"Reptilian" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... in the desperation of impatience. A friend of mine, a high authority on matters theosophical, knows of a potent explanation and anodyne for moral impatience. Humanity, he tells me, is always being recruited from Mars. Mars, in spite of its canals, is a low and wicked planet, with a reptilian population. When the Martians advance a little beyond the moral status of their fellow-creatures and close their bloodthirsty eyes in death, their spirits are wafted to our planet, there to take on new garments of flesh. The influx of brutal souls is perennial. This explains why, Churches ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... reptiles have 4 feet, some 2, some none. All birds have two feet. The bird's structure is so well suited for flight and shows the marks of design so clearly, that the clumsy aeroplane is but a poor imitation. Yet to link the 12,000 species of birds to their unknown reptilian ancestors, they show us two fossils of the archaeopteryx, as the sum total of the evidence showing the transition from reptiles to birds. The fossil varies slightly but not essentially from other birds. It has a feathered ...
— The Evolution Of Man Scientifically Disproved • William A. Williams
... in at last, and the fish, in his fishy fashion, from start to finish was happy. He was never demoralized. It is not so with us. We cannot much distend or contract our purely physical needs. Especially is any oversupply of them mischievous. They have not the reptilian elasticity. Day by day they must have just enough. But the civilized man has spiritual wants and they are as elastic ...
— The Amateur Garden • George W. Cable
... these are all nocturnal reptiles, and there can be little doubt conceal themselves during the day in holes, so that the green protective tint would be useless to them, and they accordingly retain the more usual reptilian hues. ...
— Contributions to the Theory of Natural Selection - A Series of Essays • Alfred Russel Wallace
... dangerous-looking Spanish bayonets, that through the bygone winter had waged war with all things, now sent out their contribution to the peaceful triumph of the spring, in flowers that have stirred even the chilly scientists to name them Gloriosa; and the cactus, poisonous, most reptilian of herbs, surprised the world with a splendid bloom as little like itself as the pearl is like its mother shell-fish. The sage and the greasewood lent their gold, and the sand-anemone tinged the Badland hills like bluish snow; and in the air and earth and hills on every hand was felt the ...
— Johnny Bear - And Other Stories From Lives of the Hunted • E. T. Seton
... water into foam, as through its gagged jaws a stream rushed constantly down its throat, causing suffocation. But, in spite of its amphibious nature, drowning was inevitable; and soon after became an accomplished fact—the huge reptilian carcass drifting down stream, towards the all-absorbing ocean, to become food for sharks, or some other marine monster more hideous ...
— The Castaways • Captain Mayne Reid
... hand, and he noticed that, while it was fat, it was strong and dry. He hated damp hands, which always seemed to him to have a slimy touch, as if their owner were reptilian. ...
— The Tree of Appomattox • Joseph A. Altsheler
... discovered, nor has any foot been found; so that no direct comparison can be made with the steps. It is, however, my belief, from all we know of the character of the Animal Kingdom in those days, that these animals were reptilian, but combined, like so many of the early types, characters of their own class with those of higher animals yet to come. It seems to me probable, that, in those tracks where one toe is turned backward, the impression is made not by a toe, but by a heel, or by a long sole projecting ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 12, August, 1863, No. 70 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various
... from a patent urachus, as the urine passed in jets as if controlled by a sphincter from his umbilicus. Littre mentions a patent urachus in a boy of eighteen. Congenital dilatation of the ureters is occasionally seen in the new-born. Shattuck describes a male fetus showing reptilian characters in the sexual ducts. There was ectopia vesicae and prolapse of the intestine at the umbilicus; the right kidney was elongated; the right vas deferens opened into the ureter. There was persistence in a separate condition of the ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... dragging toil—a steady pushing at a soggy, unresisting, yet heavy mass. And full concentration was imperative if anything was to be accomplished. The reptilian minds were as unstable as they were empty and would slip away unless firmly held. He stared motionlessly at his crystal, willing the huge reptiles to turn—to waddle back to the safe grasslands of the estate, far ...
— The Weakling • Everett B. Cole
... a clever reptilian movement, which Tartlet imitated as well as he could, he managed, without showing his head above the grass, to reach ...
— Godfrey Morgan - A Californian Mystery • Jules Verne
... amphisbaena. Associated Words: ophiology, ophiolatry, ophiophagous, ophiography, herpetology, ophidian, ophiologic, ophiomorphous, herpetologist, herpetotomy, herpetotomist, ophiologist, ophiomancy, echidna, echidnine, fang, uraeus, serpentry, reptilian, anguiform, anguine. ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... sat beside him stricken, shrivelled, almost reptilian in her red-eyed, motionless misery. Only her eyes moved in her wrinkled, brown face, and reflected the candle standing on the mantelpiece above his head. She sat with her hands crooked over one another in her ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... to have experimented with brains and nerve ganglia, as she has with so many other things. The huge reptilian creatures of Mesozoic time—the various dinosaurs—had ridiculously small heads and brains, but they had what might be called supplementary brains well toward the other end of the body,—great nervous masses near the sacrum, many times the size ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... the remodeling of the classification of the whole type of fishes, fossil and living, and especially the separation of the Ganoids from all other fishes, under the rank of a distinct order; second, the recognition of those combinations of reptilian and bird-like characters in the earlier geological fishes, which led the author to call them prophetic types; and third, his discovery of an analogy between the embryological phases of the higher present fishes and the gradual ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... Frisbie. He was standing a little apart from the turmoil, talking to a man on horseback; a man with half-closed, beady, black eyes, drooping mustaches, and a face reptilian ...
— Empire Builders • Francis Lynde
... fairly say, from the evidence before us, that there have been two Augustan Ages of big animals in the history of our earth—the Jurassic period, which was the zenith of the reptilian type, and the Pliocene, which was the zenith of the colossal terrestrial tertiary mammals. I say on purpose, 'from the evidence before us,' because, as I shall go on to explain hereafter, I do not myself believe that any one ...
— Falling in Love - With Other Essays on More Exact Branches of Science • Grant Allen
... most amazing popular tribute in our history. And he would have pushed on his work for that party had not the coming of the World War changed his perspective. Thenceforth, he devoted himself to saving civilization from the reptilian and atrocious Hun; that was a task, in comparison with which the fortune of a political ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... occupy the intervals between Families or Orders of the same class; but the investigations which have been carried on by Professor Gegenbaur, Professor Cope, and myself into the structure and relations of the extinct reptilian forms of the Ornithoscelida (or Dinosauria and Compsognatha) have brought to light the existence of intercalary forms between what have hitherto been always regarded as very distinct classes of the vertebrate sub-kingdom, ...
— Discourses - Biological and Geological Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... on the fishes. In the many-folded pages of the Old Red Sandstone, till we reach the highest and last, there occur the remains of no other vertebrates than those of this fourth class; but in its uppermost deposits there appear traces of the third or reptilian class; and in passing upwards still, through the Carboniferous, Permian, and Triassic Systems, we find reptiles continuing the master existences of the time. The geologic volume in which these great formations are included corresponds to the Cuvierian one devoted to ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... ended, Seth put his hat firmly on his small, reptilian head, adding greatly to the ferociousness of his thirsty countenance by his way of pulling the sombrero down ...
— Trail's End • George W. Ogden
... the Supreme Council of the Mureess rose solemnly and inclined their heads in his direction. They were tall bipeds of vaguely reptilian ancestry, most of their height being body. They stood on short powerful legs, terminating in flippered feet, and their long arms were flanged to the second elbow with a rubbery fin. Only four opposed fingers flexed the hands, but the ...
— Join Our Gang? • Sterling E. Lanier
... species are all common to England, and all the English to Belgium. It is therefore assumed that the migration of species westward having been the work of time, there was not sufficient lapse of ages to complete the fusion of the continental and British reptilian fauna, before France was separated from England and England ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell
... be urged that this idea is contradictory to the previous suggestion that the absorption of nourishment by the intra-uterine embryo was the cause of the gradual decline of the process of yolk-secretion by the ova in the ovary, but it is not really so. Originally in the reptilian ancestor, or in the Monotreme, the ovum in the follicle secreted yellow-coloured yolk. The materials for this, at any rate, passed through the follicle cells, and it is probable that these cells were not entirely passive, but actively secretory in the process. Substances diffusing from the ovum ...
— Hormones and Heredity • J. T. Cunningham
... representatives of these earliest Vertebrates. Of these two groups one consists chiefly now of the Gar-Pikes of our Western waters, though the Sturgeons share also in some of their features. In these fishes there is a singular union of reptilian with fish-like characters. The systems of circulation and of respiration in them are more complicated than in the common fishes; the structure of the skull resembles that of the skull in reptiles, and they have ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XI., April, 1863, No. LXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics. • Various
... remarking in print that the ancient Athenians, that inferior race, had got ahead in their time of the modern Loco-foco ticket. But several kinds of fish have undoubtedly got ahead in this respect of the common reptilian ticket; for instead of leaving about their eggs anywhere on the loose to take care of themselves, they build a regular nest, like birds, and sit upon their eggs till the fry emerge from them. All the sticklebacks, for instance, are confirmed nest-builders: but here once more it is the male, ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... reptiles—two classes of vertebrate animals which at present appear to be more widely separated than any others. Yet the interval between them is completely filled, in the mesozoic fauna, by birds which have reptilian characters, on the one side, and reptiles which have ornithic characters, on the other. So again, while the group of fishes, termed ganoids, is, at the present time, so distinct from that of the dipnoi, or mudfishes, that they have been reckoned as distinct ...
— The Rise and Progress of Palaeontology - Essay #2 from "Science and Hebrew Tradition" • Thomas Henry Huxley
... fancy may be roused even more strongly in darkness than by daylight. How living seem the smoulderings and the flashings of the tide on nights of phosphorescence!—how reptilian the subtle shifting of the tints of its chilly flame! Dive into such a night-sea;—open your eyes in the black-blue gloom, and watch the weird gush of lights that follow your every motion: each luminous point, as seen through the flood, like the opening and closing of an eye! At such a moment, ...
— In Ghostly Japan • Lafcadio Hearn
... probably another one," he said; and soon, by the same reptilian methods, was back for another try. There was another one, and yet another, and then a little fellow, barely hooked. "That's all," said Jonathan, as he rose to put him back into the pool, and we watched the pretty spotted creature fling himself upstream with a wild flourish ...
— More Jonathan Papers • Elisabeth Woodbridge
... 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. He wrote Lesser Reptilian Life in the Jurassio. Are you acquainted ...
— Galusha the Magnificent • Joseph C. Lincoln
... introduced and now overworked, meaning a task, or performance in one's trade, or calling,—doubtless a variant of stint, without that word's suggestion of allotment and limitation. It is still in the reptilian stage ...
— Write It Right - A Little Blacklist of Literary Faults • Ambrose Bierce
... Dimetrodon; 2, reconstruct the external adductors of the mandible in the cynodont Thrinaxodon; and 3, learn the causes of the appearance and continued expansion of the temporal fenestrae among the reptilian ancestors of mammals. ...
— The Adductor Muscles of the Jaw In Some Primitive Reptiles • Richard C. Fox
... of this reptilian family began to live in the tops of the trees, which were then often more than a hundred feet high. They no longer needed their legs for the purpose of walking, but it was necessary for them to move quickly from branch to branch. And so they changed ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... looks for a depression in the earth wherein the fawn can lie without making a hump in the landscape. The first impulse of the fawn,—even before nursing if the birth occurs in daylight,—is to fold its long legs, short body and reptilian neck into a very small package, hug the earth tightly, close its eyes and lie absolutely motionless until its mother gives the signal to arise and sup. Such infants may lie for long and weary hours without so much as moving an ear; and the anxious mother strolls away to some distance ...
— The Minds and Manners of Wild Animals • William T. Hornaday |
