"Insect" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... his eye and pinion, trained For mateship with the sun, twitched at a sting. Amazed to find a "cootie" on his wing, And that the insect dreamed, it was ordained By race heredity to serve the King— He shook ...
— Freedom, Truth and Beauty • Edward Doyle
... could never see any living creature in distress without feeling a strong desire to relieve its sufferings. She knew that Arthur was in the habit of torturing every little insect and bird that came in his way, and had often drawn his persecutions upon herself by interfering in behalf of the poor victim; and now the thought instantly flashed upon her that this was some of his work, and that he would return ere long ...
— Elsie Dinsmore • Martha Finley
... In the Insect room the child's attention is naturally drawn to the brilliantly-colored butterflies and moths, the curious beetles from tropical countries, and the "Strange insects, centipedes and scorpions." There is an extremely interesting silk-worm exhibit, and the children who visited ...
— Library Work with Children • Alice I. Hazeltine
... slipped away from him, and, with a despairing gesture, made sign that they were not alone. And her blushes grew deeper as her eyes fell upon her bare arms. She shuddered when her loose hanging hair stirred against her neck and shoulders. The slightest touch of a waving bough or a passing insect, the softest breath of air, now made her tremble as if some invisible hand were grasping ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola
... broad masses of rich grey-brown shadow—they agreed that it was incomparably more beautiful when viewed by the full light of day and in all the glory of brilliant sunshine. A thousand gorgeous colours on leaf and blossom, on gaily-plumaged bird and bright-winged insect, charmed their eyes and enriched the foreground of the picture; while the dense masses of foliage, with their subtle gradations of colour, light, and shade, as they gradually receded into the background, and finally melted into the rich purply grey ...
— The Pirate Island - A Story of the South Pacific • Harry Collingwood
... sting of an insect or the thorn of a plant. It is the sting or thorn which here is considered in prison and exhorted ...
— A Little Book of Filipino Riddles • Various
... a lord and I will show you a man whom you couldn't tell from a journeyman shoemaker if he were stripped, and who, in all that is worth being, is the shoemaker's inferior; and in the shoemaker I will show you a dull animal, a poor-spirited insect; for there are enough of him to rise and chuck the lords and royalties into the sea where they belong, and he ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... the bird we have just seen is conscious of his cruelty to the insect. The natural food of cats consists in rats, mice, birds, and such small animals as they can seize by violence or catch by craft. It was impossible she should know the value you set upon your bird, and therefore she had no more ...
— The History of Sandford and Merton • Thomas Day
... leathery substance, so that no portion of his actual body appeared, but of this, of course, we were entirely ignorant. He presented himself, therefore, as a compact, bristling creature, having much of the quality of a complicated insect, with whip-like tentacles and a clanging arm projecting from his shining cylindrical body case. The form of his head was hidden by his enormous many-spiked helmet—we discovered afterwards that he used ...
— The First Men In The Moon • H. G. Wells
... Forrester, and Miss Matty, and Miss Pole appear on that memorable Tuesday evening. I counted seven brooches myself on Miss Pole's dress. Two were fixed negligently in her cap (one was a butterfly made of Scotch pebbles, which a vivid imagination might believe to be the real insect); one fastened her net neckerchief; one her collar; one ornamented the front of her gown, midway between her throat and waist; and another adorned the point of her stomacher. Where the seventh was I have forgotten, but it was somewhere ...
— Cranford • Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell
... part of the survivors. Ragon says, that the ancients substituted the acacia for all other plants because they believed it to be incorruptible, and not liable to injury from the attacks of any kind of insect or other animal—thus symbolizing the incorruptible nature of ...
— The Symbolism of Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... were plenty: the lads gathered the fair-cheeked fox-mushrooms, so famous in the Lithuanian songs as the emblem of maidenhood, for the worms do not eat them, and, marvellous to say, no insect alights on them; the young ladies hunted for the slender pine-lover, which the song calls the colonel of the mushrooms.52 All were eager for the orange-agaric; this, though of more modest stature and less famous in song, is still the most delicious, whether fresh or salted, whether ...
— Pan Tadeusz • Adam Mickiewicz
... unconsciously; for each man, limited to his own little sphere, and limited to his own interests, and guided by his own prejudices and passions, has been as ignorant of more general tendencies as the coral insect of the reef which it has helped to build. To become distinctly conscious of what it is that we have all been doing all this time, is one step in advance. We have obeyed in ignorance; and as obedience becomes conscious, we may hope, within certain ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... not require taking up every year, unless in constant use. Take out the tacks from these, fold the carpets back, wash the floor in strong suds with a tablespoonful of borax dissolved in it. Dash with insect powder, or lay with tobacco leaves along the edge, and re-tack. Or use turpentine, the enemy of buffalo moths, carpet worms and other insects that injure and destroy carpets. Mix the turpentine with pure water in the proportion of three ...
— The Whitehouse Cookbook (1887) - The Whole Comprising A Comprehensive Cyclopedia Of Information For - The Home • Mrs. F.L. Gillette
... know the wonderful little link between the fish and the insect; and the two chatted over its strange form, till the boat returned ...
— Two Years Ago, Volume II. • Charles Kingsley
... experience to the believer which will be fraught with inestimably good things; that is, the act of dying, and not merely the being dead. It is no doubt as necessary to the nature of the soul, to its psychology, its soul-life, as the changes of the worm, chrysalis, and butterfly, are to the insect. And thus, as in all other things, where sin abounded, grace much more abounds, and even death, like a cross, is turned into a ministration ...
— Catharine • Nehemiah Adams
... believers in transmigration; and that this belief exists yet among the aborigines. I have noticed that my Indians were unwilling to kill any animal whatever, even the most noxious and dangerous, that inhabits the ruined monuments. I have often told them to kill some venomous insect or serpent that may have happened to be in our way. They invariably refused to do so, but softly and carefully caused them to go. And when asked why they did not kill them, declined to answer except by a knowing and mysterious ...
— Vestiges of the Mayas • Augustus Le Plongeon
... the water, and the active forms of monkeys and even of leopards darted among the trees. But the country—whether forest, mud-flat, or prairie—was always damp and feverish: a wet land steaming under a burning sun and humming with mosquitoes and all kinds of insect life. ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill
... going," the detective said, strutting across the room, with his little round belly protruding like that of an insect. "You can always find me at the hotel down here, if I'm in this part of the country. Just ask for me ask for me and I'll ...
— Boy Scouts in the Coal Caverns • Major Archibald Lee Fletcher
... of explanation is called for from one who has the temerity to offer a surfeited public still another book on wild flowers. Inasmuch as science has proved that almost every blossom in the world is everything it is because of its necessity to attract insect friends or to repel its foes - its form, mechanism, color, markings, odor, time of opening and closing, and its season of blooming being the result of natural selection by that special insect upon which each depends more or less absolutely ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan
... sunset slowly faded out of the western sky. And the hush of the night was over all. The feeling of an awful solitude, which comes to those whose business is to pass the night on the open prairie, is enhanced rather than reduced by the buzz of insect life upon the night air. The steady hum of the mosquito—the night song of the grasshoppers and frogs—the ticking, spasmodic call of the invisible beetles—all these things help to intensify the loneliness and magnitude of the wild surroundings. Nor ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum
... had no feeling of discomfort. Over all the dismal landscape a canopy of low, lead-colored clouds hung like a visible curse. In all this there were a menace and a portent—a hint of evil, an intimation of doom. Bird, beast, or insect there was none. The wind sighed in the bare branches of the dead trees and the gray grass bent to whisper its dread secret to the earth; but no other sound nor motion broke the awful repose of ...
— Can Such Things Be? • Ambrose Bierce
... one or two breaks in the reef surrounding this desert isle, as we could see from a link missing here and there in the chain of breakers. This was especially noticeable towards the south-western portion of the rampart the indefatigable coral insect had thrown up, where an opening about double the width of the Silver Queen's beam was plainly discernible. Through this fissure in the reef, piloted by that power which had watched over us throughout all the perils of our ...
— Afloat at Last - A Sailor Boy's Log of his Life at Sea • John Conroy Hutcheson
... and no single line about it quite straight. A cottage crazy with age, buried up to the thatch in sweetbrier, creepers, honeysuckle, and perched high above crossroads. A cottage almost unapproachable for beehives and their bees—an insect for which Clara had an aversion. Imagine on the rough, pebbled approach to the door of this cottage (and Clara had on thin shoes) a peculiar cradle with a dark-eyed baby that was staring placidly at two bees sleeping on a coverlet made of a rough linen such as Clara had never ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... this. Forget your own cares long enough to really see, but for a moment, yonder spray of roses waving in the breeze. Watch the play of light and shade in the flickering leaves overhead. Listen to the chorus of voices from bird, insect, and wind. The wine of gladness! Nature pours it in a sparkling flood, unceasing by day and night, for every ...
— The Chief End of Man • George S. Merriam
... vile insect!" said a Lion angrily to a Gnat that was buzzing around his head. But the Gnat was ...
— The AEsop for Children - With pictures by Milo Winter • AEsop
... since visited Australia, has turned his attention to the subject, and the result of his experience, which will be found below, tends to overthrow the opinion I have previously expressed, to the effect, that this substance is the exudation of a tree, not the deposit of an insect.* ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 2 • John Lort Stokes
... simple language. So he could do unto, rather than being done in. He had never realized that violent death could come in so many repulsive forms. Everything here was deadly to man—from the smallest insect to the largest plant. ...
— Deathworld • Harry Harrison
... to the system of the Metempsychosis, a soul, to undergo purification, passes into the body of some insect or animal. It is of importance not to disturb this penance, as the work must in ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... the ineffable melancholy of twilight rising from an unknown strand; then the solemn coldness of moonlight watches, the scent of the burnt land under the fierce sun, when all nature was hushed save the dreamy buzz of insect-life: the green coolness of underwood or forest, the unutterable harmony of the sighing breeze, and the song of wild birds during the long patient ambushes of partisan war; the taste of bread in hunger, of the stream in the fever of thirst, of approaching ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... time—moving spectral over the black surface of the water—they would try the lake for a change, and catch a perch as they had caught the mouse. Their catholic digestions were equally tolerant of a rat or an insect. And there were moments, proud moments, in their lives, when they were clever enough to snatch a small bird at roost off his perch. On those occasions the sense of superiority which the large bird feels every where over the small, warmed their cool ...
— Man and Wife • Wilkie Collins
... guests might have separated with at least a semblance of good feeling, but the fatal word which he had feared in his forebodings came from Mrs. J. Harry Stott, who majestically descended the broad staircase carrying before her a small reddish-brown insect impaled on a darning-needle. She walked to the desk and presented it for Mr. Cone's consideration. It was a most indelicate action, but the knowledge that it was such did not lessen the horror with which the guests ...
— The Dude Wrangler • Caroline Lockhart
... Marston did it. No one ever saw her hurried or busy, yet the proofs of her industry were here. She worked like the coral insect, in the dark, as it were, of instinct unlit by intellect, and, like the coral insect, she raised a monumental structure ...
— Gone to Earth • Mary Webb
... to find this. It is called the Tamarisk. This long, oval-shaped part is made by an insect which inhabits the plant, and is eaten by the inhabitants in the plains east of the Mediterranean Sea. It is there called Mount Sinai Manna, and is supposed to be the Manna which the Jews found when they were in the Wilderness after ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: The Mysteries of the Caverns • Roger Thompson Finlay
... varies with the changing light, while many a happy hour may be spent in watching the many coloured lizards which play among the rocks, the curious mantis and twig-insects, and other strange specimens of insect life which abound here; while, should you weary of sight-seeing and the glare of light, quietude and repose may be found among the fruit-laden fig-trees of Kitchener's Island, or in ...
— Peeps at Many Lands: Egypt • R. Talbot Kelly
... the least; not only islands, but whole Archipelagos are made annually, by the sea insects in that quarter of the world; but, then, you are not to form your notions of an insect in such an ocean, by the insects you see in such a bit of ...
— Home as Found • James Fenimore Cooper
... insect wings are glistening in the beam Of the low sun, and mountain-tops are bright, Oh, let me, by the crystal valley-stream, Wander amid the mild and mellow light; And while the wood-thrush pipes his evening lay, Give me one lonely hour to hymn the ...
— Poems • William Cullen Bryant
... The sky was full of strange gulls with long, forked tails, and a lovely little flying lizard with transparent wings of the palest green—like those of a grasshopper—was flitting about picking up insect stragglers. ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold
... of ingenuity in order to screen the mercury from the wind so as to obtain a well-defined reflection. No sooner was I getting a perfect contact of the sun's image and its reflection than some huge fly or other insect would begin to promenade on the mercury, disturbing its surface. Butterflies were even more troublesome, as they left upon the mercury—by the luminosity of which they were greatly attracted—sediments of multi-coloured powder and down from their wings and bodies. ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... will of the sweet sap. I remember also that my attempt to photograph a score of bees, two large brown butterflies and one humming-bird, all in attendance upon this birch feast, was a surprising failure. I secured a picture of the holes in the bark, to be sure, but the rapidly moving insect and bird life was too quick for an exposure of even a fraction of a second, and my negative was lifeless. These same yellow birches, picturesque in form, ragged in light-colored bark, give a brightness all their own to the deep forest, mostly of ...
— Getting Acquainted with the Trees • J. Horace McFarland
... continent to the amount of over four hundred million dollars annually. Insects destroy the crops upon which man depends for his food. Going to school hasn't made you very wise, has it? Well, the toads are insect destroyers. That's their business. If the State only knew enough to make use of them, millions of dollars might be saved every year. Does it seem to you that the human animal is so clever as it might be, when it allows such numbers of ...
— The Ontario Readers - Third Book • Ontario Ministry of Education
... Poisonous snakes are the karait, the cobra, and Russell's viper. The first is sometimes an intruder into houses. Lizards and mongooses are less unwelcome visitors. White ants attack timber and ruin books, and mosquitoes and sandflies add to the unpleasant features of the hot weather. The best known insect pest is the locust, but visitations on a large scale are rare. Of late years much more damage has been done by an insect which harbours in ...
— The Panjab, North-West Frontier Province, and Kashmir • Sir James McCrone Douie
... "'faint heart never won fair lady.' And I'm determined to win this kaliedoscope of beauty or perish in the attempt!" You will notice that our insect had a way of using big words to express himself, which leads us to suspect that the school system in Oz is the same they employ ...
— The Woggle-Bug Book • L. Frank Baum
... bees, who line their nests with small round pieces of leaves, which they themselves cut and then fit together so exactly, without gum, that they hold their stores of honey and do not leak a bit. Well, a sharp-eyed observer has found, on one of these bees, an insect whose body is no longer than the width of the dot of this "i" (1-90th of an inch), and which is believed to be the smallest insect known. It is called Pteratomus, a word which means "winged atom," and it lives entirely ...
— St. Nicholas Magazine for Boys and Girls, Vol. 5, September 1878, No. 11 • Various
... to which we had made up our minds. Is it that we despise little things; that we are not prepared for them; that they take us in our careless, unguarded moments, and tease us out of our ordinary patience by their petty, incessant, insect warfare, buzzing about us and stinging us like gnats, so that we can neither get rid of nor grapple with them; whereas we collect all our fortitude and resolution to meet evils of greater magnitude? Or is it that there is a certain stream of irritability that is ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... greater space and freedom. It suggests besides, that the universe is not rough-hewn, but perfect in its details. Nature will bear the closest inspection; she invites us to lay our eye level with the smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain. She has no interstices; every part is full of life. I explore, too, with pleasure, the sources of the myriad sounds which crowd the summer noon, and which seem the very grain and stuff of which eternity is made. Who does not remember the shrill roll-call of the ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau
... angurek warna and katong'ging; the first of which I apprehend to be the anggrek bunga putri (Angraecum scriptum, R.) and the other the anggrek kasturi (Angraecum moschatum, R.) or scorpion-flower, from its resembling that insect, as the former does the butterfly. The musky scent resides at the ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... the diseases of "the lower animals." Now the fact is that already we share a great many diseases with the lower animals, a few of them being tuberculosis, anthrax, rabies, tetanus, cancer, pleuro-pneumonia, certain insect-borne diseases, some parasitic worm diseases and some skin diseases like favus. As the knowledge of the lowly origin of many of our diseases is more widespread, this sort of ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... a great many of them," answered Arthur, "and it is supposed that new ones are constantly being formed by the labours of the coral insect. A bare ledge of coral first appears, just at the surface; it arrests floating substances, weeds, trees, etcetera; soon the sea-birds begin to resort there; by the decay of vegetable and animal matter a thin soil gradually covers the foundation of coral; a cocoa-nut is drifted upon ...
— The Island Home • Richard Archer
... explained," said Nern, simply, "that Venus dwellers, due to our advanced knowledge of sanitation and health conversation, live about 800 years and then die invariably of old age. The only unnatural cause of death encountered is this giant insect. Accidents do occur, but they are rare. There are no deliberate ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science April 1930 • Various
... felling of trees, it having been scientifically proved that trees in a certain quantity, not only purify the air from disease germs affecting the human organization, but also save the crops from many noxious insect- pests and poisonous fungi. Having learned the lesson at last, that the Almighty may be trusted to know His own business, and that trees are intended for wider purposes than mere timber, the regulations were strict concerning them. No one could fell a tree on his own ground ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... a reader has assimilated from any given book his own proper nourishment and pleasure, the rest of the book is so much oyster shell. The end of true reading is the development of individuality. Like a certain water insect, the reader instinctively selects from the outspread world of books the building materials for the house of his soul. He chooses here and rejects there, and remembers or forgets according to the formative desire ...
— The Guide to Reading - The Pocket University Volume XXIII • Edited by Dr. Lyman Abbott, Asa Don Dickenson, and Others
... The insect can be divided, because it has limbs with which to move; and an intelligence higher than man can doubtless see emanations from those particles of light. But a monad is indivisible! Think of each cubic inch of this great earth containing a million grains of sand, and those countless grains ...
— Town and Country, or, Life at Home and Abroad • John S. Adams
... evening, the whole party determined to take time by the forelock, and abandoning their cabins remove with their household goods and herds of cattle before the insect plunderers had prepared the way for a famine which they were certain to do before many days. Hastily loading their carts with their household goods and stores, and collecting their cattle, five hundred in number, they set out for the ...
— Woman on the American Frontier • William Worthington Fowler
... to the peak, the lawns And winding glades high up like ways to Heaven, The slender coco's drooping crown of plumes The lightning flash of insect and of bird, The lustre of the long convolvuluses That coil'd around the stately stems, and ran Ev'n to the limit of the land, the glows And glories of the broad belt of the world, All these he saw; but what he fain had seen He could not see, the kindly human face, Nor ever hear ...
— Beauties of Tennyson • Alfred Tennyson
... poor little captive will possibly be miserable, pining for liberty, hating its prison, dreading the visits of its jailor, and so harassed in its terror that in some cases the poor little heart is broken, and in a few hours death is the result. In the following simple sketches of animal, bird, and insect life, I have tried to show how confidence must be gained, and the little wild heart won by quiet and unvarying kindness, and also by the endeavour to imitate as much as possible the natural surroundings of its own life ...
— Wild Nature Won By Kindness • Elizabeth Brightwen
... the torrid zone, with its luxuriant vegetation, is also prolific of insect and reptile life; and, from this very circumstance, the denizen of a hot country is often subject to a greater amount of personal discomfort than the dweller in the Arctic zone. Even the scarcity of vegetable food, and the bitter, biting frost, are far easier to endure than the plague of tipulary ...
— The Plant Hunters - Adventures Among the Himalaya Mountains • Mayne Reid
... those who have never seen this delicious insect, I take leave to mention here, that, when full grown, it is a large dingy brown—coloured beetle, about two inches long, with six legs, and two f eelers as long as its body. It has a strong anti—hysterical flavour, something between rotten cheese and assafoetida, and seldom stirs aboard ...
— Tom Cringle's Log • Michael Scott
... great rubber industry of Brazil the trees grow and produce with but little if any cultivation, this is not true of the coffee trees. They have to be cultivated and carefully looked after. Insect pests that are so destructive to coffee trees in many countries, are almost absent in Brazil and this fact has not a little to do with making this the greatest coffee country in the world. In the state of Sao Paulo ...
— Birdseye Views of Far Lands • James T. Nichols
... with the solicitude of a mother removing some buzzing insect from her child's cradle, and, making a sign to enjoin silence, added in a low voice, "She is neither dead nor poisoned. Some philtre has been given to her for a bad purpose. Her breathing is even, and she cannot fail to recover from ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... to see, capacity to suffer, one may come Ito understand all things. In an insect's death are hinted all disasters. Through a knot-hole can be seen the sky and ...
— Chantecler - Play in Four Acts • Edmond Rostand
... doubling his fist and holding it within an inch of my nose. "Say afraid again, you miserable insect, and I'll ...
— Blue Jackets - The Log of the Teaser • George Manville Fenn
... in the later part of the winter, and the glazed frost that often follows them; the frosts and the snow-storms which return every year in the second half of May, when the trees are already in full blossom and insect life swarms everywhere; the early frosts and, occasionally, the heavy snowfalls in July and August, which suddenly destroy myriads of insects, as well as the second broods of the birds in the prairies; the torrential rains, due to the monsoons, which fall in ...
— Mutual Aid • P. Kropotkin
... the middle of the sixth century that two Persian monks, who had long resided in China, and made themselves acquainted with the mode of rearing the silkworm, succeeded in carrying the eggs of the insect to Constantinople. Under their direction they were hatched and fed. A sufficient number of butterflies were saved to propagate the race, and mulberry trees were planted to afford nourishment to the rising generations of caterpillars. Thus the industry was propagated. It spread into the Italian ...
— Men of Invention and Industry • Samuel Smiles
... coral insect, obeying the blind instinct of its nature, adds particle to particle, and builds a house for itself at the same time that it helps to construct a continent; so we, obeying the voice of God, in every little duty, performed not grudgingly, ...
— The Elements of Character • Mary G. Chandler
... of kinds as in the surrounding virgin forests. What a struggle between the several kinds of trees must here have gone on during long centuries, each annually scattering its seeds by the thousand; what war between insect and insect—between insects, snails, and other animals, with birds and beasts of prey—all striving to increase, and all feeding on each other or on the trees, or their seeds and seedlings, or on the other plants which first clothed the ground and thus checked the growth of the trees! ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... fellow first," said the Goblin, pointing to a large, round insect that went flying by, humming like a top. Ribsy snapped at it, and swallowed it, and the next instant disappeared with a tremendous explosion in a great cloud ...
— Davy and The Goblin - What Followed Reading 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland' • Charles E. Carryl
... but as they were not yet used to raise and manage the silk-worm, they reaped nothing but their trouble for their pains. They tore up the mulberry-trees they had planted, and, in spite of De Serres, asserted that the northern climate was not adapted for the rearing of that tender insect. The great Sully, from his hatred of all objects of luxury, countenanced the popular clamour, and crushed the rising enterprise of De Serres. The monarch was wiser than the minister. The book had made sufficient noise to reach the ear of Henry IV.; who ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... vanished into dust again. And other kings usurped their place, Who called themselves of Kintu's race, And worshipped Kintu; not as he, The mild, benignant deity, Who held all life a holy thing, Be it of insect or of king, Would have ordained, but with wild rite, With altars heaped, and dolorous cries, And savage dance, and bale-fires light, An unaccepted sacrifice. At last, when thousand years were flown, The great Ma-anda filled the throne: A prince of generous heart and high, ...
— Verses • Susan Coolidge
... resulting in curved outlines of eccentric character. This eccentricity, coupled with the very unusual character of the details at the outer extremities of the figures, leads to the surmise that each part of the design is a conventional representation of some life form, a bird, an insect, or ...
— A Study Of The Textile Art In Its Relation To The Development Of Form And Ornament • William H. Holmes
... soldier, the rope for the assassin, the fist for the rowdy; but, by Heaven! it's a ludicrous thing to squander gunpowder when insect powder will accomplish the same results. I told you, I had waited until I had the evidence," he said. "Now you are going ...
— The Price of the Prairie - A Story of Kansas • Margaret Hill McCarter
... have done the most in this world for God and for men? The largely endowed men? 'Not many wise, not many mighty, not many noble are called.' The coral insect is microscopic, but it will build up from the profoundest depth of the ocean a reef against which the whole Pacific may dash in vain. It is the small gifts that, after all, are the important ones. So let us cultivate ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... provisions and for other things. These multitudinous insects seem to flourish on the rattan vine especially, and no means are known whereby to exterminate them. Ants, especially the white ant, pay frequent visits to the house, but the worst scourge of all is the ravenous bedbug. This unpleasant insect is found under the joists just beneath the floor laths, but in greatest numbers under those parts of the floor that are continually used as sleeping places, and in the hammocks. Occasionally an effort is made to scrape them out, but they are so cunning ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... 100 of them went down to Guildford early in the morning, and returned late in the evening. It was a beautiful day, bright and cloudless; and as those London boys wandered about the country lanes and meadows of Guildford, and heard the ceaseless hum of insect life, and the uncaged birds singing high in the blue sky, and saw the wild-flowers in the hedgerows, and the glancing waters in their way, we may be sure that more than mere enjoyment was stored up in their minds, and that thoughts which might ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 446 - Volume 18, New Series, July 17, 1852 • Various
... than a heavy heart? The soothing voices of insect life which soften the darkness and cheer the wayfarer in the countryside seemed only to mock her with their myriad care-free songs. And to make matters worse there suddenly rang in her ears from far over to the west the loud clatter of those ...
— Pee-wee Harris • Percy Keese Fitzhugh
... is unjustified, and only irritates the sufferer, rouses his antagonism, and undermines his confidence in the judgment of his adviser. He knows that the sensations are there. To call them imaginary is like telling one who inspects an insect through a microscope that the claws do not look enormous; they do look enormous—through the microscope—but this does not make them so. The worrier must learn to realize that he is looking at his sensations, as he does ...
— Why Worry? • George Lincoln Walton, M.D.
... of pinch-bugs, and another is professor of toads, and another is professor of lobsters, and so on until all the kinds of insects has each a professor to itself. And them they call specialists, and each one knows more about his own kind of insect than any other man in th' world knows. So mebbe the Frinchmin is professor ...
— Mike Flannery On Duty and Off • Ellis Parker Butler
... tangled glen; wayside well—perennial, patient, silent, clear, stealing through its square font of rough-hewn stone; ever thus deep, no more;—which the winter wreck sullies not, the summer thirst wastes not, incapable of stain as of decline;—where the fallen leaf floats undecayed, and the insect darts undefiling: cressed brook and ever-eddying river, lifted even in flood scarcely over its stepping stones,—but through all sweet summer keeping tremulous music with harp-strings of dark water among the silver fingering of the pebbles. ...
— Frondes Agrestes - Readings in 'Modern Painters' • John Ruskin
... together, if you're going that way." So Tom stepped off, brushing through the steaming long grass, gemmed with wild flowers, followed by the keeper; and, as the grasshoppers bounded chirruping out of his way, and the insect life hummed and murmured, and the lark rose and sang above his head, he felt happier than he had done for many a long month. So his heart opened towards his companion, who kept a little ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes
... books from the American press is Episodes of Insect Life, by ACHETA DOMESTICA, just reprinted by J. S. Redfield. The natural history and habits of insects of every class are delineated by a close observer with remarkable minuteness, and in a style of unusual ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... things, like stones—inorganic things as they are called. Living things—organisms, as they are called—he cannot explain to you at all. When he meddles with them, he always ends like the man who killed his goose to get the golden eggs. He has to kill his goose, or his flower, or his insect, before he can analyse it; and then it is not a goose, but only the corpse of a goose; not a flower, but only the dead ...
— Madam How and Lady Why - or, First Lessons in Earth Lore for Children • Charles Kingsley
... completely unaware was Franklin Kane, who sat, as usual, just outside the circle in the sun, balancing his tea-cup on his raised knees and 'Fletcherising' a slice of cake. Gerald had glanced at him as one might glance—Althea had felt it keenly—at some nice little insect on one's path, a pleasant insect, but too small to warrant any attention beyond a casual recognition of type. But Franklin, who had a casual interest in nobody, was very much aware of the newcomer, and he gazed attentively at Gerald Digby as he had gazed at Helen on the first evening of ...
— Franklin Kane • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... insect, n. Associated Words: entomology, entomologist, entomologic, chrsalis, pupa, cicada, cocoon, credpitaculum, entomophilous, entornophily, entomtaxy, entomotomy, insecticidal, insectifuge, insectile, larva, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... piece of dead coral, William. Do you see that on every branch there are a hundred little holes? Well, in every one of these little holes once lived a sea-insect; and as these insects increase, so do the ...
— Masterman Ready • Captain Marryat
... waken them, but they would open their eyes only for a moment, then fall asleep again. Soon he began to feel a strange, sleepy feeling coming over him. He shook himself and tried to keep awake. Just then he noticed a very large insect on a branch of a tree. It had many wings on its back, which kept up a steady, droning noise. When it noticed the hunter looking at it, the insect said, "I am Weeng, the spirit of sleep. Your dogs came too near my home, and so they have fallen under my spell. ...
— Thirty Indian Legends • Margaret Bemister
... pierce the glories of the sunset and see into the streets of heaven. He is dressed in black, and is rather more clerical in appearance than most English curates are nowadays; but he does not wear the collar and waistcoat of a parish priest. He is roused from his trance by the chirp of an insect from a tuft of grass in a crevice of the stone. His face relaxes: he turns quietly, and gravely takes off his hat to the tuft, addressing the insect in a brogue which is the jocular assumption of a gentleman and not the natural speech of ...
— John Bull's Other Island • George Bernard Shaw
... by their familiars); they then attack and devour the large white lilies, and honeysuckles; finally, they spread themselves impartially all over the garden, and having literally stripped that bare, are now attacking the fruit. It is an insect which I have never seen in England; a species of beetle, much smaller, but not unlike the cockchafer we are familiar with. Their number is really prodigious, and they seem to me to propagate with portentous rapidity, for every day, ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... with the remains of the corn, or sprinkled them with wine-drops. Glaukias had the art of imitating the pattering of rain and the humming of a fly to perfection with his lips; and when the girls complained of the tiresome insect buzzing in their faces, or declared, when a drop fell on them, that in spite of the blue and cloudless sky it was certainly beginning to rain, the two men had to cover their mouths with their hands, that their laughter ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... all; they were only part of the Victorian absurdity. It is obvious that religious enthusiasm, as a personal matter, means nothing to him. He investigates the feelings of Newman or Keble as a naturalist might the contortions of an insect. The ceremonies and rites of the Church are objects of subdued hilarity to him, and in their presence, if he suppresses his laughter, it is solely to prevent his missing any detail precious to his curiosity. When the subject of ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... at sea between Mazzorbo and Murano. The ruddy arches overhead were reflected without interruption in the waveless ruddy lake below. Our black boat was the only dark spot in this sphere of splendour. We seemed to hang suspended; and such as this, I fancied, must be the feeling of an insect caught in the heart of a fiery-petalled rose. Yet not these melodramatic sunsets alone are beautiful. Even more exquisite, perhaps, are the lagoons, painted in monochrome of greys, with just one touch of pink upon a western cloud, scattered in ripples here and there on the waves below, reminding ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece • John Addington Symonds
... with horror at the description I had given of those terrible engines, and the proposal I had made. "He was amazed, how so impotent and grovelling an insect as I" (these were his expressions) "could entertain such inhuman ideas, and in so familiar a manner, as to appear wholly unmoved at all the scenes of blood and desolation which I had painted as the common effects of ...
— Gulliver's Travels - into several remote nations of the world • Jonathan Swift
... mind tire upon this, from the repeated use, another of nature's kingdoms opens itself at once upon him; the plant he is weary of observing, feeds some insect he may examine; nor is there a stone that lies before his foot, but may afford ...
— Hypochondriasis - A Practical Treatise (1766) • John Hill
... already showing the measure of their coming harvest, and then strawyard and farm buildings would slide into view; heavy dairy cattle, roan and skewbald and dappled, stood near the gates, drowsily resentful of insect stings, and bunched-up companies of ducks halted in seeming irresolution between the charms of the horse-pond and the alluring neighbourhood of the farm kitchen. Away by the banks of some rushing mill-stream, in a setting of copse and cornfield, a village might ...
— When William Came • Saki
... numerous on Mars, the conditions being very favourable to insect life; and they are all on a very much larger scale than our insects, especially those ...
— To Mars via The Moon - An Astronomical Story • Mark Wicks
... the fat body of the spider, I fired. But with another of the remarkably quick movements the spider landed the usual safe distance from destruction. Then I gave it up. For all I know, that animal, I can scarcely call it an insect after using a big game pistol on it, is still occupying the hut. About nine months later I was telling Captain Barnett, of the R.M.S. Napo which picked me up on the Amazon on my way home, about my ill success in hunting the spider. "Lange," ...
— In The Amazon Jungle - Adventures In Remote Parts Of The Upper Amazon River, Including A - Sojourn Among Cannibal Indians • Algot Lange
... much more constant means of concealment, has rendered brilliant colour less hurtful there than in the temperate and colder regions. Again, this perennial vegetation supplies abundance of both vegetable and insect food throughout the year, and thus a greater abundance and greater variety of the forms of life are rendered possible, than where recurrent seasons of cold and scarcity reduce the possibilities of life to a minimum. Geology furnishes us with another reason, in the fact, that ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... to be assaulted ferociously. As we walked we could feel them resisting our progress, and it seemed as if we were forcing our way through solid banks of them. If we rested, they alighted in such myriads that soon we appeared literally sheathed in tiny atoms of insect life, vainly trying to pierce the mesh of our clothing. To bare a hand was to have it covered with blood in a moment, and the thought of being at their mercy was an exquisitely horrible one. Night and day their voices blended in a vast drone, ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... To her, alone, in all that party, the warm arms of the sun brandished javelins, and the calm riches of the landscape concealed jibes. The meanest field labourer seemed happier than she, the commonest insect more wanton ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... window is better than a yard of crape on the door." The greatest triumph in connection with the building of the Panama Canal was not the engineering but the reduction in the death-rate among the workers, which, on account of these insect-borne diseases, had previously prevented the successful execution ...
— How to Live - Rules for Healthful Living Based on Modern Science • Irving Fisher and Eugene Fisk
... cheek the crimson ray By changes comes and goes, As rosy-hued Aurora's play Along the polar snows; Gay as the insect-bird that sips From scented flowers the dew— Pure as the snowy swan that dips Its wings in waters blue; Sweet thoughts are mirrored on her face, Like clouds on the calm sea, And every motion is a grace, Each word ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield
... with this great man, he felt that he was no bigger than an insect. He seated himself on the shore and ...
— The Indian Fairy Book - From the Original Legends • Cornelius Mathews
... the catalogue of the flying leaves and small cheap journals, political and satirical, that sprung into existence after the revolution, mostly in Berlin and Vienna; not more than three or four of them now exist. The insect world was a favorite source of names for the satirist, the sting of whose production was frequently only in the title: every week produced the Hornet, the Wasp, the Gadfly, and their plurals, the Wasps and the Gadflies; there was also an ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Vol. I. No. 3, July 15, 1850 • Various
... Dieman's Land is a smaller but much more splendid insect than the English wasp; it has four orange-coloured wings, and horns and legs of the same colour, a hard body, and a formidable sting. It is an inhabitant of the forest, and is at war with a spider that makes its ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 10, No. 279, October 20, 1827 • Various
... together with descriptions of their chief insect pests and fungous diseases, and remedies for their control. It contains an account of modern methods in feeding and handling all farm stock, including poultry. The diseases which affect different farm animals and poultry are ...
— Clovers and How to Grow Them • Thomas Shaw
... the madwoman, and then on his father and uncle. His professional instinct was getting the better of him, and he studied the mother and the sons, with all the keenness of a naturalist observing the metamorphosis of some insect. He pondered over the growth of that family to which he belonged, over the different branches growing from one parent stock, whose sap carried identical germs to the farthest twigs, which bent in divers ways according to the sunshine or shade in which they lived. And for a moment, as by ...
— The Fortune of the Rougons • Emile Zola
... daylight. I do not need to open a book; I take the whole of its contents into my mind at a single glance, through the cover; and in a million years I could not forget a single word of it, or its place in the volume. Nothing goes on in the skull of man, bird, fish, insect, or other creature which can be hidden from me. I pierce the learned man's brain with a single glance, and the treasures which cost him threescore years to accumulate are mine; he can forget, and he does ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... held the child; he remained there open-mouthed. He only dropped his head a moment when a nettle, which felt like an insect, stung his leg; then he looked up again—he looked above him at the face which looked down on him. It appeared to regard him the more steadfastly because it had no eyes. It was a comprehensive glance, having an indescribable fixedness in which there were both light and darkness, ...
— The Man Who Laughs • Victor Hugo
... still, under the whisper of the wind. He discovered that he was listening—listening for the buzz of an insect, the squeak of some grass dweller, anything which would mean that there was life about them. As he chewed on the ration concentrate and drank sparingly from his canteen, Raf continued to ...
— Star Born • Andre Norton
... record of the germs and first causes of all the greatest poets' conceptions! The elder Brunei's first hint for his "shield," in constructing the tunnel under the Thames, was taken from watching the labor of a sea-insect, which, having a projecting hood, could bore into the ship's ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 7, No. 39, January, 1861 • Various
... contempt for some one who is regarded as very mean-spirited is sometimes shown by describing such a person as a "worm," or worse, if possible, a "reptile." A "bookworm," on the other hand, the name of a little insect which lives in books and eats away at paper and bindings, is applied to people who love books in another way—great readers—and is, of course, not at ...
— Stories That Words Tell Us • Elizabeth O'Neill
... of this little book is to afford an outline sketch of the facts and meaning of insect-transformations. Considerations of space forbid anything like an exhaustive treatment of so vast a subject, and some aspects of the question, the physiological for example, are almost neglected. Other books already published in this series, such as ...
— The Life-Story of Insects • Geo. H. Carpenter
... lady-birds, may-flies, bees, and a variety of other inhabitants of the insect world, are descanted upon in a pleasing style, combining scientific information with romance, in a manner ...
— Western Characters - or Types of Border Life in the Western States • J. L. McConnel
... fortified now against certain insect plagues which once afflicted him, and the brilliant professor laid his head on an old cork fender and slept like an infant. He did not return until next evening; he went without books, tobacco, ...
— A Dream of the North Sea • James Runciman
... observing that Ludlow was about to quit the room—"Let the time of our uncertainty be short, I pray thee. Our mistress is like the insect, which takes the color of the leaf on which it dwells. You have seen her in her sea-green robe, which she never fails to wear when roving over the soundings of your American coast: but in the deep waters, her mantle vies with the blue of the ocean's depths. Symptoms of a change, ...
— The Water-Witch or, The Skimmer of the Seas • James Fenimore Cooper
... way to one of those fearful bursts of rage which no experience had succeeded in teaching him to curb. He howled till the dirt sticking about the vaulted ceiling, and the earth choking up the air-hole, dropped piecemeal to the ground, and every insect that had ears covered them up the best way it could to prevent its becoming instantaneously deafened by the horrid sound; then tearing round and round and round the confined space of his cell, till there ...
— The Adventures of a Bear - And a Great Bear too • Alfred Elwes
... Word Scarabaeus. Veneration of the Ancient Egyptians for the scarabaeus. Entomology of the insect. Symbolism of according to Plutarch, Pliny and Horapollo. Its astronomical value. Worship of insects by other peoples. Symbolism, with the Egyptians, of the scarabaeus. Uses of it with ...
— Scarabs • Isaac Myer
... qualities of its vines attracted the attention of French viticulturists. Phylloxera had been introduced from America into France and threatened the existence of French vineyards. After trying all possible remedies for the scourge, it was discovered that the insect could be overcome by grafting European grapes on American vines resistant to phylloxera. A trial of the promising species of New World grapes showed that vines of this species were best suited for ...
— Manual of American Grape-Growing • U. P. Hedrick |
