"Mastodon" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... since the ice-wave swept into their last retreats, and crushed among the rocks that bear their fossil forms, the fauna of the preglacial period, the Ichthyosaurus, the Brontosaurus, the Guyas Cutis (or Ring-tailed Roarer), the Mastodon, and the Mammoth. ...
— The Disentanglers • Andrew Lang
... discoverers of America. Mr. Kipling, however, has taken the wind out of its sails with his sketch, "The Finest Story in the World." There are all the marvels and portents of the Eyrbyggja Saga to draw upon, there are Skraelings to fight, and why should not Karlsefni's son kill the last mastodon, and, as Quetzalcoatl, be the white-bearded god of the Aztecs? After that a romance on the intrigues to make Charles Edward King of Poland sounds commonplace. But much might be made of that, too, if the right man took it in hand. Believe me, there are plenty of stories left, waiting ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... struggle. On emerging from the forest the travellers were faced by perpendicular granite crags, which they ascended on the backs of some friendly condors.... The summit proved to be an extensive plateau, the site of a prehistoric city, built of pedunculated wood-pulp. Lying among the ruins was a gigantic mastodon in excellent preservation, which Mr. Roosevelt brought ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, May 13, 1914 • Various
... will ever modify a bird further into anything that is not a bird; that no transition between the ungulates and the carnivora is possible; that the proboscideae are not a final but a transitory type, dying out gradually—our elephants and similar forms will disappear as the mastodon did. ...
— Creation and Its Records • B.H. Baden-Powell
... my brain, but I may possibly have put it there myself. If so, I make it now, for the possibilities of originality are getting scarce and will soon disappear from the face of the earth as completely as the mastodon. The present application of the saying is to the people of Goa, who, while they carry through the world patronymics which breathe of conquest and discovery, devote their energies rather to the violin and the art of cookery. The caviller may object to the application ...
— Behind the Bungalow • EHA
... across the table, the fingertips of one hand resting on the immaculate cloth. "A creature with an antediluvian lower jaw, hairy like a mastodon, and formed like a pre-historic ape, has laid this table. Are you awake, Lena? Am I? I would pinch myself, only I know that nothing would do away with this dream. Three covers. You know it is the shorter of the two who's coming—the ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... Federal Convention also sat in it, in 1787. It is now occupied by the supreme and district courts below, and by Peale's Museum above. This museum, among other articles, contains an immense fossil skeleton of the great Mastodon, or American Mammoth, which, some years ago, ...
— Travels in North America, From Modern Writers • William Bingley
... sword will go through a ghost, and Denry was still alive. The remainder of the journey was brief and violent, owing partly to a number of bags of cement, and partly to the propinquity of the canal basin. The pantechnicon jumped into the canal like a mastodon, and drank. ...
— The Card, A Story Of Adventure In The Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... night is a time of vague veilings, of grotesque transformations, of remoulding and steeping in new dyes. Matter-of-fact objects, clear-cut during the day, assume fantastic shapes; a bush may appear a crouching mountain cat; a rock may masquerade as a mastodon. This is an hour of uncertainties. And doubtings and questionings and uncertainties were other shadow shapes thronging the demesnes of two men's souls. Silence and dim dusk without, dim dusk and ...
— The Desert Valley • Jackson Gregory
... dead! If any ever really lived!" cried Cap, in a fury. "Heaven knows I am inclined to believe them to have been a fabulous race like that of the mastodon or the centaur! I certainly never saw a creature that deserved the name of man! The very first of your race was the meanest fellow that ever was heard of—ate the stolen apple and when found out laid one half of the ...
— Capitola the Madcap • Emma D. E. N. Southworth
... or of Egypt; far back beyond the origin of history or tradition, before our coast had taken its present shapes; before Shasta, and Lassen, and Castle Peaks had poured out their lava floods; before the Sacramento river had its birth; and while, if not before, the mastodon, the elephant, the rhinoceros, the horse, the mammoth bull, the tapir, and the bison lived in the land. They are indeed among the most remarkable discoveries of the age, and among the greatest wonders of geology. They deserve ...
— The Young Miner - or Tom Nelson in California • Horatio Alger, Jr.
... few years ago, and had to carry water for the men and horses. The Indians never go there, unless driven in by some tribe attacking in superior numbers. The fossils which have been brought from the Mauvaises Terres belong to a species that became extinct before the period when the Mastodon inhabited this country. The strata in which these animals are imbedded indicate that the water was fresh or brackish. It is the most desolate and barren prospect one could lay his eyes on; and if the place for bad people is like this, when they come to die, may ...
— Three Years on the Plains - Observations of Indians, 1867-1870 • Edmund B. Tuttle
... Dryad a boa-constrictor or crocodile,—the tragedy which followed would have been worthy of the pen of any sporting and dramatic historian. I can only say that, being transacted in such objectionable proximity to myself, the thing was as impressive as any combat of mastodon and iguanodon could have been ...
— Lords of the Housetops - Thirteen Cat Tales • Various
... which was covered with a marine deposit six feet thick. The geological formation where these remains were found is reported to be "as old as the drift strata of Europe," and "identical with that of Guayaquil in which bones of the mastodon are met with." The ancient surface earth or vegetable mould, with its pottery, gold-work, and other relics of civilized human life, was, therefore, below the sea when that marine deposit was spread over it. This land, after being occupied ...
— Ancient America, in Notes on American Archaeology • John D. Baldwin
... Him with absolute certainty. The power my brother calls God proceeds by the method of Trial and Error; and if we turn out to be one of the errors, we shall go the way of the mastodon and the megatherium and all the ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... to understand the nature of glaciers clearly, let us turn back to those remote ages that rolled over this Earth long before man was created. Let us in spirit leap back to the time when no living creature existed, even before the great mastodon began to leave his huge foot-prints on ...
— The Ocean and its Wonders • R.M. Ballantyne
... weight of the lords. Just as well might the gnat dispute with the foot of an elephant. One day I saw a hippopotamus tread upon a molehill; he crushed it utterly. He was innocent. The great soft-headed fool of a mastodon did not even know of the existence of moles. My son, the moles that are trodden on are the human race. To crush is a law. And do you think that the mole himself crushes nothing? Why, it is the mastodon of the fleshworm, who is the mastodon of the globeworm. But let us cease arguing. ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... Kentucky, and visited the different licks. One, long named Big Bone Lick, was famous because there were scattered about it in incredible quantity the gigantic remains of the extinct mastodon; the McAfees made a tent by stretching their blankets over the huge fossil ribs, and used the disjointed vertebrae as stools on which to sit. Game of many kinds thronged the spaces round the licks; herds of buffalo, elk, and deer, as well as bears and wolves, were ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume One - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1769-1776 • Theodore Roosevelt
... pair of oxen chewing their cuds, or dozing in a pasture. The last was unusually large, the biggest a monster, appearing, to my wide-opened eyes, with his eight or nine foot height, and ten or eleven foot spread of antlers, as he stood up there against the sky, like some reproduced mastodon of the old legends. Quietly falling back and running in under a screening treetop, I pulled down a branch and put in under my foot to hold and steady my canoe. When I raised my rifle, I aimed it for the heart of the big moose, and fired. ...
— Gaut Gurley • D. P. Thompson
... of Dec. 6, says "there is now on exhibition at the rooms of the State Board of Agriculture, or headquarters of the Geological Corps, a section of the femur or thigh bone of an animal of the mastodon species, the fossilized remains of which were recently discovered in Union county. These remains were found in a drift formation about three feet below the surface, and are similar to the remains of the Megatherium found in other parts of the State. Arrangements were made by ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various
... do you? Most honest men and dogs don't. Moonshine's no good for anybody. And now, just for that, we're in for something of a task. This fellow'd lie here until he froze stiff as a mastodon tusk if we'd let him, but we can't afford to let him, even if he did pelt us with rocks. We've got to get him on his feet somehow and make him 'walk the dog' till he sweats some of ...
— The Blue Envelope • Roy J. Snell
... Barnum listened, and gazed in silence at the horse-armor, large enough for an elephant, and a pot called "Guy's porridge-pot," which could have held seventy gallons, but when the old man produced the ribs of a mastodon which he declared had belonged to a huge dun cow, which had done much injury to many persons before being slain by the dauntless Guy, he drew a long breath, and feelingly congratulated the old porter on his ability to concentrate more lies than anyone had ever before heard ...
— A Unique Story of a Marvellous Career. Life of Hon. Phineas T. • Joel Benton
... when the salt sea was divided from the land, and the rocks were cloven by the hand of Omnipotence, and the sweet spring came bursting upward from the fragrant earth, and light and flowers came together to welcome the birthday of the glad and glorious gift. Here, many a century back, the giant mastodon trod the earth into deep hollows, as he moved upon his sounding path. Then came another time. In the hollow of the three hills, the Indian raised his bark wigwam, and the smoke of his council fire curled ...
— The Three Brides, Love in a Cottage, and Other Tales • Francis A. Durivage
... be traced, and must ever remain a mystery. But, from his immemorial ceremonies and intense conservatism, we may reasonably infer that many of them have been handed down from father to son, unchanged, from the prehistoric past to the present day; a past contemporary, perhaps, with the mastodon, but certainly far back in the mists of antiquity. The importance of rescuing them from oblivion is plain enough, and therefore the untimely death of Miss Johnson, who was evidently turning with congenital fitness to the task, is doubly to be regretted. For as Mr. ...
— The Moccasin Maker • E. Pauline Johnson
... man.' It was a saying of some great French religious teacher. But surely this is false. God can do without man. God could do without the ichthyosauri and the mastodon. These monsters failed creatively to develop, so God, the creative mystery, dispensed with them. In the same way the mystery could dispense with man, should he too fail creatively to change and develop. The ...
— Women in Love • D. H. Lawrence
... ice until the recent period, and their bones deposited contemporaneously with those of modern species and man. Another is that the geologists may be vastly mistaken as to the date of the extinction of species, and that in fact the mastodon, mammoth, and other species found in juxtaposition with human remains and works of art, have probably survived until a very recent period. Without entering into detail on these points, we would venture the prediction that ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... shaking their outstretched branches like shaking hands and fondling their little ones, while the venerable aboriginal sequoia, ancient of other days, keeps you at a distance, looking as strange in aspect and behavior among its neighbor trees as would the mastodon among the homely bears and deers. Only the Sierra juniper is at all like it, standing rigid and unconquerable on glacier pavements for thousands of years, grim and silent, with an air of antiquity about as pronounced as that of ...
— The Yosemite • John Muir
... constantly rattling by his side! This Captain Blake was a member of the Bristol Corporation, and a pleasant man, but his sword, worn by a short man, appeared prodigious!—Mr. C. said, "The sight of it was enough to set half a dozen poets scampering up Parnassus, as though hunted by a wild mastodon." ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... size, and arches of Titanic strength and power, adorned the portals, the pass-ways, the temples of this metropolis of ocean, guarded as were these last by the effigies of griffin and dragon, and winged elephant and lion, and stately mastodon and monstrous ichthyosaurus, all white ...
— Sea and Shore - A Sequel to "Miriam's Memoirs" • Mrs. Catharine A. Warfield
... base of the cliffs for a considerable distance. The ground was rolling and tree-dotted and covered with grazing animals, alone, in pairs and in herds—a motley aggregation of the modern and extinct herbivore of the world. A huge woolly mastodon stood swaying to and fro in the shade of a giant fern—a mighty bull with enormous upcurving tusks. Near him grazed an aurochs bull with a cow and a calf, close beside a lone rhinoceros asleep in a dust-hole. Deer, antelope, bison, horses, sheep, ...
— The People that Time Forgot • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... he gathered up the crockery, marched off in disgrace, and came back with a molasses-hogshead, or a wash-tub, or some such overgrown mastodon, to turn his sixpenny-worth ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. July, 1863, No. LXIX. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... his own offspring, and, grinding him to powder, sprinkled it upon the earth, and this produced many worms. The worms were then collected and scattered again. They matured into infants and these were then collected and scattered and became full-grown Dakotas. The bones of the mastodon, the Dakotas think, are the bones of Unktehees, and they preserve them with the greatest care in the medicine-bag." Neill's Hist. Minn., p. 55. The Unktehees and the Thunder-birds are perpetually at war. There are various accounts of the creation of man. ...
— The Feast of the Virgins and Other Poems • H. L. Gordon
... disappear, and are replaced by others belonging to still existing families— elephant, hippopotamus, rhinoceros—though now extinct as species. Some of these are startling, from their enormous magnitude. The great mastodon, whose remains are found in abundance in America, was a species of elephant, judged, from peculiarities of its teeth, to have lived on aquatic plants, and reaching the height of twelve feet. The mammoth was another elephant, but supposed to have survived till comparatively recent ...
— Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation • Robert Chambers
... not afraid of the grey wolf, or even the huge beast that trumpeted in the morass by the great water when the light was at his back, but when the world was darkened old men had seen strange shapes running by the wolf's muzzle, or groping with the big mastodon in the marsh land, and against these a stone axe was ...
— Dwellers in the Hills • Melville Davisson Post
... that formerly inhabited the earth. Such an aggregation of actual, living Silurian monsters, any one of which would make a man a fortune to-day, if it could be kept on ice and exhibited for one season only. You could take a full grown mastodon to-day, and with no calliope, no lithographs, no bearded lady, no clown with four pillows in his pantaloons and no iron-jawed woman, you could go across this continent and successfully compete with the ...
— Remarks • Bill Nye
... near the mouth of which was a fig-tree. The entrance was so small that it was almost necessary to crawl for some distance; but it must have been much larger at one time if the story that the younger woman told me about the bones of a mastodon having been discovered inside was well founded. As we proceeded, the roof rose rapidly, so that the rocks overhead could not presently be seen by the light of the candle and lamp. Farther in, the roof became lower, and it was ...
— Wanderings by southern waters, eastern Aquitaine • Edward Harrison Barker
... cumbrous whales, on the shore of the ocean of Poesy. Flaubert's friend, Louis Bouilhet, made a inartful attempt to tune the stubborn lyre to music of the birthday of the world, to battles of the ichthyosaurus and the plesiosaurus, to loves of the mammoth and the mastodon. But the public would have none of it, though ensphered in faultless verso, and the poets fled back to their flames and darts, and to the primrose at the river's brim. There is, however, something pathetic, ...
— Gossip in a Library • Edmund Gosse
... coincide with what is known of their succession in past ages. The characteristics of extinct genera of mammals exhibit everywhere indications that their living representatives in early life resemble them more than they do their own parents. A minute comparison of a young elephant with any mastodon will show this most fully, not only in the peculiarities of their teeth, but even in the proportion of their limbs, their toes, etc. It may therefore be considered as a general fact that the phases of development of all living animals correspond to the order of succession of ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler
... head of the chapter? His name is Monodontomerus cupreus, SM. Just try it, for fun: Mo-no-don-to-me-rus. What a gorgeous mouthful! What an idea it gives one of some beast of the Apocalypse! We think, when we pronounce the word, of the prehistoric monsters: the mastodon, the mammoth, the ponderous megatherium. Well, we are misled by the scientific label: we have to do with a very paltry insect, smaller ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... roughly to the Pleistocene epoch of geology; it is included along with the much shorter time during which civilization has existed, in the latest and shortest of the geological periods, the Quaternary. It was the age of the mammoth and the mastodon, the megatherium and Irish deer and of other quadrupeds large and small which are now extinct; but most of its animals were the same species as now exist. It was marked by the great episode of the Ice Age, when considerable parts of the earth's ...
— Dinosaurs - With Special Reference to the American Museum Collections • William Diller Matthew
... time when huge bird-like reptiles were the lords of creation, and after these had been "sealed within the iron hills" there came successive dynasties of mammals; and as the iguanodon gave place to the great Eocene marsupials, as the mastodon and the sabre-toothed lion have long since vanished from the scene, so may not Man by and by disappear to make way for some higher creature, and so on forever? In such case, why should we regard Man as in any higher sense ...
— The Destiny of Man - Viewed in the Light of His Origin • John Fiske
... prove the contemporaneity of men like ourselves with the great edentate and pachydermatous mammals, which were the most characteristic creatures of the American fauna. The prehistoric inhabitants of North America were familiar with the mastodon, those of South America with the glyptodon, the shell of which on occasion served as a roof to the dwelling of primeval reran, which dwelling was often but a den hollowed out of the ground. As in Europe, the early inhabitants ...
— Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples • The Marquis de Nadaillac
... of Glasgow, and Clan MacLean Association of Glasgow; Corresponding Member Davenport Academy of Sciences, and Western Reserve Historical Society; Author of History of Clan MacLean, Antiquity of Man, The Mound Builders, Mastodon, Mammoth and Man, Norse Discovery of America, Fingal's Cave, Introduction Study St. John's ...
— An Historical Account of the Settlements of Scotch Highlanders in America • J. P. MacLean
... America, is shown by the facility with which they have there run wild and enormously multiplied, since introduced from the Old World not long ago. There was no wild American stock. Yet in the times of the mastodon and megatherium, at the dawn of the present period, wild-horses—certainly very much like the existing horse—roamed over those plains in abundance. On the principle of original and direct created adaptation of species to climate and other conditions, ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... according to a discovery made some thirty years ago at Denise in Middle France, probably even man and another older and defunct form of pachydermata, the elephas meridionalis, in North America man and the mastodon. The reader may compare the discoveries regarding the age of mankind, as they are described most recently by Sir Charles Lyell in his work upon this subject, in the publications of the Anthropological Congress at Brussels in ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... face with the old puzzles of matter and mind. He should be able to trace in imagination the growth of stellar systems; the history of our own earth; the evolution of plant and animal life, from the first protoplasmic nuclei to the mammoth and mastodon; the emergence of man from brute hood into self-consciousness, his triumph over nature and the other animals, and his achievement of civilization. He should watch primitive man wrestling with problems as yet partly unsolved, ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake |
