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Beetle   Listen
noun
Beetle  n.  
1.
A heavy mallet, used to drive wedges, beat pavements, etc.
2.
A machine in which fabrics are subjected to a hammering process while passing over rollers, as in cotton mills; called also beetling machine.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Beetle" Quotes from Famous Books



... Temperance Association, and collecting shocking details for subsequent magic-lantern lectures on the liquor traffic; so fearful misunderstandings arose, but we gradually educated each other, and I had the best of the affair; for all I had got to teach them was that I was only a beetle and fetish hunter, and so forth, while they had to teach me a new world, and a very fascinating course of study I found it. And whatever the Coast may have to say against me—for my continual desire for hair-pins, and other pins, my intolerable habit of getting ...
— Travels in West Africa • Mary H. Kingsley

... one day be their grave. If they meet a sow when they first walk abroad in the morning, it is an omen of evil for that day. To meet an ass, is in like manner unlucky. It is also very unfortunate to walk under a ladder; to forget to eat goose on the festival of St. Michael; to tread upon a beetle, or to eat the twin nuts that are sometimes found in one shell. Woe, in like manner, is predicted to that wight who inadvertently upsets the salt; each grain that is overthrown will bring to him a day of sorrow. If thirteen persons sit at table, one of them ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay

... man o' leather Gaed through the heather, Through a rock, through a reel, Through an auld spinning-wheel, Through a sheep-shank bane. Sic a man was never seen. Wha had he been? [A beetle.] ...
— Children's Rhymes, Children's Games, Children's Songs, Children's Stories - A Book for Bairns and Big Folk • Robert Ford

... of Form and Beauty of Mind The Beetle who went on his Travels The Bell The Bell-deep The Bird of Popular Song The Bishop of Borglum and his Warriors The Bottle ...
— Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen • Hans Christian Andersen

... faculty, position, is fittest of all to do it; that man, as future not yet elected king, walks there among the rest. He with the thick black locks, will it be? With the hure, as himself calls it, or black boar's-head, fit to be 'shaken' as a senatorial portent? Through whose shaggy beetle-brows, and rough-hewn, seamed, carbuncled face, there look natural ugliness, small-pox, incontinence, bankruptcy,—and burning fire of genius; like comet-fire glaring fuliginous through murkiest confusions? It is Gabriel Honore Riquetti ...
— The French Revolution • Thomas Carlyle

... you're right; but it was a bit musty and uncomfortable! I'm much obliged to you, all the same. You seem a decent fellow, though you are a Beetle!" ...
— The Hero of Garside School • J. Harwood Panting

... lice (Aphis gossypii). Among the lepidoptera may be mentioned, Cocaecia rosaceana, or "Leaf-roller," so called from its habit of curiously rolling the leaves of the Cotton plant and then feeding inside the roll. Then grasshoppers and locusts occasionally do some damage, as well as a beetle named Ataxia crypta, which is noted for attacking the stalks of the Cotton plants, but it should be pointed out this beetle does not prey upon healthy and ...
— The Story of the Cotton Plant • Frederick Wilkinson

... on the sight, And all the air a solemn stillness holds, Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight, And drowsy tinklings lull the ...
— The Hundred Best English Poems • Various

... 'Ashenel: small as it is, this lion has something of the physiognomy of those magnificent ones which we have borrowed from the bas-reliefs of the Assyrians. Still, the intaglio is in other respects decidedly Phoenician and not Assyrian. Observe, for instance, the beetle with the wings expanded, which fills up the lower part of the field; this is a motive borrowed from Egypt, which a Ninevite lapidary would certainly not have put in such a place."[7107] The Phoenician inscription takes away all doubt as to the nationality. It ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson

... words are dreffle bores, But they ain't quite so bad ez seventy-fours. Wut England wants is jest a wedge to fit Where it'll help to widen out our split: She's found her wedge, an' 't ain't for us to come An' lend the beetle thet's to drive it home. For growed-up folks like us 't would be a scandle, When we git sarsed, to fly right off the handle. England ain't all bad, coz she thinks us blind: Ef she can't change her skin, she can her mind; ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various

... were in vain: she always retorted that she wasn't good enough for me, and recommended me to marry an accursed barmaid named Rebecca Lazarus, whom I loathed. I talked of suicide: she offered me a packet of beetle poison to do it with. I hinted at murder: she went into hysterics; and as I am a living man I went to America so that she might sleep without dreaming that I was stealing upstairs to cut her throat. In America I went out west and fell in with a man who was wanted by the police ...
— Man And Superman • George Bernard Shaw

... I don't know which I'd least soon be, Downing or a black-beetle, except that if one was Downing one could tread on the black-beetle. Dash this rain. I got about half a pint down my neck just then. We sha'n't get a game to-day, of anything like it. As you're crocked, I'm not sure that I care much. You've been sweating for years ...
— Mike • P. G. Wodehouse

... had not been so tragic,—and his outstretched hand still held the mallet at the end of the blow. The carpenter's mouth was open in amazement. Neddie Benson, the first to move or break the silence, had spread his hands as if he were about to clutch at a butterfly or a beetle; dropping them to his side, he gasped huskily, "She said there'd be a light man ...
— The Mutineers • Charles Boardman Hawes

... London daily lie? You may have dreamed the wedding, but that paragraph—that paragraph—it takes a genius of the first literary degree to dream a paragraph, though it may only need quite an ordinary fool to write it! Why, what is the matter? What is it? Did you see something? Not a mouse? Not a beetle? I prithee, not ...
— Charles Rex • Ethel M. Dell

... of carpets and rugs for the carpet beetle and the "Buffalo bug." The last bothersome creature may eat your cotton dresses in your closet. ...
— Scouting For Girls, Official Handbook of the Girl Scouts • Girl Scouts

... bitterly. The tail of his coat spread out on the divan behind him like the apple-green wings of a beetle. ...
— Atlantida • Pierre Benoit

... forge, malleate, beetle, weld, hammer; belabor, maul, buffet, smite, flagellate, whack, pelt, strike; See whip; overcome, vanquish, surpass, conquer, eclipse, subdue, checkmate, rout, excel, outdo; cheat, swindle, defraud; throb, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming

... the under-brush, masses of rubbish and crumbling walls, to the platform of the massive keep, from whence we saw, besides the superb view, far away in the distance, Madame Taverneau's yellow shawl, shining through the foliage like a huge beetle. ...
— The Cross of Berny • Emile de Girardin

... the nearest house when Toto saw a large beetle crossing the path and barked loudly at it. Instantly a wild clatter was heard from the houses and yards. Dorothy thought it sounded like a sudden hailstorm, and the visitors, knowing that caution was no longer necessary, hurried forward to ...
— The Emerald City of Oz • L. Frank Baum

... on excursions for sport, guides would be placed at their disposal, and that all who wished to do so could at any time travel through the country without the slightest fear of molestation. For some time affairs remained in the same condition. The doctor went daily on shore with butterfly and beetle nets, tin boxes, and other paraphernalia. He was generally accompanied by a couple of bluejackets, and always took a native guide to prevent the risk of being lost in the jungle, and also because the man was able to take ...
— Among Malay Pirates - And Other Tales Of Adventure And Peril • G. A. Henty

... fancy, and 'The Celestial Grocery' is as whimsical as it is fresh. 'Bill' is in yet another vein, and proves that Mr. Pain can handle the squalor of reality: while the last half of 'The Girl and the Beetle,' the best of the book, suggests a ...
— The Black Cat - A Play in Three Acts • John Todhunter

... our acquaintance amongst the inhabitants of these regions. Scorpions we knew well, tarantulas we had nodded to, but the visitor who now invaded our narrow dwellings was the homely beetle; a monstrous fellow this, as big as a crown piece. His correct name is, I think, the scavenger-beetle, though we used a much more uncomplimentary term. He was quite harmless, but he would treat blankets as a rubbish-bin. He would ...
— With Our Army in Palestine • Antony Bluett

... his sister; 'and I quake, lest you should wish to live, and more respect the trifling term of six or seven winters added to your life, then your perpetual honour! Do you dare to die? The sense of death is most in apprehension, and the poor beetle that we tread upon, feels a pang as great as when a giant dies.' 'Why do you give me this shame?' said Claudio. 'Think you I can fetch a resolution from flowery tenderness? If I must die, I will encounter darkness as ...
— Tales from Shakespeare • Charles and Mary Lamb

... the point of getting up, and twenty times he huddled miserably under the sheepskin.... At last he really did get down from the stove and determined to go home, and positively went out into the yard, but came back. Praskovia Ivanovna got up. The hired man, Luka, black as a beetle, though he was a baker, put the bread into the oven. Pyetushkov went again out on to the steps and pondered. The goat that lived in the yard went up to him, and gave him a little friendly poke with his horns. Pyetushkov looked ...
— A Desperate Character and Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev

... man was a full seven feet tall, and the most heavy-set Martian I had ever seen. A tremendous, beetle-browed, scowling fellow. He stood with hands on his hips, his leather-garbed legs spread wide; and as I confronted him, ...
— Brigands of the Moon • Ray Cummings

... hushed, save where the weak-eyed bat, With short, shrill shriek, flits by on leathern wing; Or where the beetle winds His small but ...
— English Poets of the Eighteenth Century • Selected and Edited with an Introduction by Ernest Bernbaum

... she was bonnie, in her green and white paint, lying like a great water-beetle ready to scamper over the smooth surface. Alec sprang on board, nearly upsetting the tiny craft. Then he held it by a bush on the bank while Curly handed in Annie, who sat down in the stern. Curly then got in himself, and Alec and him seized ...
— Alec Forbes of Howglen • George MacDonald

... wood you cut with your axe is least liable to worm. Then remember to hew your timber: it is the season for that work. Cut a mortar [1313] three feet wide and a pestle three cubits long, and an axle of seven feet, for it will do very well so; but if you make it eight feet long, you can cut a beetle [1314] from it as well. Cut a felloe three spans across for a waggon of ten palms' width. Hew also many bent timbers, and bring home a plough-tree when you have found it, and look out on the mountain or in the field for one of holm-oak; for this is the strongest for oxen to ...
— Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns, and Homerica • Homer and Hesiod

... slug to be found under stones in summer streams, is the most tempting bait you can offer a black bass. After a time the hellgrammite comes to the surface and takes to the air as a beetle, but in that state he interests the naturalist ...
— Healthful Sports for Boys • Alfred Rochefort

... than that? Are you a lover of dead moths, and empty beetle-skins, and butterflies' wings, and dry tufts of moss, and curious stones, and pieces of ribbon-grass, and strange birds' nests? These are some of the things I used to delight in when I was about as ...
— The Wide, Wide World • Elizabeth Wetherell

... the habit of coming up from our bunks in the evening. We used to lean over the handrail and watch the wonder of a Mediterranean sunset transform in schemes of peacock-blue and beetle-green, down and down, through emerald, pale gold and lemon yellow, and so to the horizon of the inland sea, in bands of deep chrome and ...
— At Suvla Bay • John Hargrave

... seems to be almost as great as your fear of the insect creation. But, really, it is quite a harmless little fellow. See!" and he pointed to a steel beetle set with a view to ornamental effect in the centre of a little rosette ...
— An Algonquin Maiden - A Romance of the Early Days of Upper Canada • G. Mercer Adam

... manner he has no equal. Such a gentle, high-bred air, and such inimitable ease and composure in his flight and movement! He is a poet in very word and deed. His carriage is music to the eye. His performance of the commonest act, as catching a beetle, or picking a worm from the mud, pleases like a stroke of wit or eloquence. Was he a prince in the olden time, and do the regal grace and mien still adhere to him in his transformation? What a finely proportioned form! ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs

... is most in apprehension; And the poor beetle that we tread upon, In corporal sufferance finds a pang as great As ...
— Characteristics of Women - Moral, Poetical, and Historical • Anna Jameson

... poppy bruised, With black hellebore infused; Here is mandrake's bleeding root, Mixed with moonshade's deadly fruit; Viper's bag with venom fill'd, Taken ere the beast was kill'd; Adder's skin and raven's feather, With shell of beetle blent together; Dragonwort and barbatus, Hemlock black and poisonous; Horn of hart, and storax red, Lapwing's blood, at midnight shed. In the heated pan they burn, And to pungent vapours turn. By this strong suffumigation, By this potent invocation, Spirits! ...
— The Lancashire Witches - A Romance of Pendle Forest • William Harrison Ainsworth

... were among the first to arrive, Julia in a dress of rich black silk, with some green about it, and a number of iridescent beetle-wings serving as a relief. Miss Netty Cahere was a vision of pink ...
— The Vultures • Henry Seton Merriman

... rolled up under their chins like a watch spring; which they extend to collect the honey from flowers in their sleeping state; when they are closed, and the nectaries in consequence more difficult to be plundered. The beetle kind are furnished with an external covering of a hard material to their wings, that they may occasionally again make holes in the earth, in which they passed the former state of ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin

... apples lying on the ground, Shining, quite still, as though they had been stunned By some great violent spirit stalking through, Leaving a deep and supernatural calm Round a dead beetle upturned in a furrow. ...
— Georgian Poetry 1918-19 • Various

... punishments from their superiors. However, the difficulty must be got over somehow, and at any rate the plan seems to promise better than anything I had thought of. The first difficulty is how to get the ruffians for such a business. I cannot go up to the first beetle-browed knave I meet in the street and say to him, Are you disposed to aid me in the abduction ...
— By England's Aid • G. A. Henty

... An' 't is awnly your bigness of heart, as wouldn't hurt a beetle, makes you speak kind of the boozy auld sweep. I'll soon shaw un wheer he's out if he thinks ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts

... The potato-beetle, giant water-bug, eastern swallow-tail butterfly, and promothea moth are insects suitable as types to be studied by the pupils of Form I. The giant water-bug is the large, broad, grayish-brown insect that is found on the sidewalks in May and June ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: Nature Study • Ontario Ministry of Education

... in various meanings. He calls my large gold hair-pins koppa. Perhaps in his imagination they represent horses, as do many other objects also with which he plays. Berries he now calls mamma. He has a sharp eye for insects, and calls them all putika, from the Esthonian puttukas (beetle), which he has got ...
— The Mind of the Child, Part II • W. Preyer

... Lantee and Ragnar Thorvald enter the world of beautiful women. Immensely powerful as they are lovely, these witches control men by thought domination. Shann's victory over the beetle-like Throg and his civilized alliance with the women is told here with that sweep of imagination and brilliance of detail which render Andre Norton a primary talent among writers ...
— Key Out of Time • Andre Alice Norton

... compounding "beautiful rainbow-colored powders that will give one a real grip on the world"? Ibsen, it is allowable to think, may sometimes have dreamed of a pill, "with arsenic in it, Hilda, and digitalis, too, and strychnine and the best beetle-killer," which would decimate the admirable inhabitants of Grimstad, strewing the rocks with their bodies in their go-to-meeting coats and dresses. He had in him that source of anger, against which all arguments ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse

... large, beetle-shaped man. He affected a small, graying beard that sometimes had tobacco ...
— The Great Gray Plague • Raymond F. Jones

... beyond all question, it was composed, and after a lapse of nearly one hundred years, the images which impressed the mind of the inspired poet came fresh at every turn. It is true the curfew did not toll, but the "lowing herd" were as distinctly audible as the beetle wheeling his droning flight. The yew tree's shade—that identical tree, to which, to a moral certainty, the poet had reference—is represented in the cut, in the corner of the inclosure, as distinctly as the smallness of the scale ...
— Graham's Magazine Vol. XXXII No. 2. February 1848 • Various

... living here?" asked Sunny politely. "I wish you could talk, Mr. Beetle. Maybe you've seen the Lib'ty Bonds somewhere an' you'd tell me just where ...
— Sunny Boy in the Country • Ramy Allison White

... them. All this pleased the King and Queen very much, and they made up their minds to do something for Anty and Sandy. The other guests had come, and it was time for the King and Queen. At last their coach drew up in front of the door. It was a beautiful, shiny green beetle shell drawn by two gnats. Two little liveried green midges tumbled off the coach-box, opened the coach-door, and the King and Queen stepped out, while the guests bowed low to the ground as they passed up the entrance ...
— The Cheerful Cricket and Others • Jeannette Marks

... gave back as Kress speeded up his motor, indicating that he would soon take off. Jeter and Eyer studied the outward outline of Kress' craft. It looked exactly like a black beetle which has just alighted after flight, but has not yet quite hidden its wings. It was black, probably because it was believed a black object could be followed easier from ...
— Lords of the Stratosphere • Arthur J. Burks

... a passionate wish to snare (Kilimanjaro!) Your local beetle in his lair, Kilimanjaro! O'er precipices stiff with ice (Perils for me are full of spice) To cull your ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 22, 1916 • Various

... my wings are leathery? Catch me, and you will find my wings are like down, my eyes as bright as diamonds. How much you know, writing yourselves down in books as Naturalists! My name is Vespertila; my family are from Servia, at your service. Could you offer me a fly, or a beetle? I was chasing Judge Blue Bottle, or I should not have been trapped. Go to sleep, dears, and leave me to fan you. When you are asleep, I'll bite a hole in your ear, and sup bountifully on your ...
— The Aldine, Vol. 5, No. 1., January, 1872 - A Typographic Art Journal • Various

... thousand strange relics from Egypt and the East. Tall, angular figures bearing burdens or weapons stalked in an uncouth frieze round the apartments. Above were bull-headed, stork-headed, cat-headed, owl-headed statues, with viper-crowned, almond-eyed monarchs, and strange, beetle-like deities cut out of the blue Egyptian lapis lazuli. Horus and Isis and Osiris peeped down from every niche and shelf, while across the ceiling a true son of Old Nile, a great, hanging-jawed crocodile, was ...
— Round the Red Lamp - Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life • Arthur Conan Doyle

... of iron. As woodland playmates they could never have known such intimacy as hovered about them when she rested her head lightly against his knees and they watched the Hudson, the storms and flurries of light on its waves, the windy clouds and the processional of barges, the beetle-like ferries and the great steamers for Albany. They talked in half sentences, understanding the rest: "Tough in winter——" "Might be good trip——" Carl's hand was always demanding her thick hair, ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis

... troop; light-yellow hair has he; though a bag of red-shelled nuts were spilled on his crown, not a nut of them would fall to the ground because of the twisted, curly locks of his head. Bluish-grey as harebell is one of his eyes; as black as beetle's back is the other; the one brow black, the other white; a forked, light-yellow beard has he; a magnificent red-brown mantle about him; a round brooch adorned with gems of precious stones fastening it in his mantle over his right shoulder; a striped tunic of ...
— The Ancient Irish Epic Tale Tain Bo Cualnge • Unknown

... "He's a Bumble Flower-Beetle," Buster said. "And as for his being related to me, that's all humbug. This stranger is no kin either to the Bumblebee or any other Bee family. But his voice is so much like ours that he's taken part of our name, though our family has always claimed that he has ...
— The Tale of Betsy Butterfly - Tuck-Me-In Tales • Arthur Scott Bailey

... "I saw it done myself. But your ferocious growl isn't as loud as the tick of a beetle—or one of Ojo's snores ...
— The Patchwork Girl of Oz • L. Frank Baum

... a train erupted. It came with the belch of a monstrous beetle, red-eyed and menacing, hastening terribly to ...
— The Paliser case • Edgar Saltus

... Brazilian jumping beetles differ, almost all of them, in their form, from those of Europe. Among the Heteromerides, in the neighbourhood of Rio Janeiro, owing to the dampness of the soil, no unwinged beetle is to be met with; a few varieties of the species Scotinus have been found upon ...
— A New Voyage Round the World, in the years 1823, 24, 25, and 26, Vol. 2 • Otto von Kotzebue

... are," said Peter, talking to himself as is his way when there is no one else to talk to. Just then a funny little black pollywog wriggled into sight, and while Peter was watching him, a stout-jawed water-beetle suddenly rushed from among the water grass, seized the pollywog by his tail, and dragged him down. Peter stared. Could it be that that ugly-looking bug was as dangerous an enemy to the baby Toad as Reddy Fox is to a baby Rabbit? He began to suspect so, and a little ...
— The Adventures of Old Mr. Toad • Thornton W. Burgess

... he yielded to the seductions of the ditch. He caught a big, sleepy beetle and put it on a violet leaf, and sent it sailing out to sea; and when it landed on the farther shore he found a still bigger leaf, and sent it forth on a voyage in another direction, with a cargo of ...
— Jimbo - A Fantasy • Algernon Blackwood

... the winged wardens of your farms, Who from the cornfields drive the insidious foe, And from your harvest keep a hundred harms; Even the blackest of them all, the crow, Renders good service as your man-at-arms, Crushing the beetle in his coat of mail, And crying havoc on the slug and snail." —FROM "THE ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photograph, Volume 1, Number 2, February, 1897 • anonymous

... owes his fame. He makes use of fewer colours, and enhances his lights by deepening and consolidating his shadows, so that they come into strong contrast, and his technique gains a richer impasto. He has a marvellous faculty for keeping his colour pure, and his greens shine like a beetle's wing. A nature-lover in the highest degree, his painting of animals and plants evinces a mind which is steeped in the magic of outdoor life. A subject of which he was particularly fond, and which he seems to have undertaken for ...
— The Venetian School of Painting • Evelyn March Phillipps

... of some of the insects deserves to be mentioned. A beetle was immersed in proof spirits for four hours, and when taken out crawled away almost immediately. It was a second time immersed, and continued in a glass of rum for a day and a night, at the expiration of which period it still showed symptoms of life. Perhaps, ...
— A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson • Watkin Tench

... He nearly wept, and he drew such a moving picture of a poor helpless musical fantasy being lured into a dark alley by thugs and there slaughtered that he almost had me in tears too. I felt like a beetle-browed brute with a dripping knife and ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse

... the kind of stories that your readers think should be published. I think you will find the most popular brand to be interplanetary stories and stories along the line of the "Beetle Horde." Best wishes for success in your new endeavor—F. C. Cowherd, Room 333, L. & N. Railroad, ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, May, 1930 • Various

... Mumga, who was very old and had seen many strange things in her long life; but Mumga, being an ape, had a faculty for recalling the trivial. That time when Gunto mistook a sting-bug for an edible beetle had made more impression upon Mumga than all the innumerable manifestations of the greatness of God which she had witnessed, and which, of ...
— Jungle Tales of Tarzan • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... glide harmlessly by, flinging after him a taunting "Ha-ha, ha-ha," as much as to say, "Missed your aim again, didn't you!" However, it was a pretty picture the nuthatch made, holding in her bill a large beetle with silvery wings, sometimes holding it straight out from the bark as she glanced around to see whether the coast was clear and at the same time calling her nasal "yank," so full of ...
— Our Bird Comrades • Leander S. (Leander Sylvester) Keyser

... its general diffusion and numbers, but because it produces a succession of broods throughout the summer, and is therefore always in force, ready to devour the crop immediately it appears. The so-called 'Fly' is a small beetle named Haltica (Phyllotreta) nemorum, strongly made, and decidedly voracious. The larvae are not to be feared, except that, of course, they in due time become beetles. In the perfect state this winged jumping insect makes havoc of the rising plant of Turnips, but the crop is ...
— The Culture of Vegetables and Flowers From Seeds and Roots, 16th Edition • Sutton and Sons

... his majesty's disposal,' returned the doctor, 'although I confess myself somewhat loath to be the beetle-head that must ...
— St. George and St. Michael • George MacDonald

... to another side of the wood pile, and brought a large beetle and an iron wedge. When he got back to his log, he started out the axe which he had left sticking into it. Then Rollo saw that the axe had made a little indentation, or cleft, in the wood. He put the point of the wedge into this cleft, and drove it in a very little, with a ...
— Rollo's Experiments • Jacob Abbott

... Pyrophorus noctilucus, or "cucujo," found also in Mexico and the West Indies. It resembles our large spring-beetle. The light proceeds from two eye-like spots on the thorax and from the segments underneath. It feeds on the sugar-cane. On the Upper Amazon we found the P. clarus, P. pellucens, and P. tuberculatus. At Bahia, on the opposite coast, Darwin found ...
— The Andes and the Amazon - Across the Continent of South America • James Orton

... even a hair has been added to or taken from a blossom without a lawful cause, and study it accordingly? Fragrance, abundant pollen, and bright-colored petals naturally attract many insects; but roses secrete no nectar. Some species of bees, and a common beetle (Trichius piger) for example, seem to depend upon certain wild roses exclusively for pollen to feed themselves and their larvae. Bumblebees, to which roses are adapted, require a firmer support than the petals would give, and so alight on the center of the flower, where the pistil receives pollen ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan

... the warm air a stimulating aroma. Now and then, where the bushes grew more thickly along the edge of the road, the rapturous songs of the nightingales were heard, the only sound, except the distant barking of a dog, or the buzzing of a huge night-beetle flitting past the waggon, which, at times, interrupted the silence of ...
— How Women Love - (Soul Analysis) • Max Simon Nordau

... you cannot imagine Gilderoy habited otherwise than in black; you cannot imagine this monstrous matricide taking pleasure in the smaller elegancies of life. From first to last he was the stern and beetle-browed marauder, who would have despised the frippery of Sixteen-String Jack as vehemently as his sudden appearance would have frightened the ...
— A Book of Scoundrels • Charles Whibley

... Mix equal weights of red lead, sugar, and flour, and place it nightly near their haunts. This mixture, made into sheets, forms the beetle wafers sold at ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous

... characteristics. Some butterflies are dimidiate hermaphrodites; i.e. one side of the body has the form and color of the male, the other the form and color of the female. The wings show by their color and appearance these sexual distinctions. The stag-beetle is also an example. We have accounts of dimidiate hermaphrodite lobster, male in one half and female in the other half ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce

... commission they will bring me up for judgment; that will be the day after to-morrow, and I must have my petition ready.' And he talked away like a man who had got a care off his mind, and is in high spirits; and when grinning, beetle-browed Giant Despair shook his hand, and wished him luck at parting, he stopped him, laying his white hand upon his herculean arm, and, said he, 'I've a point to urge they don't suspect. I'm sure of my liberty; what do you think of that—hey?' and ...
— The House by the Church-Yard • J. Sheridan Le Fanu

... never kills insects out of sheer brutality. If a beetle drone annoyingly, he will catch it in a handkerchief and put it outside, and so with a bee. It is a great trouble often to get your Burmese servants to keep your house free of ants and other annoying creatures. ...
— The Soul of a People • H. Fielding

... owl, or the sudden rustling in the thicket of birds frightened from their roost. The fireflies, too, which sparkled most vividly in the darkest places, now and then startled him, as one of uncommon brightness would stream across his path; and if, by chance, a huge blockhead of a beetle came winging his blundering flight against him, the poor varlet was ready to give up the ghost, with the idea that he was struck with a witch's token. His only resource on such occasions, either to drown thought or drive away evil spirits, was to sing psalm tunes and the good people ...
— The Legend of Sleepy Hollow • Washington Irving

... road immediately below, along which an object that looked like a large black beetle was rattling and panting and honking its leisurely ...
— Kildares of Storm • Eleanor Mercein Kelly

... fantastically bleached and mottled by dust and rain. There, Lamuse the Huge rises like a ruined tower to which tattered posters still cling. A cuirass of moleskin, with the fur inside, adorns little Eudore with the burnished back of a beetle; while the golden corselet of Tulacque the Big ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse

... removed and easily cleaned rugs for carpets will greatly lessen the danger from the destructive moth and beetle grubs. Carpets laid on tight floors are much less liable to injury than where numerous cracks furnish safe retreats for the insects. Tarred paper under a ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Volume IV. (of IV.) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • Grant Hague

... much as turn the sixteenth part of an eye in his direction, for even as the oyster-man, should the poor mollusc heave the faintest sigh, is inside with his knife in the twinkling of a star; even as a beetle has but to think of moving its tiniest leg for the bird to swoop upon him,—even so will the least muscular interest in your neighbour give you bound hand and foot ...
— Prose Fancies • Richard Le Gallienne

... is not larger even with its feathers than a large beetle. The colour of its feathers is variable, according to the light they are exposed in; in the sun they appear like enamel upon a gold ground, which delights the eyes. The longest feathers of the wings of this bird are not much more than half an inch ...
— History of Louisisana • Le Page Du Pratz

... that, then. Now imagine something else. The violins are playing a melodious plaint; the flutes are singing gently; the double bass drones like a beetle. ...
— Savva and The Life of Man • Leonid Andreyev

... If loue be rough with you, be rough with loue, Pricke loue for pricking, and you beat loue downe, Giue me a Case to put my visage in, A Visor for a Visor, what care I What curious eye doth quote deformities: Here are the Beetle-browes ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare

... chrysalis state, which is notoriously a dull one; and I have the further aggravation, which I suppose never occurs to the nymph bona fide, of a miserable uncertainty whether my folded-up wings are those of a purple butterfly or of a poor drudge of a beetle. Besides, it is conceivable that the chrysalis may get weary of his case, and mine is not a silken one. I have been here long enough. My aunt Landholm is very kind; but I think she would like an increase of her household ...
— Hills of the Shatemuc • Susan Warner

... alone had placed him in his present abject position. Abject indeed! By the great folk, who were passing him on all sides, he felt, well-dressed as he believed himself to be, that he was no more noticed than as if he had been an ant, a blue-bottle fly, or a black beetle! He looked, and sighed—sighed, and looked—looked, and sighed again, in a kind of agony of vain longing. While his only day in the week for breathing fresh air, and appearing like a gentleman in the world, was rapidly drawing to a close, ...
— Ten Thousand a-Year. Volume 1. • Samuel Warren

... speech with so disagreeable an inflection that Arved was astonished. He looked around and spat at a beetle. ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker

... the haw an' the rowan tree, Wild roses speck our thicket sae breery; Still, still will our walk in the greenwood be— O, Jeanie, there 's naething to fear ye! List when the blackbird o' singing grows weary, List when the beetle-bee's bugle comes near ye, Then come with fairy haste, Light foot, an' beating breast— O, Jeanie, there 's ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume II. - The Songs of Scotland of the past half century • Various

... Softly lulled the eves The song-tired birds to sleep, That other things might tell Their secrecies. The beetle humming neath the fallen leaves. Deep in what hollow do the stern gods keep Their bitter silence? By what listening well Where ...
— Silverpoints • John Gray

... &c. (covering) 223. high water; high tide, flood tide, spring tide. altimetry &c. (angel) 244[obs3]; batophobia[obs3]. satellite, spy-in-the-sky. V. be high &c. adj.; tower, soar, command; hover, hover over, fly over; orbit, be in orbit; cap, culminate; overhang, hang over, impend, beetle, bestride, ride, mount; perch, surmount; cover &c. 223; overtop &c. (be superior) 33; stand on tiptoe. become high &c. adj.; grow higher, grow taller; upgrow[obs3]; rise &c. (ascend) 305; send into orbit. render high &c. ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget

... when some unexpected grasshopper, some free-and-easy beetle presents itself without invitation or excuse, scampering over our white mats, to see the manner in which Chrysantheme indicates it to my righteous vengeance—merely pointing her finger at it, without another word than "Hou!" said with bent head, a particular pout, ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet

... country, with its pleasant ranches and its grazing cattle, its rolling, gray, sage-covered hills and its wild grass and cottonwood-covered bottoms, was left behind, and we were back in the realm of the rock-walled canyon, and beetle-browed, frowning cliffs with pines and cedars ...
— Through the Grand Canyon from Wyoming to Mexico • E. L. Kolb

... dreamy eyes and laid the beetle on one side, when his brain fully grasped that this charming vision was waiting to be entertained. She was better to look upon even than the beloved scarabeus, and he advanced to shake hands as though she had just entered the room. Mrs. Jasher—knowing his ways—rose to extend her hand, and the ...
— The Green Mummy • Fergus Hume

... talons of the tiger; and in that of the legs and claws of the parasite which clings to the hair on the tiger's body. But in the beautifully plumed seed of the dandelion, and in the flattened and fringed legs of the water-beetle, the relation seems at first confined to the elements of air and water. Yet the advantage of plumed seeds no doubt stands in the closest relations to the land being already thickly clothed with other plants; ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park

... might ask your pardon, captain, axes aren't the proper thing to break up a block of gunpowder. I should say a beetle or a mall was ...
— The Young Castellan - A Tale of the English Civil War • George Manville Fenn

... a distance and to dine in comparative darkness. Such a variety of insects come that an entomologist might make quite a respectable collection in the course of one night. One of these evening visitors after the rains is a long, slim beetle, green, or sometimes buff in colour, with a small head which fits loosely into his body. He twists his head about as if his collar was uncomfortable. When alarmed he exudes a strong acid which at once raises a blister. He ...
— India and the Indians • Edward F. Elwin

... you! You Egyptians believe in a judgment of the dead; what defence can you make before the court of Osiris[99] for being privy to a foul murder? You'll come back to earth as a fly, or a toad, or a dung-beetle, to pay the penalty for ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis

... mount, I had procured a hireling from a neighbouring farmer, but to my misery the horse did not turn up at the meet; Mr. Golightly, the charming parish priest, said I might drive about in his low black pony-carriage, called in those days a Colorado beetle, but hunting on wheels was no role for me and I did not feel like ...
— Margot Asquith, An Autobiography: Volumes I & II • Margot Asquith

... to her audience there was nothing amusing about this prescription. Stranger remedies than that had been ordered by the wise doctors of the day: a broth of beetle's legs, crab's eyes, the heads of mice, bruised flies to cure ...
— Christmas Light • Ethel Calvert Phillips

... are the most destructive insects that attack our forests. They have wasted enormous tracts of pine timber throughout the southern states. The eastern spruce beetle has destroyed countless feet of spruce. The Engelmann spruce beetle has devastated many forests of the Rocky Mountains. The Black Hills beetle has killed billions of feet of marketable timber in the Black Hills of South Dakota. ...
— The School Book of Forestry • Charles Lathrop Pack

... Molly, look at the frog I bringed you!" he exclaimed as he came close under the sill, which is not high from the ground. "If you put your face down to the mud and sing something to 'em, they'll come out of their holes. A beetle comed, too, but I couldn't ketch 'em both. Lift me up, and I can put him in the waterglass on your table." He held up one muddy hand to me, and promptly I lifted him up into my arms. From the embrace in which he and the frog and I indulged my lace ...
— The Melting of Molly • Maria Thompson Daviess

... hover near the water-lily; but its special parasites are an elegant beetle (Donacia metallica) which keeps house permanently in the flower, and a few smaller ones which tenant the surface of the leaves,—larva, pupa, and perfect insect, forty feeding like one, and each leading its whole earthly career on this ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 2, Issue 11, September, 1858 • Various

... easier to examine you on things with which no man should have any earthly concern, as I am sure he will never have a heavenly one. Beetles, minerals, gases, may be classified; and to have them classified is not only convenient but a genuine advance of knowledge. But if you had to make a beetle, as men are making poetry, how much would classification help? To classify in a science is necessary for the purpose of that science: to classify when you come to art is at the best an expedient, useful to some critics and to a multitude of examiners. It serves ...
— On the Art of Writing - Lectures delivered in the University of Cambridge 1913-1914 • Arthur Quiller-Couch

... beetle-hunter you are, for a man who has fought in half-a-dozen battles!" and Scoutbush walked on silently for ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley

... several interesting and important communications sent to the Royal Society during his lifetime. One of these was a report on what he calls "Pneumatical Experiments." "Upon including in a vacuum an insect resembling a beetle, but somewhat larger," he says, "when it seemed to be dead, the air was readmitted, and soon after it revived; putting it again in the vacuum, and leaving it for an hour, after which the air was readmitted, it was observed that the insect required a longer time ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams

... weighing her answer. "Perhaps it was the novel experience of being considered—sexless; of being classified by a number, like a beetle in a case. Let me answer with another question: Why did I interest ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge

... pul-cronach (literally pool-toad) is the name given to a small fish with a head much like that of a toad, which is often found in the pools (pulans) left by the receding tide among the rocks along shore; visnan, the sand-lance; bul-horn, the shell-snail; dumble-dory, the black-beetle (but this may be a corruption of the dor-beetle). A small, solid wheel has still the old name of drucshar. Finely pulverized soil is called grute. The roots and other light matter harrowed up on the surface of the ground ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller

... heart; my lips were stiffened with dread of loud breath, and all power of motion left me. For even a puff of wind might betray me, the ruffle of a spray, or the lifting of a leaf, or the random bounce of a beetle. Great peril had encompassed me ere now, but never had it grasped me as this did, and paralyzed all the powers of my body. Rather would I have stood in the midst of a score of Mexican rovers than thus in the presence of that one man. And yet was not this ...
— Erema - My Father's Sin • R. D. Blackmore

... in his turn, "the log may yet be split, and grimalkin lose his lives, if you often charge as madly as you did this morning. What think you of many raps from such a beetle as laid you on ...
— The Spy • James Fenimore Cooper

... pointed, voices babbled again. Someone nearby said sharply and distinctly, "... Saw it drop right out of the ceiling!" Farther down the hall, another group shifted aside enough to disclose it had been clustered about something which looked a little like the empty shell of a gigantic black beetle. ...
— Lion Loose • James H. Schmitz

... mechanical beetle, joy of David's heart, was produced in evidence; its distressed owner reddening ominously at this renewed recollection of ...
— Once Aboard The Lugger • Arthur Stuart-Menteth Hutchinson

... appearing either as simpering idiots or embryo vixens. To mild old ladies it generally gave a look of aggressive cynicism. Our vicar, as excellent an old gentleman as ever breathed, Begglely presented to us as a beetle-browed savage of a peculiarly low type of intellect; while upon the leading solicitor of the town he bestowed an expression of such thinly-veiled hypocrisy that few who saw the photograph cared ever again to ...
— Sketches in Lavender, Blue and Green • Jerome K. Jerome

... this is very evident in a garden, or even more in the nature of insects; of which beasts I have heard it said that the most stolid man in the longest of lives would acquire only a cursory knowledge of even one kind, as, for instance, of the horned beetle, which sings so ...
— Hills and the Sea • H. Belloc

... cabbage, and fruit trees. They vary in color from green to dark brown or black. They are treated in the same way as those on the house plants. Some familiar out-door insects which interfere with leaf work are the common potato bug, the green cabbage worm, the rose slug, the elm tree leaf beetle, the canker worm, the tomato worm. These insects and many others eat the leaves (Fig. 67). They chew and swallow their food and are called chewing insects. All insects which chew the leaves of plants can be destroyed by putting poison on their food. The common poisons used for this ...
— The First Book of Farming • Charles L. Goodrich

... inquiry at holes which might prove to be rabbit warrens; glaring in truculent threat up some tree which might or might not harbor an impudent squirrel; affecting to see objects of mysterious import in bush clumps; crouching in dramatic threat at a fat stag-beetle which scuttled ...
— Further Adventures of Lad • Albert Payson Terhune

... to another being, been perfected? We see these beautiful co-adaptations most {61} plainly in the woodpecker and missletoe; and only a little less plainly in the humblest parasite which clings to the hairs of a quadruped or feathers of a bird; in the structure of the beetle which dives through the water; in the plumed seed which is wafted by the gentlest breeze; in short, we see beautiful adaptations everywhere and in every ...
— On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection • Charles Darwin

... confiding in its innocence. If she had changed at all, it was that, since her marriage to the silent Algernon, she had become even more talkative than she had been in her girlhood. Her vivacity was as disturbing as the incessant buzzing of a June beetle. ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow

... on the opposite side, and then commenced crossing, arm in arm, the stubble-field that lay stretched out before them. All around them nothing whatever was stirring—not a sound, not even the chirping of a bird, or the humming of a beetle, interrupted the profound silence; neither a house, nor any trace of human life, was to be ...
— Napoleon and the Queen of Prussia • L. Muhlbach

... he entered these mansions of misery, his ears were invaded with a hoarse and dreadful voice, exclaiming, "You, Bess Beetle, score a couple of fresh eggs, a pennyworth of butter, and half a pint of mountain to the king; and stop credit till the bill is paid:—He is now debtor for fifteen shillings and sixpence, and d—n me if I trust him one farthing more, if he was the best king in Christendom. And, d'ye ...
— The Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom, Complete • Tobias Smollett

... lime to each pound of the arsenical should be added; or, better yet, Bordeaux mixture should be employed as a diluent instead of water. This mixture has some insecticidal value, is a most valuable fungicide, and is also a powerful deterrent of flea-beetle attack, acting to a less degree against other insects which are apt to be found on the tomato. In applying any spray a sprayer costing not less than $7 is ...
— Tomato Culture: A Practical Treatise on the Tomato • William Warner Tracy

... BEETLE. A shipwright's heavy mallet for driving the wedges called reeming irons, so as to open the seams in ...
— The Sailor's Word-Book • William Henry Smyth

... that it was ever more keenly felt than in my case; I doubt, too, that it is common or strong in English boys, considering the conditions in which they exist. For restraint is irksome to all beings, from a black-beetle or an earthworm to an eagle, or, to go higher still in the scale, to an orang-u-tan or a man; it is felt most keenly by the young, in our species at all events, and the British boy suffers the greatest restraint during the period when the call of nature, the instincts of ...
— Far Away and Long Ago • W. H. Hudson

... nothing. I was fairly puzzled by it all. Sarah avoided me now, but she and Mary were just inseparable. I can see now how she was plotting and scheming and poisoning my wife's mind against me, but I was such a blind beetle that I could not understand it at the time. Then I broke my blue ribbon and began to drink again, but I think I should not have done it if Mary had been the same as ever. She had some reason to be disgusted with me now, and the gap between us began to be wider and wider. And ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 25, January 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various

... came to-day. She's going to stay with us for a time till Mother is quite well again. I didn't remember her at all, for I was only four or five when she went away from Vienna. You dear little black beetle she said to me and gave me a kiss. I didn't like the black much, but Hella says that suits me, that it's piquant. Piquant is what the officers always say of her cousin in Krems, Father says she is a beauty, and she's dark like me. But I'd rather be fair, fair with brown ...
— A Young Girl's Diary • An Anonymous Young Girl

... can tell you any more until I know more myself. Yes, I do know what baby beetles are called. They are called grubs, and they live in the ground until it is time for them to turn into grown-up beetles. While they are babies they eat as much and as fast as they can, as no baby but a beetle should. The more they eat the sooner they come out into the bright world as a June-bug or some other kind of beetle. They eat all the tender little roots they can find. ...
— Little Busybodies - The Life of Crickets, Ants, Bees, Beetles, and Other Busybodies • Jeanette Augustus Marks and Julia Moody

... any words to tell you how, for there are none in any language that I ever knew to tell it; but where I am it is all ear and eye and the rest in one, and there is, oh, how much more besides! Things a homing-pigeon has known, and an ant, and a mole, and a water-beetle, and an earthworm, and a leaf, and a root, and a magnet—even a lump of chalk, and more. One can see and smell and touch and taste a sound, as well as hear it, and vice versa. It is very simple, though it may not ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al

... eleven, in their own ships' dinghies, which were sent back with orders to return at nightfall—six big-fisted, more or less fat captains, and six big-fisted, beetle-browed, and embarrassed chief mates. As they climbed the gangway they were met and welcomed by Captain Benson, who led them to the poop, the only dry and clean part of the ship; for the Almena's crew were holystoning the main-deck, and as this operation consists in grinding off the oiled surface ...
— "Where Angels Fear to Tread" and Other Stories of the Sea • Morgan Robertson

... I had often seen one placed at the end of a road on a hillock, and in the light of the sun its black arms, bending in every direction, always reminded me of the claws of an immense beetle, and I assure you it was never without emotion that I gazed on it, for I could not help thinking how wonderful it was that these various signs should be made to cleave the air with such precision as to convey to the distance of three hundred leagues the ideas and wishes of a man sitting at ...
— The Count of Monte Cristo • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... powdered with hairs at the tip, stood out obstinately between two deep folds on either side. These folds overhung the corners of his mouth, and were joined below the chin by a network of pallid veins. A noise, light as a beetle's wing, came in puffs from the half-open lips; they were swollen and purple ...
— Selected Polish Tales • Various

... of sublimated frenzy, I shall fairly deluge them with illustrations, telling how the establishment of rural mail-routes led to improved roads and these, in turn, to consolidated schools and better conditions of living in the country; how the potato-beetle, which seems at first to be a scourge, was really a blessing in disguise in that it set farmers to studying improved methods resulting in largely increased crops, and how the scale has done a like service for fruit-growers; how a friend of mine was drilling for oil and found water instead, and ...
— Reveries of a Schoolmaster • Francis B. Pearson

... producing a particularly poetical and fantastic interpretation of Midsummer Night's Dream: in which the artistic prominence was given to Oberon and Titania, or in other words to Bruno and herself. Set in dreamy and exquisite scenery, and moving in mystical dances, the green costume, like burnished beetle-wings, expressed all the elusive individuality of an elfin queen. But when personally confronted in what was still broad daylight, a man looked only at ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton

... no such transitional forms are known, that the members of the sub-kingdoms are disconnected from, or independent of, one another. On the contrary, in their earliest condition they are all alike, and the primordial germs of a man, a dog, a bird, a fish, a beetle, a snail, and a polype are, in no essential structural ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley

... death is most in apprehension; And the poor beetle, that we tread upon, In corporal sufferance finds a pang as great As when a giant dies. Measure for Measure, Act iii. ...
— The World's Best Poetry — Volume 10 • Various

... There are also bars and circles and splashes of various colors, dark and bright. Sometimes it dreams of wings—wings of an archangel, no less, Warburton! The next moment there seems to be an impotency to produce even beetle wings!... What a weathercock and variorum I am, thou ...
— Foes • Mary Johnston

... long and for the most part carried on through the keyhole, but in the end their visitor was admitted, a beetle-browed brute of much the same ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard



Words linked to "Beetle" :   water beetle, bombardier beetle, darkling beetle, beetle off, Oriental beetle, ladybird beetle, Xestobium rufovillosum, sawyer beetle, insect, clerid, melolonthid beetle, rose beetle, beetle-browed, chrysomelid, darkling groung beetle, dung beetle, Japanese beetle, carpenter's mallet, Anoplophora glabripennis, blister beetle, Dutch-elm beetle, ladybug, weevil, long-horned beetle, tiger beetle, black carpet beetle, Coleoptera, locomote, ground beetle, leaf beetle, hang, flour beetle, Colorado potato beetle, meloid, longicorn beetle, spruce bark beetle, move, elaterid beetle, Asiatic beetle, oil beetle, carpet beetle, carpet bug, beetling, fire beetle, clerid beetle, searcher beetle



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