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Spawn   Listen
verb
Spawn  v. t.  (past & past part. spawned; pres. part. spawning)  
1.
To produce or deposit (eggs), as fishes or frogs do.
2.
To bring forth; to generate; used in contempt. "One edition (of books) spawneth another."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Spawn" Quotes from Famous Books



... rubbing his hands together, 'you've got to start easy, you know. You want to start easy, so's to make the climax worth something. Now, let's see! Well, suppose you walk up to him and say, "You spawn of the pike-eyed sneak that Herod hired to kill babies, you low-down, contemptible son of a body-snatcher, you was born a murderer, but lacked the courage and became a horse-thief!" There, Sol, start in easy like that and gradually work up ...
— The Ramrodders - A Novel • Holman Day

... frogs started from the morions of Gog and Magog, and furiously assailed the knight on every side. In vain he roared, and invoked fair Dulcinea del Toboso: for frogs' wild croaking seemed more loud, more sonorous than all his invocations. And thus in battle vile the knight was overcome, and spawn all swarmed ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen • Rudolph Erich Raspe

... o'er with beauteous spots, As when the great pencil dots Heaven with stars, doth scarce begin From its impulses within— Nature's stern necessity, To be schooled in cruelty,— Monster, waging ruthless war:— And with instincts better far Must I have less liberty? Fish are born, the spawn that breeds Where the oozy sea-weeds float, Scarce perceives itself a boat, Scaled and plated for its needs, When from wave to wave it speeds, Measuring all the mighty sea, Testing its profundity To its depths so dark and chill:— And with so much ...
— Life Is A Dream • Pedro Calderon de la Barca

... the prospect. She began to wonder whether the shelter of Flint's roof had not been, after all, the discreet thing. Was not her headlong flight in company with Stillman more open to criticism than the frank acceptance of her employer's hospitality? But these vagrant questions were the spawn of a colorless spirit of social expediency which fastens itself on weak natures, and in Claire's case they died still-born. She had been too well schooled in loneliness to lean heavily on the crooked ...
— The Blood Red Dawn • Charles Caldwell Dobie

... ye do!" said Captain Pharo, waxing more and more wroth; "ye sets some feller t' work there, 't never see salt water, t' make our laws for us; 'lows us to ketch all the spawn lobsters and puts injunctions onter the little ones: like takin' people when they gits to be sixteen or twenty year old, 'n' choppin' their heads off—yer race is goin' to multiply ...
— Vesty of the Basins • Sarah P. McLean Greene

... pawpaw thickets, I passed, dashing the branches from my path, and lacerating my skin at every step. Onward, through sluggish rivulets of water, through tough miry mud, through slimy pools, filled with horrid newts, and the spawn of the huge rana pipiens, whose hoarse loud croak at every step sounded ominous ...
— The Quadroon - Adventures in the Far West • Mayne Reid

... confined to certain localities only, but forms and phases of the life in nature universally dispersed. The countless shoals which annually coast the shores of Europe and America are not so interesting to the student of nature, as the more fertile law itself, which deposits their spawn on the tops of mountains, and on the interior plains; the fish principle in nature, from which it results that they may be found in water in so many places, in greater or less numbers. The natural historian is not a fisherman, ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau

... cried small, or skulked, or feared the death which some foretold; shaking their heads about mortification, and a green appearance. Only that I seemed quite fit to go to heaven, and Lorna. For in my sick distracted mind (stirred with many tossings), like the bead in the spread of frog-spawn carried by the current, hung the black and central essence of my future life. A life without Lorna; a tadpole life. All stupid ...
— Lorna Doone - A Romance of Exmoor • R. D. Blackmore

... balance, truth with gold she weighs, And solid pudding against empty praise. Here she beholds the chaos dark and deep, Where nameless somethings in their causes sleep, Till genial Jacob,[189] or a warm third day, Call forth each mass, a poem, or a play: How hints, like spawn, scarce quick in embryo lie, How new-born nonsense first is taught to cry, Maggots half-formed in rhyme exactly meet, And learn to crawl upon poetic feet. Here one poor word an hundred clenches makes, And ductile dulness new meanders takes There motley images her fancy strike, Figures ...
— English Satires • Various

... were waiting impatiently for my work to be done, in order to try out the machine, and if satisfactory, spawn a brood of their own on the same model. I was equally impatient. I hoped to fly off with the biplane before they had ...
— Everyman's Land • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson

... post the article in the Victorian Institute with respect to frogs' spawn. If you remember in your boyhood having ever tried to take a small portion out of the water, you will remember that it is most difficult. I believe all the birds in the world might alight every day on the spawn of batrachians, and never transport ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin

... cry, and the darkness once more closed in around. A horde of hideous thoughts, the very spawn of hell, swarmed like vermin in my mind; there was the breath as of a host of contending fiends upon my face; a hundred hungry hands seemed to lay hold on me, and to strive to drag me down and down to a bottomless pit that opened at my very feet, ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.

