"Moulting" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Ivory Buck," she said, icily. "But how are you going to prove I was married? Where are you going to hunt for witnesses? Professional people are like wild geese—roosting on air and moulting their names like feathers. What proof of anything are you going to find after all these thirty years? While I—I've got your letters, every one—all your promises. Observe how I take my cue! Jury a-listening! I've been hunting the world over ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 5, June 1905 • Various
... toward them in any other living or fossil organism. But a long discussion of the problem has convinced scientific men that the feathers are evolved from the scales of the reptile ancestor. The analogy between the shedding of the coat in a snake and the moulting of a bird is not uninstructive. In both cases the outer skin or epidermis is shedding an old growth, to be replaced by a new one. The covering or horny part of the scale and the feather are alike growths from the epidermis, and the initial stages of the growth have certain analogies. But beyond ...
— The Story of Evolution • Joseph McCabe
... with those meaner souls—victims of their own ignoble vanity—, who, when Fortune has raised them suddenly beyond their hopes into her winged aerial car, know no rest, can never look behind them, but must ever press upwards. To such the end soon comes: Icarus-like, with melted wax and moulting feathers, they fall headlong into the billows, a derision to mankind. The Daedaluses use their waxen wings with moderation: they are but men; they husband their strength accordingly, and are content to fly a little higher than the ...
— Works, V3 • Lucian of Samosata
... moulting and suffering from a cutaneous disorder at the same time; so what with the falling off, and scratching off of his feathers, he looked in a most deplorable condition; which was rendered more apparent by the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... off like a glove as the occasion demanded. Replying thereto my wife said: "Fred, I consider that you had a marvellous escape with that baby, and that Winona bore it splendidly. As for her silly nonsense, she is evidently in the moulting state, and I prophesy that by the time baby has the measles we shall hear no more of it. Harold seems to understand ...
— The Opinions of a Philosopher • Robert Grant
... me seated on a fallen stone and, motionless, they took no further notice of me. Two blackbirds were there, sitting a little way apart on the bare ground; these were silent, the raggedest, rustiest-looking members of that little company; for they were moulting, and their drooping wings and tails had many unsightly gaps in them where the old feathers had dropped out before the new ones had grown. They were suffering from that annual sickness with temporary ...
— Afoot in England • W.H. Hudson
... more grieved, as I re-read this and other portions of the most affected and weak of all my books, (written in a moulting time of my life,)—the second volume of 'Modern Painters,'—at its morbid violence of passion and narrowness of thought. Yet, at heart, the book was, like my others, honest; and in substance it is mostly good; but all boiled ...
— Frondes Agrestes - Readings in 'Modern Painters' • John Ruskin
... incommoding each other. Of these are the motions of the heart and arteries; those of digestion and glandular secretion; of the ideas, or sensual motions; those of progression, and of speaking; the great annual circle of actions so apparent in birds in their times of breeding and moulting; the monthly circles of many female animals; and the diurnal circles of sleeping and waking, ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... multitudinous plumage moulting) Rats! (He yawns, showing a coalblack throat, and closes his jaws by an upward push of his parchmentroll) After having said which I took my departure. ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... Romans, these auguries were taken usually upon an eminence: after the month of March they were prohibited in consequence of the moulting season having commenced; nor were they permitted at the waning of the moon, nor at any time in the afternoon, or when the air was the least ruffled by winds or clouds. The feeding of the sacred chickens, and the manner of their taking the corn that ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian
... pity that the eagle should be mewid, while kites and buzzards prey at liberty" (Shakespeare). As hawks were caged while moulting or mewing (Fr. mue, from mutare), a mew or mews came to mean a place of confinement. "Stable so called from the royal stables in London, which were so named because built where the king's hawks were mewed or confined" (Webster). Wordsworth has "violets in their secret mews." An asylum ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... Sitaris in the chamber may reach the adult state. If the first arrival begins to absorb the egg of the Colletes, a second hungry one may kill it in the midst of its repast and take its place. But the conqueror finds the provisions already reduced and insufficient to enable it to reach the moulting stage, at the end of which it could profit by the honey. Ill-nourished and weakened, it cannot support this crisis, and its corpse falls beside that of its fellow whom it had sacrificed. Three or four parasites may thus succeed to the same feast, and ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay
... are among the shyest of God's creatures. They fly so rapidly, unless when beating against the wind, that it requires a practised shot to hit them on the wing. Even when moulting their feathers, or when young, they can escape—fluttering over the surface of the water faster than ...
— The Hunters' Feast - Conversations Around the Camp Fire • Mayne Reid
... interminable. To poor people, looking up under moist eyebrows, it seemed a wonder where it all came from. Master Francis Villon had propounded an alternative that afternoon, at a tavern window: was it only Pagan Jupiter plucking geese upon Olympus, or were the holy angels moulting? He was only a poor Master of Arts, he went on; and as the question somewhat touched upon divinity, he durst not venture to conclude. A silly old priest from Montargis, who was among the company, treated the ...
— The Great English Short-Story Writers, Vol. 1 • Various
... individual in neglecting the future, because he will not personally enjoy the fruits of his labor, must in some degree fetter the enterprise of a five years' governor. He is little better than the Lord Mayor, who flutters proudly for a year, and then drops his borrowed feathers in his moulting season. ...
— Eight Years' Wandering in Ceylon • Samuel White Baker |
