"Tailless" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... islands and in countries completely separated from each other, we meet with breeds more or less distinct; and these cases are worth giving, showing that the scarcity of distinct races in the same country is not caused by a deficiency of variability in the animal. The tailless cats of the Isle of Man are said to differ from common cats not only in the want of a tail, but in the greater length of their hind legs, in the size of their heads, and in habits. The Creole cat of Antigua, as I am informed by Mr. Nicholson, is smaller, and has a ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin
... her bedroom to be undisturbed, and Johanna went out on an errand. Maurice and Ephie sat side by side on the sofa, and he helped her to distinguish chords of the seventh, and watched her make, in her music-book, the big, tailless notes, at which she herself was always hugely tickled, they'reminded her so of eggs. But on this particular evening, she was not in a studious mood, and bock, pencil and india-rubber slid to the floor. Both windows were wide open; the air that entered was full ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... slow: "O daughter of song and sorrow, Hapless tender of sheep, arise from thy long lamentation! Since thou canst not trust fate, nor behave as becomes a Greek maiden, Look and behold thy sheep." And lo! they returned to her tailless! ...
— Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte • Bret Harte
... conversation. I was lying down near Marian, when she touched me, whispering, "Look, look, Guy, at those curious creatures!" I turned my eyes in the direction she pointed, and saw, peering at us from among the boughs of a neighbouring tree, a whole tribe of almost tailless monkeys. They were curious-looking creatures, with faces of a vivid scarlet hue; their bodies, about eighteen inches long, were clothed with long, straight, shining, whitish hair; their heads were ...
— The Wanderers - Adventures in the Wilds of Trinidad and Orinoco • W.H.G. Kingston
... here and there, either at the boundary line of worms, fishes, amphibia, reptiles, or mammals, the one cell which was destined to become man moves on to the stage of the tailed catarrhine apes, then of the tailless apes, and without staying here it irresistibly strides towards its original goal, and only stops where it is destined to stop. Speaking, however, not phylogenetically, but ontogenetically, at what point does our own cell come in contact with the cell that was intended to become ...
— The Silesian Horseherd - Questions of the Hour • Friedrich Max Mueller
... the way in which the Crown Prince had always wished to dress. He was suddenly conscious of the long trousers on his own small legs, of the ignominy of his tailless Eton jacket and stiff, rolling collar, of the crowning disgrace of his derby hat. But the lonely feeling had gone ...
— Long Live the King • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... light had come on, too, and I saw that we had been pulled off our course by the comet's attraction. I threw the nose over, past on the other side for leeway, then straightened up as the side-distance dial gave a big jump away. Though the gaseous globe, tailless of course away from the sun, showed as big as the full Earth, ...
— Out Around Rigel • Robert H. Wilson
... trap escaped, but in so doing lost his tail. Thereafter, feeling his life a burden from the shame and ridicule to which he was exposed, he schemed to convince all the other Foxes that being tailless was much more attractive, thus making up for his own deprivation. He assembled a good many Foxes and publicly advised them to cut off their tails, saying that they would not only look much better without them, but that they would get rid of the weight of the brush, which was ...
— Aesop's Fables • Aesop
... its relation to crime. It is a subject to which I have devoted some little attention. I have here four letters which purport to come from the missing man. They are all typewritten. In each case, not only are the e's slurred and the r's tailless, but you will observe, if you care to use my magnifying lens, that the fourteen other characteristics to which I have alluded are ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... some of these days on the typewriter and its relation to crime. It is a subject to which I have devoted some little attention. I have here four letters which purport to come from the missing man. They are all typewritten. In each case, not only are the 'e's' slurred and the 'r's' tailless, but you will observe, if you care to use my magnifying lens, that the fourteen other characteristics to which I have alluded ...
— The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... its whole external form. Its arms, its hands, and its feet are longer, while the thumbs, on the contrary, are much shorter, and the great toes much smaller in proportion." [9] And again, "The true Orang, that is to say, that of Asia, that of Borneo, is consequently not the Pithecus, or tailless Ape, which the Greeks, and especially Galen, have described. It is neither the Pongo nor the Jocko, nor the Orang of Tulpius, nor the Pigmy of Tyson,—'it is an animal of a peculiar species', as I shall prove in the clearest manner by the organs of voice and the ...
— Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature • Thomas H. Huxley
... Cogia was conducting his ass to the market, the tail of the animal becoming draggled with mud, the Cogia cut it off and put it into a sack. Arriving at the market, he put up the ass to auction; and on a person crying out, 'What is the use of this tailless creature?' he said, 'Don't you leave your tail in the desert ...
— The Turkish Jester - or, The Pleasantries of Cogia Nasr Eddin Effendi • Nasreddin Hoca
... everybody just the same as ever, and the moment the candle is out I shall be thinking of Glenfaba and seeing the 'Waits,' and 'Oiel Verree,' and 'Hunting the Wren,' and grandfather smoking his pipe in the study by the light of the fire, and Sir Thomas Traddles, the tailless, purring and blinking at his feet. Merry Christmas to you, my ...
— The Christian - A Story • Hall Caine
... really so we should have no racehorses like those of England, nor drayhorses so heavy in build and so unlike the racehorse; for there are no such breeds in a wild state. For the same reason, we should have no turnspit dogs with crooked legs, no greyhounds nor water-spaniels; we should have no tailless breed of fowls nor fantail pigeons, &c. Nor should we be able to cultivate wild plants in our gardens, for any length of time we please, without fear ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... full in front. The glass flew into a thousand splinters. He bashed again. The woodwork of the cabinet, stoutly resisting, worked hideous damage on the gilt stool. But Doggie went on bashing till the cabinet sank in ruins and the little dogs, headless, tailless, rent in twain, strewed the floor. Then Doggie stamped on them with his heavy munition boots until dogs and glass were reduced to powder and the Aubusson ...
— The Rough Road • William John Locke
... chiefest glory will have departed. Such a fate has actually befallen a multitude of comets which Jupiter and the other outlying planets have dragged into our system and helped the sun to hold captive here. Many of these tailless comets were known to the eighteenth-century astronomers, but no one at that time suspected the true meaning of their condition. It was not even known how closely some of them are enchained until the German astronomer ...
— A History of Science, Volume 3(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... tourist is able to land there, but the wharf arrangements are not so good as they might be. Once landed, the visitor usually first proceeds to solve the great zoological problem the island has long presented to the outer world, and finds that the Isle of Man does really possess a breed of tailless cats, whose caudal extremity is either altogether wanting or at most is reduced to ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... to the camp, saw the old man in his usual airy costume, only assumed as I came in sight, a tailless shirt. One of the gins said something to him; he growled an answer; she seemed persuading him to do something. Presently he moved away to a quite clear spot on the other side of the fire; he muttered something in a sing-song voice, and suddenly I saw him beating his ...
— The Euahlayi Tribe - A Study of Aboriginal Life in Australia • K. Langloh Parker
... belief (laugh at it if you will) that I was in the presence of a being of more than mortal endowments, I was withdrawing, when my glance fell on his weird familiars,—two tailless cats. This prodigy made me shudder, and I said, in tones of the deepest ...
— HE • Andrew Lang
... us everything but the truth. As I have before noted (vol. ix. 304), the main reason was simply that the publisher, who was by no means a business man, found the work outgrowing his limits and insisted upon its coming to an untimely and, alas! a tailless end. This is perhaps the principal cause for ignoring the longer histories, like King Omar bin al-Nu'uman (occupying 371 pages in my vols. ii. and iii.); Abu Hasan and his slave-girl Tawaddud (pp. 56, vol. v. 189-245), the Queen of the Serpents ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... big-nosed rhinoceros, Etruskan rhinoceros, Sedgwick's deer, deer of Polignac, Southern elephant. ("Prehistoric Europe," p. 95.) (10) The northern animals include the following: Alpine hare, musk-sheep, glutton, reindeer, arctic fox, lemming, tailless hare, marmot, spermophile, ibex, snowy vole, chamois. (Geikie's "Prehistoric Europe," p. 32.) (11) Geikie's "Prehistoric Europe," p. 28. (12) The following animals are given as southern species: Hippopotamus, ...
— The Prehistoric World - Vanished Races • E. A. Allen
... curious species are—the slow lemurs of South India, small tailless nocturnal animals, somewhat resembling sloths in appearance, and almost as deliberate in their movements, except when in the act of seizing their insect prey; the Tarsier, or specter lemur, of the Malay islands, a small, long tailed nocturnal lemur, remarkable for the curious development of the ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 344, August 5, 1882 • Various
... a young male, in the creek bed and sat down to examine it. It was evidently a gibbon (Hylobates), for its long arms, round head, and tailless body were unmistakable, but in every species with which I was familiar the male was black. This one was yellow and we knew it to be a prize. That there were two other species in the herd was certain ...
— Camps and Trails in China - A Narrative of Exploration, Adventure, and Sport in Little-Known China • Roy Chapman Andrews and Yvette Borup Andrews
... specimen that was too small to be dressed. There were Noah's arks that held animals that would have astonished old Noah himself, and rocking-horses in various stages of dilapidation, from the bright new one with only a scratch on his leg, to the headless and tailless steed that rocked in a melancholy way in the corner. Then there was a swing that hung from the ceiling, and a springy teeter-board that could bounce the little ones quite into the air. These and other treasures were duly inspected by the shy Louie, who soon entered heartily ...
— Miss Dexie - A Romance of the Provinces • Stanford Eveleth
... other things, and consisted of coffee in its native pot, and dry bread: the milk was set on the table in the pan in which it had been boiled, and a soup-ladle and a French wash-hand basin took the place of cup and spoon. A cat kept the door against sundry large and tailless dogs, whose appetites had not gone with their tails; and an old woman kindly delivered a lecture on the most approved method of making a ptisan from the flowers of the lime-tree, and on the many medicinal properties of that decoction, to which she attributed her good health ...
— Ice-Caves of France and Switzerland • George Forrest Browne
... 'I know you are so and so's brother, you are so like him'. Take an instance: In these Norse Tales, No. xxiii, we are told how it was the bear came to have a stumpy tail, and in an African tale, [9] we find how it was the hyaena became tailless and earless. Now, the tailless condition both of the bear and the hyaena could scarcely fail to attract attention in a race of hunters, and we might expect that popular tradition would attempt to account for both, but how are we to explain the fact, that both Norseman and African account ...
— Popular Tales from the Norse • Sir George Webbe Dasent |