... shells off twenty-five of the crawfish tails, trim them neatly and set them aside until wanted. Reserve some of the spawn, also half of the body shells with which to make the crawfish butter to finish the soup. This butter is made as follows: Place the shells on a baking sheet in the oven to dry; let the shells cool and then pound them in a mortar with a little lobster ...
— Bohemian San Francisco - Its restaurants and their most famous recipes—The elegant art of dining. • Clarence E. Edwords

... and more animated. "Do you know how I picture God myself?" he said. "As an enormous, creative organ beyond our ken, who scatters millions of worlds into space, just as one single fish would deposit its spawn in the sea. He creates because it is His function as God to do so, but He does not know what He is doing and is stupidly prolific in His work and is ignorant of the combinations of all kinds which are produced by His scattered germs. The human mind is a lucky little local, passing ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant

... man? Troth I commend his valour in evadin' such a rabble o' hell-spawn! An' what from did he escape,—th' ...
— The Maid of the Whispering Hills • Vingie E. Roe

... HECTOR swings round to WALTER.] As for you, you're a scoundrel. A rogue, a thief, a liar, a traitor. Of the very worst kind, the blackest. Not an ordinary case of a husband and wife—I trusted you—you were my best friend. You spawn, you thing of the gutter, ...
— Five Little Plays • Alfred Sutro

... she cried. "I am Norhala—daughter of another Norhala and of Rustum, whom Cherkis tortured and slew. Now go, you lying spawn of unclean toads—go and tell your father that I, Norhala, am at his gates. And bring back with you the maid and the man. ...
— The Metal Monster • A. Merritt

... They are sometimes stranded on the banks in different parts of the river. Reflecting on this circumstance since I arrived in England, the probability of these porous fragments serving as vehicles for the transportation of seeds of plants, eggs of insects, spawn of fresh-water fish, and so forth, has suggested itself to me. Their rounded, water-worn appearance showed that they must have been rolled about for a long time in the shallow streams near the sources of the rivers at the feet of the volcanoes, before they leapt the waterfalls and embarked ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates

... other amphibians stand higher in the scale of life than fish; they have acquired legs in place of fins, and lungs instead of gills; they can hop about on shore with perfect freedom. Now, frogs still produce a great deal of spawn, as every one knows: but the eggs in each brood are numbered in their case by hundreds, or at most by a thousand or two, not by millions as with many fishes. The spawn hatches out as a rule in ponds, and we have all seen the little black tadpoles crowding the edges ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various

... are as manna fallen from heaven," boomed a deep, resonant voice, surprising in its volume. "I take heart anew, young man, for surely thou art not the spawn of the scarlet woman, but, verily, one of the chosen people ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish

... "but to cauterize the vein when opened and the poisonous blood let free? 'Tis the only safe way. Avicenna indeed recommends a ligature of the vein; but how 'tis to be done he saith not, nor knew he himself I wot, nor any of the spawn of Ishmael. For me, I have no faith in such tricksy expedients; and take this with you for a safe principle: 'Whatever an Arab or Arabist says is right, ...
— The Cloister and the Hearth • Charles Reade

... one. I believe man has been wronged; he has wronged himself. He has almost lost the light that can lead him back to his prerogatives. Men are become of no account. Men in history, men in the world of to-day, are bugs, are spawn, and are called "the mass" and "the herd." In a century, in a millennium, one or two men;[72] that is to say, one or two approximations to the right state of every man. All the rest behold in the hero or the poet their own green and crude ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson

... fish is found in the lake, and nearly all were new to us. The mpasa, or sanjika, found by Dr. Kirk to be a kind of carp, was running up the rivers to spawn, like our salmon at home: the largest we saw was over two feet in length; it is a splendid fish, and the best we have ever eaten in Africa. They were ascending the rivers in August and September, and furnished active and profitable ...
— A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries • David Livingstone

... any particular thing. I ate too much of that fishy stuff at first, like salt frog spawn, and was a bit confused by olives; and—well, I didn't know which wine was which. Had to say THAT each time. It puts your talk all wrong. And she wasn't in evening dress, not like the others. We can't go on in that style, ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells

... perishing children it is; the dark-headed people create not. The wailing is for the great river; it brings the flood no more. The wailing is for the fields of men; the gunu grows no more. The wailing is for the fish-ponds; the dasuhur fish spawn not. The wailing is for the cane-brake; the fallen stalks grow not. The wailing is for the forests; the tamarisks grow not. The wailing is for the highlands; the masgam trees grow not. The wailing is for the garden store-house; honey and wine are produced ...
— From Ritual to Romance • Jessie L. Weston

... lived and knew old man Packard who would have suggested that he was not a good and thorough-going hater. His enemy and all of his enemy's household, wife and child, maid-servant and man-servant were all as the spawn of Satan. ...
— Man to Man • Jackson Gregory

... hatching season carrying with it a somewhat corresponding range in the assumption of the first signal change, and the consequent movement to the sea. They return under the greatly enlarged form of grilse, as already stated, and these grilse spawn that same season in common with the salmon, and then both the one and the other re-descend into the sea in the course of the winter or ensuing spring. They all return again to the rivers sooner or later, in accordance, as we believe, with the time they had previously ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various

... ye living people, spawn of Satan that ye are! what is the reason that ye cannot let me be at rest now that I am dead, and all is over with me? What have I done to you? What have I done to cause you to defame me in every thing, who have a hand in nothing, and to blame me for that ...
— The Sleeping Bard - or, Visions of the World, Death, and Hell • Ellis Wynne

... islands were observed, with a few trees growing on the very top—their outline having the appearance of a cock's comb. It was noticed that the water here was streaked for many miles with a brown scum supposed to be fish-spawn. At evening one of the Cumberland Islands, named Pure Island, provided an anchorage for the three ships; possibly the Lady Nelson alone had been in these waters previously, and it will be remembered, that it was hereabouts she had ...
— The Logbooks of the Lady Nelson - With The Journal Of Her First Commander Lieutenant James Grant, R.N • Ida Lee

... crept the shades of night, Whilst scarce distinguished in the black profound, Stairs, aqueducts, great pillars, gleamed around, And ruined capitals: then was seen a group Of granite elephants 'neath a dome to stoop, Shapeless, giant forms to view arise, Monsters around, the spawn of hideous ties! Then hanging gardens, with flowers and galleries: O'er vast fountains bending grew ebon-trees; Temples, where seated on their rich tiled thrones, Bull-headed idols shone in jasper stones; Vast halls, spanned by one block, where watch and stare ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo

... battle depends, and the fate of empires. War, as a means of deciding our luck, is no more scientific than dicing for it. The first battle of the Marne holds a mystery which will intrigue historians, separate friends, cause hot debate, spawn learned treatises, help to fill the libraries, and assist in keeping not a few asylums occupied, for ages. If you would measure it as a cause for lunacy, read Belloc's convincing exposition of the battle, and compare that with le Goffic's story of the fighting of the Ninth ...
— Waiting for Daylight • Henry Major Tomlinson

... their divine heads to enter into some poor man's hut, and sit there, are simple Christian realities. And instead of puzzling ourselves with metaphysical difficulties which are mere shadows, and the work of the understanding or the spawn of words, let us listen to the Christ when He says, 'We will come unto him and make our abode with him' and believe that it was no impossibility which fired the Apostle's hope when he prayed, and in praying prophesied, ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren

... abode of the swordfish, conjecture is useless. I have already discussed this question at length with reference to the menhaden and mackerel. With the swordfish the conditions are very different. The former are known to spawn in our waters, and the schools of young ones follow the old ones in toward the shores. The latter do not spawn in our waters. We cannot well believe that they hibernate, nor is the hypothesis of a sojourn in the middle ...
— Tales of Fishes • Zane Grey

... then, to read no mean books. Shun the spawn of the press on the gossip of the hour. Do not read what you shall learn without asking, in the street and the train. Dr. Johnson said, "he always went into stately shops;" and good travelers stop at the best hotels; for, though they cost more, they do not cost ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin

... don't care any more for our coolies than you do. We don't in fact, care a hoot what becomes of the spawn and dregs of no-goods in our population. We are not individualists, as you white men are! We don't aim to keep the unfit cumbering the earth! We don't care a hoot for these coolies; but what we do care for is this—we Orientals refuse to be branded any longer as an inferior ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut

... Coast salmon have been taken by net and trap, to the profit of the salmon packers and the satisfaction of those who cannot get fish save out of tin cans. The salmon swarmed in millions on their way to spawn in fresh-water streams. They were plentiful and cheap. But even before the war came to send the price of linen-mesh net beyond most fishermen's pocketbooks, men had discovered that salmon could be taken commercially by trolling lines. The lordly spring, ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair

... unformed and monstrous. I grant exceptions; and even in the New School, as it is called, I can admire the real genius, the vital and creative power of Victor Hugo. But oh, that a nation which has known a Corneille should ever spawn forth a ——-! And with these rickety and drivelling abortions—all having followers and adulators—your Public can still bear to be told that they have improved wonderfully on the day when they gave laws and models to the literature of Europe; they can bear to hear ——- proclaimed ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book VI • Edward Bulwer Lytton

... yield no crops. In a few years after this pond is made, the planters find it stocked with a variety of fishes; but in what manner they breed, or whence they come, they cannot tell, and therefore leave that matter to philosophical inquirers to determine. Some think that the spawn of fishes is exhaled from the large lakes of fresh water in the continent, and being brought in thunder-clouds, falls with the drops of rain into these reservoirs of water. Others imagine that it must have ...
— An Historical Account Of The Rise And Progress Of The Colonies Of South Carolina And Georgia, Volume 2 • Alexander Hewatt

... guilty of many scandalous things, and yet all the parish, with the parson at their head, could not make him blush, so that at last he became a by-word—Here comes old shame-the-devil; this dog is the very spawn ...
— The Fall of British Tyranny - American Liberty Triumphant • John Leacock

... are produced—from London, Paris, Brussels, New York, Berlin, St. Petersburg. The vices of our organisation begot these over-rich folk, begot their diamond-decked women, and their clipped French poodles with gold bangles spanning their aristocratic legs. These are the spawn of land-owning, of capitalism, of military domination, of High Finance, of all the social ills that flesh is heir to. I feel as I pace the terrace in the broad Mediterranean sunshine, that I am here in the midst of the very best society ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen

... "You're a spawn of Aaron Burr!" he vociferated. "There's not a man here to stand by your infernal doctrines. You sneer at your own State, you sneer at your own country, you defile the sacred ground! What are you, by the Almighty, who attack your native land in ...
— The Two Vanrevels • Booth Tarkington

... appear from time to time in the newspaper world and who seem to embody in their own personalities the essential differences between journalism and literature. Their equipment is trivial and their industry colossal. In a literary sense they are so prolific that they do not beget; they spawn. They present a marvellous combination of unquenchable enthusiasm and slovenly inaccuracy. They needs must love the highest when they see it, but they are congenitally incapable of describing it correctly. Their conception of art consists of writing a book describing ...
— An Ocean Tramp • William McFee

... visitor should examine the varieties of Snipes and Sand-pipers it contains. These birds hunt their food in gravel and amid stones in most localities. The most remarkable of the group are the lanky avocets, with their long legs adapted to hunt rivers for fish spawn and water insects: among them, the long-legged plover should be noticed. The varieties of the sand-piper, in the next case (129), now claim a careful inspection. Sand-pipers inhabit various parts of the world, and, like the ibises, love the neighbourhood of water, where they seek the food congenial ...
— How to See the British Museum in Four Visits • W. Blanchard Jerrold

... the three varieties found in the river. One, ka-cho', a very small, sluggish fish, is captured during the entire year. In February these fish were seldom more than 2 inches in length, and yet they were heavy with spawn. The ka-cho' is the fish most commonly captured with the hands. It is a sluggish swimmer and is provided with an exterior suction valve on its ventral surface immediately back of the gill opening. This valve seems to enable the fish ...
— The Bontoc Igorot • Albert Ernest Jenks

... misbegotten young fool," he said, "so there ye stand, scared like the cowardly spawn ye are. We took ye, and kept ye, and fed ye. What's more, we was friends to ye, eh mates? An' how do ye treat yer friends? Leave 'em to starve or drown on a sinkin' ship! Sneak off like a dog an' a son of a cowardly dog!" Jeremy went white with anger. "An' now"—Daggs' voice broke in a sudden ...
— The Black Buccaneer • Stephen W. Meader

... "we will go, hand in hand, to Akatan, you and I. And we will live in the dirty huts, and eat of the fish and oil, and bring forth a spawn—a spawn to be proud of all the days of our life. We will forget the world and be happy, very happy. It is good, most good. Come! Let us hurry. Let us go back to Akatan." And she ran her hand through his yellow hair, and smiled ...
— The Son of the Wolf • Jack London

... the swarm of orphan children down in the by-streets and outskirt alleys of the capital—children of whom no one has any account, and no one takes any account, who swarm down there only one floor higher, so to speak, than the spawn and small fry which are floating below in the sea among the quay piles, and which will one day become ...
— One of Life's Slaves • Jonas Lauritz Idemil Lie

... toys are here. I win, I always win. For I am the spawn of Mars, of War, and of Hate, the sister of War, and my toys are the things they leave behind." It gesticulated, waving the twisted stuff and now through the haze, they could see them—buildings. The framework of buildings and ...
— Invaders from the Infinite • John Wood Campbell

... breast whereby it could fasten itself to a rock and hold on. This fish dwelt in Port Hamilton, near Sir Ralph the Rover's ledge, and could be visited at low-tide. He happened to be engaged at that time in watching his wife's spawn, and could not be induced to let go his hold of the rock on any account! Mr Long pulled at him pretty forcibly once or twice, but with no effect, and the fish did not seem in the least alarmed! While Mr Paddle did duty in the nursery, Mrs Paddle roamed the sea at large. Apparently women's ...
— Personal Reminiscences in Book Making - and Some Short Stories • R.M. Ballantyne

... adds that he has never yet met any one with courage enough to attempt the walk. You do, in fact, come suddenly on salt-water channels in the midst of fields at long distances from the sea, and find cockles on stretches of mud where you might expect frog spawn or black slugs. Therefore, it is quite likely that the high-tide line would really, if it were stretched out straight, reach right across Ireland and far put into ...
— Priscilla's Spies 1912 • George A. Birmingham

... Honey, Seminole, Black Spanish, Phinney's Early, Ice Cream White-Seeded, jumbo or Jones, Striped Gipsy, Georgia Rattle Snake, Mammoth Iron Clad, Kolba Gem, New Dixie, Volga, Kleckley's Sweet, Iceberg Mustard.—White London or English, Giant Southern Curled Mushroom Spawn.—Best English Okra.—White Velvet Pod Parsley.—Champion Moss-Curled Parsnips.—Long White Dutch, Imp. Hollow Crown, Guernsey or Cup Pumpkins.—Imp. Cushaw, Mammoth Tours, King of Mammoth, Connecticut ...
— New York at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, St. Louis 1904 - Report of the New York State Commission • DeLancey M. Ellis

... of steel broke of the Persian host: craven, we hated them then: now we would count them Gods beside these, spawn of ...
— American Poetry, 1922 - A Miscellany • Edna St. Vincent Millay

... Pyncheon, shaking his clenched fist at Maule. "You and the fiend together have robbed me of my daughter. Give her back, spawn of the old wizard, or you shall climb Gallows ...
— The House of the Seven Gables • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... islands cannot be accounted for by their physical conditions; indeed it seems that islands are peculiarly fitted for these animals; for frogs have been introduced into Madeira, the Azores, and Mauritius, and have multiplied so as to become a nuisance. But as these animals and their spawn are immediately killed (with the exception, as far as known, of one Indian species) by sea-water, there would be great difficulty in their transportal across the sea, and therefore we can see why they do not exist on strictly oceanic islands. ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin

... rise from the ground and spring, disordered, into a firmament which satanizes. The clouds swell into breasts, divide into buttocks, bulge as if with fecundity, scattering a train of spawn through space. They accord with the sombre bulging of the foliage, in which now there are only images of giant or dwarf hips, feminine triangles, great V's, mouths of Sodom, glowing cicatrices, humid vents. This landscape of abomination changes. Gilles now sees on the ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans

... submarine did carry such spawn of Satan was plainly seen, for as the great submarines moved landward, scores of aero-subs sported gleefully about the mother ships. There was no counting the number ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science April 1930 • Various

... fermented, which will be from ten to fourteen days, make it into a bed 4 ft. wide and 2 ft. deep, mixing it well together and beating or treading it firmly. When the temperature of the bed falls to 75 degrees, or a little under, the spawn may be inserted in pieces about the size of a walnut, 2 in. deep and 6 in. apart. Now give a covering of loamy soil, 2 in. deep, and beat it down evenly and firmly. Finish off with a covering of clean straw or hay about 1 ft. thick. Water when necessary with lukewarm water; but ...
— Gardening for the Million • Alfred Pink

... among the most hideous of batrachians. It is remarkable on account of the extraordinary way in which its young are developed. The skin of the female is separated, as is the case with others of its family, from the muscles of the back, and is nearly half an inch thick. She deposits her eggs, or spawn, at the brink of some stagnant water, when the male manages to take them up in his paws and places them on her back, where they adhere by means of a glutinous secretion, and are pressed into cells which, at that time, are open to receive them. Gradually the cells are closed by a membrane ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston

... mass of which was stretched out to a great length, and bent into the form of a hook at the end. On the outer side was observed a fleshy streak, bordered by a close row of small paunches: these paunches, which were externally open, contained a great quantity of brown atoms, apparently spawn, and evidently in motion. With respect to the Rhizophysae, it has been discovered that they are of the same genus as the Physsophora, the hard part being torn away in the act of catching them; upon this occasion also, several of these separated parts, still in motion, and ...
— A New Voyage Round the World, in the years 1823, 24, 25, and 26, Vol. 2 • Otto von Kotzebue

... cricket, Hear, you spawn of the sod, The strange strong cry in the darkness Of one ...
— Poems • G.K. Chesterton

... Sahib. Would your Honour's servants permit? The jackal spawn is even now in the hands of the police. May his ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver

... remembrance in my veins Yet shrinks the vital current. Of her sands Let Lybia vaunt no more: if Jaculus, Pareas and Chelyder be her brood, Cenchris and Amphisboena, plagues so dire Or in such numbers swarming ne'er she shew'd, Not with all Ethiopia, and whate'er Above the Erythraean sea is spawn'd. Amid this dread exuberance of woe Ran naked spirits wing'd with horrid fear, Nor hope had they of crevice where to hide, Or heliotrope to charm them out of view. With serpents were their hands behind them bound, Which through their ...
— The Divine Comedy • Dante

... East, here, like a Niagara, finding its flow impeded, burst suddenly into the appalling fury of the Maelstrom, into the chaotic spasm of a world-force, a primeval energy, blood-brother of the earthquake and the glacier, raging and wrathful that its power should be braved by some pinch of human spawn that dared raise ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris

... way before them along the dusty road, Brother Archangias was angrily saying to the priest: 'Let be! Monsieur le Cure, they're spawn of damnation, those toads are! They ought to have their backs broken, to make them pleasing to God. They grow up in irreligion, like their fathers. Fifteen years have I been here, and not one Christian have I been able to turn ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola

... of a dog to some malignant spirit of storm or disease enables the modern traveller to catch a glimpse of their original paganism. They depend mainly for subsistence upon the salmon, which every summer run into these northern rivers in immense numbers to spawn, and are speared, caught in seines, and trapped in weirs by thousands. These fish, dried without salt in the open air, are the food of the Kamchadals and of their dogs throughout the long, cold northern winter. During the summer, however, their bill of fare ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan

... "salmon come up from the sea and ascend our rivers to spawn, and in time the little ones go to sea. As they grow up they continue to come every year to the same river where they were born, and nobody knows ...
— The Land of the Long Night • Paul du Chaillu

... and surely it is the spawn of Cathedral Instruments plaid on by Babylonish Minstrels, only to disturb ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume IV. • Aphra Behn

... Henry, turning to Simon de Montfort, "be it not time that England were rid of this devil's spawn and his hellish brood? Though I presume," he added, a sarcastic sneer upon his lip, "that it may prove embarrassing for My Lord Earl of Leicester to turn upon his ...
— The Outlaw of Torn • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... or less in tune. It sounded not unmelodious upon the large waters. At intervals we asked one another where the 'gert bodies of herrings' had gone off to. Eastwards, westwards, to the offing, or down to the bottom to spawn? ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds

... whose momentary dread had been dispelled by this attempt to promote a rival to the post of honour; "I am ready, sir:" muttering, however, soon afterwards to himself, as the difficulties of the way increased, "He thinks no more of his life than if he were a sprat or a spawn." No other word was breathed by either of the adventurers, as they threaded the giddy path, until about midway, when the elder paused and exclaimed, "A-hoy there, boy! there are two steps wanting; you had better indeed go back. To me, the ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall

... at the wolf, and the wolf at the fox; and if they did not smile it was not for want of will, I warrant. But your father went on, and told all his story; and when he came to your robbing master monk,—'O apostate!' cries the bell-wether, 'O spawn of Beelzebub! excommunicate him, with bell, book, and candle. May he be thrust down with Korah, Balaam, and Iscariot, to the most Stygian pot of ...
— Hereward, The Last of the English • Charles Kingsley

... the same fate as the first deserves not to be Regarded. I'll own he has sworn to it, but how? On a peice of a Stick made in the shape of a thing they name a Cross, Said to be blest and Sanctyfyed by the poluted words and hands of a wretched priest, a Spawn of the whore of Babylon, who is a Monster of Nature and a Servant to the Devill, Who for a Riall will pretend to absolve them from perjury, Incest and parricide, and Cannonize them for Cruelties Committed to we Herreticks, as they stile ...
— Privateering and Piracy in the Colonial Period - Illustrative Documents • Various

... well to give license to art,— The wisdom of license defend I; But the line should be drawn at the fripperish spawn ...
— Echoes from the Sabine Farm • Roswell Martin Field and Eugene Field

... the poles asunder; and the admirers of the latter may console themselves with the reflection that the censor was, at the same time, talking with equal disdain of the scientific discoverers of the age—conspicuously of Mr. Darwin, whom he describes as "evolving man's soul from frog spawn," adding, "I have no patience with these gorilla damnifications of humanity." Other criticisms, as those of George Eliot, whose Adam Bede he pronounced "simply dull," display a curious limitation or ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol

... them all embraided and they reclaimed the churl with civil rudeness some and shaked him with menace of blandishments others whiles they all chode with him, a murrain seize the dolt, what a devil he would be at, thou chuff, thou puny, thou got in peasestraw, thou losel, thou chitterling, thou spawn of a rebel, thou dykedropt, thou abortion thou, to shut up his drunken drool out of that like a curse of God ape, the good sir Leopold that had for his cognisance the flower of quiet, margerain gentle, advising also the time's occasion as most sacred and ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce

... standing at a somewhat lower stage of organization we may find like examples. Some land-crabs of the West Indies and North America combine in large swarms in order to travel to the sea and to deposit therein their spawn; and each such migration implies concert, co-operation, and mutual support. As to the big Molucca crab (Limulus), I was struck (in 1882, at the Brighton Aquarium) with the extent of mutual assistance which ...
— Mutual Aid • P. Kropotkin

... if it be alive, stick a skewer in the rent of the tail, (to keep the water out,) throw a handful of salt in the water; when it boils, put in the lobster, and boil it half an hour; if it has spawn on it, pick them off, and pound them exceedingly fine in a marble mortar, and put them into half a pound of good melted butter, then take the meat out of the lobster, pull it in bits, and put it in your butter, with a meat spoonful of lemon pickle, and the same of walnut catsup, a slice of ...
— The Virginia Housewife • Mary Randolph

... trellice work at the sides, so that between the two [dams] there is a square pool, into which the fish aforesaid come swimming in such shoals, in order to get up above, where they deposit their spawn, that at one tide there are 10,000 to 12,000 fish in it, which they shut off in the rear at the ebb, and close up the trellices above, so that no more water comes in; then the water runs out through the lower ...
— Narratives of New Netherland, 1609-1664 • Various

... banks and insurance companies are returning. The government nonetheless faces serious challenges in the economic arena. The government has had to fund reconstruction by tapping foreign exchange reserves and boosting borrowing. The stalled peace process and ongoing violence in southern Lebanon could spawn wider hostilities that would disrupt vital capital inflows. Furthermore, the gap between rich and poor has widened since HARIRI took office, sowing grassroots dissatisfaction over the skewed distribution of reconstruction's benefits ...
— The 1997 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... less dreary, for then the sky gleams with a lurid light, and out of the darkness the red flames leap, and high up in the air they gambol and writhe—the demon spawn of ...
— John Ingerfield and Other Stories • Jerome K. Jerome

... Grahame, in great surprise, "you are mad—absolutely mad—what interest can you have in this young spawn of an old roundhead?—His father was positively the most dangerous man in all Scotland, cool, resolute, soliderly, and inflexible in his cursed principles. His son seems his very model; you cannot conceive the mischief he may do. I know mankind, Evandale—were he an insignificant, ...
— Old Mortality, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott

... in this manner every word to its original, and not admitting, but with great caution, any of which no original can be found, we shall secure our language from being overrun with cant, from being crowded with low terms, the spawn of folly or affectation, which arise from no just principles of speech, and of which, therefore, no legitimate derivation ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson in Nine Volumes - Volume V: Miscellaneous Pieces • Samuel Johnson

... the water becomes too cool for their constitutions, when they return eastwards to seek a warmer climate in the depths of the Atlantic, or swim off to some unknown region, where they may deposit their spawn or obtain the food on which they exist. Little, however, is known of the causes which guide their movements, and the Cornish fishermen remain satisfied by knowing the fact that the beautiful little fish which enables them to support themselves and their families are sent ...
— Michael Penguyne - Fisher Life on the Cornish Coast • William H. G. Kingston

... their big rough antennae and the smaller, smoother pair between; the great teeth, or mandibles; the carapace with its projecting rostrum, the jointed abdomen with the tail-fins at the end, and the little flaps below on which the female drops her spawn. In more or less detail these things are severally described, and the many limbs severally enumerated, in one kind after another. The descriptions of the lobster and the langouste are particularly minute, and the comparison or contrast between the two is drawn ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various

... stolen my brother's child from the cradle and put that spawn of a starved devil in its place," Dominic would say to me. "Look at him! Just ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad

... than any other kind found in our waters, being decidedly the most delicious in a fresh state, and when packed command a higher price than any other by $1 per bbl. They are found in the Straits and all the Lakes. They spawn in the fall, in the Straits, and in shoals and on reefs about the Lakes. They are caught in seines, gill nets, trap nets, and with spears; never with hooks. Those found in Detroit river come up from Lake Erie regularly in the fall to deposit their ...
— Old Mackinaw - The Fortress of the Lakes and its Surroundings • W. P. Strickland

... young Earth" was only fit to spawn her frightful monster-brood; Now fiery hot, now icy frore, now reeking wet with ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton

... poet-artist, has said; and it is just this execution which is unattainable without immense application and fastidiousness. If patience be genius,—"La patience cherche et le genie trouve,"—and if execution be its chariot, what possible fame can there be for the slipshod writers of to-day, who spawn columns and volumes at so much a minute, regardless of the good name of their mother tongue, devoid of ideas, which are the product only of brains that have been ploughed up and sown with fruitful seed? An author's severest critic should be himself. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various

... free this time finally for ever; and he married, and marriage set the seal on his security, and the heir was born, and the nebuly coat was safe. But now a new confuter had risen to balk him. Was he fighting with dragon's spawn? Were fresh enemies to spring up from the—The simile did not suit his mood, and he truncated it. Was this young architect, whose very food and wages in Cullerne were being paid for by the money that he, Lord Blandamer, saw fit to spend upon the church, ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner

... they had joined, we proceeded together to the northward, being now four sail in company. We here found the sea for many miles of a beautiful red colour, owing, as we found upon examination, to an immense quantity of spawn floating on its surface: For, taking some of the water in a glass, it soon changed from a dirty aspect to be perfectly clear, with some red globules of a slimy nature floating on the top. Having ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 11 • Robert Kerr

... upon. The too exclusive preservation of fish is in a measure responsible for the destruction of water-fowl, which are cleared off preserved places in order that they may not help themselves to fry or spawn. On the other hand, the societies may claim to have saved parts of the river from being entirely deprived of fish, for it is not long since it appeared as if the stream would be quite cleared out. Large quantities of fish have also been placed in the river taken from ponds and bodily ...
— The Open Air • Richard Jefferies

... but there are no doubt many waters which would carry a good head of grayling which at present contain only trout. They probably do much less harm than most of the coarse fish constantly found in trout streams. The great crime attributed to them is that they eat the spawn of the trout, but I am inclined to think that the harm they do in this way is much over estimated. They spawn at a different time and would not be likely to frequent the spawning places at the same time ...
— Amateur Fish Culture • Charles Edward Walker

... "wisely did thy mother prophecy. Surely the Holy Spirit, the Knepth, was in her, O thou conceived by a God! See the omen. The lion there—he growls within the Capitol at Rome—and the dead man, he is the Ptolemy—the Macedonian spawn that, like a foreign weed, hath overgrown the land of Nile; with the Macedonian Lagidae thou shalt go to smite the lion of Rome. But the Macedonian cur shall fly, and the Roman lion shall strike him down, and thou shalt strike down the lion, and the land of Khem shall once more be free! ...
— Cleopatra • H. Rider Haggard

... tail preserves its elasticity if fresh, but loses it as soon as it becomes stale. The heaviest lobsters are the best; when light they are watery and poor. Hen lobsters may generally be known by the spawn, or by the breadth ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous

... noon nap. My! only fifteen minutes before how the black, mangy, nine-tenths naked, ten-tenths filthy, ignorant, bigoted, besotted, hungry, lazy, malignant, screeching, crowding, struggling, wailing, begging, cursing, hateful spawn of the original Witch had swarmed out of the caves in the rocks and the holes and crevices in the earth, and blocked our horses' way, besieged us, threw themselves in the animals' path, clung to their manes, saddle-furniture, and tails, asking, beseeching, demanding "bucksheesh! bucksheesh! ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... in many ways made plain to us That love must grow like any common thing, Root, bud, and leaf, ere ripe for garnering The mellow fruitage front us; even thus Must Helena encounter Theseus Ere Paris come, and every century Spawn divers queens who die with Antony But live a great while ...
— The Rivet in Grandfather's Neck - A Comedy of Limitations • James Branch Cabell

... deep, are divided into partitions by cross-boards, which do not reach, within a few inches, the top of the siding, so that the water shall make a continuous surface the whole length of the trough. Each trough is filled with round river stones or pebbles washed clean, on which the spawn is laid. The water is let out of the mill-race upon these troughs through a wire-cloth filter, covering them about two inches deep above the stones. At the bottom, a lateral channel or race, running at right ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt

... what is called anadromous—that is, though an inhabitant of the ocean for most of the year, it ascends the fresh-water rivers in summer to spawn. In this function it is guided by curious instincts. The female deposits her eggs in swift shallow water at the heads of streams, in trenches dug by herself and the male fish in the gravelly bottom; but it must not be fresh gravel: it must have been exposed to the action of water for at least ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Volume 11, No. 26, May, 1873 • Various

... inheritances and prudent thrift. They must have tens of millions at their command. And these millions came through alliances, manipulations, deals, by all sorts of devices whereby money could be made to spawn miraculously.... ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)

... shelves a copy of Balzac. American readers are not children, idiots, or slaves. They can govern their reading without the advice of Mr. Comstock, Mr. Wanamaker, or this new supervisor of morals named Britton—a kind of spawn from Comstock, we are informed, and who begins his campaign for notoriety by ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various

... almost any brook or pool, by means of the hand-net or dredge. It will be astonishing to see the variety of objects brought up by a successful haul. Small fish, newts, tadpoles, mollusks, water-beetles, worms, spiders, and spawn of all kinds will be visible to the naked eye; while the microscope will bring out thousands more of the most ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various

... pontifical throne, a fierce, peevish, querulous, and quarrelsome dotard; the prey and the tool of his vigorous enemies and his intriguing relations. His hatred of Spain and Spaniards was unbounded. He raved at them as "heretics, schismatics, accursed of God, the spawn of Jews and Moors, the very dregs of the earth." To play upon such insane passions was not difficult, and a skilful artist stood ever ready to strike the chords thus vibrating with age and fury. The master spirit and principal mischief-maker ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... got up and left him. That shows two things—first, that you've never been a trader in the islands; second, that you cannot at all comprehend how—well, how stunning he was. Sitting there, a single fortnight removed from cotton pants and the beach, crime-stained, imperturbable, magnificent! Spawn of the White Lights! Emperor of an island! ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... Blake, ye needn't be winkin' at me that way; it's little I care for the spawn of the ould serpent. [Here great cheers greeted the speaker, in which, without well knowing why, I heartily joined.] I'm going to give a toast, boys,—a real good toast, none of your sentimental things about wall-flowers or the vernal equinox, or that kind ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever

... to think that the dabchick likes insects and fish spawn better than fish, or at least more prudently dines upon them. "That fish are taken we have positive evidence from examples having been repeatedly picked up dead by the fishermen of the Thames, with a bull-head or miller's thumb in their ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin

... The large eels were taken, and are still taken, on their downward journey in autumn. It is then that the Thames fills, and at the first big rush of water the eels begin to descend to reach the mud and sands at the Thames mouth, where they spawn. They always travel by night, and it is then that the heavy eel-bucks are lowered. Often hundredweights are taken in a night, all of good size, one of the largest of which there is any record being one of 15 lb., taken in the Kennet near Newbury. In the ...
— The Naturalist on the Thames • C. J. Cornish

... the same time imbittered by one less simple and noble. An enemy sat at his gate. That enemy, whose enduring malice had at last begotten equal hostility in the childless baronet, was now married, and would probably have heirs; and, if so, that hateful brood—the spawn of an anonymous letter-writer—would surely inherit Bassett and Huntercombe, succeeding to Sir Charles Bassett, deceased without issue. This chafed the childless man, and gradually undermined a temper habitually sweet, though subject, as we have seen, to violent ebullitions where the provocation ...
— A Terrible Temptation - A Story of To-Day • Charles Reade

... this forced defence: Whereof the allegory and hid sense Is, that a well erected confidence Can fright their pride, and laugh their folly hence. Here now, put case our author should, once more, Swear that his play were good; he doth implore, You would not argue him of arrogance: Howe'er that common spawn of ignorance, Our fry of writers, may beslime his fame, And give his action that adulterate name. Such full-blown vanity he more doth loth, Than base dejection; there's a mean 'twixt both, Which with a constant firmness he pursues, As one that knows the strength of his own Muse. And this ...
— The Poetaster - Or, His Arraignment • Ben Jonson

... skerried coasts, With gulls and whales and fishing-posts, And vessels in shelter riding, While boats o'er the sea are gliding, And nets in fjord and seines in sound, And white with spawn the ocean's ground. ...
— Poems and Songs • Bjornstjerne Bjornson

... for his personal advantage. The fiery Pope, Paul IV, panted for the freedom of Italy as it existed in the fifteenth century; he wanted to accomplish his wishes by an alliance with France; he would place French princes on the thrones of Milan and Naples. The Spaniards he pronounced as the spawn of Jews and Moors, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various

... algae are usually grass green in color. This green variety is often seen as a spongy coating to the surface of stagnant pools, which goes by the name of "frog spawn" or "pond scum." One of this description, Spirogyra, has done thousands of dollars' worth of damage by smothering the life out of young water-cress plants in artificial beds constructed for winter propagation. When the cress is cut the plants are necessarily left in ...
— The Home Medical Library, Volume V (of VI) • Various

... too, how to find, amid thickets of laminaria and fuci, the nest of the lump-fish, and taught me to look well in its immediate neighbourhood for the male and female fish, especially for the male; and showed me further, that the hard-shelled spawn of this creature may, when well washed, be eaten raw, and forms at least as palatable a viand in that state as the imported caviare of Russia and the Caspian. There were instances in which the common crow acted as a sort of jackal ...
— My Schools and Schoolmasters - or The Story of my Education. • Hugh Miller

... reach of his greedy fingers, the water to Tantalus. To have underestimated this yellow haired young woman, he who knew women so well—there lay the bitter sting. He had been too impetuous; he should have waited till all her fears had been allayed. That spawn of Siva, the military, was insolent again, and rupees to cross their palms were scarce. Whither had she blown? Was ...
— The Adventures of Kathlyn • Harold MacGrath

... great under great circumstances; perhaps she was not in her right place. Let us remember there are as many varieties of woman as there are of man, all of which society fashions to meet its needs. Now in the social order, as in Nature's order, there are more young shoots than there are trees, more spawn than full-grown fish, and many great capacities (Athanase Granson, for instance) which die withered for want of moisture, like seeds on stony ground. There are, unquestionably, household women, accomplished ...
— Bureaucracy • Honore de Balzac



Words linked to "Spawn" :   spawner, cause, do, breed, lay



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