"Prehistoric" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... was a thrilling glimpse into prehistoric America, for these young men, stripped of their tainted white-man rags, were wholly admirable, painted lithe-limbed warriors, rejoicing once again in the light of their ancestral moons. On every face was a look like ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... skulk in hiding; All the rivers and the brooklets Have subdued their wild, free rolling. Ancient mounds and Aztec relics, Mural signs and hieroglyphics, Toltec remnants and weird mummies, All the arts and queer devices Of a prehistoric people, Have entombed their sylvan phantoms, In an everlasting Lethe. Now the woods and plains are surveys, Of distinctive tracts and precincts, Now the wide, primeval limits Bound neat villages and districts. There are Bryantsville and Fitchport, Buckeye, ...
— The Song of Lancaster, Kentucky - to the statesmen, soldiers, and citizens of Garrard County. • Eugenia Dunlap Potts
... Imagine a prehistoric prophet observing these beings, and forecasting what kind of civilizations their descendants would build. Anyone could have foreseen certain parts of the simians' history: could have guessed that their curiosity would unlock for them, one by one, nature's doors, and—idly—bestow on them stray ...
— This Simian World • Clarence Day
... and furnaces are the squalid huts and ramshackle cottages of the operatives; there too, a little removed from the river are the caves in which the Huns and Scandinavians dwell, even as their prehistoric ancestors dwelt before the ...
— The Transgressors - Story of a Great Sin • Francis A. Adams
... The hypocrisy of the thing sickens me; no one ever looks any question straight in the face, denuded of its man-made sophistries. And few realise that a woman is a creature to be fought for—it is prehistoric instinct, and if she can't be obtained in fair fight then you secure her by strategy. And if a man cannot keep her once he has secured her, it is up to him. If I had a wife, I should take good care that she desired no other man—but if ...
— The Price of Things • Elinor Glyn
... gliding over? In what questions did I not expect to find reason? Why in this savage fatras about Cronos swallowing his children, about blood-drops becoming bees (Mr. Max Muller says 'Melian nymphs'), and bees being stars, and all the rest of a prehistoric Marchen worked over again and again by the later fancy of Greek poets and by Greek voyagers who recognised Cronos in Moloch. In all this I certainly saw no 'reason,' but I have given in tabular form the general, if inharmonious, ...
— Modern Mythology • Andrew Lang
... game is found in all countries and is prehistoric. It is supposed to have arisen from the idea of fleeing from an evil spirit, and in those forms from which immunity is found by touching wood or iron or taking some particular position, that especial feature ...
— Games for the Playground, Home, School and Gymnasium • Jessie H. Bancroft
... Like some prehistoric monster about to charge down upon another of its kind, Tank A, under the guidance of Tom Swift, reeled and bumped her way over the uneven fields toward the old barn. Within the monster of steel and iron were raucous ...
— Tom Swift and his War Tank - or, Doing his Bit for Uncle Sam • Victor Appleton
... Osiris had been identified with Dionysus, and Isis with Demeter. M. Foucart has {77} endeavored to prove in an ingenious essay that this assimilation was not arbitrary, that Osiris and Isis came into Crete and Attica during the prehistoric period, and that they were mistaken for Dionysus and Demeter[8] by the people of those regions. Without going back to those remote ages, we shall merely say with him that the mysteries of Dionysus were connected with those of Osiris by far-reaching affinities, not simply by superficial ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... are closely akin to the Bohemians and Moravians. According to Mr. Rovinanek, editor of the Pittsburg Slovak Daily, they constitute the trunk of the great Slavonic national tree, from which have branched so many of the Slav people, at the head of whom now stands the powerful Russian empire. From prehistoric time they were celebrated as a peaceful, industrious people, fond of agricultural and pastoral life. The immigration has been from the agricultural class, and at first settlement was made in the mining regions of Pennsylvania. Farming ...
— Aliens or Americans? • Howard B. Grose
... balcony. The view beyond was the same as that which we had already admired from the study. Looking out, I could see no sign of disorder anywhere. There was a road curving down the side of the hill, under my very eyes. A cab from the station, one of those prehistoric survivals which are only to be found in our country villages, was toiling slowly up the hill. Lower down was a nurse girl wheeling a perambulator and leading a second child by the hand. The blue reeks ...
— The Poison Belt • Arthur Conan Doyle
... coerced into opening negotiations for the sale of his property to his tenants, but although, in the fullness of time, these might be expected to bear fruit, they were of no more immediate assistance to this over-weighted survivor of a prehistoric species, than is the suggestion to a horse to live in order ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... earliest discoveries are indeed prehistoric. The great diurnal movement of the heavens, and the annual revolution of the sun, seem to have been known in times far more ancient than those to which any human monuments can be referred. The acuteness ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... hoaxes. Once he told with great circumstance and detail of a petrified prehistoric man that had been found embedded in a rock in the desert, and how the coroner from Humboldt had traveled more than a hundred miles to hold an inquest over a man dead for centuries, and had refused to allow miners to blast the ...
— The Boys' Life of Mark Twain • Albert Bigelow Paine
... here that the copper, so often mentioned in The Kalevala, when taken literally, was probably bronze, or "hardened copper," the amount and quality of the alloy used being not now known. The prehistoric races of Europe were acquainted with ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.
... probably of the non-combatants, during the conquest, and to have derived thence a sacredness which long clung to it, and finally led, singularly enough, to its becoming a centre of idolatrous worship. The rude circle of unhewn stones without inscription was, no doubt, exactly like the many prehistoric monuments found all over the world, which forgotten races have raised to keep in everlasting remembrance forgotten fights and heroes. It was a comparatively small thing; for each stone was but a load ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... conditions of its experience after the death of the body. These beliefs, it has been agreed, even among the most enlightened peoples, rest at last on the same basis with the crudest notions of the barbarians of the prehistoric period, namely, the spontaneous workings of raw instinct and imagination. Tracing the views of Christians as to the nature of the soul, and the life to come in heaven or hell, back to the rude conceptions of the naked savages ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... the serene ease with which a man who knew so much touched on such delicate ground. The book which he had written in that state of mind, and with that conception of science and religion, had only a prehistoric interest for its author. He refused to reprint it, and declared that there was hardly a sentence fit to stand unchanged. He lamented that he had lost ten years of life in getting his bearings, and in learning, unaided, ...
— The History of Freedom • John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton
... would have marvelled to hear him. Time was when he had agreed with Miss Gossamer that only people who had known each other a long time, as he and she had, could depend upon their attitude toward each other. The attitude between Miss Gossamer and him had seemed very reliable in those prehistoric days when congeniality of taste, a flower face and the probability of getting through life without much worry on your mind and a good cigar in your mouth had seemed sufficient to him. Things like that seemed pitifully insufficient now. He wheeled ...
— Sally of Missouri • R. E. Young
... historic period is not the same in all countries. It varies from a few centuries in our own country to a few thousands of years in Oriental lands. In no country is there a hard and fast line separating the historic period from the prehistoric. In the dim perspective of years the light gradually fades away, the mist grows thicker and thicker before us, and we at last find ourselves face to ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen
... impatient curiosity impelled our steps; crackling and rattling, our feet were trampling on the remains of prehistoric animals and interesting fossils, the possession of which is a matter of rivalry and contention between the museums of great cities. A thousand Cuviers could never have reconstructed the organic remains deposited in ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne
... separate lines of development during the earliest periods of sex-differentiation; and, as this division of labor was a necessary step in the evolutionary processes, the rate of progress depended largely on the subsequent adjustment of these two primary elements or forces. A comprehensive study of prehistoric records shows that in an earlier age of existence upon the earth, at a time when woman's influence was in the ascendancy over that of man, human energy was directed by the altruistic characters which originated in ...
— The God-Idea of the Ancients - or Sex in Religion • Eliza Burt Gamble
... flint. Here was a discovery! Who were these carvers of stones, the aboriginals of Gafsa? How lived they? A prolonged and melodious whistle from the distant railway station served to remind me of the gulf of ages that separates these prehistoric men from ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... would have been highly unnecessary if I had been permitted to carry out my intention fully, and restore man to his prehistoric simplicity," interrupted Tsin-Su-Hoang. "For that reason, when the voice of the assemblage expresses itself, it must be understood that it represents in no measure the ...
— The Wallet of Kai Lung • Ernest Bramah
... your artlessness is prehistoric," he said. "You belong in the Stone Age. All in all, you and Ross Shelby aren't far removed: he's politically immoral; you ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... tribes. It is only in this folk-lore—proved often on patient investigation to be of historic value—that we can find some threads to guide us through the labyrinth of mystery to which we come in the prehistoric {113} times of Canada. Popular tradition tells us that the Hurons and Iroquois, branches of the same family, speaking dialects of one common language, were living at one time in villages not far from each other—the Hurons probably at Hochelaga and the Senecas ...
— Canada • J. G. Bourinot
... month earlier he had been a man of ambition, a man of promise. He'd even found his Dream. An Easterner had helped him to that foolishness; an -ologist from a university who expected to find prehistoric bones and ...
— Winner Take All • Larry Evans
... Darwin, Romanes, and Wolff.[11] Mantagazza, a distinguished Italian scientist, in his Physiognomy and Expression, writes as follows: "As long as I live I shall never see anything equal to the loving tenderness of two snails, who, having in turn launched their little stone darts (as in prehistoric times), caress and embrace each other with a grace that might arouse the envy ...
— The Dawn of Reason - or, Mental Traits in the Lower Animals • James Weir
... fight such an important element in the new social machinery as a railway system. Such a business, in the next European war, will be hastily entrusted to some haphazard incapables drafted from one or other of the two prehistoric arms.... I do not see how this condition of affairs can be anything but transitory. There may be several wars between European powers, prepared and organized to accept the old conventions, bloody, vast, distressful encounters that may still leave the art of war essentially unmodified, ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... brown-faced, lithe-limbed children, who looked uncannily Eastern. And the men, showing their white teeth in smiles, together with the fawning women, young and handsome, or old and hideously ugly, seemed altogether alien to the quiet, tame domestic English landscape. There was something prehistoric about the scene, and everywhere lurked that sense of dangerous primeval passions held in enforced check which might burst forth on the very ...
— Red Money • Fergus Hume
... consul at Venice was the United States Minister at Vienna, and in my time this minister was John Lothrop Motley, the historian. He was removed, later, by that Johnson administration which followed Lincoln's so forgottenly that I name it with a sense of something almost prehistoric. Among its worst errors was the attempted discredit of a man who had given lustre to our name by his work, and who was an ardent patriot as well as accomplished scholar. He visited Venice during my first year, which was the darkest period ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... curls up to sleep! He is unconsciously remembering the long grasses in which his wild ancestors dwelt. Also observe this boy, who has retained an unconscious recollection of the earliest creed of prehistoric man. Behold him instinctively, and I may say automatically, cherishing fetich stones (instead of marbles, like other boys) and adoring that green insect in the glass bottle! Oh Science,' he added rapturously, 'what will Mr. Max Mueller say now? The Infinite! ...
— 'That Very Mab' • May Kendall and Andrew Lang
... "it is generally believed that we see here the remains of an ancient temple of the Druids. They were half-mythical creatures who are thought to have inhabited England in prehistoric times. They worshiped Nature,—particularly the Sun, and lived out-of-doors entirely. Most people consider them to have been the originators of this strange work, though it has also been attributed to the Saxons, the Danes, and, I believe, even ...
— John and Betty's History Visit • Margaret Williamson
... Conway and Clwyd, and the lordships of Bromfield, Yale (Il, open land) and Chirkland, the old possessions of Gruffydd ap Madoc, arglwydd (lord) of Dinas Brn. Cefn (Elwy Valley) limestone caves hold the prehistoric hippopotamus, elephant, rhinoceros, lion, hyena, bear, reindeer, &c.; Pls Heaton cave, the glutton; Pont Newydd, felstone tools and a polished stone axe (like that of Rhosdigre); Carnedd Tyddyn Bleiddian, "platycnemic (skeleton) men of Denbighshire" ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... asked me, as he often does, 'Why do you do it?' He seems to have some sense missing in his make-up. He can't coordinate the actions of men. Perhaps that is the key to his character. D'Aubigne, who used to paint, as a student, vast canvases depicting Prehistoric Man fighting a mammoth, or Perseus chopping up Gorgons, said it was a good plate and wished he had gone in for etching. I fear he is like many painters—he doesn't realize the drudgery and technical labour involved. Let me know your ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... scorn our half-hearted theory of a gold deposit in the bed and bars of our favorite stream. We were not to look for auriferous alluvium in the bed of any present existing stream, but in the "cement" or dried-up bed of the original prehistoric rivers that formerly ran parallel with the present bed, and which—he demonstrated with the stem of Pickney's pipe in the red dust—could be found by sinking shafts at right angles with the stream. The theory ...
— The Heritage of Dedlow Marsh and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... Byzantine-Roman churches with the usual Lombard horrors. A fine passion-flower or vine encircles the porch, peacocks strut and drink from an altar, while, on the other hand, lions mangle a man and a sheep, and horrible composite monsters, resembling the prehistoric plesiosaurus, bite each other's necks. A Madonna and Christ are enthroned on Byzantine seats, the weight resting on human beings, not so realistically crushed as those of Ferrara and Milan, but suffering. There is a similar meeting of symbols in the neighbouring Cathedral of Foligno; and, ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... many respects Casa Grande ruin is one of the most noteworthy relics of a prehistoric age and people remaining within the limits of the United States. It was discovered, already in a ruinous condition, by Padre Kino in 1694, and since that time it has been a subject of record by explorers and historians. ...
— The Repair Of Casa Grande Ruin, Arizona, in 1891 • Cosmos Mindeleff
... that of the other. Indeed, Miss Beekman's friend, Prof. Abelard Samothrace, of Columbia University, probably would have admitted that just as the two had lived in the same house—albeit at different levels—on Fifth Avenue, so their forebears at some prehistoric period had, likely as not, occupied the same cave and had in company waded on frosty mornings the ice-skimmed swamps of Mittel Europa in pursuit of the cave bear, the mastodon and the woolly rhinoceros, ...
— By Advice of Counsel • Arthur Train
... not said to have fallen luminously, and not said to have been found sticking in trees, we are told by faithful hypnotics that astonished rustics come upon prehistoric axes that have been washed into sight by rains, and jump to the conclusion that the things have fallen from the sky. But simple rustics come upon many prehistoric things: scrapers, pottery, knives, hammers. We have no record of rusticity coming upon old pottery ...
— The Book of the Damned • Charles Fort
... practice dates back to prehistoric ages. Man always accepts as right anything that is in existence when ...
— Caesar's Column • Ignatius Donnelly
... was growing dark. The endless vapours and the high banks of cloud in which the whole of this world was sunk grew dimmer and dimmer. In front of him was an empty level space, and about two miles further on the huge mushrooms stood out, tall and wide like the monuments of some prehistoric age. And underneath them on the soft carpet there seemed to move a myriad ...
— Orpheus in Mayfair and Other Stories and Sketches • Maurice Baring
... that the character of Vladimir Igorievich had been cut clean out of the text of the actual opera. I could much more easily have dispensed with the buffooneries of a couple of obscure players upon the goudok (or prehistoric hurdy-gurdy), who wasted more than enough of such time as could be spared from ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, June 17, 1914 • Various
... circumvented every kind of obstacle to make me what I am—a vertebrate, breathing, walking, thinking entity, capable of some creative expression of my own—will probably not fall short now that I have immediate use for it. Of what I get from the past, prehistoric and historic, perhaps the most subtle distillation is the fact that so far is the life-principle from balking at need, need is essential to its activity. Where there is no need it seems to be quiescent; where there is something ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King
... to me in making a plan for archeological field work in 1895, that the prehistoric cliff houses, cave dwellings, and ruined pueblos of Arizona afforded valuable opportunities for research, and past experience induced me to turn my steps more especially to the northern and northeastern parts of the territory.[1] The ruins of ancient ...
— Archeological Expedition to Arizona in 1895 • Jesse Walter Fewkes
... the side with a solution especially prepared for the purpose. I have also heard of fish-bladders but can give no details on the subject. The Cundum was unknown to the ancients of Europe although syphilis was not: even prehistoric skeletons show traces of ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 7 • Richard F. Burton
... every side. The floor was littered with every imaginable shape and size of broken glass and china. Fragments of pictures, looking as if they had been chewed by some prehistoric animal, lay amid heaps of shattered statuettes and vases. As Sally moved slowly into the room after her involuntary pause, china crackled beneath her feet. She surveyed the stripped walls with a wondering eye, and turned to Gerald ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... I am told, is passing away—precise, accurate, stern, solid; knowing very little, but that little thoroughly; never overlooking a slip, but seldom guilty of an injustice; sternest and most unbending of prehistoric Tories, both in matters political and educational; yet carrying concealed somewhere under the square-cut waistcoat a heart which knew how to sympathize with boy-flesh and the many ills which it is heir to. Good old Mr. Rhomboid! I wonder if he is ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell
... thrust suddenly forward. But for the dog, those men would be helpless. But for the dog, he could turn now, and the woods would swallow him up. In a flash an inspiration was born, a conquering purpose such as must have entered the mind of prehistoric man. He waited, ...
— Frank of Freedom Hill • Samuel A. Derieux
... are offered a wide field of entertainment and moral uplift. The steamer excursions embrace trips up the lovely river Fallal to Gongor, famous for the prehistoric remains of the shrine of Saint Opodeldoc, and to beauty spots in the harbour like Glumgallion, Trehenna and Pangofflin Creek. There are also excursions in armed motor-char-a-bancs to Boscagel, Cadgerack and Flapperack. To-day visitors can view the gardens at Poljerrick, where many super-tropical ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, July 28th, 1920 • Various
... HRDLICKA: "Marked Human Bones from a Prehistoric Tarasco Indian Burial-place in the State of Michoacan, Mexico," Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History, Vol. ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz
... of one of the Wessex Field and Antiquarian Clubs that the foregoing story, partly told, partly read from a manuscript, was made to do duty for the regulation papers on deformed butterflies, fossil ox- horns, prehistoric dung-mixens, and such like, that usually occupied the more serious attention ...
— A Group of Noble Dames • Thomas Hardy
... to St. Germain. M. Reinach's prehistoric museum is there. It is very beautiful. You should not go home to your country ...
— Three Soldiers • John Dos Passos
... the Duchesse de Dordogne and the Princesse Estradina go past her door to visit Hubert's premier and marvel at the American bath-tubs and the Annamite bric-a-brac; and she had been present, with her husband, at the banquet at which Hubert had revealed to the astonished Faubourg the prehistoric episodes depicted on his dining-room walls. She had accepted all these necessities with the stoicism which the last months had developed in her; for more and more, as the days passed, she felt herself in the grasp of circumstances stronger ...
— The Custom of the Country • Edith Wharton
... religion was evolved by slow degrees and by human minds, and that all existing forms of religion and all existing "sacred books," instead of being "revelations," are evolutions from religious ideas and forms and legends of prehistoric times. It is impossible to reduce these opposite ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford
... nearly all ancient races to perpetuate the history of certain events among them. Especially true is this of the ancient people who lived in Arizona. The remarkable picture rocks and boulders, with strange symbols upon them, left by the prehistoric races of Arizona, have been the cause of much discussion among those who have seen them, as to who these ancient hieroglyphic makers were. These rock records may be divided into three different kinds, which it is thought were made by two different races. ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... younger generation holds no suffrage; and is not slow to declare that the Primordial is rightly named, characterizing the individual members of the Board of Governors as antediluvians, prehistoric monsters who have never learned that laughter lends a savor to existence. And so it is that the younger generation, (which is understood to include Maitland and Bannerman), while it religiously pays its dues and has the name of the Primordial engraved ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... 30 ft. above Lake Michigan on a deep layer of sand, once the bed of the lake, which in prehistoric time extended several miles farther inland. The city has a splendid harbour which has been extended by the use of the two rivers—the Grand and the Little Calumet—both of which have been dredged and enlarged. ...
— The Greatest Highway in the World • Anonymous
... the ground like some unwieldy prehistoric reptile. Houck knew that if he lost his footing he was done for. Once, as the cluster of fighters swung downhill, the outlaw found himself close to the edge of the group. He got his arms free and tried to beat off those clinging to him. ...
— The Fighting Edge • William MacLeod Raine
... MESA—Transformation of a Desert Plain; Use of a Prehistoric Canal; Moving Upon the Mesa Townsite; An Irrigation Clash That Did Not Come; Mesa's Civic Administration; Foundation of Alma; Highways Into the Mountains; Hayden's Ferry, Latterly Tempe; Organization of the Maricopa Stake; A Great Temple to ...
— Mormon Settlement in Arizona • James H. McClintock
... him; from those garden-beds, now at their richest, but where all is so winsomely little, to that place of "great matters," great stones, great memories out of reach. Why! the Uthwarts had scarcely had more memories than their woods, noiselessly deciduous; or their prehistoric, entirely unprogressive, unrecording forefathers, in or before the days of the Druids. Centuries of almost "still" life—of birth, death, [204] and the rest, as merely natural processes—had made them and their home what ...
— Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... to-day and addressing the real sea in these words and accents! Fancy the poet doing it! The mood and the mentality are prehistoric. I would not mind Mr. Noyes putting himself lyrically into the woaded skin of our ancestors. But I do think he might have got a little nearer the mark in indicating the "throne of her fame." Because I expect Mr. Noyes knows as well as anybody that the real throne of England's fame is not in ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett
... primitive Teutonism, however, without historical alloy; such a Teutonism as we can construct by letting the imagination work back from the most forceful qualities of the historical German to those which representatives of the same race may have had in a prehistoric age. The period of Wagner's tetralogy, it must be remembered, is purely mythical. The ruggedness of the type which we obtain by such a process is the strong characteristic of Herr Niemann's treatment of Wagner's ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... need to insist further on the point that the task of the Grail hero is in this special respect no mere literary invention, but a heritage from the achievements of the prehistoric heroes of ...
— From Ritual to Romance • Jessie L. Weston
... than he owes her, and may exact of him, if she chooses, the same prematrimonial purity that he exacts of her. But questions of this kind are never settled on the basis of equity. The sentiments by which they are determined have long and intricate roots in the prehistoric past; and we are yet very far from the millennial condition of absolute equality between the sexes. According to Herbert Spencer there is a hereditary transmission of qualities which are confined exclusively to the male, and of others which are confined to the ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... of a director of the Patent Office who in the early thirties of the last century suggested that the Patent Office be abolished, because "everything that possibly could be invented had been invented." A similar feeling must have spread through the prehistoric world when the first sail was hoisted on a raft and the people were able to move from place to place without rowing or punting or pulling from ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... company and men avoided him. It amused him grimly to learn that a new strike had been made in Nome, the biggest discovery in the camp's history, and to realize that he had fled just in time to miss the opportunity of profiting by it. He heard talk of a prehistoric sea-beach line, a streak of golden sands which paralleled the shore and lay hidden below the tundra mud. News came of overnight fortunes, of friends grown prosperous and mighty. Embittered anew, Folsom turned again to the wilderness, and he did not reappear until the summer was over. He came to ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach
... been used like kitchen-middens in Europe and elsewhere, as places for dumping the refuse of shell-fish used for food. These became places for the throwing of useless and broken articles used in the household, and thus have been the means of preserving many of the implements used in prehistoric times. The most significant discovery made in these shell heaps was that at Omori, of the bones of human beings artificially broken in such a way as to indicate that cannibalism had been prevalent at the ...
— Japan • David Murray
... the hard-beaten prairie road meandered over the sod. There had been a ridge or two and some sharp curves just west of town, and now, as they rounded the last of these and flew out upon an almost level track, the bottom of some prehistoric mountain lake, the eyes of two of the three silent occupants of the cab were strained along the gleaming rails ahead, and almost at the same instant the same thought sprang to the lips of each—Big ...
— To The Front - A Sequel to Cadet Days • Charles King
... earth is one, so is humanity. Its unity of species points to some degree of communication through a long prehistoric past. Universal history is not entitled to the name unless it embraces all parts of the earth and all peoples, whether savage or civilized. To fill the gaps in the written record it must turn to ethnology and geography, which by tracing the distribution and movements of primitive ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... the undertaking at that time was by oversight omitted from the document—the Greeks had no howitzers or mobile heavy artillery worth mentioning, and any ordnance of that class that we disposed of in the Mediterranean was of the prehistoric kind. The slip was of no great importance, however, because there never was the remotest chance of King Constantine, who was no mean judge of warlike problems, letting his country in for so ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... opposite the shrill whistle of the ferry-boat was heard announcing its departure to the passengers on the early train from San Rafael. The flickering misty atmosphere seemed like a boundless aquarium, an aquarium in which gigantic prehistoric, fabulous creatures stretched their limbs and glared at one another with fiery eyes. Trembling beams of light hovered between the dancing lights on and between the ships, rising and falling like transparent bars when ...
— Banzai! • Ferdinand Heinrich Grautoff
... a desk he sits, At times about the room he flits— Folks interrupt his perfect ease By asking questions such as these: "How tall was prehistoric man?" "How old, I pray, was ...
— More Toasts • Marion Dix Mosher
... see them, are destined to create a great and powerful Greece, which will bring about not an extension of the state by conquest, but a natural return to those limits within which Hellenism has been active even from prehistoric times. ...
— Defenders of Democracy • The Militia of Mercy
... on the scientist. "But great heat and pressure are necessary to create the gems. In nature this was probably obtained by prehistoric volcanic fires, and by the terrific pressure of immense rocks. It is possible to make diamonds in the laboratory of the chemist, but they are so minute as ...
— Tom Swift Among The Diamond Makers - or The Secret of Phantom Mountain • Victor Appleton
... 'fisherman') are the same caste as the Kahars, or 'bearers'. The boats used by them are commonly 'dugout' canoes, exactly like those used in prehistoric Europe, and now ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... inch of his body. Surely something was snapping in his brain, for those dusty khaki figures on the ground, the sky, the earth all seemed to be dancing madly about him. It was not yet light and Tim strained his eyes to pierce the darkness. Then he made a discovery. A dark mass, like some prehistoric monster, was gradually approaching. Tim spoke to a man next to him who was softly swearing and bandaging a shattered hand. He peered through the light and half-light of dawn, and then started to laugh in a nervous way. "Hell, mate;" he said, "the whole German race are advancing against ...
— War and the Weird • Forbes Phillips
... through magnificent groves of stately yellow pines which extended from Grand Canyon out past Grand View and the picturesque old stage tavern there which is the property of Mr. W. R. Hearst. Quite a distance beyond there we stopped for lunch on a little knoll covered with prehistoric ruins. I asked Smolley what had become of the people who had built the homes lying at our feet. He grunted a few times and said that they were driven out on a big rock by their enemies and then the god caused the rock to fly away with them ...
— I Married a Ranger • Dama Margaret Smith
... of the cosmos, it takes the fun out of it. In prehistoric days a man who had to hunt animals or go hungry may often have gone hungry, but he was never bored by the sameness of his meals. A man who traveled on horseback often got to his destination late, but he was not troubled with ennui on the way. In overdrive, ...
— Talents, Incorporated • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... somewhere deep in the earth, as though a volcano were about to erupt. It was not over in an instant, but went on, like the suppressed lamentations of some creature trying to break its chains. It might have been some prehistoric, tremendous creature, unknown to man, unknown to these times. But it was our creature. It was of our day. Else it could never ...
— The Sagebrusher - A Story of the West • Emerson Hough
... toward a long, dark shadow that transformed itself into a temple wall as we drew closer, and in a moment we were once more groping our way downward amid prehistoric foundation stones, with bats flitting past us and a horrible feeling possessing me, at least, that the worst ...
— Caves of Terror • Talbot Mundy
... wind, he cursed Andrew with erudite elaboration. But when Andrew eventually landed, his dripping bathing-suit clinging close to his gigantic and bony figure, appearing to derisive eyes like the skin covered fossil of a prehistoric monster of a man, his bushy hair clotted, like ruddy seaweed, over his staring, ugly face, Bakkus forgot his woes and rolled on his back convulsed ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... thereafter much of his convalescence was passed within its walls. There he read with avidity all that he could find concerning the Lake Superior copper region, and mining in general. Particularly was he interested in everything pertaining to the prehistoric mining of copper by a people, presumably Aztecs or their close kin, who possessed the art, long since ...
— The Copper Princess - A Story of Lake Superior Mines • Kirk Munroe
... Plato[2] reveals the consciousness possessed by the Greeks of that intimate connection which subsists between a country and the temper of its race. To us the name Athenai—the fact that Athens by its title even in the prehistoric age was marked out as the appanage of her who was the patroness of culture—seems a fortunate accident, an undesigned coincidence of the most striking sort. To the Greeks, steeped in mythologic faith, accustomed to regard their lineage as autochthonous and their polity as the fabric ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... G. Possum, University of Texas Press, Austin, 1952. This richly illustrated book comprehends everything pertaining to the subject from prehistoric marsupium to baking with sweet potatoes in a Negro cabin. It is the outcome of a lifetime's scientific investigation not only of possums but of libraries and popular talk. Thus, in addition to its biographical and natural history aspects, it is a study in the evolution of man's knowledge ...
— Guide to Life and Literature of the Southwest • J. Frank Dobie
... man," I exclaimed. "He'd love you; he's not a bit more like a prize-fighter than he is like a Professor, he's more like a sort of prehistoric man in ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley
... so very long ago, when under the banner of the new-born science of "Comparative Philology" there gathered together a group of men who thought they held the key to prehistoric history, and that words themselves would tell the story where ancient monuments and literature were silent. It was a great and beautiful thought, and the science which encouraged it has taken its place as a useful and reputable member of the community ...
— The Religion of Numa - And Other Essays on the Religion of Ancient Rome • Jesse Benedict Carter
... future. You, my dearest, are the embodiment of the woman of the Great War—" I smiled—"The Woman of the Great War in capital letters. What your destiny is, God knows. But it isn't to be tied to a Prehistoric Man like me." ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... mass of existing savage humanity we find social and religious customs so definite that we are forced to suppose a long preceding period of development. It has even been held that traces of religious conceptions are discernible in the first surviving records of "prehistoric" man, the contemporary of the cave bear—a period separated from the earliest clear historical records by many millenniums;[14] but, though the existence of such conceptions is by no means improbable, the alleged traces are too dim to build a theory on. The supposition of a continuous ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... points out, that in prehistoric times the Malay and Indonesian stock spread westwards to Madagascar and eastwards to the Philippines and Formosa, Micronesia and Polynesia. "This astonishing expansion of the Malaysian people throughout the Oceanic area is sufficiently attested by the ...
— British Borneo - Sketches of Brunai, Sarawak, Labuan, and North Borneo • W. H. Treacher
... oldest book was writ, Full many a prehistoric soul Arrived at this unchanging goal, Through changeless Love, that leads ...
— Maurine and Other Poems • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... history of medicine will show three fairly well defined periods. The beginning of the first is hidden in the uncertain days of prehistoric ages and the period continues down to early Christian times—perhaps the end of the second century when Galen died. The second period extends from this time to the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries, and the third period embraces the last three or four centuries. ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten
... in Washington, a famous botanist, a botanist not only of all things that live and grow to-day, but who has pushed his researches back and down into the prehistoric ages so as to understand and explain the records, the prints, the leaves and twigs, the forms of every kind that are on the rocks and left to tell the story of a life that has passed away many thousands on thousands of years ago. How much of all this marvellous realm, or even a suggestion of it, ...
— Our Unitarian Gospel • Minot Savage
... by the similarity in language, the Apache and the Navaho in prehistoric times were as nearly a single group as the present bands of Apache are; and, likewise, there is sufficient similarity in the underlying principles of their mythology to argue a common tribal origin. The names as well as the functions of several of the mythic characters are ...
— The North American Indian • Edward S. Curtis
... fragments of clay vessels of unusually large size, which excited much interest in the minds of antiquarians, not only because of the size of the vessels indicated by the fragments, but because they appeared to have been used by some prehistoric people in the manufacture of salt and because they bore impressions made by some textile fabric. In the same immediate locality were also discovered a number of box-shaped stone graves. That the latter were the work of the people who made the pottery Mr. ...
— The Problem of Ohio Mounds • Cyrus Thomas
... while the other, though of later date, belonged to a person who describes himself as "the servant of the deified Naram-Sin." Such cylinders may, of course, have been brought to the island in later times; but when we remember that a characteristic object of prehistoric Cypriote art is an imitation of the seal-cylinder of Chaldsea, their discovery ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... depicted he is capable of representing with brush and pencil as faithfully as with his pen. He had it in him to be not only a writer, but an excellent draughtsman, and even a great painter. He has reproduced in water-colour, with loving care, the decorations of the specimens of prehistoric pottery which his excavations have revealed, and which he has endeavoured to reconstruct, with all the science of an archaeologist. He has displayed the same skill in water-colour in that astonishing iconography, in which he has detailed, with marvellous accuracy, all the peculiarities ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... outset of the Empire; we cannot trace the steps by which it grew. Evidences of something that resembles town-planning on a rectangular scheme can be noted in two or three corners of early Italian history—first in the prehistoric Bronze Age, then in a very much later Etruscan town, and thirdly on one or two sites of middle Italy connected with the third or fourth century B.C. These evidences are scanty and in part uncertain, and their bearing on ...
— Ancient Town-Planning • F. Haverfield
... Dr. Leet that was in the party? I remember dancing a cotillon with a very good looking youth of that name in the prehistoric ages. He was a senior at Yale, very rich and very good looking. I wore his fraternity pin over my heart for a whole ...
— Lady of the Decoration • Frances Little
... Again it came, that prehistoric bawling cry, and with one mind the herd began to center, rushing with menacing swiftness, like warriors answering their chieftain's call for aid. With awkward lope or jolting trot, snorting with fury they hastened to the rescue, only to meet in blind bewildered mass, swirling to and fro in search ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... victim for execution; he might, however, compound for his crime by paying a certain compensation. Studying the history of other tribes in various parts of the world, we are able, with much probability, to reconstruct the antecedents of this death-penalty in our own prehistoric ages, and to trace it to the blood-feud; that is, to a tribal condition in which the next-of-kin of a murdered man was socially and religiously bound to avenge him by slaying the murderer or one of his kindred. This duty of revenge is sometimes (and perhaps was at first everywhere) regarded ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... the sandstone cliffs reared their yellow masses against the cloudless sky. Worn by the ebbing floods of a prehistoric sea, carved by the winds and rains of ages, they presented a panorama ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... lizard known as the horned frog is harmless. He has the hideousness of the prehistoric monsters whose reduced descendant he is, but he ...
— Sixes and Sevens • O. Henry
... high dreams of "the Irish Emerson." Once entered, his embodied visions attract you from all four walls of the study. Piles of them in corners make you wonder is Mrs. Russell a saint. The pictures are of Irish landscape; of "the Other People"; of heroes and heroines of Ireland's prehistoric days; of souls that have yet to be born; of souls that have passed through incarnation after incarnation, never to rise above an animal existence; of souls whose every rebirth has taken them to higher spirituality, and that now wait to pass ...
— Irish Plays and Playwrights • Cornelius Weygandt
... also much richer than is generally realized in its prehistoric monuments,—ancient Hindoo and Buddhist temples, and ruins of lofty pagodas from three to four hundred feet in height, dating many centuries previous to the appearance of Christ upon earth. What an unexplored ...
— Due West - or Round the World in Ten Months • Maturin Murray Ballou
... in the heart of unreclaimed wilderness, they had surely witnessed something crudely and essentially primitive. Something that had survived somehow the advance of humanity had emerged terrifically, betraying a scale of life still monstrous and immature. He envisaged it rather as a glimpse into prehistoric ages, when superstitions, gigantic and uncouth, still oppressed the hearts of men; when the forces of nature were still untamed, the Powers that may have haunted a primeval universe not yet withdrawn. To this day he thinks of what he termed years later in a sermon "savage ...
— The Wendigo • Algernon Blackwood
... Wild species are found in the highlands of Kurdistan, in Greece, and in Mesopotamia, that are identical with species cultivated to-day. It is thought that the cultivation of the grain began in Mesopotamia, but it is also certain that it was grown by the Swiss lake-dwellers far back in prehistoric times. It is the "corn" Joseph's brothers sought to buy when they went to Egypt, and the records of its harvesting are scattered all over ...
— Commercial Geography - A Book for High Schools, Commercial Courses, and Business Colleges • Jacques W. Redway
... curiously startled, as one is startled at finding anything human that seems less than human. He was kneeling there among the low verdure of a shallow valley, and looked like an old gray rock or some prehistoric animal. I stopped to look at him, but he paid no heed, and seemed only to shrink into himself as though, if he kept silent, he might be taken for stock or stone. I addressed him but he made no answer. I went nearer, ...
— Great Possessions • David Grayson
... indications of eyes, but these were hidden beneath a kind of permanent skin covering. In any case they would have had no use for eyes, because the water-holes were situated in the most profound darkness. In other caves I discovered quantities of extraordinary animal-bones, probably of prehistoric origin. ...
— The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont - as told by Himself • Louis de Rougemont
... prototypes. Moreover, the recorded ages of Sumerian and Hebrew patriarchs are strangely alike. It may be added that in Egypt a new fragment of the Palermo Stele has enabled us to verify, by a very similar comparison, the accuracy of Manetho's sources for his prehistoric period, while at the same time it demonstrates the way in which possible inaccuracies in his system, deduced from independent evidence, may have arisen in remote antiquity. It is clear that both Hebrew and Hellenistic traditions ...
— Legends Of Babylon And Egypt - In Relation To Hebrew Tradition • Leonard W. King
... Egyptian loom shown in ancient pictures—that is even more modern than Penelope's, although it was set up three thousand years before, a last guide-post on the backward way to the misty land called prehistoric. ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee
... Saturnian years, and since in that long period there has been no measurable change in us, few of us have believed in the legends at all. They have been thought the surviving figments of a barbarous, prehistoric worship of the sun. However, such a condition is not in conflict with the known facts of cosmogony, and since there actually exists such a humanity as yours—a humanity whose bodily tissues actually are composed largely of molten water—those ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith
... straits on a raft of driftwood. Natives cross and recross Bering straits to-day on the ice and in primitive skin canoes, not unlike Cape Cod dories, which have not been improved in construction since the days of prehistoric man. Indeed, the primitive man may be seen at East cape almost as he was thousands of years ago. Evolution and development, with the exception of firearms, seem to have halted at East cape. The place, with ...
— The First Landing on Wrangel Island - With Some Remarks on the Northern Inhabitants • Irving C. Rosse
... how completely this Celtic leaven—the true history of which is lost in the depths of prehistoric darkness—succeeded in impressing not only its language but its culture and spirit upon the various peoples with whom it came into contact. To impose a special type of civilization upon another race must always prove a task of almost superhuman proportions. ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... be some prehistoric sort of creature like the mammoths of the north pole or the dinosauras, ...
— The Boy Aviators' Polar Dash - Or - Facing Death in the Antarctic • Captain Wilbur Lawton
... on the stone flagging in front of the house; and there was an old toad who used to keep us company. I called him Prince Charming, and I am sure he was as old as Methuselah, and lived under that stone in some prehistoric age. ...
— The Gay Cockade • Temple Bailey
... first form of decoration with the needle—an art growing out of and controlled by the earlier art of weaving. Decorative bands of cross-stitch come to us on shreds of linen found in the sepulchers of Egypt and the burial grounds of the prehistoric races of South America. I have seen, in a collection of textiles found in their ancient burial places, the most elaborate and beautiful of cross-stitch borders, wrought into the fabrics which enriched Pizarro's shiploads of loot sent from Vicuna, Peru, to the court of ...
— The Development of Embroidery in America • Candace Wheeler
... raven of the waste or the parting: hence the bird of Odin symbolises separation (which is also called Al-bayn). The Raven (Ghurab Heb. Oreb and Lat. Corvus, one of the prehistoric words) is supposed to be seen abroad earlier than any other bird; and it is entitled "Abu Zajir," father of omens, because lucky when flying towards the right and v.v. It is opposed in poetry to the (white) ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 4 • Richard F. Burton
... is the first serious attempt to describe the great barren tableland that extends to the south of Limousin in the Department of Aveyron, Lot, etc., a country of dolomite cliffs, and canons, and subterranean rivers. The region is full of prehistoric and historic interest, relics of cave-dwellers, of mediaeval robbers, and of the English domination ...
— The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... once loomed very large before him sank to insignificance as he drank to the full of the desolation around him. The past, in which no doubt men strove and hoped, hated and loved and feared, had left the just recognisable ruins of some castles and the causeway built by an unknown hermit or the prehistoric lake-dwellers. A few thatched cabins, faintly smoking, and here and there a cairn of stones gathered laboriously off the wretched fields, were the evidences of present activity. Now and then a man ...
— Hyacinth - 1906 • George A. Birmingham
... Samuel Bryant (Electronics). "We've spent six solid weeks looking for something that simply is not there. All they've got is the prehistoric Whitworth system and that's all it is. Nothing else. Detectors—hell! I tell you I can see better by moonlight than the very best they can do. With everything they've got you couldn't detect a woman in ...
— Masters of Space • Edward Elmer Smith
... mighty prehistoric monster, they made their way along its side, seeking a door. Suddenly Wade stopped short and exclaimed: "Arcot, this is senseless—we can't do this! The machine is so big that it'll take us half an hour of steady walking ...
— The Black Star Passes • John W Campbell
... instance of that inventive ingenuity of the original chroniclers, which so cleverly imagined a whole line of fabulous kings, to give dignity and importance to the "ancient kingdom" thus carried back to inarticulate prehistoric ages. In this way the Stewarts, actually a branch of a well-known Norman family, were linked to a poetic and visionary past by their supposed identification with the children of Banquo, with all the circumstantial details of an elaborate pedigree. According to the legend, ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... and, with a movement that was both a gesture of welcome and an invitation to follow him, turned and entered the passage which led to the library. Rand moved in silence through the hall, where Indian curiosities, horns of elk, and prehistoric relics were arranged above the marble heads of Buonaparte and Alexander the First, Franklin and Voltaire, and down the narrow passage to the room that had been almost chief of all his sacred places. It was now somewhat dimly lit, with every window wide to the night. Jefferson, sitting beside ...
— Lewis Rand • Mary Johnston
... assembling of facts and figures, is an increasing revelation of the imagination, the exactness, the thoroughness, and the great progressive plans of God. Evolution has become a spiritual formula. The scientist looks out over the earth and sky and sun and star. Against his little years are meted out vast prehistoric spans; against his mastery of a few forms of life, stands Life itself. Back of all, there looms up the great Figure of the Originator of life, and of the forms of life; the Maker and Ruler of them all. Each scientific fact ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... made, untold ages before those to which our earliest historical records extend. For example, the observation of the apparent movement of the sun, and the discrimination between the planets and the fixed stars, are both to be classed among the discoveries of prehistoric ages. Nor is it to be said that these achievements related to matters of an obvious character. Ancient astronomy may seem very elementary to those of the present day who have been familiar from childhood ...
— The Story of the Heavens • Robert Stawell Ball
... "is like a great museum of prehistoric fauna. The house roofs, denuded of tiles and the joists left naked, have tilted forward on to the sidewalks, so that they hang in mid-air like giant vertebrae.... One house only of the whole village ...
— Kings, Queens And Pawns - An American Woman at the Front • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... tribes, but two main races can be clearly distinguished: the aboriginal natives, and the Arab settlers. The indigenous inhabitants of the country were negroes as black as coal. Strong, virile, and simple-minded savages, they lived as we may imagine prehistoric men—hunting, fighting, marrying, and dying, with no ideas beyond the gratification of their physical desires, and no fears save those engendered by ghosts, witchcraft, the worship of ancestors, and other forms of superstition common among peoples of low development. They displayed the virtues ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill |
