"Fossil" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... I found it. I reckoned it up this way, d'ye see, Middlebrook—the man who'd left it there had used it on the beach—maybe he'd cut his toe, bathing, or something o' that sort, or likely a cut finger, gathering a shell or a fossil—and had thrust it carelessly into a side-pocket, for a thorn to catch hold of as he passed. But there it was, ...
— Ravensdene Court • J. S. (Joseph Smith) Fletcher
... 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 market, talent, beauty, ...
— Confessions and Criticisms • Julian Hawthorne
... words! Is there any such sense of ownership, reaching even to the feeling of identity, as that which the lover has in the one he loves? His thoughts and affections, however short the time, had so grown about her and encased her, as the hardened clay imbeds the fossil flower buried ages ago. It rather seems as if he had found her by quarrying in the depths of his own heart than as if he had picked her from the outside world, from among foreign things. She was never foreign, else he could not have had that intuitive ...
— Dr. Heidenhoff's Process • Edward Bellamy
... and that will cover all 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 "Ozokerite," which ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Fourteenth Annual Meeting • Various
... my children; but it was rather for the enjoyment of a freer air than for any beauty of prospect, that we took our daily climb. These hills afford neither shrubs nor flowers, but furnish the finest specimens of millepore in the world; and the water courses are full of fossil productions. ...
— Domestic Manners of the Americans • Fanny Trollope
... state of the surrounding parts. But there are specimens brought from many different places, which contain, in themselves, the most evident marks of this injection of the flinty substance in a fluid state. These are pieces of fossil wood, penetrated with a siliceous substance, which are brought from England, Germany, and Lochneagh ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 1 (of 4) • James Hutton
... then we see the prevalence, as if by descent, in time as in space, of the same types in the same areas; and in neither case does the similarity of the conditions by any means seem sufficient to account for the similarity of the forms of life. It is notorious that the fossil remains of closely consecutive formations are closely allied in structure, and we can at once understand the fact if they are likewise closely allied by descent. The succession of the many distinct species of the same genus throughout the long series of geological formations seems to ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Vol. I. • Charles Darwin
... the right-about. What about your Dinosaurs? I'm not denying their existence; it's only the estimates of time that are so ridiculous. God made them and destroyed them in the great Flood, of which their fossil remains are the evidence—" ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston
... as the most definite and unquestionable of all the results of paleontology, must be mentioned the immense extension and impulse given to botany, zoology, and comparative anatomy, by the investigation of fossil remains. Indeed, the mass of biological facts has been so greatly increased, and the range of biological speculation has been so vastly widened, by the researches of the geologist and paleontologist, that it is to be feared there are ...
— Geological Contemporaneity and Persistent Types of Life • Thomas H. Huxley
... 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 you sure? ...
— Kent Knowles: Quahaug • Joseph C. Lincoln
... paddle his own canoe. Fancy having to lower yourself into a chair like that! When an old Johnny got to such a state it was really a mercy when he snuffed out, and made way for younger men. How his Companies could go on putting up with such a fossil for chairman was a marvel! The fossil rumbled and said in that ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... years after the foundation of the most learned Academies of Ireland, a pretty little Zoological Garden was opened in the capital of the country; but no living type of the Irish wolf-dog is to be found there, nor were any 'fossil remains' of the noble animal discovered in the Wicklow Mines,[G] which were worked some fifty years back, but which, for want of capital or perseverance, only furnished a few Cronobane halfpence, ...
— Anecdotes of Dogs • Edward Jesse
... stratified conglomerates and quartzites. They rejoiced with Miss Lever, however, when she secured a fairly intact belemnite. It was the only good find they had, though some of the girls got broken bits of fossil shells. ...
— The Luckiest Girl in the School • Angela Brazil
... INFUSORIAL ANIMALCULES. Living and Fossil, containing Descriptions of every Species, British and foreign; the methods of procuring and viewing them, &c., illustrated by numerous ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 217, December 24, 1853 • Various
... contain the remains of animals very different from those now existing in the same regions, yet in the caves of Brazil extinct species of nearly all the territorial quadrupeds now inhabiting this region occur. The Australian caverns contain fossil bones of a large extinct kangaroo. In New Zealand the wingless apteryx is still found in the wilds, and the caves of that country show us that it was preceded by other wingless birds of gigantic stature; among them the moa, which, when alive, ...
— The Mines and its Wonders • W.H.G. Kingston
... "No wonder that old fossil in the village thought it was a queer sort of a break," he shouted. "He knew what he was talking about after all when he ...
— Behind the Line • Ralph Henry Barbour
... steep ditch, some thirty feet deep by sixty or eighty wide, cut out of the solid rock, and the precipice-like wall above, with towers crested with forked battlements set along it at due intervals. The rock is a soft and crumbling limestone, containing "fossil creatures still so like the creatures they were once, that there it first occurred to the human brain to imagine that the buried shapes were not mockeries of life, but had indeed once lived; and, under those white banks by the roadside, was born, like ...
— On the Old Road, Vol. 2 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... 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
... by Goeppert and Berendt, on "Amber and the Fossil Remains of Plants contained in it," published at Berlin, 1845, a passage is found (of which a translation is here given) which quite harmonizes with the account of Tacitus:—"About the parts which are known by the name of Samland an island emerged, or rather a group ...
— The Germany and the Agricola of Tacitus • Tacitus
... 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 at all! Good-bye, now, and God bless you all, darling Mother, and everyone dear ...
— The British Association's visit to Montreal, 1884: Letters • Clara Rayleigh
... in any way to the species known as "Fossil Tories." He is rather a fossil Liberal. He was a Whig Radical, and more, when the slightest suspicion of Radicalism exposed an Englishman to contumely, to obloquy, to poverty, to fines, to stripes, to gyves, and to the jail. He was quite as advanced a politician as William ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 87, January, 1865 • Various
... attack three men and a boy who are ashore boiling the fossil pitch; kill one man, and carry off the boy. Raleigh, instead of going up to Port of Spain and demanding satisfaction, as he would have been justified in doing after this second attack, remains quietly ...
— Sir Walter Raleigh and his Time from - "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... material near the generator, the solid substances just mentioned may preferably be replaced by one of those partially inorganic compositions sold for "lagging" steam-pipes and engine-cylinders, such as "Fossil meal." Indeed, the exact nature of the lagging matters comparatively little, because the active substance in retaining the heat in the acetylene generator or the steam-pipe is the air entangled in the pores of the lagging; and therefore the value of any ...
— Acetylene, The Principles Of Its Generation And Use • F. H. Leeds and W. J. Atkinson Butterfield
... 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
... reverend elder, whose long white beard flows almost to his waist, and whose face is furrowed by a thousand storms; Anthony Jenkinson by name, the great Asiatic traveller, who is discoursing to the Christ-church virtuoso of reindeer sledges and Siberian steppes, and of the fossil ivory, plain proof of Noah's flood, which the Tungoos dig from the ice-cliffs of the Arctic sea. Next to him is Christopher Carlile, Walsingham's son-in-law (as Sidney also is now), a valiant captain, afterwards general ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... side of it;—the stomach with its winding canal, the liver, and heart occupy the centre of the body, as in the two other classes. This class includes all the Cuttle-Fishes, Squids, and Nautili, and has a vast number of fossil representatives. Many of these animals are destitute of any shell; and where they have a shell, it is not coiled from right to left or from left to right as in the spiral of the Gasteropoda, but from behind forwards as in the Nautilus. These shells are usually divided into a number of chambers,—the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various
... vegetable world. Ages ago they inhabited our northern states. Their family has come down practically unchanged from the steaming days of the Carboniferous period, when ferns grew one hundred feet high, and thronged with other rank tropical growths in matted masses to form the coal measures. The fossil remains of cycads in the rocks of that period prove that they once flourished in the tropic swamps where now are the ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... to stray splashes. It is clear, however, that the sand and water were forced not only up to the surface, but even in a continuous stream to heights of from two to ten feet above it. In many districts, trunks of trees or lumps of coal and fossil resin were washed up with the water, and even, in one or two cases, pebbles of hard rock weighing as ...
— A Study of Recent Earthquakes • Charles Davison
... of shells first found in Barrow’s Strait in 1819 occurred in very great abundance and perfection, wholly detached from the lime in which for the most part they were found embedded in other places on this coast. Indeed, it was quite astonishing, in looking at the numberless fossil animal remains occurring in many of the stones, to consider the countless myriads of shell fish and marine insects which must once have existed on this shore. The cliffs next the sea, which here rise to a perpendicular height of between four and five ...
— Journal of the Third Voyage for the Discovery of a North-West Passage • William Edward Parry
... first looked upon the lake from near the mouth of the Ogden River, in 1833. His name has been given to a great fossil lake, whose shore line may now be seen throughout the neighbouring valleys, and of which the Great Salt Lake ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... together of Particles. Hardening by Exposure to Air. Concretionary Nodules. Consolidating Effects of Pressure. Mineralization of Organic Remains. Impressions and Casts: how formed. Fossil Wood. Goppert's Experiments. Precipitation of Stony Matter most rapid where Putrefaction is going on. Sources of ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell
... with his father and mother. Here he planted the vines and the quincunx which his verses mention; and being under the necessity of making a subterraneous passage to a garden on the other side of the road, he adorned it with fossil bodies, and dignified it with the title of a grotto; a place of silence and retreat, from which he endeavoured to persuade his friends and himself that cares ...
— Lives of the English Poets: Prior, Congreve, Blackmore, Pope • Samuel Johnson
... whether she retained recollection enough of her own country to be entertained with "that strange caricature, Castle Rack Rent." Contemporary judgments such as these (not more extravagant than Horace Walpole's) are to the historian of literature what fossil remains are to ...
— Autobiography, Letters and Literary Remains of Mrs. Piozzi (Thrale) (2nd ed.) (2 vols.) • Mrs. Hester Lynch Piozzi
... Alpine eagle caught in the Jura. Gourdon also possessed a collection of lepidoptera,—a word which led society to hope for monstrosities, and to say, when it saw them, "Why, they are only butterflies!" Besides these things he had a fine array of fossil shells, mostly the collections of his friends which they bequeathed to him, and all the minerals ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac
... The sacred beetle, bound upon the breast Of the blind heathen! Snatch the curious prize, Give it a place among thy treasured spoils, Fossil and relic,—corals, encrinites, The fly in amber and the fish in stone, The twisted circlet of Etruscan gold, Medal, intaglio, poniard, poison-ring,— Place for the Memphian beetle with ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... inference that the rock which contains these shells has been subjected to enormous pressure in a direction at right angles to the planes of cleavage. The shells are all flattened and spread out in these planes. Compare this fossil trilobite of normal proportions with these others which have suffered distortion. Some have lain across, some along, and some oblique to the cleavage of the slate in which they are found; but in all cases ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... know Otis Harvey—or used to. I'd send him a wire, and he'd understand it was a ground-hog case with me. That's exactly what I told this British fossil company here." ...
— The Day's Work, Volume 1 • Rudyard Kipling
... a grindlestone, another he said "Nay; It's nought but an' owd fossil cheese, that somebody's ...
— R. Caldecott's First Collection of Pictures and Songs • Various
... prosperous Western-style capitalist economy, with a per capita GDP at the level of the highly industrialized West European countries. Rich in natural resources, Australia is a major exporter of agricultural products, minerals, metals, and fossil fuels. Commodities account for 57% of the value of total exports, so that a downturn in world commodity prices can have a big impact on the economy. The government is pushing for increased exports of manufactured goods, but competition in international ...
— The 1998 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... mausoleums. In 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 ...
— The Magician's Show Box and Other Stories • Lydia Maria Child
... cavity and stalagmitic crust. Teeth found in the floor. A third cavern. Breccia on the surface. Similar caverns in other parts of the country. At Buree. At Molong. Shattered state of the bones. Important discoveries by Professor Owen. Gigantic fossil kangaroos. Macropus atlas. Macropus titan. Macropus indeterminate. Genus Hypsiprymnus, new species, indeterminate. Genus Phalangista. Genus Phascolomys. Ph. mitchellii, a new species. New Genus Diprotodon. Dasyurus ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 2 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell
... with the 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 all ...
— Patchwork - A Story of 'The Plain People' • Anna Balmer Myers
... 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
... also, who examined the place himself, mentions the recent accumulation which occurs at St. Hospice, about sixty feet above the present level of the sea, as containing marine shells in a scarcely fossil state (a peine fossiles) and he describes the mass in which they occur, as belonging to a formation still more recent than the upper marine beds of the environs ...
— Narrative of a Survey of the Intertropical and Western Coasts of Australia] [Volume 2 of 2] • Phillip Parker King
... stiff pages of a folio volume, or the yellow leaves of a manuscript, in short, a poem, a code of laws, a confession of faith, what is your first comment? You say to yourself that the work before you is not of its own creation. It is simply a mold like a fossil shell, an imprint similar to one of those forms embedded in a stone by an animal which once lived and perished. Beneath the shell was an animal and behind the document there was a man. Why do you study ...
— Prefaces and Prologues to Famous Books - with Introductions, Notes and Illustrations • Charles W. Eliot
... centuries ago, men began to find fossil remains of animals in the rocks, a severe shock was given to the prevailing doctrine of the recent creation of the earth. The adherents of the old theology made strenuous efforts to explain away this unwelcome circumstance. The shells found had been dropped by pilgrims ...
— Man And His Ancestor - A Study In Evolution • Charles Morris
... other part. It had no tail-board, and its shafts were sharp as famine; and into this mimicry of a vehicle the murderer was to be sent to the Potomac river, while the man he had murdered was moving in state across the mourning continent. The old negro geared up his wagon by means of a set of fossil harness, and when it was backed to Garrett's porch, they laid within it the discolored corpse. The corpse was tied with ropes around the legs and made fast to the wagon sides. Harold's legs were tied to stirrups, and he was placed in the centre of four murderous looking cavalrymen. The two ...
— The Life, Crime and Capture of John Wilkes Booth • George Alfred Townsend
... 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
... 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 ...
— In the School-Room - Chapters in the Philosophy of Education • John S. Hart
... my whole time to arranging my huge pile of notes, to observing, and to experimenting in relation to the transmutation of species. During the voyage of the Beagle I had been deeply impressed by discovering in the pampean formation great fossil animals covered with armor like that on the existing armadillos; secondly, by the manner in which closely allied animals replace one another in proceeding southward over the continent; and thirdly, by the South American character of most ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... and cover immense tracts in high latitudes, extending southward, on this continent, as far as the very boundary of the tropics, where they are found side by side with the Dwarf Palm of Florida. But in the region of the true Palms the Pine is wanting. It is worthy of remark, however, that in the fossil vegetation of the Eocene world these two vegetable tribes are found associated. This fact, it seems to me, should be attributed to the mixing of the mountain Pines with the Palms of the sea-level, during that revulsion of Nature by ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 46, August, 1861 • Various
... you want an interesting and delightful nature lesson that is a little out of the ordinary, get, if you can, a fossil fern. If you are in the city, doubtless you can get one from the museum, or, better yet, you may find that among your pupils there is someone who has such a specimen carefully treasured away. In some localities where ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... a mattock and a pick, they made an attack on their fossil, whose covering cracked. It was an ammonite nodosus, corroded at the ends but weighing quite six pounds; and ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert
... 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 before brought in by the waves lay ...
— Out of the Triangle • Mary E. Bamford
... Jack Barnes suddenly, "I've done nothing and am not afraid to be arrested. I'm going to give myself up." Of course there was a storm of protest and a flow of tears, but the culprit was firm. "Tell the old fossil that if he'll guarantee safety ...
— The Daughter of Anderson Crow • George Barr McCutcheon
... fame now rather upon tradition than upon any perennial liveliness. By their solitude in the pages of American literature their very title has acquired a certain gravity, and we are apt to regard them with respect rather than to read them for amusement. Fossil wits seem properly to be classed with the formation from which they are dug, and not with living types of the same order. Yet no picture of the times in which Webster lived would be complete without a ...
— Noah Webster - American Men of Letters • Horace E. Scudder
... down, and thus to say, for instance, that the Devonian period was the time of the origin of Amphibians. In other cases the geologist utilises the fossils in his attempt to work out the order of the strata when these have been much disarranged. For the simpler fossil forms of any type must be older than those that are more complex. There is no vicious circle here, for the general succession of strata is clear, and it is quite certain that there were fishes before there were amphibians, and amphibians before there were reptiles, and reptiles before there were ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... real philosopher in practice, lived without care, in a very pleasant house which he himself had built in a very pretty garden, laid out with his own hands. In digging the terraces of this garden he found fossil shells, and in such great quantities that his lively imagination saw nothing but shells in nature. He really thought the universe was composed of shells and the remains of shells, and that the whole earth was only the sand of these in different stratae. His attention ...
— The Confessions of J. J. Rousseau, Complete • Jean Jacques Rousseau
... Carthew's memory. "That three minutes' talk was all the education I ever had worth talking of," says he. "It was all life in a nut-shell. Confound it! I thought, have I got to the point of envying that ancient fossil?" ...
— The Wrecker • Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne
... "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 ...
— An Expository Outline of the "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation" • Anonymous
... the account of the marriage of the tulasi shrub (Ocymum sanctum) with the salagram stone, or fossil ammonite, in Chapter ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... Early British and Roman remains have been found in the district, and according to the authority previously quoted—"In one of the quarries, which are abundant, Dr. Mantell discovered some of the most interesting and rarest chalk fossils with which we are acquainted, including the fossil ...
— A Week's Tramp in Dickens-Land • William R. Hughes
... 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 a scientific ...
— The Mayas, the Sources of Their History / Dr. Le Plongeon in Yucatan, His Account of Discoveries • Stephen Salisbury, Jr.
... life upon the globe. According to the first of these hypotheses, living beings, such as now exist, have existed from all eternity upon this earth. We tested that hypothesis by the circumstantial evidence, as I called it, which is furnished by the fossil remains contained in the earth's crust, and we found that it was obviously untenable. I then proceeded to consider the second hypothesis, which I termed the Miltonic hypothesis, not because it is of any particular consequence to me whether John Milton seriously entertained it ...
— American Addresses, with a Lecture on the Study of Biology • Tomas Henry Huxley
... exists; but he owes his existence to some cause. Is this cause within or without himself, finite or infinite? Trace our origin back, if you will, to our first parent, Adam; then you must ask, How did he come into being? The doctrine of the eternity of man cannot be supported. Fossil remains extend back but 6,000 years. Man is an effect; he has not always existed. Geology proves this. That the first Cause must have been an intelligent Being is proven by the fact that we are ...
— The Great Doctrines of the Bible • Rev. William Evans
... 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 234, April 22, 1854 • Various
... explanation I gave you some time ago," said the enthusiastic Alf, "about Professor Heer of Zurich, who came to the conclusion that primeval forests once existed in these now treeless Arctic regions, from the fossils of oak, elm, pine, and maple leaves discovered there. Well, I found a fossil of a plane leaf the other day,—not a very good one, to be sure—and now, here is a splendid specimen of a petrified oak-leaf. Don't you trace it ...
— The Giant of the North - Pokings Round the Pole • R.M. Ballantyne
... keeps back the dinner two hours, The smoke-jack stands still while they learn motive powers; Flies and shells swallow up all our every-day gains, And our acres are mortgaged for fossil-remains. ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 12, - Issue 326, August 9, 1828 • Various
... 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 another ...
— South with Scott • Edward R. G. R. Evans
... oriental turquoise used for brooches and rings which, like the banal pearl and the odious coral, serves to delight people of no importance. He chose occidental turquoises exclusively, stones which, properly speaking, are only a fossil ivory impregnated with coppery substances whose sea blue is choked, opaque, sulphurous, as though yellowed ...
— Against The Grain • Joris-Karl Huysmans
... tarry while the Cross was in danger and the Infidel lived. He did not know that it was all finished and over hundreds of years ago, a page of history upon which many pages were turned, and which lay as unalterable as the fate of some warm swift creature of early Eocene days over whose fossil today the strata ...
— Don Rodriguez - Chronicles of Shadow Valley • Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, Baron, Dunsany
... 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 ...
— A Book of Golden Deeds • Charlotte M. Yonge
... 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 could hear ...
— The Visioning • Susan Glaspell
... the Japanese character even if they understood English. That was what he chiefly used the Chinese ink for. But he also used to copy the inscriptions from these things." Here Stephen lifted from the mantelpiece what looked like a fossil Bath bun, but was actually a clay tablet ...
— The Mystery of 31 New Inn • R. Austin Freeman
... more plausible objection is that raised by Darwin when he said that there were no fossil remains of instincts. And, if there were, O master, what would they teach us? Not very much more than what we learn from the instincts of to-day. Does not the geologist make the erstwhile carcases live anew in our minds in the light of the world as we see it? With nothing but analogy to guide them, ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre
... 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 have been in the Munich Museum at this ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... distinctions had been 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 ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... in the room where I write these lines is a fossil herring which the boys dug up in the Rockies near Frozen Dog, at an altitude ...
— Evening Round Up - More Good Stuff Like Pep • William Crosbie Hunter
... some of the lower strata demonstrated the presence of fossil ants and tumble-bugs (the latter accompanied by their peculiar goods), and with high gratification the fact was enrolled upon the scientific record; for this was proof that these vulgar laborers belonged to the first ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... moods under whose influence one gazes with a certain poignant tenderness at the worn face of the moon; that little "fossil world'' (the child of our mother earth, too) bears such terrible scars of its brief convulsive life that a sense of pity is awakened by the sight. The moon is the wonder-land of the telescope. Those towering mountains, whose "proud aspiring peaks'' cast silhouettes of shadow that seem ...
— Curiosities of the Sky • Garrett Serviss
... "Come, my 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 paper-weight. Thanks to eternal justice, ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... and the club long ago very foolishly permitted the like privilege to their ancestors! That is 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 of national football that they should ever for one moment ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen
... a thing in the wide world to wear! I should mention just here, that out of Miss Flora's Two hundred and fifty or sixty adorers, I had just been selected as he who should throw all The rest in the shade, by the gracious bestowal On myself, after twenty or thirty rejections, Of those fossil remains which she called her "affections," And that rather decayed but well-known work of art Which Miss Flora persisted in styling her "heart." So we were engaged. Our troth had been plighted, Not ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VIII (of X) • Various
... field of geology that Leonardo is entitled to the greatest admiration by modern scientists. He had observed the deposit of fossil shells in various strata of rocks, even on the tops of mountains, and he rejected once for all the theory that they had been deposited there by the Deluge. He rightly interpreted their presence as evidence ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... a fossil, you see, and I'm called Fossell: and so he sends it to me. He has made a good deal of fun out of my name before now, in his humorous way. Not that I ...
— Major Vigoureux • A. T. Quiller-Couch
... the Odes of Pindar dedicated to George the Fourth. The literary historian must rove in other hunting grounds. He is the geologist of literature, whose study lies among the buried strata of forgotten generations, among the fossil remnants of the past. The great men with whom he must deal are the great men who are no longer great—mammoths and ichthyosauri kindly preserved to us, among the siftings of so many epochs, by the impartial benignity of Time. It is for him to unravel the jokes of Erasmus, ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... has a prosperous Western-style capitalist economy, with a per capita GDP 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 exports of manufactured goods, but competition ...
— The 1992 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... the police about our ears. I believe that in substance such was your sapient counsel to me in the cabin of the Alethea; was it not?... And you, sir!"—fixing Brentwick with a cold unfriendly eye. "You animated fossil, what d'you mean by telling me to go to the devil?... But let that pass; I hold no grudge. ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... Fossil geology occupied much of the time and attention of the great philosopher and statesman, Jefferson, and he was rewarded by the discovery of the megatherium. The mastodon, exhumed in 1801, from the marl pits of New York, by Charles Wilson Peale, has proved but one of an order of animal giants. Even ...
— Continental Monthly , Vol. 6, No. 1, July, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy. • Various
... interpreted as periods of twenty-four hours each and the universality of the Noachian deluge was accepted by everybody, it would have been something like a miracle if he had at once fathomed the true meaning of the shark's teeth, elephant's bones, and other fossil remains which came under his notice. His idea was that all these things were mere concretions "generated by fermentation in the spots where they were found," as he very quaintly and even absurdly put it. The accusation, however, ...
— Science and Morals and Other Essays • Bertram Coghill Alan Windle
... to be standing up examining a strange fossil he had found, and as he casually glanced at the boy he saw the coolie hand him something, which he promptly hid in the folds of a kind of ...
— Adventures in Many Lands • Various
... 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 permit. I had plenty ...
— The People that Time Forgot • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... of time. Coarse and plain, it is 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 incidents ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various
... obvious method of testing the theory of evolution is by the study of fossil forms, and our knowledge of these has progressed enormously during the period under review. Not only have a number of new and strange types of ancient life come to light, but in some cases, e.g. in that of the horse and elephant, a very complete series of ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... harmonies of human development. If Prof. Agassiz could determine the form and size of a fish by seeing its scales, and Prof. Owen outline the skeleton of an unknown animal by viewing a portion of its fossil, why should not the physician understand the language of temperaments, since it opens to him the revelations of human development? The sculptor blends character with form, the artist endows the face with natural expression, the anatomist accurately traces the nerves and arteries, ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... kings or to gain lawsuits, and a Roman citizen was put to death in the reign of Claudius for bringing such an amulet into court. Pliny had seen this "egg." It was about the size of an apple, with a cartilaginous skin covered with discs.[1137] Probably it was a fossil echinus, such as has been found in Gaulish tombs.[1138] Such "eggs" were doubtless connected with the cult of the serpent, or some old myth of an egg produced by serpents may have been made use of to account for their formation. This is ...
— The Religion of the Ancient Celts • J. A. MacCulloch
... hospitality from Senhor Lubata. The town has more than a thousand inhabitants; the district has 28,063, with only 315 slaves. It stands on a mound of calcareous tufa, containing great numbers of fossil shells, the most recent of which resemble those found in the marly tufa close to the coast. The fort stands on the south side of the town, on a high perpendicular bank overhanging the Coanza. This river is here a noble stream, ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... [114]Selenousia, in Ionia, was upon a salt lake, sacred to Artemis. In Epirus was a city called Alesa, Elissa, and Lesa: and hard by were the Alesian plains; similar to the Elysian in Egypt: in these was produced a great quantity of fossil [115]salt. There was an Alesia in Arcadia, and a mountain Alesium with a temple upon it. Here an antient personage, AEputus, was said to have been suffocated with salt water: in which history there is an allusion to the etymology of the name. It is true that Pausanias ...
— A New System; or, an Analysis of Antient Mythology. Volume I. • Jacob Bryant
... (for the monstrous has its mode of being complete) that all things were possible to him, even emotion. In every savant there is something of the corpse, and this man was a savant. Only to see him you caught science imprinted in the gestures of his body and in the folds of his dress. His was a fossil face, the serious cast of which was counteracted by that wrinkled mobility of the polyglot which verges on grimace. But a severe man withal; nothing of the hypocrite, nothing of the cynic. A tragic dreamer. He was one of those whom crime leaves ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... in quest of the mallard. That "swopping" bird, still justly respected, was thought, for many ages, to linger in the college of which he is the protector. But now all hope of recovering him alive is lost, and it is reserved for the excavator of the future to marvel over the fossil bones ...
— Oxford • Andrew Lang |
