"Antediluvian" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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, and tore up the smaller ones by the roots, and so ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin
... the exhumation there of numerous animal and vegetable remains. As an additional fact I inform you, that, at about three hundred feet below the surface of the sand-bank, (of which the island is composed,) there is a vast prostrate antediluvian forest, masses of which are being continually developed by the influence of marine agency, and exhibit highly singular appearances. When the workmen were employed some years back in sinking a well to supply the garrison ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, - Issue 282, November 10, 1827 • Various
... to the entrance. Rain had begun to fall, 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 open window and with ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... moving back showed that the barge was not standing still but moving. The ferrymen swung the oars evenly in time; Semyon lay with his stomach on the tiller and, describing a semicircle in the air, flew from one side to the other. In the darkness it looked as though the men were sitting on some antediluvian animal with long paws, and were moving on it through a cold, desolate land, the land of which one sometimes ...
— The Schoolmistress and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... 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 and long ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss
... All the branches, however, were gone; the tree had been uprooted, transported, whirled and worn by deluges; then to commemorate the victory of the water sprites, it had been changed into stone. The sight of these remnants of antediluvian woodlands made history seem the reminiscence of a child. They were already petrifactions when the human ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... powdered and plaited, stood out stiff from the back of his head, as if in perpetual protest against any new-fangled notions of hair-dressing; his livery, scrupulously neat and well brushed, was threadbare and of an antediluvian cut, and his whole appearance was that of highly respectable antediluvianism. As he stood there with his antique and venerable figure his whole face fairly beamed with delight at seeing ...
— The Cryptogram - A Novel • James De Mille
... is 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 has been tching-tchinging at every ...
— The Adventures of a Special Correspondent • Jules Verne
... is put into the town now and then by very 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, remain ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 1 • Horace Walpole
... legends do not speak of an antediluvian race, nor of any family who escaped the waters. Michabo, the spirit of the dawn, their supreme deity, alone existed, and by his power formed and peopled it. Nor did their neighbors, the Dakotas, though firm in the belief that the globe had ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... "Laws, mamma, how 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 ...
— The Eustace Diamonds • Anthony Trollope
... The antediluvian waiters come in to lay the table presently, and I ordered peaches and grapes and some very special chablis—I felt exultant at my having manoeuvred that Miss Sharp ...
— Man and Maid • Elinor Glyn
... 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 ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... 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 Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 13, No. 76, February, 1864 • Various
... the 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 ...
— Legends Of Babylon And Egypt - In Relation To Hebrew Tradition • Leonard W. King
... 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 crash, Steve became conscious of another sound, dull and distant ...
— The Long Roll • Mary Johnston
... 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 ...
— A House-Boat on the Styx • John Kendrick Bangs
... adjusting himself as well as possible, "I must resign myself. But here's a strange nuptial night. 'Tis a pity. There was something innocent and antediluvian about that broken ...
— Notre-Dame de Paris - The Hunchback of Notre Dame • Victor Hugo
... is. I work in the primary colors. If you should prefer something a little less advanced...." He waved his maulstick vaguely, as if in reference to the professorial practice of Munich, or to the antediluvian school of England. ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller
... relation are very strong—and cleave to his wife—with whom it may be he has but a few weeks' acquaintance—and they two shall be one flesh. What therefore God hath joined together let no man put asunder." But if the cause had no existence, save in the brain of some antediluvian novel-writer, and God did not so unite them, the consequence is only a notion also, and any man may leave his wife ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... up), this did not prevent at least one representative of the navy from passing that barrier. This was the Australian submarine, A2. It may not be generally known that Australia had two submarines at the outbreak of war. These would appear antediluvian alongside the latest underwater monster, but, nevertheless, one of these accomplished a feat such as no German submarine has ever approached. The first of our submarines met an unknown fate as it disappeared somewhere ...
— "Over There" with the Australians • R. Hugh Knyvett
... conditions, a larger number of messages, tests, and visions seen are of this nature and character—the symbolism often being so elaborate that the original thought is not perceived. As Mr. Coates remarked: "When a 'psychometer' places a geological specimen to his forehead, and describes an 'antediluvian monster,' roaring and walking about, no one but a very shallow individual would imagine for a moment that the psychometer was actually seeing the original," but rather that he obtained a faint and dream-like impression of the world at that epoch, and his subconscious impression was ...
— The Problems of Psychical Research - Experiments and Theories in the Realm of the Supernormal • Hereward Carrington
... curious and important observations on this Vesuvius, and its seven several great eruptions, with their remains vitrified, and still existing, in so many different strata under ground, till the diggers came to the antediluvian waters, with their proportionable interstices, implying the deluge to have been above two thousand five hundred years before the Christian era, according to ...
— The Antiquities of the Jews • Flavius Josephus
... dusty, primitive roads and quaint bullock carts, that were hewn out of soft wood and joined together with thongs of rawhide and built without the vestige of iron or other metal. There were the same antediluvian plows, made of two sticks, as used in ancient Egypt at the time of the Exodus, when Moses led the Jews out of captivity to their Promised Land. The very atmosphere, so dry and exhilarating, seemed strange. In this transparent air, ...
— Tales of Aztlan • George Hartmann
... 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 ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... in particular, I had copied with tolerable exactness from a notice of one of my 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 neighboring town, and whom I had once instinctively corrected in a Latin quantity. But this I have been forced to omit, from ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... Professor Sayce, and did more literary work "under great difficulties" at the Bodleian, though he escaped all the evil effects; but against its wretched accommodation for students and its antediluvian methods he never ceased to inveigh. Early in August he was at Ramsgate and had the amusement of mixing with a Bank Holiday crowd. But he was amazingly restless, and wanted to be continually in motion. No place pleased him more than a day ...
— The Life of Sir Richard Burton • Thomas Wright
... hillside, and displacements of the red soil, resembling more the chaos of some primary elemental upheaval than the work of man; while halfway down, a long flume straddled its narrow body and disproportionate legs over the chasm, like an enormous fossil of some forgotten antediluvian. At every step smaller ditches crossed the road, hiding in their sallow depths unlovely streams that crept away to a clandestine union with the great yellow torrent below, and here and there were the ruins of some cabin ...
— Selected Stories • Bret Harte
... construction and design throughout their arts, which have shown but few moments of change in growth—scarcely a sign of evolution. And we may fairly surmise that this Accadian culture (if such it be) is reflected from antediluvian tradition. ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... life in the pathetic old society was its real interest in the antediluvian and prehistoric. For the life that was dead it had a perfect passion, and it sometimes held conversaziones to gaze at it through microscopes. Occasionally it would waken up to literature with a paper on Akenside. In everything that didn't in the least matter some of these mild ...
— The Romance of Zion Chapel [3d ed.] • Richard Le Gallienne
... companion. He liked the girl for herself, as well as for the 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 laughed up into the eyes of the stranger just exactly as, two short weeks before, ...
— On the Firing Line • Anna Chapin Ray and Hamilton Brock Fuller
... years ago the earth was washed with the regenerating waters of a terrible flood. Millions were suddenly cut off, with their handiwork and antediluvian civilisation. The swelling floods subsided, and the God-avenging waters retired to their appointed place. The earth again stood forth in virgin strength, lonely, bare, and citiless, but with a potency and promise inviting and grand. Across these swelling floods one craft ...
— The Lost Ten Tribes, and 1882 • Joseph Wild
... arrived within a cast of the mill, he took a coil of the anchor-rope in his right hand; a hook was fastened to its end. The rudderless mass came quickly nearer, like some drifting antediluvian monster—blind chance guided it; its paddle-wheel turned swiftly with the motion of the water, and under the empty out-shoot the mill-stone revolved over the flour-bin as ...
— Timar's Two Worlds • Mr Jkai
... insulators above the mountain of snow. The 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 ...
— Over Prairie Trails • Frederick Philip Grove
... received 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 ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume I. (of X.) • Various
... says Professor Smyth, 'the enchanted 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; ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... on account of the scarcity of reindeer and the dangerous condition of the mountain passes. The task of conveying the mammoth, even as far as this point, had been an almost super-human one, but no trouble or expense had been spared in the preservation of this antediluvian monster, which is undoubtedly the most perfect specimen of its kind ever brought to light. The animal was found frozen into a huge block of ice, as it had evidently fallen from a cliff overhead, for the forelegs were broken and there ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... the very depths of that pleasant little garden, where it would play in the waters 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 ...
— The Magic Skin • Honore de Balzac
... who had strict views on this matter, as the literature of his day proves—astrology, too, having held a prominent place in most of the gardening books of the same period. Michael Drayton, who has chronicled so many of the credulities of his time, referring to the longevity of antediluvian ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer
... for a time buried my bulls and all beneath a heap of learning. However, I contrived 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 ...
— The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen • Rudolph Erich Raspe
... the dolmens (rude altars of unhewn stone) of the primitive inhabitants of Gaul, Britain, and Germany. The human bones, therefore, in the caves which are associated with such fabricated objects, must belong not to antediluvian periods, but to a people in the same stage of civilization as those who constructed the ...
— The Antiquity of Man • Charles Lyell
... that my father could not get near enough to see what it contained, but I may say here, that when, two days later, circumstances compelled him to have a close look at it, he saw that it consisted of about a dozen fine coprolites, deposited by some antediluvian creature or creatures, which, whatever else they may have been, were certainly ...
— Erewhon Revisited • Samuel Butler
... with His aid, in the most corrupt period of human history. Noah, Abraham, and Moses did not stand more isolated amidst universal wickedness than did the Phrygian slave and the imperial master of the world. And as the piety of Noah could not save the antediluvian empires, as the faith of Abraham could not convert idolatrous nations, as the wisdom of Moses could not prevent the sensualism of emancipated slaves, so the lofty philosophy of Aurelius could not save the Empire which he ruled. And yet the piety of Noah, the faith of ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume IV • John Lord
... 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 ...
— De Quincey's Revolt of the Tartars • Thomas De Quincey
... This, if anything, seems to have been an antediluvian conception; for we find primitive men thinking that almost everything is significant and can exert influence of some sort. The search for the more definite influences seems to have started in the question: "Who, or what, is to blame?"—for any illness, ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... 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 ...
— Around the World with Josiah Allen's Wife • Marietta Holley
... exterior, certainly applied to himself as well. His carriage was full of dignity, and a certain rustic refinement; his voice was wonderfully gentle, but deep; and slowest when most impassioned. He seemed to have come of some gigantic antediluvian breed: there was something of the Titan slumbering about him. He would have been a stern man, but for an unusual amount of reverence that seemed to overflood the sternness, and change it into strong love. No one had ever seen him thoroughly angry; his simple displeasure ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... distance of a mile eastward, is cleanly cut as that of a marble inlay. It is varied with protuberances, which from hereabouts have the animal aspect of warts, wens, knuckles, and hips. It may indeed be likened to an enormous many- limbed organism of an antediluvian time—partaking of the cephalopod in shape—lying lifeless, and covered with a thin green cloth, which hides its substance, while revealing its contour. This dull green mantle of herbage stretches down towards the levels, ...
— A Changed Man and Other Tales • Thomas Hardy
... or the 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
... out the nature of the 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
... are on one leg, when even the little armadillo is quiet, and the monkeys have ceased their chatter, he — I mean the hippopotamus — and the elephant, and the long-necked giraffe, perhaps may lay their heads together and have a colloquy about the great silent antediluvian world which they remember, where mighty monsters floundered through the ooze, crocodiles basked on the banks, and dragons darted out of the caves and waters before men were made to slay them. We who lived before railways ...
— Some Roundabout Papers • W. M. Thackeray
... himself with the celestial intelligences, possessed the philosopher's stone—he could cure all diseases, and prolong life to as many centuries as he pleased; it being by the very same means that Adam and the antediluvian patriarchs prolonged theirs. Life was an emanation from the stars—the sun governed the heart, and the moon the brain. Jupiter governed the liver, Saturn the gall, Mercury the lungs, Mars the bile, ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay
... 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. ...
— Jorrocks' Jaunts and Jollities • Robert Smith Surtees
... given with more than Talmudic exaggeration in the Targum of Jonathan ben Uzziel, while the author of the Book of Jasher (chap. lxv., verses 23, 24) makes the camp and the mountain forty miles in extent. The giant here figures in antediluvian tradition. He is said to have been saved at the Flood by laying hold of the ark, and being fed day by day through a hole in the side of the ark by Noah himself. A tradition which says the soles of his feet ...
— Hebraic Literature; Translations from the Talmud, Midrashim and - Kabbala • Various
... Josephus, and afterwards by Servius, in his notes on Virgil. Pausanius, Philostratus, Pliny and several other writers give us accounts of the remains of gigantic bodies which have been found in the earth, serving in some degree to confirm Moses' account of the antediluvian giants. Berosus, the Chaldean historian, quoted by Josephus, and Abidenus by Eusebius, Plutarch, Lucian, Molo, Nicholas Damascenus, as well as many of the heathen poets, mention the deluge; and some traditions respecting it are to be found among the Americans ...
— Museum of Antiquity - A Description of Ancient Life • L. W. Yaggy
... coexistent with the ordinary races, but liable to be absorbed and gradually lost by intermarriage amongst other tribes of the ordinary standard. Occasional exhumations of such Titan skeletons would strengthen the common prejudice. They would be taken, not for a local variety, but for an antediluvian or prehistoric type, from which the present races of man had arisen ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... The inhabitants of 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, whom He ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... as you see, a bower of dreams. In the heart of Venice could I have erected a better? You behold around you, it is true, a medley of architectural embellishments. The chastity of Ionia is offended by antediluvian devices, and the sphynxes of Egypt are outstretched upon carpets of gold. Yet the effect is incongruous to the timid alone. Proprieties of place, and especially of time, are the bugbears which terrify mankind from the contemplation of the magnificent. ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... where numerous evergreens were sweetly contrasted and mingled with the various shades of autumnal yellow. Flocks of aquatic birds enlivened the rocky shores, and the whole country resounded with the wild notes of the feathered tribe.... The view of rude sceneries in the style of Rosa, of antediluvian forests which clothed the rock, and of numerous rills of water which everywhere rolled down the steep declivity, altogether conspired ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... 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 must ...
— The Lair of the White Worm • Bram Stoker
... of Righteousness; to have been in a sense the disciple, as he was the most illustrious antitype of Christ, even centuries previous to his incarnation! The cross is indeed the centre of union and the point of attraction to all ages and nations. There the antediluvian and patriarchal saints associate with those of later times, imbibing one spirit, coalescing upon one principle, meeting in one sacred spot, conjoined in one fraternal band! The wise and the good of a former dispensation looked forward with anticipating pleasure to the ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox
... 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
... 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 itself ...
— Canada and the Canadians - Volume I • Sir Richard Henry Bonnycastle
... of the party, were successively asked their opinions. One of the young ladies guessed it to be the petrifaction of an antediluvian mussel. Lord Curryfin said petrifactions were often siliceous, but never pure silex; which this purported to be. It gave him the idea of an ass's head; which, however, could not by any process ...
— Gryll Grange • Thomas Love Peacock
... dried it in the sun, and then baked it under a bonfire, like in Foul Play. And most of the things were such queer shapes that they should have done for almost anything—Roman or Greek, or even Egyptian or antediluvian, or household milk-jugs of the cavemen, Albert's uncle said. The pots were, fortunately, quite ready and dirty, because we had already buried them in mixed sand and river mud to improve the colour, and not remembered to ...
— The Wouldbegoods • E. Nesbit
... long staircases, I was confronted with a pale, thin man, of calm, gentlemanly bearing, with the unmistakable stamp of culture upon his brow. He shook my hand with grave politeness, and pointing to a huge arm-chair of antediluvian make, invited me to be seated. The large, low-ceiled room was filled with furniture of the most fantastic styles;—tables and chairs with twisted legs and scrolls of tarnished gilt; a solid-looking, elaborately carved chiffonier, ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... that they did not exist in the 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
... silence 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
... take my chances in an antediluvian rattle-trap like that," said the tall wayfarer, bending quite close to her ear. "It will fall to pieces ...
— Green Fancy • George Barr McCutcheon
... 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 or for ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... are too many, and willy- nilly they'll drag down the would-be equestrian before ever he gets astride. You can't get away from them, and you'll have to swallow the whole slave-morality. It's not a nice mess, I'll allow. But it's been a- brewing and swallow it you must. You are antediluvian anyway, with your Nietzsche ideas. The past is past, and the man who says history repeats itself is a liar. Of course I don't like the crowd, but what's a poor chap to do? We can't have the man on horseback, ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... 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 an equally relentless consistency both ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... Ships.—In the history of mankind several vessels of extraordinary magnitude have been constructed, all distinctively styled great, and all unfortunately disastrous, with the honorable exception of Noah's Ark. Setting aside this antediluvian craft, concerning the authenticity of whose dimensions authorities differ, and which, if Biblical measures are correct, was inferior in size to the vessel of most importance to modern shipowners, the great galley, constructed by the great engineer Archimedes for the great King ...
— Burroughs' Encyclopaedia of Astounding Facts and Useful Information, 1889 • Barkham Burroughs
... gates from Highland Falls into the Government Reservation. We meant to arrive, shed the dust at our hotel, and then saunter forth for dress parade, but instead of that we had to see the great sight of the day sitting in our motors. The poor Hippopotamus did look antediluvian among all the smart cars and carriages assembled! But the rest of us weren't so bad, even after a day's run, and, anyhow, we had no time to think of ourselves, there was too much else ...
— The Lightning Conductor Discovers America • C. N. (Charles Norris) Williamson and A. M. (Alice Muriel)
... journey from Thomar to Lisbon, by Abrantes, at which place I saw an old gentleman in an antediluvian uniform, wearing his sword transversely like a powdered marquis in a play, advance towards me, and throw himself on his knees, embracing mine, and exclaiming, "Let me embrace the man who brought back Napoleon!" (Le conducteur de ...
— Memoirs • Prince De Joinville
... could never induce him to consider the chances of the various parties, nor to enlist in that one of them which seemed likely to carry the day. However, he still occasionally came to spend an evening in the yellow drawing-room. Granoux interested him like an antediluvian animal. ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... 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 out to be a canoe ...
— The Wild Man of the West - A Tale of the Rocky Mountains • R.M. Ballantyne
... I have desired to do this time? That which we have both been trying to do at one and the same time: to seize, in passing, these stirring times of ours, these modern manners, that society which perpetuates the antediluvian uproar, that feverish, bustling world always posing before the footlights, that market for the sale of appetites, that kirmess of pleasure that saddens us a little and amuses us a great deal, and allows us romance-writers, simple seekers after truth, to smile in our sleeves ...
— His Excellency the Minister • Jules Claretie
... on the Boulevard, which an enterprising Belgian had lately bought and was endeavouring to modernise; an old-fashioned hotel, that still clung to its ancient character in the presence of half a dozen old people, who, for antediluvian reasons, continue to dine on certain well-specified days at the table d'hôte. Fifteen years have passed away, and these old people, no doubt, have joined their ancestors; but I can see them still sitting in that salle à manger, the buffets en vieux chéne, the opulent candelabra ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore
... on the doctrine of metempsychosis, to which indeed my reader (if there shall ever be one) may perhaps not be inclined to give implicit belief. It is unnecessary for me, therefore, to begin by alluding to my former visit to this earth. I shall not even hint, whether if it ever took place, it was in antediluvian ages, or during the Babylonian, Grecian, or Roman glory; or in more modern times. Be assured, however, gentle reader, (if any there ever be,) that I have the faculty of observation—that I have seen many generations of men—that I have been in almost every corner of the habitable world, and ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 343, November 29, 1828 • Various
... what 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 unfortunate ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... 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 ...
— The Negro: what is His Ethnological Status? 2nd Ed. • Buckner H. 'Ariel' Payne
... patriarchs,—it is of wood, I grant you; but the house we build with our own hands is always a palace. Did you ever build one when you were a boy? And the lords of that palace are lords of the land almost as far as you can see, and of those numberless flocks; and, better still, of a health which an antediluvian might have envied, and of nerves so seasoned with horse-breaking, cattle-driving, fighting with wild blacks,—chases from them and after them, for life and for death,—that if any passion vex the breast of those kings of the Bushland, fear at least ...
— The Caxtons, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... words left his lips than a turn of the road brought them within sight of a great volume of black smoke rushing slowly but surely towards them; whilst a horrible roaring and howling, as of an antediluvian monster in its wrath, filled the silence of the summer afternoon with a hideous and ...
— Vera Nevill - Poor Wisdom's Chance • Mrs. H. Lovett Cameron
... Nathan was of the same mind. The wide hat, long, 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, ...
— The Fortunes of Oliver Horn • F. Hopkinson Smith
... discourse, I was able to recall every word of this, which is branded into my mind; and I am prepared, Socrates, to rehearse to you the entire narrative. The imaginary State which you were describing may be identified with the reality of Solon, and our antediluvian ancestors may be your citizens. 'That is excellent, Critias, and very appropriate to a Panathenaic festival; the truth of the story is a great advantage.' Then now let me explain to you the order of our entertainment; first, Timaeus, who is a natural philosopher, will speak of the ...
— Timaeus • Plato
... Frances. Not by a word or look has she shown the least inclination to assume the position of mistress of the house, nor does she seem to think me at all in the way; but that she considers me quite an antediluvian I am certain, for, in speaking of something which happened in 1820, she asked if I remembered it! And I only three years older than Guy! But then she once called him a dear old grandfatherly man, and thought it a good joke that on their wedding tour she ...
— Miss McDonald • Mary J. Holmes
... small tribute to progress. The rest threw solid shot for the most part. Imposing as they certainly looked, and heavier though they were than most of those with which the world's famous sea-fights have been fought, they were already antediluvian. A few years later I saw a long range of them enjoying their last repose on the skids in a navy-yard; and a bystander, with equal truth and irreverence, called them pop-guns. One almost felt that the word should be uttered in a whisper, out of respect ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan
... of the Cantab's carnal delights and intellectual jockeyism; The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green, an Oxford Freshman, wherein one 'Cuthbert Bede, B.A.' has by 'numerous illustrations' of numerous dissipations, given as good an idea as is desirable of the 'rowing men' in that very antediluvian receptacle of elegant scholarship; are all present evidences of the affectionate interest with which the graduate reverts to his college days. In like manner Student Life in Scotland has engaged ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... poet. Possibly some uninspired groveller, who has never climbed Parnassus, nor drunk of the Castalian spring, may murmur that this is very likely, for that all poetry is "moonstruck madness." Alas if such an antediluvian barbarian be permitted to "revisit thus the glimpses of the moon, making night hideous" as he mutters his horrid blasphemy! We, however, take a nobler view of the matter. To us the music of the spheres is exalting as it ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... 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" ...
— Stray Leaves from an Arctic Journal; • Sherard Osborn
... with Pope Gregory XVI. upon the Gallican propositions. He asserted that the Pope could not answer his arguments. He detracted, it is true, from the significance of his success by admitting that no one in Rome took him au serieux, and the residents in the Vatican made sport of him as being "an antediluvian." It is a pity-that they did not pay more heed to what he said. A complete change took place about 1840. The older members whose training dated from before the Revolution were dead, and the younger ones nearly all rallied to ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... 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 ...
— Black Ivory • R.M. Ballantyne
... the German poet, who was Berlioz's friend, called him a "colossal nightingale, a lark of eagle-size, such as they tell us existed in the primeval world." The poet goes on to say: "Berlioz's music, in general, has in it something primeval if not antediluvian to my mind; it makes me think of gigantic species of extinct animals, of fabulous empires full of fabulous sins, of heaped-up impossibilities; his magical accents call to our minds Babylon, the hanging gardens the wonders ...
— Great Italian and French Composers • George T. Ferris
... 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 ...
— The Young Fur Traders • R.M. Ballantyne
... gigantic ferns became more numerous. Among them were most curious pitcher-plants. They took the form of half-climbing shrubs, their pitchers, of various sizes and forms, hanging in numbers from their leaves. Every ridge was now crowned with gigantic ferns, which reminded us of the descriptions of the antediluvian world, when ferns appear to have been the chief vegetation which covered the surface of the globe.—I will not mention ...
— In the Eastern Seas • W.H.G. Kingston
... all the gamut of its vegetation, the wealth of the varied flora which climb its flanks from base to summit, and which range "from the scarlet flowers of the pomegranate to the violet of Mont Cenis and the Alpine forget-me-not" (4/18.), as well as the antediluvian fauna revealed amid its entrails, a vast ossuary rich ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... song books, Bibles and lesson sheets. There they sat in throbbing, quivering silence with the rest of the "entertainers," until the first strains of the piano solo broke forth, when they walked sedately out and took their seats along the side of the platform—an antediluvian custom which has long been discarded by everything ...
— Prudence Says So • Ethel Hueston
... broad swords made of black birch, the edges of which were inlaid with the teeth of animals, or the shells of fish, ground sharp. Besides these, were skulls of great size and in good preservation, stone pipes, pouches, and so on; also some enormous teeth and bones of an antediluvian animal, found in the Bras Dor lake in Cape Breton. It was, take it altogether, the most complete collection of relics of this interesting race, the Micmacs, and of natur's products to be found in this province. Some of the larger moose horns are ingeniously managed, so ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... 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 ...
— The Fortunes of the Farrells • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... manor consisting of a long chain of rocks and mountains called Tirzah. Shallum was "of gentle disposition, and beloved both by God and man." He was the lover of Hilpa, a Chinese antediluvian princess, one of the 150 daughters of Zilpah, of the race of Cohu or Cain.—Addison, Spectator, ...
— Character Sketches of Romance, Fiction and the Drama - A Revised American Edition of the Reader's Handbook, Vol. 3 • E. Cobham Brewer
... 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 ...
— Life of John Milton • Richard Garnett
... 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 ...
— Life And Adventures Of Martin Chuzzlewit • Charles Dickens
... and 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 these identical ...
— Harry Escombe - A Tale of Adventure in Peru • Harry Collingwood
... of making faithful and formative creatures of themselves, or unfaithful and de-formative. And this distinction between the creatures who, blessing, are blessed, and evermore benedicti, and the creatures who, cursing, are cursed, and evermore maledicti, is one going through all humanity; antediluvian in Cain and Abel, diluvian in Ham and Shem. And the question for the public of any given period is not whether they are a constitutional or unconstitutional vulgus, but whether they are a benignant or malignant vulgus. So also, whether it is indeed ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... conceptions, even as our own transcended the ideas of the previous orders of existence. Undoubtedly, had the ichthyosaurus, ploughing through the deep and making it boil like a pot, or one of those mammoth creatures of the antediluvian age who browsed half a dozen trees for breakfast, crunched a couple of oxen for luncheon and a whole flock of sheep for his dinner, been consulted on a similar problem, he would have replied, without hesitation, "I ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... 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 Thrace; the Tuatha de Danann from Athens; and, above all, ...
— The Ethnology of the British Islands • Robert Gordon Latham
... age commonly are, let some sparks escape into a bundle of straw, which kindling quickly, spread the conflagration over every part of their poor mansion, till it was reduced to ashes. Together with the cottage (a sorry antediluvian make-shift of a building, you may think it), what was of much more importance, a fine litter of new-farrowed pigs, no less than nine in number, perished. China pigs have been esteemed a luxury all over the East ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Volume 2 • Charles Lamb
... fishing-boats in the tiny harbour are all stranded in the mud—our two colliers (our watering-place has a maritime trade employing that amount of shipping) have not an inch of water within a quarter of a mile of them, and turn, exhausted, on their sides, like faint fish of an antediluvian species. Rusty cables and chains, ropes and rings, undermost parts of posts and piles and confused timber defences against the waves, lie strewn about, in a brown litter of ...
— Dickens' London • Francis Miltoun
... subject is both new and interesting. It is to be presumed that our beloved country existed before the Flood: if so, it must have had a history. I have therefore endeavoured to fill up what is lacking in the annals of our land, by a record of its antediluvian state, adapted to the meanest comprehension, and founded on the most baseless facts. I am desirous, sir, to see myself in print. I should like my work, sir, to appear in large letters; in very large letters, ...
— The Adventures of Mr. Verdant Green • Cuthbert Bede
... I 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 ...
— Daybreak: A Romance of an Old World • James Cowan
... versa, in an instant. This is an important point to a builder, but our lockmakers do not seem to know it. Several attempts have been made to introduce locks of this kind, but the fancy prices put upon every article which departs, in ever so slight a measure, from the antediluvian patterns mostly used, practically prohibits their adoption. The carcass of the lock is of cast iron; the casting, like all the small American castings, is simply perfect; bosses are cast round the follower and keyholes; the box staple is one piece ...
— Scientific American, Volume 40, No. 13, March 29, 1879 • Various
... Swallows retire to rest, the hour succeeding sunset 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 ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... 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 ...
— Calamities and Quarrels of Authors • Isaac D'Israeli
... from Breda, and who had long been in the habit of supplying the castle with turf. In the absence of woods and coal mines, the habitual fuel of the country was furnished by those vast relics of the antediluvian forests which abounded in the still partially submerged soil. The skipper represented that his vessel had passed so often into and out of the castle as to be hardly liable to search by the guard on its entrance. He suggested a stratagem by which it might ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... between us and these first parents of our present progress that is strangely obscure. It is a sort of antediluvian age, in which there were evidently stupendous mechanical powers of some kind, and an extensive acquaintance with some things. The ruins of Egypt alone would prove this. But a deluge of oblivion has ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 • Various
... us was a boys' school—"Maison d'Education, Dirigee par M. Jules Saindou, Bachelier et Maitre es Lettres et es Sciences," and author of a treatise on geology, with such hauntingly terrific pictures of antediluvian reptiles battling in the primeval slime that I have never been able to forget them. My father, who was fond of science, made me a present of it on my sixth birthday. It ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... nonsense, 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, I tell you." ...
— Adventure • Jack London
... by men of genius, in the infancy of the science, are those of Whiston, "who fancied that the earth was created from the atmosphere of one comet, and deluged by the tail of another;" and that, for their sins, the antediluvian population were drowned; "except the fishes, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 13, No. 354, Saturday, January 31, 1829. • Various
... 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," ...
— Molly Bawn • Margaret Wolfe Hamilton
... name I have forgotten, sent me a collection of fossils—tiny mollusk shells beautifully marked, and bits of sandstone with the print of birds' claws, and a lovely fern in bas-relief. These were the keys which unlocked the treasures of the antediluvian world for me. With trembling fingers I listened to Miss Sullivan's descriptions of the terrible beasts, with uncouth, unpronounceable names, which once went tramping through the primeval forests, tearing down the branches of gigantic trees for food, and died in ...
— Stories of Achievement, Volume IV (of 6) - Authors and Journalists • Various
... them—men quite equal to the perpetration of whatever had not been already done to bring Heraldry into contempt. This was accomplished first, by gravely discoursing, in early heraldic language, upon the imaginary Heraldry of the patriarchal and antediluvian worthies: making a true coat of arms of Joseph's "coat of many colours," giving armorial ensigns to David and Gideon, to Samson and Joshua, to "that worthy gentilman Japheth," to Jubal and Tubal-Cain, and crowning the whole by declaring that ...
— The Handbook to English Heraldry • Charles Boutell
... Without disturbing his brother, he rose, dressed himself, and took a survey of his chamber by daylight. It was a large, gloomy-looking room, unceiled and unpainted, and the rough beams and rafters looked like the ponderous ribs of some antediluvian monster, which might crumble in at any time, and bury all beneath them. The windows were large, but dingy and begrimed with the unmoved dust of years; and spiders' webs hung in profuse festoons from the dirty sashes. A quantity of old barrels, ...
— The Brother Clerks - A Tale of New-Orleans • Xariffa
... not doubting it would throw some light on the subject that absorbed her. But she shut up the volume in a rage when she found that it had nothing but excuses to offer for the fall of a married woman. After that, and guided only by chance, she read a number of other novels, most of which were of antediluvian date, thus accounting, she supposed, for their sentiments, which she found old fashioned. We should be wrong, however, if we supposed that Jacqueline's crude judgment of these books had nothing in common with true criticism. Her only object, however, ...
— Jacqueline, v1 • Th. Bentzon (Mme. Blanc)
... you or 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, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 78, April 26, 1851 • Various
... times, and would differ from them according "to the degree of the modifying power."[149] Again, he says, "The animals living to-day have been derived by a series of uninterrupted generations from the extinct animals of the antediluvian world."[150] He gave as an example the crocodiles of the present day, which he believed to have descended from the fossil forms. While he admitted the possibility of one type passing into another, separated by characters of more than generic value, he always, according to his ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... against individuals insignificant enough to elude them, and therefore the larger body, the nation, is hit and wounded by them. Neither is there any defence open to us. We send abroad gigantic stories of huge antediluvian lizards, 'larger than the largest size,' and we ourselves are kept upon the stare at our own wonders from Georgia to Maine, until we find out we have been exulting over the stranded remains of a common spermaceti whale. At this present ...
— Personal Memoirs Of A Residence Of Thirty Years With The Indian Tribes On The American Frontiers • Henry Rowe Schoolcraft
... figurative point of view, upon his legs. He is at his place in Lincolnshire; but the waters are out again on the low-lying grounds, and the cold and damp steal into Chesney Wold, though well defended, and eke into Sir Leicester's bones. The blazing fires of faggot and coal—Dedlock timber and antediluvian forest—that blaze upon the broad wide hearths and wink in the twilight on the frowning woods, sullen to see how trees are sacrificed, do not exclude the enemy. The hot-water pipes that trail themselves all over the ...
— Bleak House • Charles Dickens
... political millennium foreshadowed by this petticoat movement to be ushered in. Let the women keep the ball moving, so bravely started by those who have become tired of the restraints imposed upon them by the antediluvian notions of a Paul or the tyranny of man.—Rochester (N. Y.) Daily Advertiser, ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... 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 ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... true that a passionate mob, its unearthly admixture of laughter with fury, of vacancy with deadly concentration, is as terrible as some uncouth antediluvian, or the unfamiliar monsters of the sea, or one of the giant plants that make men shudder with mysterious fear. The history of our own country in the eighteenth century tells of the riots against meeting-houses in Doctor Sacheverell's time, and the riots against papists and their abettors in Lord ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley
... mentioned in Scripture" were hung up in public places. Jurieu saw some of them thus suspended in one of the churches of Valence; and Henrion, apparently under the stimulus thus given, drew up tables showing the size of our antediluvian ancestors, giving the height of Adam as 123 feet 9 inches and that of Eve as 118 feet ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... "suit;" it had been made and worn two summers before suits were thought of; yet it suited very well, as people's things are apt to do, after all, who do not trouble themselves about minutiae of fashion, and so get no particular antediluvian marks upon them that show ...
— Real Folks • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... pointed out where roofs had been and should be again, where gables had been pulled down, and where floors had vanished, showing her how to reconstruct their details from marks in the walls, much as a comparative anatomist reconstructs an antediluvian from fragmentary bones and teeth. She appeared to be interested, listened attentively, but said little in reply. They were ultimately in a long narrow passage, indifferently lighted, when Somerset, ...
— A Laodicean • Thomas Hardy
... zone for wounded lay along this ridge, which rises like the vertebrae of some great antediluvian reptile—dropping sheer down on the Gulf of Saros side, and, in varying slopes, to the plains and the Salt Lake on ...
— At Suvla Bay • John Hargrave
... small section of him is all wrong. It looks 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 out one whit better. The huge corpulence ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... be anchored to one spot of the geographical distribution like a barnacle to a ship during the whole of his mortal belligerency?" he one day asked his wife. "We hear nothing, see nothing, become nothing, and our system becomes fossilized, antediluvian. Why not see everything, know everything? Life is hardly worth while, but since we are here we may as well feed from the choicest fruits, and ...
— Skookum Chuck Fables - Bits of History, Through the Microscope • Skookum Chuck (pseud for R.D. Cumming)
... 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 had been to ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... the 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
... 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 coat or the old hat before they get him a new one! How ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... of the Hofkammerarchiv, and lasted until his honorable retirement in 1856. He was a conscientious official; but throughout this time he was regarded, and regarded himself, primarily as Grillparzer the poet; and in spite of loyalty to the monarchy, he was entirely out of sympathy with the antediluvian administration of Metternich and his successors. Little things, magnified by pusillanimous apprehension, stood in his way. In 1819 he expressed in a poem The Ruins of Campo Vaccino esthetic abhorrence of the cross most inappropriately placed over the portal of the Coliseum in Rome, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... 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 ...
— The Old Bell Of Independence; Or, Philadelphia In 1776 • Henry C. Watson
... have a style of formations peculiar to itself, though of infinite variety. Days might be spent in these superb grottoes, without becoming familiar with half their hidden glories. One could imagine that some antediluvian giant had here imprisoned some fair daughter of earth, and then in pity for her loneliness, had employed fairies to deck her bowers with all the splendor of earth and ocean. Like poor Amy Robsart, in the solitary ...
— The International Monthly Magazine, Volume 5, No. 1, January, 1852 • Various
... antediluvian affairs I ever beheld, the old fellow now coming towards us is the queerest; he looks like a fossil edition of Methuselah, dug up and modernised some hundred years ago at the very least. Holloa! he's going mad I believe; I hope he does ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley
... divided 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 was entranced by ...
— Modern Broods • Charlotte Mary Yonge
... hopelessly provincial, however much of London they might possess between them. In these go-ahead days their provincialism stared out even more than it used to. Why, old Nicholas was still a Free Trader, and a member of that antediluvian home of Liberalism, the Remove Club—though, to be sure, the members were pretty well all Conservatives now, or he himself could not have joined; and Timothy, they said, still wore a nightcap. Aunt Juley spoke ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... soon brought, but the paper was only found after a long search. Fink undertook to pound the chocolate, the forester brought fresh water from the spring, Lenore washed out some cups, and Fink hammered away with all his heart. "This is antediluvian paper," said he, "thick as parchment; it must have lain for some centuries in this magic hut." Lenore shook the chocolate powder into the saucepan, and stirred it. Then they all three sat down, and much enjoyed the result of ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... 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 burrows, the roofs of ...
— Life of Charles Darwin • G. T. (George Thomas) Bettany
... was moving. The ferrymen plied the oars with a slow measured stroke; Brains hung over the tiller with his stomach pressed against it and swung from side to side. In the dim light they looked like men sitting on some antediluvian animal with long limbs, swimming out to a cold ...
— The House with the Mezzanine and Other Stories • Anton Tchekoff
... border, and josses, and jars, and beakers to match; and I can venture to promise one vase of pre-eminent size and beauty. Oh, indubitably! if your la'ship prefers it, you can have the EGYPTIAN HIEROGLYPHIC PAPER, with the IBIS BORDER to match! The only objection is, one sees it everywhere—quite antediluvian—gone to the hotels even; but, to be sure, if your la'ship has a fancy—At all events, I humbly recommend, what her Grace of Torcaster longs to patronise, my MOON CURTAINS, with candlelight draperies. A ...
— The Absentee • Maria Edgeworth
... 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
... Instincts of Animals, questions whether there may not be an abyss of waters within the globe, communicating with the ocean, and whether the huge animals of the Saurian tribe—great reptiles, supposed to be exclusively antediluvian, and now extinct—may not be inhabitants of it. He quotes a passage from Revelation, where the creatures under the earth are spoken of as distinct from those of the sea, and speaks of a Saurian fossil that has been found deep in the subterranean regions. He thinks, or suggests, that these ...
— Passages From The American Notebooks, Volume 1 • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... trees—virgin growth—(I use the term as it is usually applied, although, philosophically considered, it is inaccurate) giants, which centuries will not replace, instead of seeking beneath the superficial covering of mould, nourishing these, for the exhaustless riches, carboniferous remains of antediluvian woods, hidden in the bowels of your mountains, and underlying ...
— At Last • Marion Harland
... 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 ...
— Duncan Polite - The Watchman of Glenoro • Marian Keith
... purchase are determined by the nature of human beings, not by the nature of embryonic stars. And Spinoza's doctrine of necessity maintains that all events are determined by their proper causes, not that everything is immediately caused by some antediluvian event. And this is true even though we can start from any event in the present, no matter how trivial, and go back to an event causally antecedent, and from that to another, even until we recede into the stellar dust itself. But this only amounts to saying, what ...
— The Philosophy of Spinoza • Baruch de Spinoza
... 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, and polish off the ten last ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., November 8, 1890 • 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 of the simplest kind, unassisted ...
— Lectures on Popular and Scientific Subjects • John Sutherland Sinclair, Earl of Caithness
... 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 (Tepu-mereme). ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America V3 • Alexander von Humboldt
... on board,—the latter with many 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, ...
— Bluebell - A Novel • Mrs. George Croft Huddleston
... the admiration which he received 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 ...
— Beauty and The Beast, and Tales From Home • Bayard Taylor
... 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 ...
— The History of the Devil - As Well Ancient as Modern: In Two Parts • Daniel Defoe
... an old safe of some antediluvian manufacture and the lock was worn. The stem of the key was smooth and it slipped in her gloved hands. She could not hold it firm enough to turn the lock. Finally with her bare fingers and with one hand to aid the other she was ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... who naturally look upon me as being of almost antediluvian age, sometimes ask me to describe the discomforts of an all-night coach journey in my youth, or inquire how many days we occupied in travelling from, say, London to Edinburgh. They are obviously sceptical when I assure them that my memory does not extend ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton |
