness of his intellect on any needful theme of the hour; it may be the scale of a fossil fish, or the annual movement of a glacier, the disclosures of the spectrum, or the secrets of the arrow-headed tongue. All great explorers have been largely their own teachers, and each young scholar has made the best use of all helps and ...
— The History of Dartmouth College • Baxter Perry Smith
... worked and lectured, and obtained the office of assistant to the aged professor of comparative anatomy. In the year of his appointment, he made a mark in the study which he rendered so famous, by a memoir on the Megalonyx, a fossil animal known by a few of its bones, and which, contrary to received opinion, he boldly proved to have been a gigantic sloth. This was the first of those able comparisons of the fossil with the present world which revolutionized geology, extended comparative anatomy, ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... removed and there sounded down the way, "One cantaloupe, Honey!" Back the waiter came in a moment. "The old party says it's too ripe." There were only two left to choose from. "Knock his slats in if he don't like that, the old fossil." In another moment the waiter was back again with the second half. "He says he don't want no cantaloupe, anyhow. Says he meant an order of ...
— Working With the Working Woman • Cornelia Stratton Parker
... crushed; in all cases the distortion leads to the inference that the rock which contains these shells has been subjected to enormous pressure in a direction at right angles to the planes of cleavage. The shells are all flattened and spread out in these planes. Compare this fossil trilobite of normal proportions with these others which have suffered distortion. Some have lain across, some along, and some oblique to the cleavage of the slate in which they are found; but in all cases the distortion is such, as required for its production a compressing force acting, ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... very tenacious, and near the surface is generally of a brown colour, probably owing to the decomposition of the iron pyrites which it contains. It abounds in selenite or sulphate of lime, and in nodules which often contain organic remains. Fossil wood with Teredo antenautae is also met with, and pyritous casts of univalve and bivalve shells. Lower down the stratum becomes more compact and is of a bluish or blackish colour, and its fossil contents are in a fine state of preservation. During the last summer, while examining the ...
— Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society - Vol. 3 - Zoology • Various
... used to season flesh, fish, butter, &c., and other things that are to be kept. It is distinguished, with reference to the general sources from which it is most plentifully derived, into three different sorts, namely, fossil, or rock salt; sea, or marine salt; and spring salt, or that drawn from briny springs ...
— A Catechism of Familiar Things; Their History, and the Events Which Led to Their Discovery • Benziger Brothers
... is this? The sacred beetle, bound upon the breast Of the blind heathen! Snatch the curious prize, Give it a place among thy treasured spoils, Fossil and relic,—corals, encrinites, The fly in amber and the fish in stone, The twisted circlet of Etruscan gold, Medal, intaglio, poniard, poison-ring,— Place for the Memphian ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... may not be obtainable that are necessary to show the connection of others: as, for example, the hypothesis that all species of animals have arisen from earlier ones by some process of gradual change, can be only imperfectly verified by collecting the fossil remains of extinct species, because immense depths and expanses of fossiliferous strata have been destroyed. Or, again, the general state of culture may be such as to prevent men from tracing the consequences of an hypothesis; for ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... learned men, too, hold, till within the last twenty-five years, that a flying dragon was an impossible monster? And do we not now know that there are hundreds of them found fossil up and down the world? People call them Pterodactyles: but that is only because they are ashamed to call them flying dragons, after denying so long that flying ...
— The Water-Babies - A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby • Charles Kingsley
... get over it. He is a great hunter of insects, and he thinks that the wings of his butterflies might yield very excellent texts; he is fond of geology, and cannot, especially when he is in the company of the clergyman, resist the temptation of hurling a fossil at Moses. He wears his scepticism as a coquette wears her ribbons—to annoy if he cannot subdue—and, when his purpose is served, he puts his scepticism aside—as the coquette puts her ribbons. Great arguments arise between them, and the doctor loses his field through his loss ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie
... those who say, 'You were born in time, and in time you must die, as all other creatures do; Time is your king and lord, as he has been of all the old worlds before this, and of all the races of beasts, whose bones and shells lie fossil in the rocks of a thousand generations;' then we can answer them, in the words of the wise man, and in the name ...
— The Water of Life and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... which Mr. Darwin would bring us is, that all the various forms of vegetable and animal life with which the globe is now peopled, or of which we find the remains preserved in a fossil state in the great Earth-Museum around us, which the science of geology unlocks for our instruction, have come down by natural succession of descent from father to son,—"animals from at most four or five progenitors, and plants from an equal or less number" (p. 484), as Mr. Darwin ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... about the biggest fright he had ever received. It was a book in which were pictured and described many of the great extinct monsters of the old times. These enormous hideous creatures, whose bones and fossil remains are still occasionally to be found, quite alarmed him. Yet the book was generally about the first one ...
— Algonquin Indian Tales • Egerton R. Young
... visiting mosques and mausoleums. In every land he made collections of its greatest curiosities in art, literature, science, natural history, and politics. A sphinx, an obelisk, a winged bull from Nineveh, stuffed porcupines, live monkeys, fossil remains, a pinchbeck president of the United States, and many rare specimens even more curious, did he collect, and after years of wandering, by land and by sea, carry with him to his native village. There he converted an old barn into a museum, and gave out to the villagers ...
— The Magician's Show Box and Other Stories • Lydia Maria Child
... obtained some few specimens of fossil shells from the shingly beds of the Khyber Pass. They seem to be a Spirifer with a very square base, quite different from the common species of the Bolan Pass, which is like a large cockle, and of which I have one beautiful ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith
... remembered,—and Brother Heber continued to trot out the members of his marital stud for discussion of their points with his more humble fellow-polygamist of the hammer; but when I happened to touch upon the earliest Mrs. Heber, whom I naturally thought he would by this time regard as a forgotten fossil in the Lower Silurian strata of his connubial life, and referred to the interview I had enjoyed with her on the afternoon before entering the city, his whole manner changed to a proper husbandly dignity, and, without seeking corroboration from the carpenter, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 78, April, 1864 • Various
... at the end like the feathers on an arrow's shaft. The name expresses exactly what they are like—diminutive kangaroos—but, of course, they are rodents and not marsupials. During the glacial period of the early Pleistocene, about one hundred thousand years ago, we know from fossil remains that there were great invasions into Europe of most of these types of tiny mammals, which we were catching during this delightful ...
— Across Mongolian Plains - A Naturalist's Account of China's 'Great Northwest' • Roy Chapman Andrews
... is, or seems to me to be, if I may sum it up in my own words, that the modern pre-historic men—those of whom we have collected so many remains, and to whom are due the ancient, strange customs of historical nations (the fossil customs, we might call them, for very often they are stuck by themselves in real civilisation, and have no more part in it than the fossils in the surrounding strata)—pre-historic men in this sense were 'savages without the fixed habits of savages;' that is, that, like savages, they had strong ...
— Physics and Politics, or, Thoughts on the application of the principles of "natural selection" and "inheritance" to political society • Walter Bagehot |
