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Fossil   Listen
adjective
Fossil  adj.  
1.
Dug out of the earth; as, fossil coal; fossil salt.
2.
Preserved from a previous geological age; as, fossil water from deep wells; usually implying that the object so described has had its substance modified by long residence in the ground, but also used (as with fossil water) in cases where chemical composition is not altered.
3.
(Paleon.) Like or pertaining to fossils; contained in rocks, whether petrified or not; as, fossil plants, shells.
Fossil copal, a resinous substance, first found in the blue clay at Highgate, near London, and apparently a vegetable resin, partly changed by remaining in the earth.
Fossil cork, Fossil flax, Fossil paper, or Fossil wood, varieties of amianthus.
Fossil farina, a soft carbonate of lime.
Fossil ore, fossiliferous red hematite.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Fossil" Quotes from Famous Books



... Melbourne to Wood Bay, and examine the neighbourhood geologically and geographically. The sledge team found some remarkable ice structures and new and interesting glaciers. They had, a crop of small adventures, and found sandstone rock containing fossil wood and many other excellent fossils, garnets, etc., besides which Campbell did good work surveying. A new glacier was named after Priestley and ...
— South with Scott • Edward R. G. R. Evans

... moment the possible stumbling-block, Henry Lord, Ph.D., came in and greeted her civilly. His manner was never genial, for there was neither love in his heart nor warm blood in his veins; but he was courteous, for he was an educated fossil, of good birth and up-bringing. He had been dissecting specimens in his workroom, and he looked capable of dismembering Mother Carey; but bless your heart, she had weapons in her unseen armory that were capable of bringing confusion to his ...
— Mother Carey's Chickens • Kate Douglas Wiggin

... maintained the equally fanciful idea that the consolidation of all strata—clays, sandstones, conglomerates, limestones and even rock-salt—must be ascribed to the action of heat, and that even the formation of chalk-flints and the silicification of fossil wood were due to the injection of ...
— The Coming of Evolution - The Story of a Great Revolution in Science • John W. (John Wesley) Judd

... est une specialite. Celui qui en fait metier ne fait jamais des reponses. La question est une maniere tres commode de dire les choses suivantes: "Me voila! Je ne suis pas fossil, moi,—je respire encore! J'ai des idees,—voyez mon intelligence! Vous ne croyiez pas, vous autres, que je savais quelque chose de cela! Ah, nous avons un peu de sagacite, voyez vous! Nous ne sommes nullement ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes

... ourselves, is necessarily obscure to us. In the alteration of our own character, we have lost the key which would interpret the characters of our fathers, and the great men even of our own English history before the Reformation seem to us almost like the fossil skeletons of another order of beings. Some broad conclusions as to what they were are at least possible to us, however; and we are able to determine, with tolerable certainty, the social condition of the people of this country, such as it was ...
— The Reign of Henry the Eighth, Volume 1 (of 3) • James Anthony Froude

... Christian era. This looks like an extraordinarily long period of time, but it must be remembered that geologists claim that the remains of man found in the caves of Europe date back 500,000 years; and the fossil Calaveras skull was found deep under the base of Table Mountain, California, the whole mountain having been formed since the man to whom it belonged ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly

... time, ponders its own ideals, not of literature and art only—not of men only, but of women. The idea of the women of America, (extricated from this daze, this fossil and unhealthy air which hangs about the word lady,) develop'd, raised to become the robust equals, workers, and, it may be, even practical and political deciders with the men—greater than man, we may admit, through their divine maternity, always their towering, emblematical ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman

... INFUSORIAL ANIMALCULES, Living and Fossil, containing Descriptions of every Species, British and foreign; the methods of procuring and viewing them, &c., illustrated by numerous Engravings. ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 216, December 17, 1853 • Various

... of disease, even, may prophesy forms of health. The geologist has discovered that the figures of serpents, griffins, flying dragons, and other fanciful embellishments of heraldry, have their prototypes in the forms of fossil species which were extinct before man was created, and hence "indicate a faint and shadowy knowledge of a previous state of organic existence." The Hindoos dreamed that the earth rested on an elephant, and the elephant ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various

... often let one leg hang down, so that the longest toe touches the surface of the mud occasionally, leaving a single mark of this kind. He brought away some slabs of the recently formed mud, in order that naturalists who were sceptical as to the real origin of the ancient fossil ornithichnites might compare the fossil products lately formed with those referable to the feathered bipeds which preceded the era of the ichthyosaurus ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston

... woman's legal and social disabilities. Among other authorities she quoted with judgment, was the following from Wm. W. Story: "In respect to the powers and rights of married women, the law is by no means abreast the spirit of the age. Here are seen the old fossil prints of feudalism. The law relating to woman tends to make every family a barony, a monarchy, or a despotism, of which the husband is the baron, king, or despot, and the wife the dependent, the serf, or slave. That this is not always the fact, is not due to the law, but to ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage

... festivals at Fleurs. All work ceases at noon; and by two, the people, dressed in holiday attire, muster at the trysting-spot, and march in a body to the castle, preceded by Tam Anderson, the duke's piper, a grave, old-fashioned man, in livery of green coat and black velvet breeches—a fossil specimen he of what the Border minstrel once was, when his art was in its prime. As Tam drones away on his bagpipe "Lumps o' Puddin'," and "Brose and Butter," they take their places at three long tables, covering a large court. Three hundred workpeople and their families ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various

... Jim, on'y I guess Jake Bond's that same deaf mule you spoke of. He's too fond of gettin' at youngsters, the old fossil. I told 'im as I 'card suthin', an' 'e told me as I was a tenderfoot and didn't know wot I ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum

... as they played knuckle-bones on the beach, his enjoyment of the cool breeze which swept through his villa even in summer or of the cool plash of water from the fountain in the peristyle, his curiosity about the big fossil bones dug up in the island which he sent to Rome to be placed in the galleries of his house on the Palatine, his fun in quizzing the pedants who followed him by Greek verses of his own making. But in the midst of his idleness the indefatigable energy which marked the man was ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green

... have the lastingness of such, delighting our age with the same startle of newness and beauty that pleased our youth. Is it his thought? It has the shifting inward lustre of diamond. Is it his feeling? It is as delicate as the impressions of fossil ferns. He seems to have caught and fixed forever in immutable grace the most evanescent and intangible of our intuitions, the very ripple-marks on the remotest shores of being. But this intensity of mood which insures high quality is ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell

... things they had seen. The amount of "curios" and souvenirs brought aboard would fill a museum. Pieces of projectiles and Mauser cartridge shells, fragments of an unusual red wood, and pieces of fossil rock, of which the cliff was composed, were stowed away in ...
— A Gunner Aboard the "Yankee" • Russell Doubleday

... what, think you, had the man in view? I tell you, Jack, you are a fossil beside him. You talk of making good citizens, quite in the old Hellenic style. Oh yes, I recognised the incurable Aristotle in your exhortation, though you did address it to two score of rustic British children. But, my dear fellow, you are ...
— Shining Ferry • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

... of huge fossil animals, as Mrs. Jameson says, on the high authority of Professor Owen, may have modified our ancestors' notions of dragons: but in the old serpent worship we believe the real explanation of these stories is to be found. There is no doubt that human victims, and even young maidens, ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley

... point which the reader may be surprised to see omitted. It is, that if these slow changes were always going on, why is not the present world full of, and the fossil-bearing rocks also abounding in, intermediate forms, creatures which are on their way to being something else? But there are reasons to be given on this ground which make the subject a less definite one for treatment. It is said, for example, that in the fossil rocks we have only such scanty ...
— Creation and Its Records • B.H. Baden-Powell

... by the dry distillation of a bituminous mineral containing fossil fishes. Used as a remedy for some ...
— Mother's Remedies - Over One Thousand Tried and Tested Remedies from Mothers - of the United States and Canada • T. J. Ritter

... source This entry indicates the percentage share of annual electricity production of each energy source. These are fossil fuel, hydro, nuclear, and other (solar, geothermal, ...
— The 2001 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... ages, whence morasses of immense extent; and from these as the more soluble parts were washed away first, were produced sea-salt, nitre, iron, and variety of acids, which combining with calcareous matter were productive of many fossil bodies, as flint, sea-sand, selenite, with the precious stones, and perhaps the diamond. ...
— The Botanic Garden - A Poem in Two Parts. Part 1: The Economy of Vegetation • Erasmus Darwin

... an arrow's shaft. The name expresses exactly what they are like—diminutive kangaroos—but, of course, they are rodents and not marsupials. During the glacial period of the early Pleistocene, about one hundred thousand years ago, we know from fossil remains that there were great invasions into Europe of most of these types of tiny mammals, which we were catching during this delightful summer ...
— Across Mongolian Plains - A Naturalist's Account of China's 'Great Northwest' • Roy Chapman Andrews

... which fools had worshipped; a god easy to break to pieces. His austerity—for them without fullness—his meagre output, his solemn reiterated code of "perfect taste," moved them to a facile but intense aggression. He it was that had turned to fossil stone the living matter of the sixteenth century: He that had stifled and killed the spirit they attempted ...
— Avril - Being Essays on the Poetry of the French Renaissance • H. Belloc

... little man!" has no parallel in life or fiction. Nevertheless, such is the fortunate recuperative faculty of boyhood that day after day I would forget the horrors of that hour, and be happy in climbing over the decayed chalk acclivities of Whitby, picking up the fossil shells that nestle there. Yonder on my table, as I write, lies a coiled ammonite found there; it had been there ten thousand years or ages before I detached it from its bed, and, for aught I know, my remotest posterity may use it, as I have done, for a ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne

... a preconception."—Until the birth of geology, and fossil paleontology, concurring with vast strides ahead in the science of comparative anatomy, it is a well-established fact, that oftentimes the most scientific museum admitted as genuine fragments of the human osteology what ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey

... of the former Soviet republics in territory, excluding Russia, possesses enormous fossil fuel reserves as well as plentiful supplies of other minerals and metals. It also is a large agricultural - livestock and grain - producer. Kazakhstan's industrial sector rests on the extraction and processing ...
— The 2004 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency

... gastropods, strange Devonian fishes, enormous Triassic reptiles, the rich and varied shells of the Jurassic, the dinosaurs and primitive birds of Cretaceous, the little early horses of Eocene, and Miocene's camels and mastodons mingling their fossil remnants in a democracy of ruin to defy ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard

... he admitted. "I had intended to, but you see—Dear me, dear me, I hope you will feel that I did right. You see, our paleontological department had been hoping to fit out an expedition to the Wyoming fossil fields, but it was lamentably short of funds, appropriations—ah—and so on. Hambridge and I were talking of the matter. A very adequate man indeed, Hambridge. Possibly you've read some of his writings. He wrote Lesser Reptilian ...
— Galusha the Magnificent • Joseph C. Lincoln

... like. But the distinction scarcely covers a real difference. The scope of the archaeologist's studies must include every department of the ancient history of man as preserved in antiquities of whatever character, be they tumuli along the Baltic, fossil skulls and graven bones from the caves of France, the flint implements, pottery, and mummies of Egypt, tablets and bas-reliefs from Mesopotamia, coins and sculptures of Greece and Rome, or inscriptions, waxen ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various

... Report on the Sandstone of the Connecticut Valley, especially its Fossil Footmarks, made to the Government of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. By Edward Hitchcock, Professor in Amherst College. Plates, etc. Boston. William White, Printer to the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various

... a maiden aunt of Sir James, Miss Patricia, a stern and awful specimen of the female sex in its fossil state; her ward, Miss Henderson, who, having long passed her pupilage, remained at Collingham-Westmore in the capacity of gouvernante and companion to the young heiress; the heiress aforesaid, and myself. A priest—did ...
— A Stable for Nightmares - or Weird Tales • J. Sheridan Le Fanu

... after the dreary inflated nonsense one is compelled to listen to from their better educated townsmen, it is refreshing to talk with them. From the Belleville pothouse I went to the Faubourg St. Germain. In this solemn abode of a fossil aristocracy I have a relative—a countess. She is, I believe, my cousin about sixteen times removed, but as she is the only person of rank with whom my family can claim the most distant relationship, we stick to the cousinship and send her every year cheap presents, which she ...
— Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris • Henry Labouchere

... were low, both with respect to their class as fishes, and the order to which they belong—that of the cartilaginous or gristly fishes. In all the orders of ancient animals there is an ascending gradation of character from first to last. Further, there is a succession from low to high types in fossil plants, from the earliest strata in which they are found to the highest. Several of the most important living species have left no record of themselves in any formation beyond what are, comparatively speaking, modern. Such are the sheep and the goat, and such, above all, is our ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various

... of elephants, the market is extensively supplied by the fossil ivory derived from the tusks of the great mammoth or fossil elephant of the geologist. The remains of this gigantic animal are abundantly distributed over the whole extent of the globe. They exist in large masses in the northern hemisphere, deeply embedded in the ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal, No. 421, New Series, Jan. 24, 1852 • Various

... spoken of the deposits of salt, petroleum, and lignite, and in association with the second is found the substance known as ozokerit or fossil wax. This is a brownish-yellow translucent crystalline hydrocarbon, which softens with the warmth of the hand, and burns with a bright light. It has never been industrially applied, excepting in small quantities by the peasantry, who themselves ...
— Roumania Past and Present • James Samuelson

... spiritual nature was not questioned, nor that he was a most acute reasoner, who could unfold a proposition into its consequences as patiently, as convincingly, as a palaeontologist extorts its confession from a fossil fragment. But it was maintained that so many dehumanizing ideas were mixed up with his conceptions of man, and so many diabolizing attributes embodied in his imagination of the Deity, that his system of beliefs was tainted throughout by them, and that the fact of his being so remarkable a logician ...
— Pages From an Old Volume of Life - A Collection Of Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... regarded as friendly to the human race. Religions, laws, sciences, arts, theories, and histories, instead of passing Ariel-like into the elements when their task is done, are made perpetual prisoners in the alcoves of dreary libraries. They have a fossil immortality, surviving themselves in covers, as poems have survived minstrels. The memory of man is made omni-capacious; its burden increases with every generation; not even the ignorance and stolidity ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various

... collection of the fossils of Solenhofen to be sold in Bavaria; the best in existence, containing many specimens unique for perfectness, and one, unique as an example of a species (a whole kingdom of unknown living creatures being announced by that fossil). This collection, of which the mere market worth, among private buyers, would probably have been some thousand or twelve hundred pounds, was offered to the English nation for seven hundred: but we would not give seven hundred, and the whole series would ...
— Time and Tide by Weare and Tyne - Twenty-five Letters to a Working Man of Sunderland on the Laws of Work • John Ruskin

... declined, the general alarm visibly diminished. Poor Mr. Glastonbury had never looked into a newspaper in his life, save the County Chronicle, to which he occasionally contributed a communication, giving an account of the digging up of some old coins, signed Antiquarius; or of the exhumation of some fossil remains, to which he more boldly appended ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli

... slumbering around the region of the Magdalena River of late. You have a hunch that we may just be unlucky enough to run across some of those ragged chaps, who want to upset the present government of Colombia, and seat some old ex-president fossil in the chair again." ...
— The Aeroplane Boys on the Wing - Aeroplane Chums in the Tropics • John Luther Langworthy

... for another party of visitors who were coming. Then Mr. Thorold took me all round the edge of the fort. At the south, we looked down into the woody gorge where Dr. Sandford and I had hunted for fossil infusoria. From here the long channel of the river running southernly, with its bordering ridge of hills, and above all, the wealth and glory of the woodland and the unheaved rocks before me, were almost as good as the eastern view. The path along the parapet in places was narrow and dizzy; ...
— Daisy • Elizabeth Wetherell

... 348) showing how old and widespread the fable of the Rukh was, and is of opinion that the reason that the legend was localized in the direction of Madagascar was perhaps that some remains of the great fossil Aepyornis and its colossal eggs were found in that island. Professor Sayce states that the Rukh figures much—not only in Chinese folk-lore—but also in the old, Babylonian literature. The bird is of course familiar to ...
— The Itinerary of Benjamin of Tudela • Benjamin of Tudela

... fossil remains of extinct species of animals are found in the earth's crust which are evidently ancestors of existing species. Until the doctrine of descent was accepted there was no way of explaining the presence of these fossil remains of extinct animals in the earth's crust. It was supposed ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood

... genus is considered, and its ancient richness in species and individuals; comparing our Sierra Giant and Sequoia sempervirens of the Coast Range, the only other living species of Sequoia, with the twelve fossil species already discovered and described by Heer and Lesquereux, some of which seem to have flourished over vast areas in the Arctic regions and in Europe and our own territories, during tertiary and cretaceous times,—then indeed it becomes plain that our two surviving species, restricted to ...
— The Mountains of California • John Muir

... Peter," said Julie. "I love a great place like that. I almost wish we had had dress-circle seats or stalls out amongst the people. But I don't know; that box was delicious. Did you see how that old fossil in front kept looking round? I made eyes at him once, deliberately—you know, like this," and she looked sideways at Peter with subtle invitation just hinted in her eyes. "I thought he would ...
— Simon Called Peter • Robert Keable

... of our needs for hot countries. But in getting paraffins that melt at 136, 137 or 138 degrees we have a rather definite crystalline element. Mr. Bixby has suggested the use of the earth wax which is mined in Australia. It is really a fossil paraffin and is not so granular. I found that it is not to be had in this country at the present time, however, although various dealers told me that they had it, and I obtained from a firm in New York City a misbranded specimen called ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Fourteenth Annual Meeting • Various

... the hill of Montmartre in the XVIII^e arrondissement, and in the zone of the old stone or gypsum quarries which existed before Paris extended so far out in that direction, and from which were taken the fossil remains of the early tertiary mammals ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard

... origin, where can we stop? Can we find any point in his history where we can say, Here his natural history ends, and his supernatural history begins? Does his natural history end with the pre-glacial man, with the cave man, or the river-drift man, with the low-browed, long-jawed fossil man of Java,—Pithecanthropus erectus, described by Du Bois? Where shall we stop on his trail? I had almost said "step on his tail," for we undoubtedly, if we go back far enough, come to a time when man had a tail. Every unborn child at a certain stage of its development ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs

... an irrational interference with the liberty of the players which hardly anybody nowadays ventures to defend in principle, and which is only upheld in some half-hearted way (save in the case of that fossil anachronism, the Duke of Argyll) by supposed arguments of convenience. It won't last long now; there is talk in the committee of "mending or ending it." It shows the long-suffering nature of the poor blind players at this compulsory game ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen

... me, I'm quite an old fossil," dowager lady Chia observed. "I'm no good whatever. My eyesight is dim; my ears are deaf, my memory is gone. I can't even recollect any of you, old family connections. When therefore any of our relations come on a visit, I don't ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin

... observing aloud that Mr F.'s Aunt had a great deal of spirit. Stimulated either by this compliment, or by her burning indignation, that illustrious woman then added, 'Let him meet it if he can!' And, with a rigid movement of her stony reticule (an appendage of great size and of a fossil appearance), indicated that Clennam was the unfortunate person at whom the challenge ...
— Little Dorrit • Charles Dickens

... trust that naturalists will remember, that they must refer for details to the larger publications which comprise the scientific results of the Expedition. The Zoology of the Voyage of the Beagle includes an account of the Fossil Mammalia, by Professor Owen; of the Living Mammalia, by Mr. Waterhouse; of the Birds, by Mr. Gould; of the Fish, by the Rev. L. Jenyns; and of the Reptiles, by Mr. Bell. I have appended to the descriptions ...
— The Voyage of the Beagle • Charles Darwin

... n. Mineral [from amber ite, mineral formative, 'O.E.D.'], a fossil resin found in masses amidst lignite coals in various parts of New Zealand. Some identify it with the resin of Dammara australis, generally called Kauri ...
— A Dictionary of Austral English • Edward Morris

... rough the nether millstone. Glazed pipes and earthenware used in smelting iron, show that iron was smelted in the remotest ages in Africa. These earthenware vessels, and fragments of others of a finer texture, were found in the delta of the Zambesi and in other parts in close association with fossil bones, which, on being touched by the tongue, showed as complete an absence of animal matter as the most ancient fossils known in Europe. They were the bones of animals, as hippopotami, water hogs, antelopes, crocodiles, identical with those now living in the country. These were the primitive fauna ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume II (of 2), 1869-1873 • David Livingstone

... is the ivory throughout Northern Russia," says Lyell, Principles, vol. 1, p. 183, "that, according to Tilesius, thousands of fossil tusks have been collected and used ...
— The Christian Foundation, April, 1880

... initiation. He was its spoiled and pampered favourite. Ivory? I should think so. Heaps of it, stacks of it. The old mud shanty was bursting with it. You would think there was not a single tusk left either above or below the ground in the whole country. 'Mostly fossil,' the manager had remarked, disparagingly. It was no more fossil than I am; but they call it fossil when it is dug up. It appears these niggers do bury the tusks sometimes—but evidently they couldn't bury this parcel deep enough to save the gifted ...
— Heart of Darkness • Joseph Conrad

... fossils formed? Teeth, bone and wood don't last long in their original state. However, buried materials decompose, leaving a film of carbon as a fossil. This results in a leaf tracery, or the outlines of some simple animal. On a gigantic scale, this process of forming carbon has resulted in our great ...
— Let's collect rocks & shells • Shell Oil Company

... it was a chart of the Pacific Islands," answered Brown. "Put a feather with a fossil and a bit of coral and everyone will think it's a specimen. Put the same feather with a ribbon and an artificial flower and everyone will think it's for a lady's hat. Put the same feather with an ink-bottle, a book and a stack of writing-paper, and ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton

... only the colour will be darker when we make use of the strong, than when we use the weak acids. By degrees the pupil should be accustomed to employ the strong acids; such as the vitriolic, the nitric, and the muriatic, which three are called fossil acids, to distinguish them from the vegetable, or weaker acids. We may be permitted to advise the young chemist to acquire the habit of wiping the neck of the vessel out of which he pours any strong ...
— Practical Education, Volume II • Maria Edgeworth

... is called ecclesiastical law, and play all kinds of tricks with obsolete old monsters of acts of Parliament, which three-fourths of the world know nothing about, and the other fourth supposes to have been dug up, in a fossil state, in the days of the Edwards. It's a place that has an ancient monopoly in suits about people's wills and people's marriages, and disputes among ships ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens

... proof, that her prayers ought to have virtue in them. The reverence for her was enhanced by a report, which began to circulate about this time, that she had refused to marry a rich man in order to keep up her labor among the poor. Rumor is always an artist, and tradition, which is but fossil rumor, is the great saint-maker. The nature and extent of Phillida's sacrifice were amplified and adapted until people came to say that Miss Callender had refused a young millionaire because he wished her not to continue her work in Mackerelville. This pretty story did not ...
— The Faith Doctor - A Story of New York • Edward Eggleston

... marbles in Rome of much more recent geological origin—belonging indeed to the Miocene epoch—which are called Lumachella, from the Italian word signifying snail, on account of the presence in all the species of fossil shells. They vary in colour from the palest straw to the deepest purple. Some of them are exceedingly beautiful and valuable, and they are nearly all more or less rare, being found chiefly in small fragments of ancient pavements. Their substance is formed of the shells of the common oyster ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan

... letter.)—1. and 2. Garnetiferous quartz rock. 3 and 4. Micaceous quartz rock. 5. Granite. 6. Basalt with traces of chalcopyrite.—L. C. G.—They are fossil sharks' teeth, common in marl beds.—J. E. C.—1. Iron sulphide and lead sulphide. 2. Quartzite, with traces of galena and molybdic sulphide. 3 and 4. Dolomite. 5. Fossiliferous argillaceous limestone, containing traces of lead sulphide. 6. ...
— Scientific American, Volume XLIII., No. 25, December 18, 1880 • Various

... treat me with great deference and rise as soon as I come who seem to me the most charming, but the ones who, with proper manners, of course, yet have a touch of comradeship, as if they recognized in me something more than a fossil exhibit. I like to have them go on talking about their beaux and their work and play, and let me talk about it, too. Sally Meade makes me feel always that there is in me an undying young girl who has outlived all of my years and is her ...
— The Militants - Stories of Some Parsons, Soldiers, and Other Fighters in the World • Mary Raymond Shipman Andrews

... obtained some few specimens of fossil shells from the shingly beds of the Khyber Pass. They seem to be a Spirifer with a very square base, quite different from the common species of the Bolan Pass, which is like a large cockle, and of which I have one beautiful ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith

... "nothing else. A great pity—this storm. You know climate has an immense effect upon birth. A fine day perks a woman—gives her heart for her business. Good weather is as necessary to a confinement as it is to a washing day. Not bad—that last remark of mine—for a professional fossil, eh?" ...
— In a German Pension • Katherine Mansfield

... that long line which fringes the Somali coast from Tajurrah to Ras Jerd Hafun (Cape Guardafui). In the portion visited by Lieutenant Speke it is composed principally of limestones, some white, others brownish, and full of fossil shells. The seaward face is a gradual slope, yet as usual more abrupt than the landward side, especially in the upper regions. Steep irregular ravines divide the several masses of hill. The range was thinly covered with Acacia scrub ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton

... and removed and there sounded down the way, "One cantaloupe, Honey!" Back the waiter came in a moment. "The old party says it's too ripe." There were only two left to choose from. "Knock his slats in if he don't like that, the old fossil." In another moment the waiter was back again with the second half. "He says he don't want no cantaloupe, anyhow. Says he meant an ...
— Working With the Working Woman • Cornelia Stratton Parker

... because it was comprehensible to the minds that sprang from it; there were mysteries in it, but mysteries that enticed rather than baffled, for they unfolded new glories with every discovery that man could make; even inanimate objects, the fossil, the electric current, the far-off stars, these were dust thrown off by the Spirit of the World—fragrant with His Presence and eloquent of His Nature. For example, the announcement made by Klein, the astronomer, ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson

... is a laboratory of fossil botany, with a corps of paleobotanists, Mr. Lester F. Ward being ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 484, April 11, 1885 • Various

... every land he made collections of its greatest curiosities in art, literature, science, natural history, and politics. A sphinx, an obelisk, a winged bull from Nineveh, stuffed porcupines, live monkeys, fossil remains, a pinchbeck president of the United States, and many rare specimens even more curious, did he collect, and after years of wandering, by land and by sea, carry with him to his native village. There he converted an old barn into a museum, and gave out to the villagers that he was ...
— The Magician's Show Box and Other Stories • Lydia Maria Child

... greatly err, all the real knowledge which we possess of the fossil remains of man goes no farther back than the Quaternary epoch; and the most that can be asserted on Professor Virchow's side respecting these remains is, that none of them present us with more marked ...
— Freedom in Science and Teaching. - from the German of Ernst Haeckel • Ernst Haeckel

... hurt. "If you had not recovered the manuscript, a work of considerable interest to students of British paleontology would have been lost. I must show you a letter I have just received from Sir Thomas Potter, of the British Museum, agreeing with my conclusions about the fossil remains of Ichthyosaurus, Plesiosaurus, and Mosasaurs, discovered last year at Roslyn Hole. It is very gratifying to me; very gratifying. But what can I ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees

... them before he started upon his manuscript that he rather slighted them. As I stood there beneath that tree—a tree which should have been part of a coal-bed countless ages since—and looked out across a sea teeming with frightful life—life which should have been fossil before God conceived of Adam—I would not have given a minim of stale beer for my chances of ever seeing my friends or the outside world again; yet then and there I swore to fight my way as far through this hideous land as circumstances would ...
— The People that Time Forgot • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... and its history. But when the Keeper of the Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities in the British Museum, in a book that is not intended to be humorous,[135] seriously claims Dr. Andrews' discovery of a gigantic fossil snake as "proof" of the former existence of "the great serpent-devil Apep," it is time ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith

... one of the most valuable of gums, and is furnished by many countries in the districts of Africa explored by Mr. H. M. Stanley, the discoverer of Livingstone. Copal is found in a fossil state in very large quantities. The natives collect the gum by searching in the sandy soil, mostly in the hilly districts, the country being almost barren, with no large tree except the Adansonia, and occasionally a few ...
— French Polishing and Enamelling - A Practical Work of Instruction • Richard Bitmead

... to Miss Sparrow. I implored her to tell me how I had vexed her, but she broke away from me and rushed out of the room. I cannot understand her conduct. I might have known such a bright young girl couldn't fancy an old fossil like me, but am I so bad a fellow, Hal, that she need feel insulted by my love? I would have walked barefooted over burning coals sooner than have wounded her as I have done.' And so on, and so on, till the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 20, August 1877 • Various

... few fossils on the side of this ridge, as we ascended, which at once induced us to name it, Fossil Head. Our view was decisive of the fact, that all further progress eastward was at an end, but to the south sandbanks and patches of dark-coloured water bounding our view left still great hope. The high land terminated abruptly to the southward, whilst ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 2 • John Lort Stokes

... Prosey the second chimes in, and works away, and hems and haws, and hawks up some old scraps of schoolboy Latin and Greek, which are all Hebrew to you, honest man, until at length he finishes off by some solemn twaddle about fossil turnips and vitrified brickbats; and thus concludes Fozy No. 2. Oh, shade of Edie Ochiltree! that we should stand in the taunt of such umnerciful spendthrifts of our time on earth! Besides, the devil ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott

... go a-begging. Precisely! Incapables take them, but capables shy. For twenty-one years you have harried us nicely. And now, like the rest, we're on Strike, Sir. And why? The game, you old fossil, is not worth the candle, Your kicks for my halfpence? The bargain's too bad! If you want bogus leaders sham soldiers to handle, You'll now have to take ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 100, April 11, 1891 • Various

... employed by the company resided in bachelor retirement. My host described a mammal's tooth that weighed nearly fourteen pounds, which had been taken from a phosphate mine; it had been sent to a public room at Beaufort, South Carolina. A fossil shark's tooth, weighing four and a half pounds, was also found, and a learned ichthyologist has asserted that the owner of this remarkable relic of the past must have been one hundred feet ...
— Voyage of The Paper Canoe • N. H. Bishop

... that wander through eternity." Symbol was his native tongue, his first form of speech—as, indeed, it is his last—whereby he was able to say what else he could not have uttered. Such is the fact, and even the language in which we state it is "a dictionary of faded metaphors," the fossil ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton

... has a prosperous Western-style capitalist economy, with a per capita GNP comparable to levels in industrialized West European countries. Rich in natural resources, Australia is a major exporter of agricultural products, minerals, metals, and fossil fuels. Of the top 25 exports, 21 are primary products, so that, as happened during 1983-84, a downturn in world commodity prices can have a big impact on the economy. The government is pushing for increased ...
— The 1990 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency

... effaced. The most familiar names had become obsolete. There was no longer a Normandy or a Burgundy, a Brittany and a Guienne. The France of Lewis the Sixteenth had passed away as completely as one of the Preadamite worlds. Its fossil remains might now and then excite curiosity. But it was as impossible to put life into the old institutions as to animate the skeletons which are imbedded in the depths of primeval strata. It was as absurd to think that France could again be placed under the ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... we stand in awe and wonder before the fossil skeleton of the Megatherium, and the savants struggle to unveil its past, while the equally great and marvelous Rhinoceros indicus is being rushed into oblivion. We marvel at the fossil shell of the gigantic ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday

... country continues exactly similar to that already observed—hillocks intersected by ravines, loose sandstone, very barren in appearance. Vegetation is the same, but more stunted; fossil wood is common, especially in the bottom of ravines. {147} Of fossils very few were seen, but more are to be procured by digging. The most common trees are Zizyphus, Acacia, and a Capparis: the most common grass Aristida. Arrived ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith

... Mississippi. He now proceeded to make those remarkable solitary explorations of Kentucky which have given him immortality—through the valley of the Kentucky and the Licking, and along the "Belle Riviere" (Ohio) as low as the falls. He visited the Big Bone Lick and examined the wonderful fossil remains of the mammoth found there. Along the great buffalo roads, worn several feet below the surface of the ground, which led to the Blue Licks, he saw with amazement and delight thousands of huge ...
— The Conquest of the Old Southwest • Archibald Henderson

... an index to a chapter of life. In the occupations of a busy existence we forget how much we owe to the sweet emotional nature which, by mere chance association, retains the dearer part of the past fixed in memory, just as the graceful volutes of a fossil shell are preserved in the coarse matrix of a stony paste. In this way the nodule connects itself with my emotional life, and recalls the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various

... blue bay held many fossil shells. Children sometimes strayed here and there with hammers, pounding out fossils from fallen pieces of the cliffs. On the extent of sands that bordered the cliffs and stretched up the coast between them and the breakers, old stumps that had been months ...
— Out of the Triangle • Mary E. Bamford

... appeared for more than a mile, to which distance Mr. Ross and myself walked inland, following the banks of the stream. Among the fragments we picked up one piece of limestone, on which was the impression of a fossil-shell. We saw here a great number of young black guillemots, and a flock of ducks, which we supposed to be ...
— Three Voyages for the Discovery of a Northwest Passage from the • Sir William Edward Parry

... geologist, from the nuts of a similar plant abounding in the tertiary formations at the mouth of the Thames, and having floated about there in as great profusion as here, till buried deep in the silt and mud that now forms the island of Sheppey.* [Bowerbank "On the Fossil Fruits and Seeds of the Isle of Sheppey," and Lyell's "Elements of Geology," ...
— Himalayan Journals (Complete) • J. D. Hooker

... valleys between San Fiorenzo and the tower of Farinole, the tertiary deposits are seen in successive layers forming beds which in some places are in the aggregate from 400 to 500 feet thick, and the calcareous beds contain great quantities of fossil remains of marine animals of low organisation, such as sea-urchins, pectens, and other shells; forming a compact mass, of which the greater part of the formation consists. The singular phenomenon of the presence of rounded boulders ...
— Rambles in the Islands of Corsica and Sardinia - with Notices of their History, Antiquities, and Present Condition. • Thomas Forester

... We learn, from the recent discoveries in the Swiss Lakes, that man was in Switzerland before that time; in France, as Boucher's and Rigollet's discoveries prove; in Great Britain, as the caves in Devonshire show; in North America, as the fossil human skull beneath Table Mountain demonstrates. Hence, for the flood to destroy man alone at so recent a period, it must have been as wide spread ...
— The Deluge in the Light of Modern Science - A Discourse • William Denton

... 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 ...
— Frank Fairlegh - Scenes From The Life Of A Private Pupil • Frank E. Smedley

... Wiltsh., you find frequently roundish stones, as big,, or bigger than one's head, which (I thinke) they call braine stones, for on the outside they resemble the ventricles of the braine; they are petrified sea mushromes. [Fossil Madrepores ...
— The Natural History of Wiltshire • John Aubrey

... observes, has been a fossil—it should be a plant; statute law should express, not impede, the mind of mankind. In tracing the course of human political institutions, he finds feudalism succeeding monarchy, and this again followed by trade, the good and evil of which is that it would put everything in the ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne

... "Fossil history has no doubt still some obscure passages; and these have been partially adverted to. Fuci, the earliest vegetable fossils as yet detected, are not, it has been remarked, the lowest forms of aquatic vegetation; neither are the plants of the coal-measures the very lowest, ...
— An Expository Outline of the "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation" • Anonymous

... somewhat rude. The country possesses no marble, and has not even any stone of a fine grain. The cretaceous limestone, which is the principal geological formation, is for the most part so pierced with small holes and so thickly sown with fossil shells as to be quite unsuited for the chisel; and even the better blocks, which the native sculptors were careful to choose, are not free from these defects, and in no case offer a grain that is satisfactory. ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson

... cabinet which I now approached with a strange mingling of reverence and curiosity. Perhaps, like a geologist, I was about to turn up to the light some of the buried strata of the human world, with its fossil remains charred by passion and petrified by tears. Perhaps I was to learn how my father, whose personal history was unknown to me, had woven his web of story; how he had found the world, and how the world had left him. ...
— Phantastes - A Faerie Romance for Men and Women • George MacDonald

... face was pale, and there was a curious look about her whole figure. It seemed as if shrinking from something, twisting itself rigidly, as a fossil tree might shrink in a wind that ...
— Jane Field - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

... being particularly interested in the study of minerals and different species of rock, he often endeavored to explain to me the various forms of strata which were found below the earth; but my comprehension could not take it in. He was continually poring over fossil remains, and digging in the garden for something curious. He one day ran in with his apron full of stones and other rubbish, and holding up in triumph an object of various hues, through which a slight blue shade was distinctly visible, ...
— A Grandmother's Recollections • Ella Rodman

... wind and tide, and a power placed in human hands which seems almost unlimited. To these novel and still extending improvements may be added others, whish, though of a secondary kind, yet materially affect the comforts of life, the collecting from fossil materials the elements of combustion, and applying them so as to illuminate, by a single operation, houses, streets, and even cities. If you look to the results of chemical arts you will find new substances of the most ...
— Consolations in Travel - or, the Last Days of a Philosopher • Humphrey Davy

... is said to come from a Phoenician word, meaning a serpent, and the Greeks called this isle of serpents, which is all in favor of the truth of the story. But, on the other hand, such traditions often are prompted by the sight of the fossil skeletons of the dragons of the elder world, and are generally to be met with where such minerals prevail as are found in the northern part of Rhodes. The tale is disbelieved by many, but it is hard to suppose it an entire invention, though the ...
— A Book of Golden Deeds • Charlotte M. Yonge

... says Uncle Jack, whimsically. "I haven't the advantage of being a girl with a brother and a baker's dozen of beaux in bell buttons and gray. I'm only an old fossil of a 'cit,' with a scamp of a nephew and that limited conception of the delights of West Point which one can derive from running up there every time that versatile youngster gets into a new scrape. You'll admit my ...
— Starlight Ranch - and Other Stories of Army Life on the Frontier • Charles King

... immensely interesting fossil word. It lies just at the foot of the Wrekin, and the hill which takes that name in English must have been pronounced by the old Celtic inhabitants much like Uricon: for of course the awkward initial letter has only become silent in these later lazy centuries. The Romans ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen

... irregular, and are piled one over the other, so that the shell becomes more and more thickened and bulky. Judging from the great thickness to which some oyster-shells have attained, this mollusc is capable, if left to its natural changes and unmolested, of attaining a patriarchal longevity. Among fossil oysters, specimens are found occasionally of enormous thickness; and the amount of time that has passed between the deposition of the bed of rock in which such an example occurs, and that which overlies it, might be calculated from careful observation of the shape and number ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 431 - Volume 17, New Series, April 3, 1852 • Various

... himself the author of Fossil Chess adds "In the same work may be found some account of the paintings on the tombs at Beni Hassan, presumably the oldest in Egypt, dating from the time of Osirtasen I, twenty centuries before the Christian era, and eight hundred years anterior to the reign of Rameses III, by whom the ...
— Chess History and Reminiscences • H. E. Bird

... all these nations and languages from late colonies of Mongols within less than one thousand years ago, who came to America over the ice, bringing with them tame elephants for sport, that are since become the fossil elephants and mammoths buried in our diluvial or alluvial soil—to state these absurdities is a sufficient refutation, every man of any reading and scientific ...
— The Ancient Monuments of North and South America, 2nd ed. • C. S. Rafinesque

... Californian beef Cattle Grasses of California Horses Breakfast Leave Dr. Marsh's Arrive at Mr. Livermore's Comforts of his dwelling Large herds of cattle Sheep Swine Californian senora Slaughtering of a bullock Fossil oyster-shells Skeleton of a whale on a high mountain Arrive at mission of San Jose Ruinous and desolate appearance of the mission Pedlars Landlady Filth Gardens of the mission Fruit orchards Empty warehouses ...
— What I Saw in California • Edwin Bryant

... old fossil!" David cried. "And I'm not going to take that back or be sorry for saying it. Hadn't he better sense than to throw a wet blanket on ...
— Patchwork - A Story of 'The Plain People' • Anna Balmer Myers

... Some of them are very good and nice. Miss Fox is delightful—upwards of eighty, and yet so full of interest in everything good and beautiful; she is like a piece cut out of the old past, and a very wonderful old fossil, full of energy and cleverness. Hedley desires his love, and is very well and happy. We go to 240, Drummond Street, Montreal, on Monday or Tuesday, Dick in same street, and John and E—- near. Gibson has never been ill ...
— The British Association's visit to Montreal, 1884: Letters • Clara Rayleigh

... taken place in the climate. At first the temperature of the earth was much warmer than now, and uniform in all parallels of latitude, as is shown by the fossil remains. Now we have a great diversity of climate, whether we contrast the polar with the torrid regions, or the different seasons of the temperate zone ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... No-matter-what, I have no shoes, she has no chemise, that just suits; I want to throw my career, my future, my youth, my life to the dogs; I wish to take a plunge into wretchedness with a woman around my neck, that's an idea, and you must consent to it!" and the old fossil will consent.' Go, my lad, do as you like, attach your paving-stone, marry your Pousselevent, ...
— Les Miserables - Complete in Five Volumes • Victor Hugo

... the first example in which a State Government in our country has erected a museum for the exhibition of its natural resources, its mineral and rock, its plants and animals, living and fossil. And this seems to me the most appropriate spot in the country for placing the first geological hall erected by the Government; for the County of Albany was the district where the first geological survey was undertaken, on this side of the Atlantic, and, perhaps, the world. ...
— The Uses of Astronomy - An Oration Delivered at Albany on the 28th of July, 1856 • Edward Everett

... as Geology, even to common and ignorant people, especially when you have a bank or the side of a cutting, studded with fossil fish and things and oysters that were stale when Adam was fresh to illustrate by. (Remark made by Steelman, professional wanderer, to ...
— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson

... overcome by keen-witted human foes like "Jack the Giant-killer." It may be that traditions of pre- historic peoples have sometimes given birth to legends of giants. Another source of stories concerning them has been the discovery of huge fossil bones, such as those of the mammoth or mastodon, which were formerly supposed to be bones of gigantic men. The ogres, who sometimes figure in folk tales, are giants with a taste for human flesh. They recall the cannibals of the ...
— EARLY EUROPEAN HISTORY • HUTTON WEBSTER

... correspondent of Professor Owen, and supplied the Prince of Science with curious data of the strange, and then but scantily known, Australian fauna, from the platypus, at the head of modern wonders, back to the earliest marsupialdom of the fossil world. ...
— Personal Recollections of Early Melbourne & Victoria • William Westgarth

... in the mass, David, and no one living can do it better. I am like most women, I think: I deal with the individual. That is all the difference. When do the Annerses go out to the fossil-beds?" ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde

... the one of his day, the iridescent Irishman, whose remembered repartees are a feast, sharp and ringing, at divers tables descending from the upper to the fat citizen's, where, instead of coming in the sequence of talk, they are exposed by blasting, like fossil teeth of old Deluge sharks in monotonous walls of our chalk-quarries. Nor are these the less welcome for the violence of their introduction among a people glad to be set burning rather briskly awhile by the most unexpected ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... too insufferably complacent. It was the look to be forgiven a man only when he wears it in the presence of his first-born. If snapshots tell anything at all, these told that Oswald was the father of a mammoth sauropod and had merely dug up the baby in a fossil bed somewhere. ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson

... exposed the scaur which runs out from Colburn Nab, at the mouth of the beck, a one can examine masses of recently fallen rocks, the new faces of which are almost invariably covered with ammonites or clusters of fossil bivalves. The only hindrance to a close examination of these new falls from the cliffs is the serious danger of another fall occurring at the same spot. The fisher-folk are very kind in pointing ...
— Yorkshire—Coast & Moorland Scenes • Gordon Home

... familiar conjunctions of things wherewith the inanimate world baits the mind of man when he pauses in moments of suspense, opposite Knight's eyes was an imbedded fossil, standing forth in low relief from the rock. It was a creature with eyes. The eyes, dead and turned to stone, were even now regarding him. It was one of the early crustaceans called Trilobites. Separated by millions of years in ...
— A Pair of Blue Eyes • Thomas Hardy

... wherein I would derive "Ambrosia." Ambergris was long supposed to be a fossil, a vegetable which grew upon the sea-bottom or rose in springs; or a "substance produced in the water like naphtha or bitumen"(!): now it is known to be the egesta of a whale. It is found in lumps weighing several pounds upon the Zanzibar Coast and is sold at a high price, being held ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton

... conclusion if he found it mistaken. I do not know whether Mrs. Agassiz has put into her interesting life of him, a delightful story which she told me about him. He came to her beaming one day, and demanded, "You know I have always held such and such an opinion about a certain group of fossil fishes?" "Yes, yes!" "Well, I have just been reading ———'s new book, and he has shown me that there isn't the least truth in my theory"; and he burst into a laugh of unalloyed ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... is the word. And economy!" he cried. "That is the true American spirit! That is what appeals to the man who is not a fossil!" This was a delicate compliment to Mr. Gratz, but Mr. Gratz was so used to receiving compliments when Mr. Smalley was talking to him that he did not blush with pleasure. He merely got red in the face. "Think of the ...
— Mike Flannery On Duty and Off • Ellis Parker Butler

... flint spears from the Island of Cozumel. Next follow fossil shells, collected by Mrs. Alice Le Plongeon from an excavation at Chichen-Itza, which may be useful in ...
— The Mayas, the Sources of Their History / Dr. Le Plongeon in Yucatan, His Account of Discoveries • Stephen Salisbury, Jr.

... d'Allemagne, and commonly used for floors to rooms, not only in the province of Normandy, but throughout the whole kingdom. There is also a considerable export of them for the same purpose. It was in these quarries that the fossil crocodile was discovered in 1817; which, as being extraordinarily perfect, and the first specimen ever found with scales, has excited an uncommon degree ...
— Architectural Antiquities of Normandy • John Sell Cotman

... Sure? No cramp? Well, I have a cramp in my left leg which will make me kick down the cliff in another minute, if I don't move it. Let me help you up.... That's the way. Now you sit safely there, while I get unwedged.... By Jove! I believe I've grown into the cliff, like a fossil ichthyosaurus. Did you ever see an ichthyosaurus? Doesn't it seem years since you said: 'And who is Davy Jones?' Don't you want some breakfast? I suppose it's ...
— The Mistress of Shenstone • Florence L. Barclay

... land was still in its natural condition of stones, fossil shells, and green shrubs with fragrant herbs. There might be seen occasionally starting up before the intruding wanderer, partridges, hares, quails, the wild pigeon, the ...
— Byeways in Palestine • James Finn

... excel them in object. Nature is ransacked, explored, and hunted down in every field, only that she may add to the general knowledge. Museums collect and arrange all the types of creative wisdom, from the simple cell to man. Science searches out their extinct species and fossil remains, and tells their age by Geology. The microscope pursues organic matter down into an infinity of smallness, proportionately as far as the telescope traces it upwards in the infinity of illimitable space. Last of all, though not till long after ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various

... Amber, the fossil resin of a pine tree, was found in Sicily, the shores of the Baltic, and other parts of Europe. It was a precious stone then as now, and an article of trade with the Phoenicians, those early merchants of the Mediterranean. ...
— The Story Of Electricity • John Munro

... surely distance the one who gropes along by guess and by tradition. A general diffusion of scientific knowledge saves the community from innumerable wasteful and foolish mistakes. In England, not many years ago, the partners in a large mining company were ruined from not knowing that a certain fossil belonged to the old red sandstone, below which coal is never found. In another enterprise, L20,000 were lost in the prosecution of a scheme for collecting the alcohol that distils from bread in baking, all of which might have been saved, had the parties known that less than ...
— In the School-Room - Chapters in the Philosophy of Education • John S. Hart

... parent flame, the sacred fire of Pueblo Estufas, of Greek Prytaneum, of Roman Vesta, of Persian Atish-khudahs? If the Laurentian system be the oldest upheaval of land, and its "dawn animal" the first evolution of life that left fossil footprints, where are all the missing links in ethnology, which would save science that rejects Genesis—the paradox of peopling the oldest known continent by ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson

... in the same school of philosophy as his father, belonged to another generation. The time of my history is the beginning of the latter half of the present century, and Michael was already considered somewhat of a fossil. Robert was inconsistent, as the old doctrine when it is decaying, or the new at its advent always is; but the main difference between Michael and Robert was not any distinct divergence, but that truths believed by Michael, and admitted by Robert, ...
— Miriam's Schooling and Other Papers - Gideon; Samuel; Saul; Miriam's Schooling; and Michael Trevanion • Mark Rutherford

... is often seen The impress of some southern sheen, The brightness of a warmer bloom, Unknown to winter's frost and gloom. The fossil flower of epoch fair Has left its lasting impress there. So in some men whose hearts are cold You find a trace of days ...
— Gleams of Sunshine - Optimistic Poems • Joseph Horatio Chant

... chimpanzee, orang, and gorilla considerably resembles that of man, but so more distantly does a frog's, so does Scheuchzer's fossil amphibian in the museum, so does a squirrel's, so does a parrot's. Yet, because parrots, squirrels, frogs, and asses have skulls, a pelvis, and fore-arms, they are not men any more than fish are. Linnaeus has given the real specific, the real class, order, and generic character ...
— Heads and Tales • Various

... You'd find ways enough to amuse yourself without the help of an old fossil like me, I guess," blustered the clockmaker. Nevertheless it was plain to be seen the words pleased him, for he was a kind man who enjoyed doing a service for another. Moreover, Christopher had worn a path to his lonely heart ...
— Christopher and the Clockmakers • Sara Ware Bassett

... brief ones, wherein through the poet are opened vast vistas into the shining universe, or is concentrated in single or few lines the life of man's finer nature, as in the diamond are condensed the warmth and splendor that lie latent in acres of fossil carbon. ...
— Essays AEsthetical • George Calvert

... protokolo. Formula formulo. Forsake forlasi. Fort fortikajxeto. Fortify (milit.) fortikigi. Fortify fortigi. Fortitude kuragxeco. Fortnight du semajnoj. Fortress fortikajxo. Fortune ricxeco. Forward! antauxen! Forward (in advance) antauxe. Forward ekspedi, sendi. Fossil elfosatajxo. Foster nutri. Foster child sucxinfano. Foul malpura. Foulard silktuko. Found fondi. Foundation fondo, fondajxo. Founder (ship) sxipperei. Foundry fandejo. Fountain fontano. Four kvar. Fowl (domestic) kortbirdo. ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes

... bookshelf, where he looked to see the life of Jesse James, he was astonished and somewhat reassured to discover a title like "Fossil Fishes of the Old Red Sandstone of the British Isles." It was unlikely, he reasoned, that a man who voluntarily read, for instance, "Contributions to the Natural History of the United States," would split his skull when his ...
— The Man from the Bitter Roots • Caroline Lockhart

... shape, entirely without appendages. These acoelomatous worms did not as yet possess a true body cavity (coelom) nor blood. No member of the next higher animals are in existence, neither are there any fossil remains, owing to the soft nature of their body. They are therefore called soft worms, or scoleceda. They developed out of the turbellaria of the sixth stage by forming a true body cavity (a coelom) and blood in their interior. The nearest still living coelomati is probably ...
— Was Man Created? • Henry A. Mott

... of a design or revision that has been badly compromised by a requirement to be compatible with {fossil}s or {misfeature}s in other programs or (esp.) previous releases of itself. "MS-DOS 2.0 used as a path separator to be bug-compatible with some cretin's choice of / as ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0

... of Australia are all of the oldest rocks, in which there are either no fossil traces of past life, or the traces are of life in the most ancient forms. Resemblance of the Australian cordilleras to the Ural range, which he had especially been studying, caused Sir Roderick Murchison, in 1844, to predict that gold would ...
— Early Australian Voyages • John Pinkerton

... fallen into an error which recent discoveries place in a singularly clear light. They say that the argument they are dealing with would lead to leaving the earth to the brutes without human inhabitants. But the recent discoveries in Fossil Osteology have proved that the earth, for ages before the last 5,000 or 6,000 years, was left to the lower animals; nay, that in a still earlier period of its existence no animal life at all was maintained upon its surface. So that, ...
— The Fallen Star; and, A Dissertation on the Origin of Evil • E. L. Bulwer; and, Lord Brougham

... coniferous grove they wandered side by side, The tender Iguanodon and Ichthyosaurian bride And through the enubilious air, the carboniferous breeze, Awoke, with their amphibious sighs, the silence in the trees. "To think," they cried, botaurus-toned, "when ages intervene, Our osseous fossil forms will ...
— Dot and the Kangaroo • Ethel C. Pedley

... must act promptly now to complete final action on this vital energy legislation. Our Nation will then have a major conservation effort, important initiatives to develop solar power, realistic pricing based on the true value of oil, strong incentives for the production of coal and other fossil fuels in the United States, and our Nation's most massive peacetime investment in the ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various

... to me," Maurice objected, "that Phil is looking at truth as a sort of fetish. He seems to feel that the root of the matter is in a dogma, and a dogma is only the fossil remains of a truth that is ...
— The Puritans • Arlo Bates

... from an antecedent point of view. The first is that organic forms are only then recognised as species when intermediate forms are absent. If the intermediate forms are actually living, or admit of being found in the fossil state, naturalists forthwith regard the whole series as varieties, and name all the members of it as belonging to the same species. Consequently it becomes obvious that naturalists, in their work ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes

... towards the old lawyer rather the same sort of patronizing attitude that he had had towards the old man. It would be a rotten dinner probably followed by a deadly dull evening with a snuffy old fossil who would tell him long-winded, rambling anecdotes of what New York had been like when there were wild goats in ...
— By Advice of Counsel • Arthur Train

... the mainland and in Sumatra, while the MAIAS or orang-utan (SIMIA SALYRUS) is found also in Sumatra and, though not now surviving on the continent, must be regarded as related to anthropoids whose fossil ...
— The Pagan Tribes of Borneo • Charles Hose and William McDougall

... light and not esteemed very good; but I am informed that this is the case with all coal found near the surface of the earth, and, as the veins are observed to run in an inclined direction until the pits have some depth, the fossil must be of an indifferent quality. The little island of Pisang, near the foot of Mount Pugong, was supposed to be chiefly a bed of rock crystal, but upon examination of specimens taken from thence they ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden

... The more abundant species occurring at Gamrie, as determined by Dr R. H. Traquair, are Diplacanthus striatus, Rhadinacanthus, Cheiracanthus Murchisoni, Pterichthys Milleri, Coccosteus decipiens. In view of the fossil evidence these beds have been referred to the middle or Orcadian division of this formation. In the interior near Tomintoul, another large deposit, composed of conglomerate and sandstone, occurs, which may be of the same age, though no fossils have as yet been obtained from these ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 2 - "Baconthorpe" to "Bankruptcy" • Various

... lectured, and obtained the office of assistant to the aged professor of comparative anatomy. In the year of his appointment, he made a mark in the study which he rendered so famous, by a memoir on the Megalonyx, a fossil animal known by a few of its bones, and which, contrary to received opinion, he boldly proved to have been a gigantic sloth. This was the first of those able comparisons of the fossil with the present world which revolutionized geology, extended comparative anatomy, and absolutely ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various

... second largest of the former Soviet republics in territory, possesses enormous untapped fossil fuel reserves as well as plentiful supplies of other minerals and metals. It also has considerable agricultural potential with its vast steppe lands accommodating both livestock and grain production. ...
— The 1999 CIA Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... him ordering their excellent dinner she wondered what he would think of Ann's father. She could hear him calling Centralia a God-forsaken spot and Ann's father a benighted fossil. Doubtless he would speak of the Reverend Saunders as a type fast becoming obsolete. "And the quicker the better," she ...
— The Visioning • Susan Glaspell

... found myself saying over and over. I must have said other things before, but I don't remember them. "You can't! it is impossible. You! marry an old fossil like me! Oh, Frances, are ...
— Kent Knowles: Quahaug • Joseph C. Lincoln

... interesting to know that even before the Tertiary period the undergrowth consisted of ferns and fleshy fungi. What a time of delight for the botanist! But there were no human beings in those days to roam amongst that luxuriant undergrowth, and only the fossil remains in the deposits of coal and peat are left to tell of ...
— Among the Mushrooms - A Guide For Beginners • Ellen M. Dallas and Caroline A. Burgin

... ay!" the fire-peak thunders, "And he must view my wonders! I'm but a lonely crater, Till I have him for spectator!" The mountain hearts are yearning, The lava-torches burning, The rivers bend to meet him, The forests bow to greet him, It thrills the spinal column Of fossil fishes solemn, And glaciers crawl the faster To the feet of ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 97, November, 1865 • Various

... farther we penetrated; this was rather a disappointment, as we had fancied there was something more to be seen than a mere cave. A heap of reddish earth in one corner attracted Sumichrast's attention, who examined it to see if he could discover some fossil bones. Standing all together, we must have formed, by the smoky light of our odoriferous torches, rather a fantastic-looking group. More than half an hour elapsed without discovering any results from our digging. L'Encuerado, who had tried to crawl in between the roof ...
— Adventures of a Young Naturalist • Lucien Biart

... God's truth must agree, whether discovered by looking within upon the soul or without upon the world. A truth written upon the human heart to-day in its full play of emotions or passions, cannot be at any real variance even with a truth written upon a fossil whose poor life was gone millions of years ago. And this being so, it would also seem a truth irrefragable; that the search for each of these kind of truths must be followed out in its own lines, by its own methods, to its own results, without any interference ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various

... Distribution.—Similarity between the Flora of Japan and that of the United States, especially on the Atlantic Side.—Former Glaciation as explaining the Present Dispersion of Species.—This confirmed by the Arctic Fossil Flora of the Tertiary Period.—Tertiary Flora derived from the Preceding Cretaceous.—Order and Adaptation in Organic Nature likened to ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray

... modestly—like a violet, not like some of these blatant tropical flowers. He had been in the house for six weeks, and had not as yet attempted to slap him on the back, or address him as "old boy," or try to make him feel a superannuated fossil. He had nothing of the exasperating young man's chatter. He was good-tempered, had not much to say for himself, was not clever by any means, thank goodness—wrote my friend. It appeared, however, that Jim was clever enough to be quietly appreciative of his wit, while, ...
— Lord Jim • Joseph Conrad



Words linked to "Fossil" :   fogey, fossil copal, belemnite, colloquialism, golden ager, ammonoid, dodo, fossil oil, microfossil, index fossil, guide fossil, fossilist, fogy, remains, old person, senior citizen, ammonite, fossilize, fucoid, fossil fuel, wormcast, oldster



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