"Prehistoric" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... breakers 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 Transgressors - Story of a Great Sin • Francis A. Adams
... the barrows and lynchetts or terraces, and the vast green earth-works crowning their summit. Up here on the turf, even with the lark singing his shrill music in the blue heavens, you are with the prehistoric dead, yourself for the time one of that innumerable, unsubstantial multitude, invisible in the sun, so that the sheep travelling as they graze, and the shepherd following them, pass through their ranks without suspecting their presence. And from that elevation ...
— A Shepherd's Life • W. H. Hudson
... of 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 ancient legends must indeed have ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith
... the building of the barrow of Hector (Il. xxiv.) brings vividly before us the scene so often suggested by the examination of the tumuli of prehistoric times. During nine days wood was collected and brought, in carts drawn by oxen, to the site of the funeral pyre. Then the pyre was built and the body laid upon it. After burning for twenty-four hours the smouldering embers were extinguished ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... together as we came up to the chatting attendants. But Raffles must needs interrupt them to ask the way to the Prehistoric Saloon. ...
— Raffles - Further Adventures of the Amateur Cracksman • E. W. Hornung
... the first place, but languished at home when my betters admired Miss Cushman—terribly out of the picture and the frame we should to-day pronounce her, I fear—as the Nancy of Oliver Twist: as far away this must have been as the lifetime of the prehistoric "Park," to which it was just within my knowledge that my elders went for opera, to come back on us sounding those rich old Italian names, Bosio and Badiali, Ronconi and Steffanone, I am not sure I have them quite right; signs, of a rueful ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... ago there was a club of college undergraduates which called itself the Lost Digamma. The digamma, I am informed, is a letter that was lost in prehistoric times from the Greek alphabet. A prudent alphabet would have offered a reward at once and would have beaten up the bushes all about, but evidently these remedies were neglected. As the years went on ...
— Chimney-Pot Papers • Charles S. Brooks
... of Bontoc say that in the past the Igorot people once extended to the seacoast in the Provinces of Ilokos Norte and Ilokos Sur. This, of course, is a tradition of the prehistoric time before the Ilokano invaded northern Luzon; but, as has been stated, the Bontoc people claim never to have been driven by that invasion, neither have they any knowledge of such a movement. It is not improbable, however, that traditions of the invasion may linger with the people nearer ...
— The Bontoc Igorot • Albert Ernest Jenks
... in the last [eighteenth] century was the calumny known as mercheta mulierum, now known as a malignant fable popularized by novelists and playwrights. Another suggestion is that it is a custom that has survived from some prehistoric race; a third that it has grown up at different points...." Mr. Peacock regards the last as the most likely. "It is only when the population becomes relatively dense that land, apart from what it produces, is of any ...
— The Customs of Old England • F. J. Snell
... is so unutterably saddening as that of the evolution of humanity, as it is set forth in the annals of history. Out of the darkness of prehistoric ages man emerges with the marks of his lowly origin strong upon him. He is a brute, only more intelligent than the other brutes, a blind prey to impulses, which as often as not lead him to destruction; a victim to endless illusions, which make his mental existence a terror and a burden, ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... questions about casual or future events. He will not forget that "clairvoyance is strictly limited to the perception of human personality," according to the role so well formulated by Dr. Osty. Experiments have been made in which a psychometer, on touching the tooth of a prehistoric animal, saw the landscapes and the cataclysms of the earth's earliest ages displayed before his eyes; in which another medium, on handling a jewel, conjured up, it would seem with marvellous exactness, the games and processions of ancient ...
— The Unknown Guest • Maurice Maeterlinck
... a difference in the physical strength of the sexes to have become well established through this process in prehistoric times, before the dawn of civilization, the rest of the story follows very simply. The now confessedly dominant sex would, of course, seek to retain and increase its domination and the now fully subordinated sex would in time come to regard the inferiority to which ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy
... was I 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, conclusions of more exact and conscientious ...
— Modern Mythology • Andrew Lang
... Aborigines—i. e. "those from the very beginning"—that simple rudimental form of historical speculation as to the Latin race—are met with about 465 in the Sicilian author Callias. It is of the very nature of a chronicle that it should attach prehistoric speculation to history and endeavour to go back, if not to the origin of heaven and earth, at least to the origin of the community; and there is express testimony that the table of the pontifices specified the year of the foundation of Rome. ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... we found in possession only prehistoric chaos and demoniacal influence. Everywhere had clinging weeds grown to rankness; everywhere one found one's feet entangled among bindweed and other vegetation of the sort. And now see what beauty and joy and comfort the hand of ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... you are gloriously alive. I'm of the past, as I say. You're of the 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
... discovered 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 ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, June 17, 1914 • Various
... ghastly prominence the suspended shape of a human skeleton contained within—"I say! What the dickens is this? Looks like a doctor's specimen, b'gad. You haven't let anybody—I mean, you haven't been buying any prehistoric bones, have you, ...
— Cleek, the Master Detective • Thomas W. Hanshew
... Sherman believes, as do many other eminent scientists, that nuts were a staple in the diet of primitive man. Professor Elliot, of Oxford University, in his work, "Prehistoric Man," calls attention to the fact that in the early ages of his long career, man was not a flesh eater; and the famous Professor Ami, editor of the Ethnological History of North America, and other ...
— Northern Nut Growers Report of the Proceedings at the Twenty-First Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association
... "Marked Human Bones from a Prehistoric Tarasco Indian Burial-place in the State of Michoacan, Mexico," Bulletin of the American Museum of ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz
... the shingled roof—red. A strongly-guyed flagstaff jutting out from one gable, and copies of the "Game" and "Fire Acts" tacked on the door gave the abode an unmistakable official aspect. Over the doorway was nailed a huge, prehistoric-looking buffalo-skull, bleached white with the years—the time-honoured insignia of the R.N.W.M.P. being a buffalo-head, which is also stamped on the regimental badge ...
— The Luck of the Mounted - A Tale of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • Ralph S. Kendall
... side of Death Valley. It was all hell to get into that country, Cribbens had said, and not many men went there, because of the terrible valley of alkali that barred the way, a horrible vast sink of white sand and salt below even the sea level, the dry bed, no doubt, of some prehistoric lake. But McTeague resolved to make a circuit of the valley, keeping to the south, until he should strike the Armagosa River. He would make a circuit of the valley and come up on the other side. He would ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... right 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
... Atlantean ideas these spirits were:—Vice Elementals; Morbas (or Disease Elementals); Clanogrians (or malicious family ghosts, such as Banshees, etc.); Vampires; Barrowvians, i.e. a grotesque kind of phantasm that frequents places where prehistoric man or beast has been interred; Planetians, i.e. spirits inimical to dwellers on this earth that inhabit various of the other planets; and earthbound spirits of such dead human beings as were mad, imbecile, cruel and vicious, together with the phantasms of vicious and mad beasts, and ...
— The Sorcery Club • Elliott O'Donnell
... the early inhabitants of the Balearic Islands nothing is certainly known, though Greek and Roman writers refer to the Boeotian and Rhodian settlements. There are numerous sepulchral and other monuments, which are generally believed to be of prehistoric origin. According to general tradition the natives, from whatever quarter derived, were a strange and savage people till they received some tincture of civilization from the Carthaginians, who early took possession ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various
... tea-time, and wouldn't let him go out in the nice flint boat along with the other children,—it was the annual school-treat next day,—and he came and flung himself down near me on the morning of the treat, and he kicked his little prehistoric legs about and said he wished he was dead. And of course ...
— Five Children and It • E. Nesbit
... of our worthy ancestors. Prehistoric man lived thickly on the moor, and as no one in particular has lived there since, we find all his little arrangements exactly as he left them. These are his wigwams with the roofs off. You can even see his hearth and his couch if you have the curiosity ...
— Hound of the Baskervilles • Authur Conan Doyle
... of the various Sumerian and Babylonian versions of the Deluge that have come down to us shows us that they are incomplete. And as none of them tells so connected and full a narrative of the prehistoric shipbuilder as Berosus, a priest of Bl, the great god of Babylon, it seems that the Mesopotamian scribes were content to copy the Legend in an abbreviated form. Berosus, it is true, is not a very ancient ...
— The Babylonian Story of the Deluge - as Told by Assyrian Tablets from Nineveh • E. A. Wallis Budge
... mere facts," he cried out in a kind of despair. "The mere facts! Do you really admit—are you still so sunk in superstitions, so clinging to dim and prehistoric altars, that you believe in facts? Do you not trust an ...
— The Club of Queer Trades • G. K. Chesterton
... 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 ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach
... 100 feet into the cavern. It is composed to a small extent of sand and clay carried by the stream, and of earth blown or washed in from the outside; but, as investigation proved, it is mainly ashes from prehistoric fires. The surface of this deposit, especially toward the inner end, is very uneven, being higher near the walls than through the central portion. This is due to two causes: In very wet seasons water has carried away much of it, and a large amount has been hauled ...
— Archeological Investigations - Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 76 • Gerard Fowke
... Company owned a square league of prehistoric titles on the western slope of the foot-hills,—land enough for the preservation of a natural park within its own boundaries where fire-lines were cleared, forest-trees respected, and roads kept up. Wherever the company erected a board fence, gate, or building, the same was methodically ...
— A Touch Of Sun And Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote
... like taking the leavings of a meal to which we have not been invited, or putting on the clothes which some unknown visitor has laid aside. The thought we read is related to the thought which springs up in ourselves, as the fossil-impress of some prehistoric plant to a plant as it buds ...
— The Art of Literature • Arthur Schopenhauer
... view of the finish of drinking; publishers would fall over one another in their eagerness to secure the 'Memoirs of the Last Publican'; the Salvation Army would put the last drunkard in the British Museum as a prehistoric specimen; on the death of this National Hero, the Dean of Westminster would politely offer the Abbey for a memorial service, with no ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... savage times we know only what we can learn from fragmentary prehistoric remains, from the structure of early languages, from records of travelers and students among savages of more recent times; or what can be inferred from human nature in general. Most of this data is difficult to interpret, but it is ...
— Woman in Modern Society • Earl Barnes
... gold—very strange the sudden gleam.... We passed the little wooden shelter where an old man in a high furry cap kept oranges and apples and nuts and sweets in paper. One candle illuminated his little store. He looked out from the darkness behind him like an old prehistoric man. His shed was peaked like a cocked hat, an old fat woman sat beside him knitting and drinking ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... anti-clerical might be willing to risk the chance that it would add to the political power of the churches. It may cease to be true that in England the Christian day of rest, in spite of the recorded protest of the founder of Christianity, is still too much hedged about by the traditions of prehistoric taboo to be available for the most solemn act of citizenship. It might again be possible to lend to the polling-place some of the dignity of a law court, and if no better buildings were available, at least to clean and decorate the dingy schoolrooms now used. But such improvements in the external ...
— Human Nature In Politics - Third Edition • Graham Wallas
... 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
... civilisation seemed to have fallen from him. He was the great and splendid animal, transformed with an overmastering passion. There was murder in his eyes. His great right arm, with its long, hairy fingers and its single massive ring, was like the limb of some prehistoric creature. Philip's brain and his feet, however, were alike nimble. He sprang a little on one side, and though that first blow caught him just on the edge of the shoulder and sent him spinning round and round, he saved himself ...
— The Cinema Murder • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... fellows. There he died in old age, leaving no indication of the extent of his knowledge, other than what is to be found in the yellowed pages of his manuscript; and these afford no evidence that this "Gentleman Adventurer" possessed any information derived from books regarding those relics of a prehistoric people, which are widely scattered throughout the Middle and Southern States of the Union and constitute the grounds on which our century has applied to the race the ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish
... French novel, but the place held me and I stayed. I sat down in an arm-chair before the fireplace and the stone birds. Very odd those gawky things, like prehistoric Great Auks, looked in the moonlight. I remember that the alabaster moon shimmered like translucent pearl, and I fell to wondering about its history. Had the old Sabaens used such a jewel in their rites in the ...
— The Moon Endureth—Tales and Fancies • John Buchan
... were solaced by pictures of banquets in which the winecup passes round, graven on the walls of their tombs. A knowledge of the process of fermentation, therefore, was in all probability possessed by the prehistoric populations of the globe; and it must have become a matter of great interest even to primaeval wine-bibbers to study the methods by which fermented liquids could be surely manufactured. No doubt, therefore, it was ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... life and across the history of all life that goes to make the world, strugglingly mastering the abysmal slime of the prehistoric with the love that had come into existence and had become warp and woof of him in far later time, his wrath of ancientness still faintly reverberating in his throat like the rumblings of a passing thunder-storm, knew, in the wide warm ways ...
— Jerry of the Islands • Jack London
... period prehistoric, When all was absurd and phantasmagoric. Born later, when Clio, celestial recorded, Set down great events in succession and order, He surely had seen nothing droll or fortuitous In anything here but the lies that she threw ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... forest something stirred. But it was not the note of a bird, as the song would have us believe. From the depths of the wood opposite came a crackling, crunching sound, as of some prehistoric beast forcing its way through tropical undergrowth. And then, suddenly, out from the thinning edge there loomed a monster—a monstrosity. It did not glide, it did not walk. It wallowed. It lurched, with now and then a laborious heave of its shoulders. ...
— All In It K(1) Carries On - A Continuation of the First Hundred Thousand • John Hay Beith (AKA: Ian Hay)
... one spark of life in the pathetic old society was its real interest in the antediluvian and prehistoric. For the life that was dead it had a perfect passion, and it sometimes held conversaziones to gaze at it through microscopes. Occasionally it would waken up to literature with a paper on Akenside. In everything ...
— The Romance of Zion Chapel [3d ed.] • Richard Le Gallienne
... noted that the extinction of species has been preceded by a great increase in their size, for example, the case of the great reptilia of prehistoric time. That possibly represented pituitary stabilization, and so an abeyance of the ability to vary, necessary for fresh adaptation to a changing environment. Indeed, endocrine instability appears the fundamental condition of the tendency to ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... "ditches," which anywhere but in Ireland would be called "embankments," and entered upon great stone-strewn wastes of land seemingly unreclaimed and irreclaimable. Huge boulders lay tossed and tumbled about as if they had been whirled through the air by the cyclones of some prehistoric age, and dropped at random when the wild winds wearied of the fun. The last landmark we made out through the gathering storm was the pinnacled crest of Errigal. Of Dunlewy, esteemed the loveliest of the Donegal lakes, we could see little or nothing as we hurried ...
— Ireland Under Coercion (2nd ed.) (1 of 2) (1888) • William Henry Hurlbert
... which 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 Wallet of Kai Lung • Ernest Bramah
... so Mr Button would shake his lethargy off, and rise and look round for "seagulls," but the prospect was sail-less as the prehistoric sea, wingless, voiceless. When Dick would fret now and then, the old sailor would always devise some means of amusing him. He made him fishing tackle out of a bent pin and some small twine that happened to be in the boat, and told him to ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... "The cave of torture." I afterwards saw this dreadful place, also a legacy from the prehistoric people who lived in Kor. The only objects in the cave itself were slabs of rock arranged in various positions to facilitate the operations of the torturers. Many of these slabs, which were of a porous stone, were stained quite ...
— She • H. Rider Haggard
... 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
... delighted his soul were crude indeed, compared with the creations of your world's foremost artists today. But in a relative sense only, for the state of your art is as far behind the art of the Martians as are the carvings of your prehistoric cavemen behind the productions of your Michael Angelos. As man unfolds spiritually there is a corresponding advance in his artistic point ...
— The Planet Mars and its Inhabitants - A Psychic Revelation • Eros Urides and J. L. Kennon
... you lived?" he exclaimed explosively—"are you a fool, or merely an ignorant woman? I am talking of prehistoric times, thousands of years ago, when you were probably a stray atom embedded in ...
— The Green Mummy • Fergus Hume
... George IV and even the Regency, but without ever getting quite to the source. His mind must have been open to impressions very early, but it must also have closed early, for the politics of the day have little interest for him, while he is fiercely excited about questions which are entirely prehistoric. He shakes his head when he speaks of the first Reform Bill and expresses grave doubts as to its wisdom, and I have heard him, when he was warmed by a glass of wine, say bitter things about Robert Peel and his abandoning of the Corn Laws. The death ...
— Round the Red Lamp - Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life • Arthur Conan Doyle
... of the cultivation of the European grape go back five or six thousand years. The ancient Egyptians, Phoenicians, Greeks and Romans grew the vine and made wine from its fruit. Grape seeds have been found in the remains of European peoples of prehistoric times, showing that primitive men enlivened their scanty fare with wild grapes. Cultivation of the grape in the Old World probably began in the region about the Caspian Sea where the vine has always run wild. We have proof of the great antiquity of the ...
— Manual of American Grape-Growing • U. P. Hedrick
... day dawned in Egypt and Assyria, and its works lie buried in the tombs of prehistoric Pharaohs and Ninevite kings. The second day the sun rose on the shores of many-isled Greece, and shed its rays over Etruria and Rome, and ere it set, temples and palaces were flooded with beauty. The gods had taken human form, and were ...
— Fra Bartolommeo • Leader Scott (Re-Edited By Horace Shipp And Flora Kendrick)
... eyes that watched them there was something weird and frightful in their aspect. It was as though the huge brutes of the prehistoric world had taken form before them. Even those monsters had never carried ...
— Army Boys in the French Trenches • Homer Randall
... entrance was gained by raising a large flat stone which was a part of the hearth. But the winter came without any alarm to the Hardings, and drew its slow length across the green hills and valleys like some albino monster of prehistoric times. The firs were snow-crowned and the white mantle lay deep in the hollows. Bryce and Enoch added generously to the family larder by the fruit of their hunting-trips, for there was plenty of time for such sport now. They had learned to weave snow-shoes in Indian fashion, too, and Bolderwood ...
— With Ethan Allen at Ticonderoga • W. Bert Foster
... with such ferocity that it flings the foam over the top of the lighthouse, which is 360 feet in height. This inhospitable place, with its population of 13 human beings, some sheep and goats, was inhabited in prehistoric days; when the excavations were being made for the lighthouse a variety of implements from the Stone Age were discovered, including a stone arrow that was found between the ribs of a skeleton.... But the Austrian Ambassador let it be known at the same time that he ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... matched, these two, the monarch of the Western plains, and the monarch of the Northeastern forests. Both had something of the monstrous, the uncouth, about them, as if they belonged not to this modern day, but to some prehistoric epoch when Earth moulded her children on more lavish and less graceful lines. The moose was like the buffalo in having his hind-quarters relatively slight and low, and his back sloping upwards to a hump over the immensely ...
— Children's Literature - A Textbook of Sources for Teachers and Teacher-Training Classes • Charles Madison Curry
... 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 ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... periods of history, by the uncovering of the remains of Babylon, Assyria, and other abodes of early civilization, and by the deciphering of monumental inscriptions in characters long forgotten; but the discovery of buried relics of prehistoric men has afforded glimpses of human life as it was prior to all written memorials. One of the most instructive writers on this last subject is Tylor in his Primitive Culture, and in other works on ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... of the sexes is not constant, then, supposing all races have diverged from one original stock, it follows that there must have been transmission of accumulated differences to those of the same sex in posterity. If, for instance, the prehistoric type of man was beardless, then the production of a bearded variety implies that within that variety the males continued to transmit an increasing amount of beard to descendants of the same sex. This ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... an armoured train in the railway-yard, with a Maxim and a Hotchkiss. We have a Nordenfeldt, a couple of Maxims more, four seven-pounder guns of almost prehistoric date, slow of fire, uncertain as regards the elevating-gear, and, I tell you plainly, as dangerous, some of 'em, to be behind as to be in front of! One or two more we've got that were grey-headed in the seventies. By the Lord! ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... follies? Whose deep-lunged laughter oft would shake The ceiling with its thunder-volleys? Are we the youths with lips unshorn, At beauty's feet unwrinkled suitors, Whose memories reach tradition's morn,— The days of prehistoric tutors? ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... a considerable hiatus before, in the process of retrospection, we get back to a civilization which (in Europe at least) we ordinarily regard as Ancient. Again, in History, we distinguish commonly two provinces within the undoubted area of the Ancient, the Prehistoric and the Historic, the first comprising all the time to which human memory, as communicated by surviving literature, ran not, or, at least, not consciously, consistently and credibly. At the same time it is not implied that we can have no knowledge at all of the ...
— The Ancient East • D. G. Hogarth
... 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 ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... into yarn often goes under the name of spinning, it is obvious that a considerable number of processes are involved, and an immense amount of work has to be done before the actual process of spinning is attempted. The nomenclature is due to custom dating back to prehistoric times when the conversion of fibre to yarn was conducted by much simpler apparatus than it is at present; the established name to denote this conversion of fibre to yarn now refers only to one of a large number of important processes, ...
— The Jute Industry: From Seed to Finished Cloth • T. Woodhouse and P. Kilgour
... Botticelli—between the traditional conventions, the contemporary ideas, and the refinements of the artist's own fancy. The same indulgence must be extended to dramatic art. The tragedy of King Lear is not rude or primitive, although the subject belongs to prehistoric times in Britain. Nor is Goethe's Faust mediaeval in spirit as in theme. So neither is the Oedipus Rex the product of 'lawless and uncertain thoughts,' notwithstanding the unspeakable horror of the story, but is penetrated by the most ...
— The Seven Plays in English Verse • Sophocles
... was made of stone which, being brittle, was liable to crack; the picture characters which delineate the object in the latter dynasties shew that metal took the place of the stone axe-head, and being tough the new substance needed no support. The mightiest man in the prehistoric days was he who had the best weapon, and knew how to wield it with the greatest effect; when the prehistoric hero of many fights and victories passed to his rest, his own or a similar weapon was buried with him to enable him to ...
— Egyptian Ideas of the Future Life • E. A. Wallis Budge
... form of pyramids with a square base, and are the equivalent in stone or brick of the tumulus of heaped earth which was piled over the body of the warrior chief in prehistoric times (Note 14). The same ideas prevailed as to the souls of kings as about those of private men; the plan of the pyramid consists, therefore, of three parts, like the mastaba, —the chapel, the passage, and the ...
— Manual Of Egyptian Archaeology And Guide To The Study Of Antiquities In Egypt • Gaston Camille Charles Maspero
... the herd, like a many-jointed, prehistoric reptile wandering over the limitless spaces of some primeval world. A cloud of red dust hung over them in a dense haze, trailed after them a weary length, then all was featureless monotony as before. What were a thousand steers, a handful of men ...
— Judith Of The Plains • Marie Manning
... the most conversationally familiar,—still I cannot conceive that even that unrivalled romance-writer can so bewitch our understandings as to make us believe that, if Miss Mordaunt's cat dislikes to wet her feet, it is probably because in the prehistoric age her ancestors lived in the dry country of Egypt; or that when some lofty orator, a Pitt or a Gladstone, rebuts with a polished smile which reveals his canine teeth the rude assault of an opponent, he ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... said, "was made to be loved, and not enslaved. My consideration for the welfare of our women exceeds that for our men, because man is so constituted as to be more able to take care of himself." So much was this old prehistoric chief away ahead of his dark, heathen times. But this masculine weakness of his was nearly his undoing with his warriors, as ...
— Skookum Chuck Fables - Bits of History, Through the Microscope • Skookum Chuck (pseud for R.D. Cumming)
... reach of the ordinary visitor. Science has lately shed its vivid light upon the physical history of the Roman plain; and the researches of the archaeologist have brought into the daylight of modern knowledge, and by a wider comparison and induction have invested with a new significance, the prehistoric objects, customs, and traditions which make primeval Rome and the surrounding sites so fascinating to the imagination. But these results are not to be found in the books which the English visitor usually consults. In the following chapters I have ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... 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 habitations in these regions had been partially, ...
— Archeological Expedition to Arizona in 1895 • Jesse Walter Fewkes
... 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 heart of the town is at the intersection ...
— The Greatest Highway in the World • Anonymous
... man came with ax and arrow the wilderness of the Blue Ridge teemed with wild animal life. The bones of mastodon and mammoth remained to attest their supremacy over an uninhabited land thousands upon thousands of years ago. Then, following the prehistoric and glacial period, more recent fauna—buffalo, elk, deer, bear, and wolf—made paths through the forest from salt lick to refreshing spring. These salt licks that had been deposited by a receding ocean centuries before came to have names. Big Bone Lick located in what today is Boone ...
— Blue Ridge Country • Jean Thomas
... a desolate spot. The waters stretched out before him, still, and silent, and black. There was not even a ripple upon its steaming surface. Here the haze hung as it always hung, and the cavern was belching forth deep mists, like the breathing of some prehistoric monster. He glanced up at the birdless rock above, and into the broken outlines of it he read the distorted features of some baleful, living creature, or some savage idol. But there was no answer here to ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... forgotten that spring had come, so had he forgotten about his personal appearance. He had rushed ashore from a man's job that was now waiting for him to rush back to it. He did not realize that he looked like a cave-man—resembled some shaggy, prehistoric human; his mind was too full of ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... platform where they are caught.[179] The Polynesians depend largely on fish for their food supply. They had nets a thousand ells long, which could be handled only by a hundred men. They made hooks of shell, bone, and hard wood.[180] The first fishhooks of prehistoric men in Europe and North America were made of pieces of bone pointed at both ends, the cord being attached in the middle.[181] The Shingu Indians fished with bow and arrow, nets, scoop baskets, and weirs. Bait was used to make the fish rise. Then they were shot with an arrow. The people ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... your style as in itself a fatal handicap. However, the trouble has its root in your amusing attitude of superiority to the work. You think of editorial writing as small hack-work, entirely beneath the dignity of a man who has had one or two articles accepted by a prehistoric magazine which nobody reads. In reality, it is one of the greatest and most splendid of all professions, fit to call out the very best of a really big man. You chuckle and sneer at Colonel Cowles and think yourself vastly ...
— Queed • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... independence and the possession of Goresthorpe Grange. My habits are Conservative, and my tastes refined and aristocratic. I have a soul which spurns the vulgar herd. Our family, the D'Odds, date back to a prehistoric era, as is to be inferred from the fact that their advent into British history is not commented on by any trustworthy historian. Some instinct tells me that the blood of a Crusader runs in my veins. Even now, after the lapse of so ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes - Mystic-Humorous Stories • Various
... with three or four about it. A waiter buzzed around it like a bee, and silver and glass shone upon it. And, preliminary to the meal, as the prehistoric granite strata heralded the protozoa, the bread of Gaul, compounded after the formula of the recipe for the eternal hills, was there set forth to the hand and tooth of a long-suffering city, while the gods lay beside their nectar and home-made ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry
... hard cases. Between you and me, our military law is a bit prehistoric. You're a lawyer and know more about it than I do. But isn't there something for civilians called a First Offenders Act? Bind 'em over to come up for judgment if called on—that kind of thing. Gives a man another chance. Why ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan
... man's control 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, Bors's ship traveled almost ...
— Talents, Incorporated • William Fitzgerald Jenkins
... specimen of what Scott called "antiquarian old womanries," but for the interest which he takes in the universally diffused archaic patterns on rocks and stones, which offer a singular proof of the identity of the working of the human mind. Anthropology and folklore are the natural companions and aids of prehistoric and proto-historic archaeology, and suggest remarks which may not be valueless, whatever view we may take of the disputed objects from the ...
— The Clyde Mystery - a Study in Forgeries and Folklore • Andrew Lang
... dull, stubborn prejudice; bigotry, if you like. I will only remark just this—that Mrs Lawford and I, in our inmost hearts, know. You, my dear Danton, forgive the freedom, merely incredulously grope. Faith versus Reason—that prehistoric Armageddon. Some day, and a day not far distant either, Lawford will come back to us. This—this shutter will be taken down as abruptly as by some inconceivably drowsy heedlessness of common Nature it has been put up. He'll win through; and of his own sheer will and courage. But ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... met by a demand for the production of a signed, sealed, and delivered contract, or at least for evidence that such a contract was ever made. But Rousseau says—with a good sense and modesty which dealers in "prehistoric" history would do well to copy—that he does not know how government in fact arose. Nor does anyone else. What he maintains is that the moral sanction of government is contractual, or, as Jefferson puts it, that government ...
— A History of the United States • Cecil Chesterton
... ancient as the universe. It was known to man in prehistoric times, we must suppose, for the very earliest historical reference to the Magi of Asia records them as worshiping the eternal fires which then blazed, and still blaze, in the fissures of the mountain heights overlooking the Caspian Sea. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 497, July 11, 1885 • Various
... knots is so dim and ancient that really little is known of their origin. That earliest man used cordage of some kind and by his ingenuity succeeded in tying the material together, is indisputable, for the most ancient carvings and decorations of prehistoric man show knots in several forms. Doubtless the trailing vines and plants first suggested ropes to human beings; and it is quite probable that these same vines, in their various twistings and twinings, gave man his first ...
— Knots, Splices and Rope Work • A. Hyatt Verrill
... 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 helps exegesis and evidence. Each ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... From these naturally but a very imperfect and hypothetical representation can be formed of the soft bodies with which they were once clothed. And even then it remains forever doubtful whether the progeny of the prehistoric creature, the scant remains of which we study, has not become entirely extinct, so that it can in no way be regarded as the progenitor of any creature living at present." I should like to know wherein ...
— At the Deathbed of Darwinism - A Series of Papers • Eberhard Dennert
... natural to inquire into the origin of the need of a fireplace, and to do so we must go back to prehistoric times and trace the discovery of fire-making apparatus, for without the means of lighting a fire it is obvious that the grate would be useless. With the fire came artificial light, the two great discoveries being perfected side by side, sometimes the one gaining ...
— Chats on Household Curios • Fred W. Burgess
... those passionate lovers of line loved the moment of sunset apart even from colour. The ridges of pines and cypresses soon remain the only distinguishable thing in the valleys, pulling themselves (as one feels it) rapidly up, like great prehistoric shapes of Saurians. Soon the sky only and mountains will exist. Then begins the time, before the starlit night comes to say its say, when everything grows drowsy, a little vague, and the blurred mountains go to sleep in the smoke of dusk. Then only, due west, the great Carrara ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... a work on paleontology, a book which by some chance had accompanied a few selected works that I had brought with me from England. The picture that so interested him, I saw as I drew nearer, represented the skeleton of a prehistoric mammoth with a man standing by its side, the latter figure placed in the picture, no doubt, for the purpose of showing relations of size. As I stepped up close to Arthur's side, he turned a page in the book and disclosed a still more startling representation, that of a reconstructed ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... OF 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 Rise ...
— Mormon Settlement in Arizona • James H. McClintock
... think it barbaric and prehistoric to kill! It is jolly to hear these Parisians protesting against the brutal instincts which urge the male to kill the female if she deceives him, and preaching indulgence and reason! They're splendid apostles! ...
— Jean-Christophe Journey's End • Romain Rolland
... masterpiece of the Mound Builders is known as Fort Ancient. Its colossal size, ingenuity in design and perfection in construction give it first rack in interest among all prehistoric fortifications, and it represents the highest point attained by this lost race in their earth-work structures. Why make a journey to Europe to see the old forts when we have in Ohio one so old we have no record of its building? Truly we were more impressed while rambling ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand
... many notable events in English history, was probably a fishing-port in prehistoric times. It is situated on flat and low-lying marsh-land, about 15 miles westward along the coast from Hastings. Here the Romans built a town and fortress. Entering Pevensey Castle by the main gateway, you stand on the site of the Roman city ...
— What to See in England • Gordon Home
... most natural, and simplest means by which a living being can utter itself is gesture—action. It is not necessary to speculate on prehistoric conditions. We need only observe the world around us, the behaviour of our friends and acquaintances, particularly those of South-European blood, to recognize how direct and eloquent is the expression of gesture. On the stage a simple series ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... that every important human function must be organized and avenged by law; that all education must be state education, and all employment state employment; that everybody and everything must be brought to the foot of the august and prehistoric gibbet. But a somewhat more liberal and sympathetic examination of mankind will convince us that the cross is even older than the gibbet, that voluntary suffering was before and independent of compulsory; and in short that in most important matters ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... Notwithstanding its obvious prehistoric origin, many have claimed that Metempsychosis has its birthplace in old Egypt, on the banks of the Nile. India disputes this claim, holding that the Ganges, not the Nile, gave birth to the doctrine. Be that as it may, we shall treat the ...
— Reincarnation and the Law of Karma - A Study of the Old-New World-Doctrine of Rebirth, and Spiritual Cause and Effect • William Walker Atkinson
... to lodge? The date was but five years old, but in that time the world had changed for Silverado; like Palmyra in the desert, it had outlived its people and its purpose; we camped, like Layard, amid ruins, and these names spoke to us of prehistoric time. A boot-jack, a pair of boots, a dog-hutch, and these bills of Mr. Chapman's were the only speaking relics that we disinterred from all that vast Silverado rubbish-heap; but what would I not have given to unearth a letter, a pocket-book, a diary, only a ledger, or ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... popularly known as "tanks." These destructive engines of warfare were from twenty to forty feet long and were painted a dull drab, or some unassuming color calculated to blend with the tones of the landscape. In a dim light they suggested the giant slugs of a prehistoric age. Sliding along the ground on caterpillar wheels, with armored cheeks on each side of the head, above which guns stuck out like the stalked eyes of land crabs, their first appearance in this sector may well have created consternation ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume VI (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... that he came out of the hot fog suddenly, but it seemed that he did. He was sitting in dappled sunshine in an ordinary lawn chair of tubular magnesium with a back and bottom of gaudy fabric. Above him was a narrow, sealed roof of stellene. The stone walls showed the beady fossils of prehistoric Mars. More than probably, these chambers had been cut in the living rock, by ...
— The Planet Strappers • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... and knees, and ragged fringes round the bottoms of the legs of their trousers, grew pale, and glanced apprehensively at each other. If ever Socialism did come to pass, they evidently thought it very probable that they would have to walk about in a sort of prehistoric highland costume, without any trousers or boots ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... 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 ...
— The Wendigo • Algernon Blackwood
... her to come in now—if you like." The Professor won't show too vivid an interest. It isn't as if the matter related to a Scythian war-chariot, or a gold ornament from a prehistoric tomb, ...
— Somehow Good • William de Morgan
... grew to perfection. Midway between the river and the high hills was a narrow ridge which ran parallel with the river. This natural backbone of land reached its greatest height on Mr. LeMonde's farm. But the highest point of all had been increased in size by artificial means. In prehistoric times a race of people living in this region had added earth to this hill until they had made an almost circular mound, which became a conspicuous object in the valley. Mr. LeMonde's father, who bought the farm many years before, ...
— The Kentucky Ranger • Edward T. Curnick
... never taken any interest in the traces of Early Man in this country, this may appear a musty subject, but to me it is quite the reverse. The long lines of entrenchments, the round tumuli, and the prehistoric sites generally—omitting lake dwellings—are most invariably to be found upon high and windswept tablelands, wild or only recently cultivated places, where the echoes have scarcely been disturbed since the ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home
... the taller, stronger tribes who interfered with them and tried to push them out of their territory. The remembrance of them would be handed down long after they had become extinct, and, of course their doings were exaggerated, and their cunning tricks were set down to magic. Just as the prehistoric monsters lingered as dragons and firedrakes, so the small early inhabitants of Europe have passed into dwarfs and brownies and pixies. If anybody cared to dig in those caves I dare say flint weapons might ...
— The Jolliest School of All • Angela Brazil
... vrata) was, says Mr. Hewitt, the only diet in the Soma-sacrifice. See Ruling Races of Prehistoric Times (preface). The Soma itself was a fermented drink prepared with ceremony from the milky and semen-like sap of certain plants, and much used in sacrificial offerings. ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... over from a prehistoric era," Frank Merrill explained, shaking with excitement. "No vulture or eagle or condor could be as big as that at this distance. At least I think so." He paused here, as one studying the problem in the scientific spirit. "Often in the Rockies I've confused ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore
... beautifully made bronze bucket, buried deep below clay and sand in a bed of gravel. It has been classified by the experts as belonging to a Venetian workshop of the seventh century B.C.—actually the early days of the Tarquins. Prehistoric traffic between Britain and Italy may not be an entirely new idea, but the ...
— Highways and Byways in Surrey • Eric Parker
... and sleeping, there remained two guards, so that in Muene-Motapa's capital there was a lucid riddle, "What is it that casts three shadows?" Those two prehistoric warriors were aware of an incomprehensible great value locked up in the captive's mind; yet at his first false movement they would have slaughtered him, destroying cheerfully, like many others before them, what they could never hope to understand. However, ...
— Sacrifice • Stephen French Whitman
... place. Wandering tribes could not till and sow the fields. The origin of wheat furnished a legendary theme for many races, and mythology contained tales of wheat-gods favoring chosen peoples. Ancient China raised wheat twenty-seven centuries before Christ; grains of wheat had been found in prehistoric ruins; the dwellers along the Nile were not blind to the fertility of the valley. In the days of the Pharaohs the old river annually inundated its low banks, enriching the soil of vast areas, where soon a green-and-gold ocean ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... of man, as well as the organs of speech, the hand and the external form, could not have been evolved by Natural Selection (the "child" he is supposed to "murder "). At p. 391 he writes: "In the brain of the lowest savages and, as far as we know, of the prehistoric races, we have an organ ... little inferior in size and complexity to that of the highest types.... But the mental requirements of the lowest savages, such as the Australians or the Andaman Islanders, are very little above those of many animals.... How then was an organ ...
— Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters and Reminiscences, Vol. 1 (of 2) • James Marchant
... water into cool depths where strange bright fish darted through the submarine chapparal, but the coolness was imaginary, for the water was at 80. degrees {47} The air above the great black lava flood, which in prehistoric times had flowed into the sea, and had ever since declined the kindly draping offices of nature, vibrated in waves of heat. Even the imperishable cocoanut trees, whose tall, bare, curved trunks rose from the lava or the burnt red earth, were gaunt, tattered, ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird
... 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
... dead as doornails, and horribly mauled by the sea and the breakers. Nor did we ever get a snake, a lizard, a frog, or a fresh-water fish, whose eggs I at first fondly supposed might occasionally be transported to us on bits of floating trees or matted turf, torn by floods from those prehistoric Lusitanian or African forests. No such luck was ours. Not a single terrestrial vertebrate of any sort appeared upon our shores before the advent of man with his domestic animals, who played havoc at ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... and a small husband. To her party came all of the Bunch, perhaps thirty-five of them when they were completely mobilized. Babbitt, under the name of "Old Georgie," was now a pioneer of the Bunch, since each month it changed half its membership and he who could recall the prehistoric days of a fortnight ago, before Mrs. Absolom, the food-demonstrator, had gone to Indianapolis, and Mac had "got sore at" Minnie, was a venerable leader and able to condescend to new Petes and Minnies ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... with impregnable continuity about any subject in which he happened to be interested. He listened to no comment; he demanded no criticism. If he conversed about his parishioners or his fellow-parsons or his country neighbours, it was not uninteresting; but when it was genealogy or folklore or prehistoric remains, it was merely a tissue of scraps, clawed out of books and imperfectly remembered. Howard found himself respecting the Vicar more and more; he was so kindly, so unworldly, so full of perfectly guileless satisfaction: ...
— Watersprings • Arthur Christopher Benson
... 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 to be ...
— Tom Swift Among The Diamond Makers - or The Secret of Phantom Mountain • Victor Appleton
... pieces in a jig-saw puzzle and that our every movement affects the fortunes of some other piece. Just so, faintly at first and taking shape by degrees, must the germ of civic spirit have come to Prehistoric Man. We are all ...
— Piccadilly Jim • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... good quarter inch of beard, every hair of it stiff with dirt. I can feel the dirt-pools under my eyes. My hands are rough with dirt. My uniform is smeared and creased in a hundred thousand directions. My puttees and shoes are prehistoric in appearance.... ...
— The Enormous Room • Edward Estlin Cummings
... the clods and grass-blades. Only one conical hill close by showed an odd artificial patterning, like the work of huge ants who had scarred it with criss-cross ridges. We were told that these were French trenches, but they looked much more like the harmless traces of a prehistoric camp. ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... the tribal conscience, and who was eager to see society organized, off-hand, on what he thought a rational method. In the absence of history, we must fall back on that branch of hypothetics which is known as prehistoric science. We must reconstruct the Romance of the First Radical from the hints supplied by geology, and by the study of Radicals at large, and of contemporary savages among whom no Radical reformer has yet appeared. In the following little apologue ...
— In the Wrong Paradise • Andrew Lang
... tradition he comes a terrible cropper, as in this case. Bernard Shaw (I strongly suspect) began to disbelieve in Santa Claus at a discreditably early age. And by this time Santa Claus has avenged himself by taking away the key of all the prehistoric scriptures; so that a noble and honourable artist flounders about like any German professor. Here is a whole fairy literature which is almost exclusively devoted to the unexpected victory of the weak over the strong; and Bernard Shaw manages to make it mean the inevitable victory ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... historic and even prehistoric times till the construction of our great railways in the second quarter of the present century [the nineteenth], there had been absolutely no change in the methods of human locomotion."—"The Wonderful Century," ...
— Our Day - In the Light of Prophecy • W. A. Spicer
... 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 ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... sheer declivity; the even sky-line was indented in two places—one where it was cracked into a fanciful resemblance to a human profile, the other where it was curved like a bowl. Need it be said that one was distinctly recognized as the silhouette of a prehistoric giant, and that the other was his drinking-cup; need it be added that neither lent the slightest human suggestion to the solitude? A toy-like pier extending into the loch, midway from the barren shore, only heightened the desolation. And when the little steamboat that occasionally entered ...
— The Bell-Ringer of Angel's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... and reptilian shapes Amphibious and pelagic, swim and crawl, Cleaving the waters with tremendous strokes, Writhing with foul contortions in disport, Splashing and laving in the thermal seas Of the remote and prehistoric past; Thou who hast seen them fail and pass away Shalt also shine when man ...
— Mountain idylls, and Other Poems • Alfred Castner King
... with their kinsmen, the Danes, probably settled in Scandinavia long before the beginning of the Christian era. During the earlier part of the prehistoric period the inhabitants were still in the Stone Age, but the use of bronze, and then of iron, was gradually introduced. Excavations in ancient grave mounds have revealed implements of the finest polished stone, beautiful ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER
... ascending the hill, and running down into the salt water. The causes of these lights, and of the lights on the burial isle of St. Mun, in the middle of the sea strait, remain a mystery. Thus the country is still a country of prehistoric beliefs and of fairly accurate traditions. For example, at the trial of James Stewart for the murder of Glenure, one MacColl gave damaging evidence, the MacColls being a sept subordinate to the MacIans or Macdonalds of Glencoe, who, by the way, had no hand ...
— Historical Mysteries • Andrew Lang |
