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Antediluvian

noun
1.
Any of the early patriarchs who lived prior to the Noachian deluge.  Synonym: antediluvian patriarch.
2.
A very old person.  Synonym: ancient.






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"Antediluvian" Quotes from Famous Books



... parading the streets of the town. I have become heartily 'fed up' with the dirty antediluvian place. Morgan actually, after nine solid months of residence here, says that he likes it and the people. I could not have imagined that there were many of the latter whose acquaintance would be particularly charming; but he speaks upon the authority ...
— At Ypres with Best-Dunkley • Thomas Hope Floyd

... cheerful sort of House-Warming with one of you off scouring the country for more blisters and chilblains, and another huntin' antediluvian elephants." The Colonel spoke with uncommon irascibility. The great feast-day had certainly ...
— The Magnetic North • Elizabeth Robins (C. E. Raimond)

... in our day from its discordance with modern sentiment. We look upon religions as members of the same family, and are more interested in their resemblances than their antagonisms. Moloch and Dagon themselves appear no longer as incarnate fiends, but as the spiritual counterparts of antediluvian monsters; and Milton's treatment of the Olympian deities jars upon us who remember his obligations to them. If the most Hebrew of modern poets, he still owed more to Greece than to Palestine. How living a thing Greek mythology was to him from his earliest years appears from his college vacation ...
— Life of John Milton • Richard Garnett

... George Cruikshank called upon, for instance, to depict a lady fording a puddle on a rainy day, and were he averse (for he is the modestest of artists) to displaying too much of her ankle, he would assuredly make manifest, beneath her upraised skirts, some antediluvian pantalet, bordered by a pre-Adamite frill. But the keen-eyed Mr. Leech would be guilty of no such anachronism. He would discover that the mysterious garments in question were ofttimes encircled by open-worked embroidery. He would find out that the ladies sometimes wore Knickerbockers. And ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various

... most ancient of all the sciences. The Chaldeans, the Egyptians, the Chinese, the Hindoos, Gauls, and Peruvians, each regarded themselves as the inventors of astronomy, an honour which Josephus deprives them of by ascribing it to the antediluvian patriarchs. From the few facts to be gleaned out of the vague accounts by ancient authors regarding the Chaldeans, it may be inferred that their boasted knowledge of this science was confined to observations ...
— Lectures on Popular and Scientific Subjects • John Sutherland Sinclair, Earl of Caithness

... supreme! Not a shriek, not a scream, Scarcely even a howl or a groan, As the man they called "Ho!" told his story of woe. In an antediluvian tone. ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various

... almost proof against decay. Thus, about seventy years ago, a huge animal was found imbedded in the ice in Siberia: from a comparison of its skeleton with those of existing species, Cuvier inferred that this animal must have been antediluvian; and yet, so completely had the cold prevented putrefaction, that dogs willingly ate of the still existing flesh. At St Petersburg, when winter is approaching, the fish in the markets become almost like blocks of ice, so completely are they frozen; and in this state they will remain sound ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 460 - Volume 18, New Series, October 23, 1852 • Various

... of her pilgrimage. From the deep furrows on her cheeks, and the strong lines of her naturally striking countenance, which, as she advanced in years, assumed more and more the character of her Indian parentage, and the leather-like appearance of her skin, she might have passed for an antediluvian. While other less important matters lost their impression on her memory, the Hessian inroads upon her sausages and buckwheat cakes were neither forgotten nor entirely forgiven to the last. She sent ...
— The Old Bell Of Independence; Or, Philadelphia In 1776 • Henry C. Watson

... be read into them; every eulogium possible to a human character shines from them. He was a devout man, a fearless preacher of righteousness, an intimate friend of God, and the only man of his dispensation who did not see death. He sheds a lustre on the antediluvian age, and he shines still as an example to all generations ...
— Men of the Bible; Some Lesser-Known Characters • George Milligan, J. G. Greenhough, Alfred Rowland, Walter F.

... pleasure bent, others of whom had come to listen to a debate, for which the entertainment committee had provided, between the venerable patriarch Noah and the late eminent showman P. T. Barnum. The question to be debated was upon the resolution passed by the committee, that "The Animals of the Antediluvian Period were Far More Attractive for Show Purposes than those of Modern Make," and, singular to relate, the affirmative was placed in the hands of Mr. Barnum, while to Noah had fallen the task of upholding the virtues of the modern freak. ...
— A House-Boat on the Styx • John Kendrick Bangs

... be actin' out a commentary on modern sins. What business has he to be rakin' over the old ashes of Sodom and Gomorrah for bones of antediluvian sinners, and leave his livin' flock to be burnt and choked by the fire and flames of the present volcano of crime, the Liquor System, that belches ...
— Around the World with Josiah Allen's Wife • Marietta Holley

... to see the great salamander of Japan, an animal rare in this country, and quite unknown elsewhere, a great cold mass; sluggish and benumbed, looking like some antediluvian experiment, forgotten in the ...
— Madame Chrysantheme • Pierre Loti

... any of your learned correspondents inform me of any work likely to assist me in my researches into the antediluvian history of our race? The curious treatise of Reimmanus, and the erudite essay of J. Joachimus Maderus, I have now before me; but it occurs to me that, besides these and the more patent sources of information, such as Bruckerus and Josephus, there must be other, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 78, April 26, 1851 • Various

... yards above Steve's nook a part of a high railroad bridge. The gaunt trestle ran out past midstream, then stopped, all the portion toward the northern shore burned away. It stood against the intensely lit sky and stream like the skeleton of some antediluvian monster, then vanished into Stygian darkness. The thunder crashed at once, an ear-splitting clap followed by long reverberations. As these died, in the span of silence before should come the next flash and ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston

... whose sudden appearance had occasioned this abrupt departure would, in truth, have been somewhat singular, not to say alarming, in aspect, to those who did not know its nature. At a distance it looked like one of those horrible antediluvian monsters one reads of, with a lank body, about thirty feet long. It was reddish-yellow in colour, and came on at a slow, crawling pace, its back appearing occasionally above the underwood. Presently its outline became more defined, and it turned ...
— The Wild Man of the West - A Tale of the Rocky Mountains • R.M. Ballantyne

... of Rossini; and if in 1824 he was known as an agreeable musician, a composer of various drawing-room melodies, judge if he was likely to be famous in 183l! In 1844, the year in which the single drama of this obscure life began, Sylvain Pons was of no more value than an antediluvian semiquaver; dealers in music had never heard of his name, though he was still composing, on scanty pay, for his own orchestra ...
— Cousin Pons • Honore de Balzac

... neighborhood abounds in remains of the antediluvian world: they are found not only in considerable quantity, but in great perfection. In the course of last year; a fossil crocodile was dug up at Allemagne, a village about a mile distant, imbedded in blue lias. Other specimens of the same genus, comprising, as it appears, two species, both ...
— Account of a Tour in Normandy, Vol. II. (of 2) • Dawson Turner

... fully sustained as we advance. Cush was Ham's oldest son, and the father of Nimrod. It appears from the Bible, that this Nimrod was not entirely cured, by the flood, of this antediluvian love for and miscegenation with negroes. Nimrod was the first on earth who began to monopolize power and play the despot: its objects we will see presently. Kingly power had its origin in love for and association with the negro. Beware! Nimrod's hunting was not only of wild animals, ...
— The Negro: what is His Ethnological Status? 2nd Ed. • Buckner H. 'Ariel' Payne

... Believe me, there is no time like the present. Here are the tools. They look quite antediluvian. Do you think now that it really was a flesh-and-blood Indian we saw here; or was it the ghost of some murdered priest? And has he been digging down here to excavate his own old bones, or have a peep to see that they ...
— Our Home in the Silver West - A Story of Struggle and Adventure • Gordon Stables

... one-and-twenty was inclined to think pretty things thrown away upon an antediluvian creature of forty, but if Ruth could have had a glimpse of herself as "others saw her" at that moment, she might have been more content. The subdued lamp-light dealt kindly with the old blue serge coat and skirt, the pink scarf ...
— The Fortunes of the Farrells • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey

... appendicitis, but which in reality resulted from the loss of a rib which had in turn evoluted into the charming and very human being I now saw before me. That woman was Eve; that mirror-like lake was set in the midst of the Garden of Eden; I was Adam, and not this watery-eyed antediluvian calling himself by my name, who is a familiar figure in the Anthropological Society, an authority on evolution, and a ...
— The Enchanted Typewriter • John Kendrick Bangs

... than take my chances in an antediluvian rattle-trap like that," said the tall wayfarer, bending quite close to her ear. "It will fall to ...
— Green Fancy • George Barr McCutcheon

... when verging on his nine hundreth year, to have assembled his descendants to a kind of jubilee, when sacrifices, and other antediluvian solemnities, being observed, "Seth, the pious son of his comfort, gravely arose, and, after due obedience to the first of men, humbly beseeched the favour to have their memories refreshed by a short history of the marvellous things in the beginning." Then Adam thus:—Hereupon ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 235, April 29, 1854 • Various

... spur of this Lemurian land that the Rmoahal race was born. Roughly it may be located at latitude 7 deg. north and longitude 5 deg. west, which a reference to any modern atlas will show to lie on the Ashanti coast of to-day. It was a hot, moist country, where huge antediluvian animals lived in reedy swamps and dank forests. The fossil remains of such plants are to-day found in the coal measures. The Rmoahals were a dark race—their complexion being a sort of mahogany black. Their height in these early days was about ten or twelve feet—truly a race of ...
— The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria • W. Scott-Elliot

... man." This time Sheldon had lost his temper over the superficial aspects of the situation. "Bosh and nonsense, that's all it is. Men don't fight duels in the twentieth century. It's—it's antediluvian, ...
— Adventure • Jack London

... Russia, when the current money consisted of sable and squirrel skins, so universal was the desire of being provided with the means of guarding against the cold. The most curious thing in the museum at Petersburg, is a rich collection of bones of antediluvian animals, and particularly the remains of a gigantic Mammoth, which have been found almost whole among the ices of Siberia. It appears from geological observations, that the world has a much older history than that which we know: infinity is fearful in all things. At present, the inhabitants, ...
— Ten Years' Exile • Anne Louise Germaine Necker, Baronne (Baroness) de Stael-Holstein

... has just been here. He's made a mess of things, as usual, and I've got to go down and put things right. Oh, it's quite country! I don't know if you like the country. I adore it myself. A place called Enmore. I've got an antediluvian aunt who lives there, and we'll go and foist ourselves on her. She's always asking me to go and see her, so she'll be delighted. Well, what ...
— The Phantom Lover • Ruby M. Ayres

... antique halls, we wandered through saloons of antediluvian animals, some set up in skeletons, others imprisoned in solid stone; also specimens of still extant animals, birds, reptiles, shells, minerals,— the whole circle of human knowledge and guess-work,—till I wished that the whole Past might be swept away, and each ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... often it is when the son finds the father in famine, as Joseph found Jacob in famine, the young people make it very hard for the old man. They are so surprised he eats with a knife instead of a fork. They are chagrined at his antediluvian habits. They are provoked because he cannot hear as well as he used to, and when he asks it over again, and the son has to repeat it, he bawls in the old man's ear: "I hope you hear that!" How long he must wear the old ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage

... means truth is to be attained, his few perfunctory remarks on logic are lost in an historical narrative given with infinite zest, of the earliest recorded blunders. The period of history in which he most delighted was the antediluvian—probably because it afforded the widest field for speculation. His books are full of references to the early days of the world. He takes a keen personal interest in our first parents. He discusses the ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen

... should bear in mind the enormous ages attained by the antediluvian patriarchs, and that the world around them was so quickly populated that Cain might, and did, meet with plenty of people who possibly, as he thought, would regard him as a monster to be driven from amongst them. A long course ...
— The Girl's Own Paper, Vol. VIII, No. 357, October 30, 1886 • Various

... seriousness both of their topics and of their manner, a contrast to the majority of his essays in the earlier volumes; but several of them, both in this vein and in one less lofty, are among the best known, if not the finest, of all his essays. Such are the "Mountain of Miseries''; the antediluvian novel of "Shalum and Hilpa''; the "Reflections by Moonlight ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... to have been the state of antediluvian sinners, when the spirit had ceased to strive with them, agreeably to ...
— Sermons on Various Important Subjects • Andrew Lee

... and solitariness into the same climate of sympathy with his audience. Tear away the old sofa, ragged and spring-broken, on which the pastors of forty years have been obliged to sit, and see whether there are any cats in your antediluvian pulpit. ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage

... injunctions to ascertain that two old-fashioned hirsute trunks containing her wardrobe were really put into the steamer at Quebec. Bluebell had treated herself to a smart little portmanteau for the cabin, being rather ashamed of her antediluvian luggage. She had ten sovereigns in her purse, that had been scraped together among them as a provision for any emergency. The Rolleston children had sent her a travelling-bag; but not even a message came from Cecil, which saddened Bluebell, but did not make her resentful, for ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston

... not here committing an anachronism, and making Jupiter, before the deluge, relate the story of a historical personage, who existed long after it, the origin of the story of Lycaon must be sought in the antediluvian narrative. It is just possible that the guilty Cain may have been the original of Lycaon. The names are not very dissimilar: they are each mentioned as the first murderer; and the fact, that Cain murdered Abel at the moment when he was offering sacrifice to the Almighty, may have given rise ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Vol. I, Books I-VII • Publius Ovidius Naso

... shrewdness, and the sort of wily cupidity which is needful in business. At that time these old families were less rare than they are now, in which the characteristic habits and costume of their calling, surviving in the midst of more recent civilization, were preserved as cherished traditions, like the antediluvian remains found by ...
— At the Sign of the Cat and Racket • Honore de Balzac

... To the very root of the family tree Were a task as rash as ridiculous: Through antediluvian mists as thick As London fog such a line to pick Were enough, in truth, to puzzle old Nick, Not ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood

... of the pool, like a beam of golden light which gleams through the chinks of a shutter into a room in Spain, that has been carefully darkened for a siesta. When the sun rose above the old crater that some antediluvian revolution had filled with water, its rocky sides took warmer tones, the extinct volcano glowed again, and its sudden heat quickened the sprouting seeds and vegetation, gave color to the flowers, and ripened the fruits of this forgotten corner of ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac

... possible form of caricature, the theatres burlesqued their pretensions, songs and epigrams contributed to their discomfiture, and all the ingenuity of a witty and laughter-loving people was unmercifully poured out upon this resurrection of antediluvian remains. Their royal patrons came in for a full share of the general derision, but they seemed entirely unmindful that there was such a thing as popular opinion, or any other will than their own. There were objects ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various

... trip. I had long been familiar with a paint in my color-box called Burnt Sienna, and was now much interested to learn that it was made of the yellow clay on which the city of Siena stands; and when I discovered for myself that this clay, having formed the bed of some antediluvian ocean, was full of fossil shells, I thought that Siena was a place where I would do well to spend one of my lifetimes. The odd, parti-colored architecture of the town did not so much appeal to me, and certainly the streets and squares were less attractive in themselves ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne

... fine History might this old Gentleman write of the Antediluvian world, and of all the weighty affairs, as well of state as of religion, which happen'd during the fifteen hundred years of the ...
— The History of the Devil - As Well Ancient as Modern: In Two Parts • Daniel Defoe

... necessary ingredients in the character of its votaries, extirpating from among them that simplicity which was so fatal an obstacle to the progress of Newton,—and turning the newly discovered joint of an antediluvian reptile into a theme of perennial and ambitious declamation; nothing is said about those discussions on baptismal fonts, those discoveries of trochees for iambics, or the invention of new potatoe boilers, which in the days of Hegel, Berryer, Schlosser, Savigny, and Cousin, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 55, No. 344, June, 1844 • Various

... she could, but she sallied forth and did battle when the challenge was really to "spirit," the spirit she after all confessed to, proudly and a little shyly, as to that of the better time, that of their common, their quite far-away and antediluvian social period and order. She made use of the street-cars when need be, the terrible things that people scrambled for as the panic-stricken at sea scramble for the boats; she affronted, inscrutably, under stress, all the public concussions and ordeals; and yet, with that slim mystifying ...
— The Jolly Corner • Henry James

... the table. An edifying sight is this venerable dame, bearing an exalted title, as she mopes and mouths over her varying luck, missing her stake twice out of three times, when she fain would push it with her rake into some particular section of the table! She is very intimate with one or two antediluvian diplomatists and warriors, who are here striving to bolster themselves up for another year with the waters, and may be heard crowing out lamentations over her fatal passion for play, interspersed with bits of moss-grown scandal, disinterred from the social ruins of ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz

... bad news from abroad, one should be quite stupefied. There is nobody left but two or three solitary regents; and they are always whisking backwards and forwards to their villas; and about a dozen antediluvian dowagers, whose carcasses have miraculously resisted the wet, and who every Saturday compose a very reverend catacomb at my old Lady Strafford's. She does not take money at the door for showing them, but 'you pay twelvepence apiece under the denomination of card-money. Wit and beauty, indeed, ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole

... spite of Bath, was as antediluvian a hundred and fifty years ago as the lanes and coombes of Devonshire. Larks' Hall, Foxholes, Bearwood, the Vicarage of Mosely, and their outlying acquaintances, their yeomen and their labourers, lived as old-fashioned and hearty ...
— Girlhood and Womanhood - The Story of some Fortunes and Misfortunes • Sarah Tytler

... respected your rights, Miss Effingham, though, with a wish to prevent any violence to your tastes, I have caused sundry antediluvian paintings and engravings to ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper

... makes one of the signs of the strata that nourish gold; and at length the moon, now in all her pomp of light, mid-heaven among her subject stars, gleamed through the fissures of the cave, on whose floor lay the relics of antediluvian races, and rested in one flood of silvery splendor upon the hollows of the extinct volcano, with tufts of dank herbage, and wide spaces of paler sward, covering the gold below—gold, the dumb symbol of organized Matter's great mystery, storing in itself, according ...
— The Lock and Key Library • Julian Hawthorne, Ed.

... substantial herbage on the eastern, give those plains a peculiar appearance. The soil is composed of sand and red or yellow clay, and this is covered by a layer of earth, in which the vegetation takes root. The geologist would find rich treasures in the tertiary strata here, for it is full of antediluvian remains—enormous bones, which the Indians attribute to some gigantic race that ...
— In Search of the Castaways • Jules Verne

... providing them with a fuller repast than any other part of the day. No sooner has the Swallow disappeared, than the Whippoorwill and the Night-Jar come forth, to prey upon the larger kinds of aerial insects. The Bat, an animal of an antediluvian type, comes out at the same time, and assists in lessening these multitudinous swarms. The little Owls, though they pursue the larger beetles and moths, direct their efforts chiefly at the small quadrupeds that steal out in the early evening to nibble the tender ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various

... our actor? What a continuous stream of wheezes, unintelligible for the most part, of antediluvian puns, of pure nonsense at which he laughs so heartily that it is difficult not to laugh with him. He wanted to learn a few words of Chinese, and Pan-Chao having told him that "tching-tching" means thanks, he ...
— The Adventures of a Special Correspondent • Jules Verne

... whole surface of this gigantic drift showed again that "exfoliated" appearance which I have described. Strange to say, this very exfoliation gave it something of a quite peculiarly desolate aspect. It looked so harsh, so millennial-old, so antediluvian and pre-adamic! I still remember with particular distinctness the slight dizziness that overcame me, the sinking feeling in my heart, the awe, and the foreboding that I had challenged a force in Nature which might defy all tireless effort and the ...
— Over Prairie Trails • Frederick Philip Grove

... afflict this vast mass of buildings, buried under the Palais de Justice and the quay, like some antediluvian creature in the soil of Montmartre; but the worst affliction is that it is the Conciergerie. This epigram is intelligible. In the early days of the monarchy, noble criminals—for the villeins (a word signifying the peasantry in French and English alike) and the citizens ...
— Scenes from a Courtesan's Life • Honore de Balzac

... nature glorious with form, color, and motion, that every globe in the remotest heaven; every chemical change from the rudest crystal up to the laws of life; every change of vegetation from the first principle of growth in the eye of a leaf, to the tropical forest and antediluvian coal-mine; every animal function from the sponge up to Hercules, shall hint or thunder to man the laws of right and wrong, and echo the Ten Commandments. Therefore is nature ever the ally of Religion: lends all her pomp and riches to the religious sentiment. Prophet and priest, David, ...
— Nature • Ralph Waldo Emerson

... propose to relate occurred in antediluvian times, when there were giants in the earth who lived a thousand years. Then matter reigned, not mind. It was the age of brawn. Everything material existed on a gigantic scale, and man's architectural works, rude in design but well adapted for shelter and ...
— Daybreak: A Romance of an Old World • James Cowan

... sphinx, half human, half animal, etc., which the ancients have preserved, are simply records of the past. They are chronological tables of cosmic time, and relate to eras of the past, of the Sun's motion, and not by any means to living creatures of antediluvian creations, as some wiseacres have imagined. Many of these ancient monuments, monstrous in form, are records of that awful period of floods and devastation known as the Iron Age, when there was a vertical Sun at the poles; or, in other words, ...
— The Light of Egypt, Volume II • Henry O. Wagner/Belle M. Wagner/Thomas H. Burgoyne

... the beginning of the world, we may presume to have had in some form or another, the Pantomimic Art. In the lower stages of humanity, even in our own times, there is, in all probability, a close similarity to the savagedom of mankind in the early Antediluvian period as "This is shown (says Darwin) by the pleasure which they all take in dancing, rude music, painting, tattooing, and otherwise decorating themselves—in their mutual comprehension of gesture language, and by the same inarticulate ...
— A History of Pantomime • R. J. Broadbent

... Semites as the ruling race in Babylonia; and incidentally they necessitate a revision of current views with regard to the cradle of Babylonian civilization. The most remarkable of the new documents is one which relates in poetical narrative an account of the Creation, of Antediluvian history, and of the Deluge. It thus exhibits a close resemblance in structure to the corresponding Hebrew traditions, a resemblance that is not shared by the Semitic-Babylonian Versions at present known. But in matter the Sumerian tradition is more primitive ...
— Legends Of Babylon And Egypt - In Relation To Hebrew Tradition • Leonard W. King

... day for their fame to spread. On the second day they attracted crowds. Money poured in upon them. Little Patou, like a double-tailed serpent rearing himself upright on his tail tips, appeared at first a creature remote, of some antediluvian race—until he talked a familiar, disarming patter with his human, disarming grin. The Great Patapon, contrary to jealous anticipation, saw himself welcomed as a contrast and received more than his usual meed of applause. This satisfied, for ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke

... the door to look down the street for him. He was dressed in a fine flowing, olive-green frock (made like a dressing-gown), with a black velvet collar, having a gold embroidered stag on each side, gilt stag-buttons, with rich embossed edges; an acre of buff waistcoat, and a most antediluvian pair of bright yellow-ochre buckskins, made by White, of Tarporley, in the twenty-first year of the reign of George the Third; they were double-lashed, back-stiched, front-stiched, middle-stiched, and patched at both knees, with a slit up behind. The coat he had won ...
— Jorrocks' Jaunts and Jollities • Robert Smith Surtees

... of the seeming injustice to Sculpture at the time of the Revival. Its relative excellence was undervalued, because what it could do was not quite to the point. While the painters went on producing their antediluvian forms, the sculptors saw things much more as we do,—yet the paintings seemed the most life-like. It is astonishing, when we remember that Nicola was older than Cimabue, Giovanni than Giotto, Ghiberti than Fra Angelico, that the painters did not learn from the sculptors more of the actual ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various

... by, go by , pass away, go away , pass off, go off; lapse, blow over. look back, trace back, cast the eyes back; exhume. Adj. past, gone, gone by, over, passed away, bygone, foregone; elapsed, lapsed, preterlapsed[obs3], expired, no more, run out, blown over, has-been, that has been, extinct, antediluvian, antebellum, never to return, gone with the wind, exploded, forgotten, irrecoverable; obsolete &c. (old) 124. former, pristine, quondam, ci-devant[Fr], late; ancestral. foregoing; last, latter; recent, over night; preterperfect[obs3], preterpluperfect[obs3]. looking back &c. v.; retrospective, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus

... that some eminent naturalists have actually believed, that, like the sloths, to which they are intimately related, they subsisted by climbing back downwards on trees, and feeding on the leaves. It was a bold, not to say preposterous, idea to conceive even antediluvian trees, with branches strong enough to bear animals as large as elephants. Professor Owen, with far more probability, believes that, instead of climbing on the trees, they pulled the branches down to them, ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin

... each were the product of a single pen, represent in reality movements which extended over decades and even centuries. The Jehovist, e.g., who traces the descent of shepherds, musicians, and workers in metal to antediluvian times (Gen. iv. 19-22), cannot be the Jehovist who told the story of the Flood, which interrupted the continuity of human life. These distinctions are known to criticism as Jl, J2, etc.; but, though they stand ...
— Introduction to the Old Testament • John Edgar McFadyen

... feet in circumference. The bark is arranged and fastened to an inner framework in such a manner as to give an idea of the tree itself. There is a circular concert room, with tiers of benches as in a Colosseum. Lastly, in the gardens are to be seen life-size reproductions of antediluvian monsters, megatheriums, dinotheriums, and others. In these gardens Blondin does his tricks at the ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume I. - Great Britain and Ireland • Various

... where we lunched off a tin of antediluvian Spanish sardines, some mouldy sweet biscuits, and black wine. (A distinction is made in these parts between black and red wine; the former is the Apulian variety, the other from Sulmona.) During this repast, ...
— Alone • Norman Douglas

... corner, and pulled up with a crash, seeming to shoot the men off. These swarmed, for a few seconds, about the hose, water plug, and nozzles. At the same instant the great fire-escape came rushing on the scene, like some antediluvian monster, but by that time Giles had swept away the debris of the donkey-cart, with Mrs Twitter imbedded therein, and had stretched the blanket with five powerful volunteers to hold it. "Jump, sir, jump!" he cried. Samuel Twitter jumped—unavoidably, for Welland pushed him—just as the ...
— Dusty Diamonds Cut and Polished - A Tale of City Arab Life and Adventure • R.M. Ballantyne

... from others. He was an oracle on the subject of 'Nature.' Having eaten nothing for two years, except Graham bread, vegetables without salt, and fruits, fresh or dried, he considered himself to have attained an antediluvian purity of health—or that he would attain it, so soon as two pimples on his left temple should have healed. These pimples he looked upon as the last feeble stand made by the pernicious juices left from the meat he had formerly eaten and the coffee he had drunk. His theory was, that through a ...
— Beauty and The Beast, and Tales From Home • Bayard Taylor

... science who spend whole months in gnawing at the bone of an antediluvian monster, in calculating the laws of nature, when there is an opportunity to peer into her secrets, the Grecians and Latinists who dine on a thought of Tacitus, sup on a phrase of Thucydides, spend their life in brushing the dust from library shelves, in keeping ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part I. • Honore de Balzac

... and struck terror in gentle bosoms. "Oh, gracious!" cried Fanny, "one ought to drink nothing but champagne." Uxmoor looked grave. Vizard affected to doubt their authenticity. He said, "You may not know it, but I am a zoologist, and these are antediluvian eccentricities that have long ceased to embellish the world we live in. Fie! Miss Gale. Down ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade

... without getting into a scrape with the commodore; and, from the ease with which they cut through the rotten stuff around our position, I already foresaw a fresh era in arctic history, and that the fine bows would soon beat the antediluvian "bluffs" out ...
— Stray Leaves from an Arctic Journal; • Sherard Osborn

... of the prebendal commissary called for me, and I found in his father a most eccentric, whimsical sort of man. The curiosities of his collection consisted of his family tree, of books of magic, relics, coins which he believed to be antediluvian, a model of the ark taken from nature at the time when Noah arrived in that extraordinary harbour, Mount Ararat, in Armenia. He load several medals, one of Sesostris, another of Semiramis, and an old knife of a queer shape, covered with rust. Besides ...
— The Memoires of Casanova, Complete • Jacques Casanova de Seingalt

... bewitching but deceptive light of the moon, the whole place lends itself supremely well to every man's individual fancy, and even my unimaginative mind could easily have brought itself to see here a once majestic antediluvian city with its palaces and temples, but now wrecked and ruined by manifold upheavals of nature, and worn into rarest mockeries of its ancient splendours by the wild storms ...
— With the Guards' Brigade from Bloemfontein to Koomati Poort and Back • Edward P. Lowry

... woman," implying that there are no differences among women, makes one indignant. Have we not seen women to whom death seems an indignity—looking, in every feature and glance, as immortal as Pallas Athene? And have we not seen women whose hideous shape and fiendish spirit suggested an alliance with antediluvian monsters? Is there not a Volumnia, as chaste as that star seen in winter dawns shivering on the cold forehead of the morning? And is there not a Messalina, who would receive embraces in a bath of blood? Is there not a Fulvia, who takes the head of the murdered Cicero in her hands, and tears ...
— The Friendships of Women • William Rounseville Alger

... the loftiest truth, Uncle William," said the professor; "every Christian emblem about the church is superlatively correct, but paleontologically it is a fraud. Wharton and Hazard did the emblems, and I supplied them with antediluvian beasts which were all right when I drew them, but Wharton has played the devil with them, and I don't believe he knows the difference between a saurian and a crab. I could not recognize one of ...
— Esther • Henry Adams

... the antediluvian world, as a consequence of man's first transgression, fell lower and lower in the scale of good morals. They became so confirmed in wickedness, so totally depraved, that God destroyed them all, save one man and his family, ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various

... consistent in its principles. We are told that the great French naturalist, Cuvier, was able to reconstruct the whole anatomy of an animal merely through examining the structure of a tooth or the fragment of a bone. Applying to the German historian the method which Cuvier applied to the antediluvian mastodon, we can reduce the whole complex political philosophy of Treitschke from a few fundamental principles which he follows with a single mind, and which the Prussian State has applied with ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea

... things worse, the small percentage of hydrogen in the atmosphere got sneaky sometimes. It could insinuate itself into places where neither the methane nor the ammonia could get. Someone once called hydrogen the "cockroach element," since, like that antediluvian insect, the molecules of H{2} can insidiously infiltrate themselves into places where they are not only unwelcome, but shouldn't even be able to go. At red heat, the little molecules can squeeze themselves through the crystalline interstices of ...
— Unwise Child • Gordon Randall Garrett

... stole our antediluvian horse and cow. The barking of the faithful dog awakened father and brothers who rushed to the rescue, leaving mother half dead with fear; but at length the marauders were overtaken, shots were exchanged, heads were broken, and after a fierce struggle ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss

... Connecticut meadow. It is wonderful, and passing wonder, how teachable and quick of perception and prehension is Nature in the studio of Art. She, the oldest of painters, that hung the earth, sea, and sky of the antediluvian world with landscapes, waterscapes, and cloudscapes manifold and beautiful, when as yet the human hand had never lifted a pencil to imitate her skill; she, with the colors wherewith she dyed the fleecy clouds that ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt

... a shabby covered chaise, one of those antediluvian chaises without springs in which no one travels in Russia nowadays, except merchant's clerks, dealers and the less well-to-do among priests, drove out of N., the principal town of the province of Z., and rumbled noisily along the posting-track. It rattled and creaked at every movement; ...
— The Bishop and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov

... great matters relating to himself, and all the little matters he collected in his rounds relating to others. Among other personalities, he indulged his satirical fluency on the scientific collectors. The Antiquarian Society were twitted as medal-scrapers and antediluvian knife-grinders; conchologists were turned into cockleshell merchants; and the naturalists were made to record pompous histories of stickle-hacks and cockchafers. Cautioned by Martin Folkes, President of the Royal Society,[284] not to attempt his election, our ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli

... not, originally, of my asking; but, as the learned are at open feud on the subject, it should not be passed by in silence. Its deviser is, more than likely, as undiscoverable as the name of the valiant antediluvian who first tasted an oyster. But the deductive character of the miscreant is another thing; and hereon there is a war between the philosophers. Mr. G. P. Marsh, as if he had actually spotted the wretched creature, passionately and categorically denounces him as 'some grammatical pretender.' 'But,' ...
— The Verbalist • Thomas Embly Osmun, (AKA Alfred Ayres)

... his cares between the strata and Dolores' kodak, how even his photography could not spoil Aunt Alda; how charming a group of sisters Dolores contrived to produce; how Adrian was the proud pioneer into a coach adorned with stalactites and antediluvian bones; how Anna collected milkwort and violets for Aunt Cherry; how a sly push sent little Joan in a headlong career down a slope that might have resulted in a terrible fall, but did only cause a tumble and great fright, and a severe reprimand from the elder sisters; how Agatha ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge

... ought to be expelled from our creed, he did not dare to attempt the reform of humanity by annihilating the mischief-maker: he could not rob man of his dearest spiritual possession; had he thought of consigning the Devil to the antediluvian period of our moral and social formation, he never could have succeeded in his reform. The Devil, in fact, was his strongest helpmate; he could describe the ritual of the Romish Church as the work of the Evil Spirit, produced ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies

... thing, and a newcomer to the scene, with no local knowledge of circumstantial evidence to guide him, would have hesitated between a buffalo or a hippopotamus and finally given a vote in favour of it being some slime-crawling saurian that we come across in pictures of antediluvian natural history. ...
— A Dweller in Mesopotamia - Being the Adventures of an Official Artist in the Garden of Eden • Donald Maxwell

... next object passing townward is a butcher's cart canopied with its arch of snow-white cotton. Behind comes a "sauceman" driving a wagon full of new potatoes, green ears of corn, beets, carrots, turnips and summer squashes, and next two wrinkled, withered witch-looking old gossips in an antediluvian chaise drawn by a horse of former generations and going to peddle out a lot of huckleberries. See, there, a man trundling a wheelbarrow-load of lobsters. And now a milk-cart rattles briskly onward, covered with green canvas and conveying the contributions of a whole herd of cows, ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... thrown, were extremely interesting to the naturalist, and gave rise to numerous observations and suggestions in later works. The huge tortoises slowly carrying their great bodies about, appeared like strange antediluvian animals. The hideous large water-lizard (Amblyrhynchus), swimming with perfect ease, and capable of an hour's immersion in sea-water; and the land lizard of the same genus, so numerous that at James Island it was hardly possible to find a spot free from their ...
— Life of Charles Darwin • G. T. (George Thomas) Bettany

... ever be objects of admiration and love, as to them he is indebted for his guidance through the untrodden wilderness he is traversing. "And sweet it is to watch them in the evening skies weeping dew from their gentle eyes." Several hundred pelicans, those antediluvian birds, made their appearance upon the water early this morning, but seeing us they flew away before a shot could be fired. These birds came from the north-west; indeed, all the aquatic birds that ...
— Australia Twice Traversed, The Romance of Exploration • Ernest Giles

... evenly parted hair, and pen-wiper cloak could be traced to these same old-fashioned ideas. These idiosyncrasies excited no comment so far as Nathan was concerned. He was always looked upon as belonging to some antediluvian period, but with a progressive man like Richard the case, his neighbors thought, might ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith

... discordance that went by that name, was furnished by two cowboys with banjos and an antediluvian gentleman with a fiddle. Nevertheless, it was music that could be danced to, and there ...
— The Rustlers of Pecos County • Zane Grey

... on with the history of our day. After coffee, Madame de Vinde sits down at a round table in the middle of the room, and out of a work-basket, which is just the shape of an antediluvian work-basket of mine, made of orange-paper and pasteboard, which lived long in the garret, she takes her tapestry work: a chair-cover of which she works the little blue flowers, and M. Morel de Vinde, pair de France, ...
— The Life And Letters Of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 1 • Maria Edgeworth

... fact that, in this remote corner of the world, she represented the sole bit of feminine companionship which is the rightful heritage of every son of Eve. True, there was Miss Arthur; but Miss Arthur was antediluvian. Under these conditions, it was galling to Weldon to see Ethel absorbed by a comrade who, he frankly admitted to himself, was far the more personable man of the two. And the girl's blue eyes had ...
— On the Firing Line • Anna Chapin Ray and Hamilton Brock Fuller

... the curiosities of Llangollen mentioned by Miss Seward in her letters, about the year 1760. I mentioned to you in a former letter the effect they produced upon me in public, but never shall I forget the first burst yesterday upon entering the drawing-room: to find the dear antediluvian darlings, attired for dinner in the same manified dress, with the Croix de St. Louis, and other orders, and myriads of large brooches, with stones large enough for snuff-boxes, stuck in their starched neckcloths! I have not room to describe their most fascinating ...
— The "Ladies of Llangollen" • John Hicklin

... for a giraffe, as endeavor to impose a Papist upon him for a true follower of King William. He could have given you more generic distinctions to guide you in the decision than ever did Cuvier to designate an antediluvian mammoth; so that no sooner had he seated himself upon the coach than he buttoned up his great-coat, stuck his hands firmly in his side-pockets, pursed up his lips, and looked altogether like a man that, feeling ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever

... the sea, just off the coast, the mother-subs had touched their blunt nose against the upward shelving of the sea bottom—had touched bottom, and were slowly but surely following the underwater curve of the land, up toward the surface, like unbelievable antediluvian monsters out ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science April 1930 • Various

... possible. The foreman has sent to London for more hands. I've wired the Bardsleys, telling them we've got to hurry up. It's always the way with these swells; when they want anything, they want it all in a minute. Something like ham and eggs! Rather different to the measly rasher and the antediluvian eggs from the grocer's opposite. But you don't seem to be very keen?" he added, as Nell pushed her plate away and absently took a slice of toast. "Miss the good old London air, Nell, or the appetizing smells of ...
— Nell, of Shorne Mills - or, One Heart's Burden • Charles Garvice

... you really wish it.' So he accompanied Mr Tigg to the retreat in question; on arriving at which place that gentleman took from his hat what seemed to be the fossil remains of an antediluvian pocket-handkerchief, and wiped ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens

... continent of Atlantis, that Ouranos, one of the Atlantean kings, ordered his whole army to be circumcised that they might escape a fatal scourge then decimating the people to their westward.[3] This tradition tells us that the hygienic benefits of circumcision were recognized antediluvian facts, as it also points out the way by which circumcision traveled westward across to the Western World. As Donnelly has pointed out, many of the Americans possessed not only traditions, habits, and customs that must have come from the Old World, but the similarity ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino

... ever since the shock of my first appearance was surmounted, she has contrived to vote me a nonentity; and that she may annihilate me completely, she has chosen, of all occupations, that of working a stocking! From what cursed old antediluvian, who lived before the invention of spinning-jennies, she learned this craft, Heaven only knows; but there she sits, with her work pinned to her knee—not the pretty taper silken fabric, with which Jeannette of Amiens coquetted, while Tristram ...
— St. Ronan's Well • Sir Walter Scott

... of old almost entirely by the arsenal works, is a desolate little stronghold among towering mountains, the ruins being in the foreground. The precipices on either side of the river belong to the Elk Ridge, through which, at some antediluvian period, the colossal current has hewed its way. At the base of the Virginia side of the mountains, hugged in by the Potomac and Shenandoah Rivers, and by Loudon and Bolivar ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various

... gradually by those singular steps, or ridges, formerly banks or shores oL antediluvian oceans, till it reaches the vicinity of the Holland river, a tortuous, sluggish, marshy, natural canal, flowing or lazily creeping into Lake Simcoe, at an elevation of upwards of seven-hundred and fifty feet above Lake Ontario, and emptying ...
— Canada and the Canadians - Volume I • Sir Richard Henry Bonnycastle

... Heyst across the table, the fingertips of one hand resting on the immaculate cloth. "A creature with an antediluvian lower jaw, hairy like a mastodon, and formed like a pre-historic ape, has laid this table. Are you awake, Lena? Am I? I would pinch myself, only I know that nothing would do away with this dream. Three covers. You know it is the shorter of the two ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad

... weather-stained, and it was apparent even to the casual eye of a landsman that she had left her girlhood behind her out on the Nor'-East Rough. Some of the younger trawlers would jeeringly refer to her behind her back as "Auntie," and affected to regard her as an antediluvian old dowager, which of course was mainly due to jealousy. But she still pegged away at her work, bringing in from the Dogger week by week her cargoes of fish, regardless alike of the ravages of time and the jibes of her upstart rivals. As long as her owners were satisfied ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 28th, 1920 • Various

... the intricate mazes of the forest; now diving down and disappearing altogether in the umbrageous foliage of a dell; anon reappearing on the other side and scrambling up the bank on all-fours, he and the canoe together looking like some frightful yellow reptile of antediluvian proportions; and then speeding rapidly forward over a level plain until he reached a sheet of still water above the rapids. Here he deposited his burden on the grass, and halting only for a few seconds to carry a few drops of the clear water to ...
— The Young Fur Traders • R.M. Ballantyne

... requisite, to furnish the bourgeois social system of France with fit surroundings of the European continent, and such as were in keeping with the times. Once the new social establishment was set on foot, the antediluvian giants vanished, and, along with them, the resuscitated Roman world—the Brutuses, Gracchi, Publicolas, the Tribunes, the Senators, and Caesar himself. In its sober reality, bourgeois society had produced its own true interpretation in the Says, Cousins, Royer-Collards, Benjamin Constants and Guizots; ...
— The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte • Karl Marx

... article on "Antediluvian Archaeology in its relation to Genesis and the Iliad," and now all that remains to do is to carry the rest of my books down to the new library, make catalogue, consider subjects for five more speeches, write thirty-six letters and postcards, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., November 8, 1890 • Various

... tales of Bagdad,' the court poets of Al Mamoun (son of the far-famed Haroun al Raschid) 'drew gorgeous pictures of the contents of the pyramid's interior.... All the treasures of Sheddad Ben Ad the great Antediluvian king of the earth, with all his medicines and all his sciences, they declared were there, told over and over again. Others, though, were positive that the founder-king was no other than Saurid Ibn Salhouk, a far greater one than the other; and these last gave many more minute particulars, ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor

... brother to the judge, and younger than he by five years, was a married man, and had had children around his hearthstone; but they were attacked in detail by measles, croup, and scarlet fever, and this had given the doctor a chance with his effective antediluvian methods; so the cradles were empty. He was a prosperous man, with a good head for speculations, and his fortune was growing. On the first of February, 1830, two boy babes were born in his house; one to him, one to one of his slave girls, Roxana by name. Roxana was twenty years old. She ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... hear his own thoughts. She menaces everything she meets: now she looks as though she would grind to bits the salambaw, insecure fishing apparatus which in their movements resemble skeletons of giants saluting an antediluvian tortoise; now she speeds straight toward the clumps of bamboo or against the amphibian structures, karihan, or wayside lunch-stands, which, amid gumamelas and other flowers, look like indecisive bathers who with their feet ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal

... abnegation, abstract *Ad to adduce, adjacent, affect, accede *Ante before antediluvian, anteroom *Bi two biped, bicycle *Circum around circumambient, circumference *Cum, com, with, together combine, consort, coadjutor con, co *Contra against contradict, contrast *De from, negative deplete, decry, demerit, declaim down, intensive *Di, dis asunder, ...
— The Century Vocabulary Builder • Creever & Bachelor

... invites his feet; and now our steady approach compels him to seek a new retreat. It is a bird of the oldest Thalesian school, and no doubt believes in the priority of water to the other elements; the relic of a twilight antediluvian age which yet inhabits these bright American rivers with us Yankees. There is something venerable in this melancholy and contemplative race of birds, which may have trodden the earth while it was yet in a slimy and imperfect state. Perchance their tracks too are still visible on ...
— A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers • Henry David Thoreau

... If the antediluvian sinners were any thing like the modern ones, Noah must have been richer than the Rothschilds, or he never could have obtained their services; which he must have done, or it could never be truthfully said, "according to all that God commanded him, ...
— The Deluge in the Light of Modern Science - A Discourse • William Denton

... performance was admitted at Somerset Place[631]. The subject, as I recollect, was the Deluge, at that point of time when the water was verging to the top of the last uncovered mountain. Near to the spot was seen the last of the antediluvian race, exclusive of those who were saved in the ark of Noah. This was one of those giants, then the inhabitants of the earth, who had still strength to swim, and with one of his hands held aloft his infant ...
— Life Of Johnson, Volume 4 (of 6) • Boswell

... take sword and spear and free the suffering village and win deathless fame; and each night's heated discussion always ended in nothing. Meanwhile the dragon, a happy Bohemian, lolled on the turf, enjoyed the sunsets, told antediluvian anecdotes to the Boy, and polished his old verses while ...
— Dream Days • Kenneth Grahame

... a promise of somewhat more than antediluvian longevity. But the poet proved a false prophet, for Mr. Haldane did not survive the delivery of this ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 2, 1917 • Various

... own discourses, which, from its superior tone and appearance of vast experience, I concluded to have been written by a man at least three hundred years of age, though I recollected no existing instance of such antediluvian longevity. Nevertheless, I afterwards discovered the author to be a young gentleman preparing for the ministry under the direction of one of my brethren in a neighbouring town, and whom I had once instinctively corrected in a Latin quantity. But this I have ...
— The Biglow Papers • James Russell Lowell

... of sacrifice, streaming up and mingling with the rays of the rising sun. His noble family, and all flesh saved, are grouped round about him. There is Ham, at the foot of the green hillock, standing, in his antediluvian, rakish recklessness, near the long-necked giraffe, type of his Africa,—his magnificent wife, seated on the grass, her little feet nestling in the tame lion's mane, her long black hair flowing over crimson drapery and covered with gems from ...
— Slavery Ordained of God • Rev. Fred. A. Ross, D.D.

... thought I was on a camel's back, pursuing Jacqueline's abductors through the hot sands of an Egyptian desert; sometimes I was on shipboard, sinking in a tropical sea, beneath which amid the marl and ooze of delta depositions, hideous, antediluvian creatures, with faces like that of Leroux, writhed and stretched up their tentacles ...
— Jacqueline of Golden River • H. M. Egbert

... Mehrman Singh. His face was seamed with smallpox marks, and he had seven or eight black patches on it the first time I saw him, caused by the splintering of his flint when he let off his antediluvian gun. When he saw my breechloaders, the first he had ever beheld, his admiration was unbounded. He told me he had come on a leopard asleep in the forest one day, and crept up quite close to him. His faith in his old gun, however, was not so lively as to make him rashly ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis

... that would make it harder to find a taxi. It would happen, now of all times! Ten minutes passed, then up the street chug-chugged a somewhat battered motor-vehicle with the apache hanging on the step. Yes, it was a taxi, an antediluvian one, but she must not be critical. If a chariot offered one a lift out of hell, one would not stop to inquire its horse-power. The apache helped her in and closed the door. She turned grateful eyes on him through the ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell

... ignorant of, and who sent her no diamonds, and not even any flowers. But he was young and good-looking, and stood so retiringly, and so evidently in love, at the small side door of the Opera House every night, when she got out of her antediluvian rickety fly, and also when she got into it again after the performance, that she could not help noticing him. Soon, he began to follow her wherever she went, and once he summoned up courage to speak to her, when she ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant

... more like the tapering tail of an anaconda, than the broad palms of the true whale's majestic flukes. But go to the old Galleries, and look now at a great Christian painter's portrait of this fish; for he succeeds no better than the antediluvian Hindoo. It is Guido's picture of Perseus rescuing Andromeda from the sea-monster or whale. Where did Guido get the model of such a strange creature as that? Nor does Hogarth, in painting the same scene in his own Perseus Descending, make ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville

... same regions, and must have come from elsewhere." Geoffrey Saint Hilaire opposed to Cuvier's inductive treatment of the question the following expression of belief: "I have no doubt that existing animals are directly descended from the animals of the antediluvian world," but added, "it is my belief that the season has not yet arrived for a ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various

... painting-rooms right and left, above and below, but the dirtiest room of all was that in which lumps of clay lay casually about on tables and rests and on the floor, where embryonic things perched upon tripods, like antediluvian birds and saurians, and where the daughters of Praxiteles and sons of Phidias pursued their claggy but fascinating studies under a sculptor who possessed the inestimable gift of teaching more than he knew himself. It was all very unromantic. Strange how ugliness ...
— The Orchard of Tears • Sax Rohmer

... of. geological arrangement of. incrustations of. nature of. subterranean fires in. caverns of. varieties of. worship of. antediluvian. auriferous. of Cabo Blanco. which compose the island of Teneriffe. of the plains. painted ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V3 • Alexander von Humboldt

... good time, my antediluvian friend. When I've wound up my business here I'll go—not before. But, just to oblige you, we'll get down to it.... Kirkwood, you have a revolver of mine. Be good enough to ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance

... a little adventure. As he cantered up to London with two servants and a post-boy, all riding on horses ordered in relays beforehand, he came up with an antediluvian coach, stuck fast by the road-side. Looking into the window, with the humane design of quizzing the elders who should be there, he saw a young lady of surpassing beauty. This altered the case; Sir Charles instantly drew ...
— Peg Woffington • Charles Reade

... terrific sacrifice of at least two hundred and fifty thousand souls, to say nothing of herds and flocks past all reckoning. These had all perished: ox, 10 cow, horse, mule, ass, sheep, or goat, not one survived—only the camels. These arid and adust creatures, looking like the mummies of some antediluvian animals, without the affections or sensibilities of flesh and blood—these only still erected their speaking eyes to the eastern 15 heavens, and had to all appearance come out from this long tempest of trial unscathed and hardly diminished. The Khan, knowing ...
— De Quincey's Revolt of the Tartars • Thomas De Quincey

... shading off to a dirty whitish-grey beneath, with a long tail broad and flat at its extremity, and with four seal-like flippers instead of legs and feet, the monsters looked more like nightmare creatures, evolved by reading a book on antediluvian animals after a—. Of course, that was it, Escombe decided, as his thoughts took some such turn as above. He now distinctly remembered having read some years ago a most interesting illustrated magazine article upon extinct animals, and one of the pictures portrayed ...
— Harry Escombe - A Tale of Adventure in Peru • Harry Collingwood

... state, instead of endeavouring to bring it round by a few fallow years and manure, as in England, they immediately cleared a fresh tract. They now begin to use manure, and have discovered a very extraordinary kind; viz. antediluvian oyster-shells, large beds of which are found a few feet beneath the surface of the earth in several parts of the state[Footnote: See Bartram's Account of a similar Bed in Georgia, page 213.]: these being laid on the land, are, by the effect of ...
— Travels in the United States of America • William Priest

... to extricate myself, and advanced with awful admiration through the vast avenues of the library. I perceived on every side innumerable volumes and repositories of ancient learning, and all the science of the Antediluvian world. Here I met with Hermes Trismegistus, and a parcel of old philosophers debating upon the politics and learning of their days. I gave them inexpressible delight in telling them, in a few words, all the discoveries of Newton, and ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen • Rudolph Erich Raspe

... antediluvian you are! No doubt he did like her,—after his fashion; though what he saw in her, I never could tell. I think Miss Morris would make a very nice wife for a country clergyman who didn't care how poor things were. But she has no style;—and as far as I ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope

... much of a pet with the human beings of old, unless "there were giants in those days," and enormous ones at that. How Owen must have gloated over that treasure-trove! Captain Kyd's buried booty would have been worse trash to him than Iago's stolen purse, beside this unearthed deposit of an antediluvian age. Its missing caudal vertebrae would outweigh now, in his anatomical scales, all the hidden gains of the whole race of pirates, past, present, and to come. Think of those bones with all the original muscle upon them! Why, they would outweigh all the worthy members of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various

... few centuries after the flood, while some who had witnessed the sin and the destruction of the antediluvian world were still living, Jehovah saw fit, in accordance with his designs of eternal wisdom, to separate Abraham from his brethren, calling upon him to leave the land of his birth and go out into a strange land, to dwell in a far country. He was to pass the rest of ...
— Notable Women of Olden Time • Anonymous

... to visit me here, and from whose visit I have received all that pleasure which I do from whatever comes from you, and especially from a subject so deservedly dear to you. He found me in a retirement I doat on, living like an antediluvian patriarch among my children and grandchildren, and tilling my soil. As he had lately come from Philadelphia, Boston, &c. he was able to give me a great deal of information of what is passing in the world, and I pestered him with questions pretty much as our friends Lynch, Nelson, &c. will us, ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson

... needed, which it was not, and masses of umbrageous plants with large yellow flowers grew along the banks, while, down among the underwood, giant roots rose in fantastic convolutions above ground, as if the earth were already too full, and there wasn't room for the whole of them. There was an antediluvian magnificence, a prehistoric snakiness, a sort of primeval running-to-seedness, which filled Harold and Disco with feelings of awe, and induced a strange, almost unnatural tendency to regard Adam and Eve as ...
— Black Ivory • R.M. Ballantyne

... as it regards the separating of metals from foreign matters in the ore, smelting and refining them, is of the highest antiquity; it is even supposed to have been understood and practised in the antediluvian world. ...
— A Catechism of Familiar Things; Their History, and the Events Which Led to Their Discovery • Benziger Brothers

... people in this trying hour? Did He forget faithful Noah when judgments were visited upon the antediluvian world? Did He forget Lot when the fire came down from heaven to consume the cities of the plain? Did He forget Joseph surrounded by idolaters in Egypt? Did He forget Elijah when the oath of Jezebel threatened him with the fate of the prophets of Baal? Did ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White

... first, whoever reads Dr. Prichard's[14] account of the contents of the earliest chronicles, consisting, amongst other matters, of an antediluvian Caesar; a landing of Partholanus with his wife Ealga, on the coast of Connemara, twelve years after the Deluge, and on the 14th of May; the colony of the Neimhidh, descendants of Gog and Magog; the Fir-Bolg from the ...
— The Ethnology of the British Islands • Robert Gordon Latham

... rather heavy gentleman is carried by fifteen men; each of the ladies by half-a-dozen. We who walk, make the best use of our staves; and so the whole party begin to labor upward over the snow—as if they were toiling to the summit of an antediluvian Twelfth-cake. ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Vol VIII - Italy and Greece, Part Two • Various

... satisfaction at least of getting up plenty of excitement. What transpired in that fatal interview between him and the ruling elder could never be accurately learned from the former. When questioned upon the subject, he confined his remarks to dark hints regarding antediluvian pig-headedness and backwoods ignorance, but Wee Andra, who in his heart was rather proud of his sire's fighting qualities, spread the account of the schoolmaster's defeat over the whole neighbourhood, with the result that for a season the agitators left ...
— Duncan Polite - The Watchman of Glenoro • Marian Keith

... peace and beauty. The vast expanse of water was without a ripple, mirroring all the changing shades of the sunset glow. Miles and miles of a desolate sandbank lay like a huge amphibious reptile of some antediluvian age, with its scales glistening in shining colours. As our boat was silently gliding by the precipitous river-bank, riddled with the nest-holes of a colony of birds, suddenly a big fish leapt up to the surface of the water and then disappeared, displaying on its vanishing figure all the ...
— Sadhana - The Realisation of Life • Rabindranath Tagore

... usually the eldest son of the former. A number of families under their respective patriarchs constituted a tribe, and from the family patriarchs was selected a prince for the whole tribe. Among the antediluvian patriarchs were Adam, Seth, Enoch and Noah. Those after the flood were Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and each of the twelve sons of Jacob. After Jacob's death, it is most likely that Joseph acted, in some sense, as the prince of the tribe during his lifetime. Then ...
— The Theology of Holiness • Dougan Clark

... highest peaks and ridges, as well as the deepest valleys and ravines, were covered with the embowering forest; but here and there a huge boss of granite or porphyry reared its bare scalp out of the verdure like the head and shoulders of some antediluvian monster. The gigantic palms and foliage trees, all tufted with air-plants or strangled with climbers, were literally buried in flowers of every hue, and the crown of the forest rolled under us like a sea of blossoms. Every moment one enchanting prospect after another opened to our wondering ...
— A Trip to Venus • John Munro

... such monsters in the early geologic periods, at least there was plenty of possibility. In England there were originally vast plains where the plentiful supply of water could gather. The streams were deep and slow, and there were holes of abysmal depth, where any kind and size of antediluvian monster could find a habitat. In places, which now we can see from our windows, were mud-holes a hundred or more feet deep. Who can tell us when the age of the monsters which flourished in slime came to an end? There ...
— The Lair of the White Worm • Bram Stoker

... everybody. But, in truth, by so doing they would by no means please the Duke. He had told them on previous occasions that they might elect whom they pleased, and felt no anger because they had elected a Conservative. They might send up to Parliament the most antediluvian old Tory they could find in England if they wished, only not his son, not a Palliser as a Tory or Conservative. And then, though the little town had gone back in the ways of the world, the county, or the Duke's division of ...
— The Duke's Children • Anthony Trollope

... "Your informant was careful not to overstep the truth. It is marvelous—exquisite—her voice," says the Italian, with such unrepressed enthusiasm as makes Luttrell smile. "These antediluvian attachments," thinks he, ...
— Molly Bawn • Margaret Wolfe Hamilton

... to his cabin for a gun he always kept loaded. The doctor armed himself, and held himself in readiness to fire upon an animal which, by its dimensions, recalled the antediluvian quadrupeds. He neared the ship in immense leaps; Shandon and the doctor fired at the same time, when, suddenly, the report of their firearms, shaking the atmospheric stratum, produced an unexpected effect. The doctor looked attentively, ...
— The English at the North Pole - Part I of the Adventures of Captain Hatteras • Jules Verne

... sir," said Goggins, "in the first place, it is quite beautiful to see the mind in adversity bearing up against the little antediluvian afflictions that will happen occasionally, and then how fine it is to remark the spark of generosity that kindles in the noble heart and rushes to the assistance of the destitute! I do assure you, sir, it is a most beautiful sight to see ...
— Handy Andy, Vol. 2 - A Tale of Irish Life • Samuel Lover



Words linked to "Antediluvian" :   oldster, old person, senior citizen, golden ager, patriarch, old, diluvial



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