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Primitive   Listen
adjective
Primitive  adj.  
1.
Of or pertaining to the beginning or origin, or to early times; original; primordial; primeval; first; as, primitive innocence; the primitive church. "Our primitive great sire."
2.
Of or pertaining to a former time; old-fashioned; characterized by simplicity; as, a primitive style of dress.
3.
Original; primary; radical; not derived; as, primitive verb in grammar.
Primitive axes of coordinate (Geom.), that system of axes to which the points of a magnitude are first referred, with reference to a second set or system, to which they are afterward referred.
Primitive chord (Mus.), that chord, the lowest note of which is of the same literal denomination as the fundamental base of the harmony; opposed to derivative.
Primitive circle (Spherical Projection), the circle cut from the sphere to be projected, by the primitive plane.
Primitive colors (Paint.), primary colors. See under Color.
Primitive Fathers (Eccl.), the acknowledged Christian writers who flourished before the Council of Nice, A. D. 325.
Primitive groove (Anat.), a depression or groove in the epiblast of the primitive streak. It is not connected with the medullary groove, which appears later and in front of it.
Primitive plane (Spherical Projection), the plane upon which the projections are made, generally coinciding with some principal circle of the sphere, as the equator or a meridian.
Primitive rocks (Geol.), primary rocks. See under Primary.
Primitive sheath. (Anat.) See Neurilemma.
Primitive streak or Primitive trace (Anat.), an opaque and thickened band where the mesoblast first appears in the vertebrate blastoderm.
Synonyms: First; original; radical; pristine; ancient; primeval; antiquated; old-fashioned.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Primitive" Quotes from Famous Books



... that for over a year I spent most of my time in the company of the cannibalistic blacks of that region, camping and hunting with them; and during this adventurous period I became so interested in these primitive people that the study of savage and barbaric races has ...
— Unknown Mexico, Volume 1 (of 2) • Carl Lumholtz

... instead of a system for the discharge of honest but unfortunate debtors upon the surrender of their estates, a criminal code and a thumb-screw machine for the collection of doubtful and desperate debts. They covet a return to the primitive practices which prevailed in Rome, when the debtor was sold into slavery or had his body cut into pieces and distributed ...
— Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2 • George Hoar

... wide in extent as Dartmoor, lofty as Helvellyn, we realize all the sombreness and solitude of the Russian steppe. These stony wastes, aridity itself, yet a carpet of wild-flowers in spring, are sparsely peopled by a race having a peculiar language, a characteristic physique, and primitive customs. Here are laboriously cultivated oats, rye, potatoes—not a blade of wheat, not an apple-tree is to be discerned; no spring or rivulet freshens the parched soil. The length and severity of the winter are betokened by the trees and poles seen at intervals on either side of the road. ...
— The Roof of France • Matilda Betham-Edwards

... never forget, in that moment, how instantly conscious I became of my manhood. The primitive deeps of my nature stirred. I felt myself masculine, the protector of the weak, the fighting male. And, best of all, I felt myself the protector of my loved one. She leaned against me, so light and lily-frail, and as her trembling eased away it seemed as though I became aware ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London

... whole story carries us back, and how impossible it becomes to account for the survival of primitive man against this kind of foe! For fire—which has hitherto been regarded as his main safeguard against the carnivora—these cared nothing. It is curious that the Tsavo lions were not killed by poison, for strychnine is easily used, and with effect. ...
— The Man-eaters of Tsavo and Other East African Adventures • J. H. Patterson

... lessened, not only by the natural torpidity and inertia of the bucolic mind, but also by the progressive decrease of the rural as compared with the urban population in modern states; for I believe it will be found that the artisans who congregate in towns are far less retentive of primitive modes of thought than their rustic brethren. In every age cities have been the centres and as it were the lighthouses from which ideas radiate into the surrounding darkness, kindled by the friction of mind with mind in the ...
— Balder The Beautiful, Vol. I. • Sir James George Frazer

... what a recent clever writer calls "the inevitable consequences" ordinarily come and cause the inevitable anxiety, more, doubtless, to the man than to the woman. There comes a time when she he loves must bear him their first child. In primitive existence this trouble to the man must have been much less, must have been little more than the sympathy of an hour, because, in nature, unaffected, there is seldom much of suffering and almost never death ...
— A Man and a Woman • Stanley Waterloo

... underworld. The atmosphere and the underworld together formed the earth as opposed to the sky or heaven. The texts say that the first two gods to be created were LAKHMU and LAKHAMU. Their attributes cannot at present be described, but they seem to represent two forms of primitive matter. They appear to have had no existence in popular religion, and it has been thought that they may be described as theological conceptions containing the notions of matter and ...
— The Babylonian Legends of the Creation • British Museum

... succeeded one another only too rapidly in Canada was directed towards maintaining the natural or factitious barriers between the two territories. The savages, excited and flattered by both sides, loudly proclaimed their independence and their primitive rights over the country which the Europeans were disputing between themselves. "We have not ceded our lands to anybody," they said; "and we have no mind to obey any king." "Do you know what is the difference between the King of France and the Englishman?" the Iroquois was asked ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot

... WHEWELL suggests, resembling a large meteoric stone. How after wards came this unformed mass to be like our earth, to be covered with motion and organization, with life and general felicity? What primitive cause stocked it with plants and animals, and produced all the surprising and subtle contrivances which we find in their structure, all the wide and profound mutual dependence which we trace in their economy? Is it possible to conceive, as the Vestiges inculcate, that man, with his sentiment ...
— An Expository Outline of the "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation" • Anonymous

... horse through the passes down into the forests and jungles, out upon the endless, sparsely settled pampas, and eventually into the remote village that witnessed the passing every second day of a primitive and far from dependable railway train, was presented with agreeable simplicity and conciseness. He passed briefly over what might have been expanded into grave experiences, and at last came, so to speak, to the gates of the city, unharmed, resolute ...
— West Wind Drift • George Barr McCutcheon

... the shining spaces of the hall and into the morning-room. Books, flowers and sunlight seemed to furnish it, and, with something austere and primitive, to make it the most fitting background for herself. But while her presence perfected it for him, it was her guardian's absence that preoccupied Karen. Again, and comically, she reminded Gregory of the sacristan explaining to the sight-seer that the famous altar-piece had been temporarily ...
— Tante • Anne Douglas Sedgwick

... out-of-the-way corners of the globe, Paul had long ago accustomed himself to discomfort—even hardship. But he shuddered as he thought of his dainty lady being subjected to the vicissitudes of a long trip on those primitive Russian railways. For two days and a night, in a heaving, swaying train, in a carriage full of reeking people smoking rancid tobacco, he was forced to curb his eagerness. As the time of his arrival drew nearer Paul found it all the more difficult ...
— High Noon - A New Sequel to 'Three Weeks' by Elinor Glyn • Anonymous

... Good Hope women have a limited vote. In the tiny Island of Pitcairn, in the Southern Pacific, they have the same suffrage as men. This is doubtless true of many isolated localities whose records are little known. Among primitive peoples the government is generally in the hands of the most competent without regard to sex, and some of these are still under the reign of the Matriarchate, or the rule of mothers, to whom belong the property ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume IV • Various

... our most recent acquisitions, the Punjab, the people have deteriorated under our rule. Runjeet Singh had no prisons. Thieves caught in the act were maimed and allowed to go their way. Murderers and other great offenders were at once put to death. We can scarcely adopt this primitive mode of maintaining order, and by our codes, courts, judges, and witnesses we have no doubt opened the door to evils of which the Punjab knew nothing in Runjeet Singh's time. If the early colonists of New York and Boston ...
— Life and Work in Benares and Kumaon, 1839-1877 • James Kennedy

... art of printing has done more toward the advancement of that art than the simple inking appliance familiarly and commonly known as "the printer's roller,"—without which, indeed, the evolution of the power printing press from the primitive hand machines of the fathers would not have been possible,—it is an inexplicable truth that historians and encyclopaedia makers who have made investigation of the origin and progress of the art ...
— The Building of a Book • Various

... had dreamed of going. These later enthusiasts were not satisfied with the abolition of the Shogunate, the restoration of imperial power, and the revival of the ancient cult: they wanted a return of all society to the simplicity of primitive times; they desired that all foreign influence should be got rid of, and that the official ceremonies, the future education, the future literature, the ethics, the laws, should be purely Japanese. They were not even satisfied with the ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn

... something strangely uncanny about her nature that was itself almost an excuse to those who hinted that she had dealings with the underworld. She was one of the older style of inhabitants, who retained the primitive habits and customs of the island, whose spoken language had in it a mixture of the Norse, which distinguished it from the simpler Scotch dialect familiarly used by us of the younger generation, and yet more from the purer ...
— The Pilots of Pomona • Robert Leighton

... of Smithson's writings from the standpoint of the analytical chemist, is the success obtained with the most primitive and unsatisfactory appliances. In Smithson's day, chemical apparatus was undeveloped, and instruments were improvised from such materials as lay readiest to hand. With such instruments, and with crude reagents, Smithson obtained analytical results ...
— Something of Men I Have Known - With Some Papers of a General Nature, Political, Historical, and Retrospective • Adlai E. Stevenson

... is a curiosity, but, as music, of little value. The flight of the Midianites is depicted in the following primitive manner:— ...
— The Pianoforte Sonata - Its Origin and Development • J.S. Shedlock

... later period, the sacred name of friendship was unfortunately used to veil relations that had lost all the purity and delicacy of their primitive character. This fact has sometimes been rather illogically cited, as an argument not only against the moral influence of the salons but against the intellectual development of women. There is neither excuse nor palliation to be offered for the Italian manners and the recognized system ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason

... which blossomed in Iceland and flourished for two or three centuries wherever Norsemen made homes for themselves offers a unique intellectual phenomenon, for nothing like their record remains to us from any other primitive ...
— Bjoernstjerne Bjoernson • William Morton Payne

... rather inclined to believe that courage, physical and moral fortitude, self-denial, stoicism, the renunciation of every sort of comfort, the faculty of self-sacrifice and the power of facing death belonged only to the more primitive, the less happy, the less intelligent nations, to the nations least capable of reasoning, of appreciating danger and of picturing in their imagination the dreadful abyss that separates this life from the life unknown. We were even almost ...
— The Wrack of the Storm • Maurice Maeterlinck

... more angry with himself he became. Yet he dreaded to go back to England and face it all: the reproach of his people; the amusement of society; his wife herself. He never attempted to picture her as a civilised being. He scarcely knew her when he married her. She knew him much better, for primitive people are quicker in the play of their passions, and she had come to love him before he had begun ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker

... electro-magnet, with the heavy glass across its perforated poles, and P the second Nicol.) Exciting the magnet, one half of the image becomes suddenly red, the other half green. Interrupting the current, the two colours fade away, and the primitive ...
— Six Lectures on Light - Delivered In The United States In 1872-1873 • John Tyndall

... always objects; they are sometimes events, that is to say, periodical cycles of events, that being the only mode in which events can possess the property of permanence. Not only, for instance, is the earth itself a permanent cause, or primitive natural agent, but the earth's rotation is so too: it is a cause which has produced, from the earliest period (by the aid of other necessary conditions), the succession of day and night, the ebb and flow of the sea, and many other effects, while, as we can assign no cause ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill

... which Bob changed the conversation, the brakeman led him to the lavatory, and soon Bob had made his very primitive toilet. ...
— Bob Chester's Grit - From Ranch to Riches • Frank V. Webster

... Gerhardt's Mission is told by William of Newbury and Ranulph de Diceto. It seems strange that a company of thirty German peasants should have set forth to bring England back to the pure primitive faith; yet not stranger than that four hundred years earlier, Boniface the Englishman should have set out to convert Germany from heathenism. Boniface succeeded; Gerhardt failed. The reason for the failure, ...
— One Snowy Night - Long ago at Oxford • Emily Sarah Holt

... to the young doctor by the friendship that came about between him and Miss Hitchcock—a friendship quite independent of anything her family might feel for him. She let him see that she made her own world, and that she would welcome him as a member of it. Accustomed as he had been only to the primitive daughters of the local society in Marion and Exonia, or the chance intercourse with unassorted women in Philadelphia, where he had taken his medical course, and in European pensions, Louise Hitchcock presented a very definite and delightful picture. That it was but ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick

... which the Jew has had to make is the thing that has differentiated him and made him strong. Those first Christians—Primitive Christians—who lived from the time of Paul to that of Constantine, were a simple, direct, sincere and honest people—opinionated no doubt, and obstinately dogmatic, but with virtues that can never be omitted ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard

... stimulus of fear drains the cup of nervous energy even though no visible action may result.... Perhaps the most striking difference between man and animals lies in the greater control which man has gained over his primitive instinctive reactions. As compared with the entire duration of organic evolution, man came down from his arboreal abode and assumed his new role of increased domination over the physical world but a moment ago. And now, though sitting at his desk ...
— Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy • Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury

... was when herrings run up the Santee river. Such a gross slander Mr. Scranton declares to be the most impious. They were always independent; and, if they were poor, and preferred to habit themselves in primitive garbs, it was only because they preferred to be honest! This, Mr. Scranton, the northern philosopher, asserts with great emphasis. Yes! they are honest; and honest patriots are always better than rich traitors. From the san-pit men, Mr. Scranton, his face distended with eloquence, turns ...
— Our World, or, The Slaveholders Daughter • F. Colburn Adams

... strange, sad, heroic games and pastimes, those primitive children under his guidance. Two little girls would be driving the cows home about dusk; three little boys would play Indian and capture them and carry them off; the husbands of the little girls would form a party to the rescue; the prisoners would ...
— Southern Literature From 1579-1895 • Louise Manly

... airplane the aviator's methods are more simple. Sometimes the bombs are carried in a rack beneath the body of the machine, and released by means of a lever at the side. A more primitive method often in use is merely to attach the bomb to a string and lower it to a point at which the aviator is certain that in falling it will not touch any part of the craft, and then cut the string. Half a dozen devices by which the aviator ...
— Aircraft and Submarines - The Story of the Invention, Development, and Present-Day - Uses of War's Newest Weapons • Willis J. Abbot

... the first approximation to a cause that seems to him intelligible and says: "This is the cause!" In historical events (where the actions of men are the subject of observation) the first and most primitive approximation to present itself was the will of the gods and, after that, the will of those who stood in the most prominent position—the heroes of history. But we need only penetrate to the essence of any historic ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy

... Revolutionary notoriety. The river, very wide at that point, was shaded by willow-trees to some extent along its banks, immediately in front of the Academy of St. Mark's, and beyond it to a considerable distance on either hand. The town itself was an old-fashioned, primitive village rather than burgh, quaintly built, and little adorned by modern taste or improvement; but the air was fine and elastic, the water unexceptionable, and bathing and boating were among our privileged amusements. Among other less useful ...
— Miriam Monfort - A Novel • Catherine A. Warfield

... natural that the earliest cut stones should have the simple rounded lines of the cabochon cutting, for the first thing that would occur to the primitive worker who aspired to improve upon nature's product, would be the rubbing down of sharp edges and the polishing of the whole surface of the stone. Perhaps the next improvement was the polishing of flat facets ...
— A Text-Book of Precious Stones for Jewelers and the Gem-Loving Public • Frank Bertram Wade

... subsequent progress of creation is only the successive development, upon mechanical and necessary principles, and as fast as proper occasions were offered, of these qualities thus made inherent in the primitive constitution of matter. The atoms thus marvellously endowed have gone on, without any further aid from Almighty power, to form suns, and astral systems, and planets with their satellites, and worlds tenanted by successive generations ...
— A Theory of Creation: A Review of 'Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation' • Francis Bowen

... good-humouredly put into his pocket, and it was not till he was asked to go into the house that the stranger discovered him to be the owner.[10] He is, however, delightfully vivacious, and full of agricultural hobbies. His wife is a very pleasing, primitive-looking person. We tasted at their house some of the ham for which this city, called by the wits Porkopolis, is so remarkable. The maple sugar is used in curing it, and ...
— First Impressions of the New World - On Two Travellers from the Old in the Autumn of 1858 • Isabella Strange Trotter

... wolf-dogs rushing in furry projectiles of wrath upon Smoke's stranger dogs, the scolding of squaws, laughter, the whimpering of children and wailing of infants, the moans of the sick aroused afresh to pain, all the pandemonium of a camp of nerveless, primitive wilderness folk. ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London

... road to see a water fall made by a considerable stream down a precipice of at least a hundred feet. The cultivated fields seemed to be generally planted either with sugar cane, maize, or manioc, but we were often in the shade of the primitive woods. ...
— A Voyage to Terra Australis Volume 2 • Matthew Flinders

... Shann ran swiftly to take up a new position, downgrade and to the east of the domes. Here he put into action another of the primitive weapons Thorvald had devised, a spear hurled with a throwing stick, giving it double range and twice as forceful penetration power. The spears themselves were hardly more than crudely shaped lengths of wood, their points charred in the fire. Perhaps these missiles could ...
— Storm Over Warlock • Andre Norton

... balance Eve at the Tree of Death, stood by the Tree of Life—in popular non-Catholic theology is banished, with the rest of those who have passed away, to a position of complete insignificance. This arrangement, I had become accustomed to believe, was that of Primitive Christianity and of the Christianity of all sensible men: Romanism had added to the simple Gospel, and had treated the Mother of God with an honour which she would have been the first ...
— Lourdes • Robert Hugh Benson

... something vital about the stuff of these men's thoughts. Their logomachy was far more stimulating to his intellect than the reserved and quiet dogmatism of Mr. Morse. These men, who slaughtered English, gesticulated like lunatics, and fought one another's ideas with primitive anger, seemed somehow to be more alive than Mr. Morse and ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London

... rose and led the way into the cabin. Clayton was embarrassed at first. On one bed lay a rather comely young woman with a child by her side; on a chest close by sat another with her lover, courting in the most open and primitive manner. In the corner an old grandam dozed with her pipe, her withered face just touched by the rim of the firelight. Near a rectangular hole in the wall which served the purpose of a window, stood a girl whose face, silhouetted against the darkness, had ...
— A Mountain Europa • John Fox Jr.

... conceive the state of mind of primitive man the first thing that occurs to us is the bewilderment and terror he must have felt in the presence of the powers of nature. Naked, houseless, weaponless, he is at the mercy, every hour, of this immense and incalculable Something ...
— The Greek View of Life • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson

... My primitive idea, as I watched my islands in this their almost lifeless condition, was that the Gulf Stream and the trade winds from America would bring the earliest higher plants and animals to our shores. But in this I soon found I was quite mistaken. The distance to be traversed was ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen

... indeed in every other. When I speak of this, the dying out of words, I do not refer to mere tentative, experimental words, not a few of which I adduced in my last lecture, words offered to the language, but not accepted by it; I refer rather to such as either belonged to the primitive stock of the language, or if not so, which had been domiciled in it long, that they might have been supposed to have found in it a lasting home. Thus not a few pure Anglo-Saxon words which lived on into the times of our early English, have subsequently ...
— English Past and Present • Richard Chenevix Trench

... with its egotistic liberty, its lynch-law, its political frauds—the South with its turbulent republics, its barbarous revolutions, civil wars, pronunciamientos, as in its mother Spain! Europe applauded when the powerful Portugal despoiled the Moluccas, it applauds while England is destroying the primitive races in the Pacific to make room for its emigrants. Europe will applaud as the end of a drama, the close of a tragedy, is applauded, for the vulgar do not fix their attention on principles, they look only at ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal

... to be up by the dawn in the morning, be the weather rain or shine, fog, or otherwise. They will be marched for scores of miles all day long, and, on their arrival at their destination, shall consider themselves lucky if they find the most primitive accommodation. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 1, 1893 • Various

... in spite of domestication and training, Nature in her great moments returns to the primitive and instinctive! My brown cow, never having had anything but the kindest treatment, is as gentle an animal as could be imagined, but she had followed the nameless, ages-old law of her breed: she had escaped in her great moment to the most ...
— Adventures In Contentment • David Grayson

... world, goes a great way. Eight or nine hundred a year does wonders. Scantily enough ours would have answered among wealthy people at home. My father is English, and I bear an English name, although I never saw England. But here, in this lonely and primitive place, where everything is so marvelously cheap, I really don't see how ever so much more money would at all materially add to ...
— Carmilla • J. Sheridan Le Fanu

... longer think that a perfect organic being is a miracle issuing from nothing. We understand its perfection when we are able to explain it as a development from imperfection. The structure of an ape is no longer a miracle if we assume its ancestors to have been primitive fishes which have been gradually transformed. Let us at least submit to accept as reasonable in the domain of spirit what seems to us to be right in the domain of nature. Is the perfect spirit to have the same antecedents ...
— Christianity As A Mystical Fact - And The Mysteries of Antiquity • Rudolf Steiner

... of his repugnance was primarily his strong sense, already illustrated, that the sacredness of marriage, and the customs that regulate it, were triumphs of culture which had been won, painfully and with effort, from the unbridled promiscuity of primitive life. To impair that sacredness, to dislocate those customs, was to take a step backwards into darkness and anarchy. His keen sense of moral virtue—that instinctive knowledge of evil which, as Frederick Robertson said, ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell

... Naked babies, whose shaven heads made a warm resting-place for flies, stared at Domini with a lustrous vacancy of expression. At the corners of the alleys unveiled women squatted, grinding corn in primitive hand-mills, or winding wool on wooden sticks. Their heads were covered with plaits of imitation hair made of wool, in which barbaric silver ornaments were fastened, and their black necks and arms jingled with chains ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens

... has come in which God is present in this island. May your Reverence send us laborers, or at least one father, until those from Espana arrive. Fortunate is he who may come hither, for he will delight in the fervor of this primitive church." ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, - Volume XIII., 1604-1605 • Ed. by Blair and Robertson

... Rome; whence, under a natural reaction, they were systematically depreciated by the great leaders of the Protestant Reformation. And yet hardly in a corresponding degree. For there was, after all, even among the reformers, a deep-seated prejudice in behalf of all that was "primitive" in Christianity; under which term, by some confusion of ideas, the fathers often benefited. Primitive Christianity was reasonably venerated; and, on this argument, that, for the first three centuries, it was necessarily more ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey

... exactly like all other respectable men, only a little grander, a little more glorified. She hates, as only a bad biographer can hate, the telling of the truth with respect to those faults and foibles which made the light and shade of his character. This, it appears, was the primitive view of biography. The mass of medieval memorials was of the "expanded-tract" order: it was mainly composed of lives of the saints, tractates in which the possible and the impossible were mingled in inextricable disorder, but where every word was intended directly ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard

... the Gold Trail, how shall I describe it? It was based on that primal instinct of self-preservation that underlies our thin veneer of humanity. It was rebellion, anarchy; it was ruthless, aggressive, primitive; it was the man of the stone age in modern garb waging his fierce, incessant warfare with the forces of nature. Spurred on by the fever of the gold-lust, goaded by the fear of losing in the race; ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service

... mysterious beast was uncompromisingly hostile. He was bitter on account of the dog. He felt that the great wolf had put a dishonor upon him; and for a few days he was no longer the impartial student of natural history, but the keen, primitive hunter with the blood-lust hot in his veins. Then this mood passed, or, rather, underwent a change. He decided that the Gray Master was, indeed, too individual a beast to be just snuffed out, but, at the same time, far too dangerous ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts

... general assessment: primitive system; telephone density one of the lowest in the world; fixed-line connections stand at well less than 1 per 100 persons; mobile-cellular usage is increasing but remains at a meager 3 per 100 persons domestic: sparse system of open-wire, radiotelephone communications, and low-capacity microwave ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... city of Utgard, as they are related in the old "Prose Edda," were prophetic of the future achievements of the race, of which he was a chief god. Thor once went on a journey to Joetunheim, or Giant-land,—a primitive outlying country, full of the enemies of the Asgard dynasty, or cosmical deities. In the course of the journey, he lodged one night with his two companions in what he supposed to be a huge hall, but which turned out to be the glove of a giant named Skrymir, who was asleep and snoring as ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 15, January, 1859 • Various

... which are all open, the deposits of the night-soil of the city, with convenient wells at every corner and in niches in the walls. At these are to be found, at all hours, men with buckets slung on bamboos, filling them for transportation in these primitive open vessels to the farmers, who use the compost on their fields. These wretches, with their vile burdens, are met at every turn, and pass through the streets and roads in long files, loading the air with abominations. No attention is paid to the wells and sewers until they overflow, ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 6, December 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various

... of our readers have had the good fortune to behold a lamplighter's funeral, they will not be surprised to learn that lamplighters are a strange and primitive people; that they rigidly adhere to old ceremonies and customs which have been handed down among them from father to son since the first public lamp was lighted out of doors; that they intermarry, and betroth ...
— The Lamplighter • Charles Dickens

... would-be hermit's house was rather primitive. Three rooms, one over another, composed the main building. The ground floor served as drawing-room; above it was the anchoret's bedroom; and the top story was used as a study. Sixty feet away, rose a second building containing kitchens, stables, and ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton

... the growth of human belief, custom and institutions that he has incorporated into the stupendous series of books called "The Golden Bough." The things that influence us most in our lives are heritages, not much changed, from the beliefs of primitive societies. Believing that the forces of the world were animate, like himself, and that they might be moved, persuaded, cajoled and frightened into favorable action, undeveloped man based most of his ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson

... effect of the use of ink upon civilization from primitive times to the present, as we have seen, offers a most suggestive field and certifies to the importance of the manufacture of honest inks as necessary to the future enlightenment of society. That it has not been fully ...
— Forty Centuries of Ink • David N. Carvalho

... institution at Chartreux, near Grenoble, was maintained in all the Carthusian establishments throughout Europe, even after the ascetic severity of the order had been to some extent relaxed, and the primitive simplicity of their buildings had been exchanged for the magnificence of decoration which characterizes such foundations as the Certosas of Pavia and Florence. According to the rule of St Bruno, all the members of a Carthusian brotherhood lived in the most absolute ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... personal transmission, especially for epidemic influences. It allows for the possibility of different modes of conveyance of the destructive principle. It recognizes and supports the belief that a series of cases may originate from a single primitive source which affects each new patient in turn; and especially from cases of Erysipelas. It does not undertake to discuss the theoretical aspect of the subject; that is a secondary matter of consideration. ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... entered the new market, an immense red-brick square with a smooth, cemented floor, and a lofty roof on steel girders. It is here the people amuse themselves with the primitive delights of an English fair ...
— Jonah • Louis Stone

... every suitable accommodation, and "well watered" by a large river which ran through it, and afterward divided itself into four considerable branches. In being directed to "dress" and to "keep" the garden, the goodness of God appears in providing him with an employment adapted to a state of primitive innocence, and calculated by a proper occupation of his time to promote his happiness. A slothful inactivity is not only incompatible with true enjoyment in our fallen state, but would have been inconsistent with the bliss of original paradise; and even when our nature shall have attained its ...
— Female Scripture Biographies, Vol. I • Francis Augustus Cox

... was not especially struck, and did not at all become overjoyed when he triumphantly showed her the passport. She was only glad to see Lichonin again. Perhaps, this primitive, naive soul had already contrived to cleave to its protector? She did throw herself upon his neck, but he stopped her, and quietly, almost ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin

... in the working conditions at the tannery, conditions that were unsanitary, primitive—obscene! I met the Maxon person in a grocery, as I told you, but it was before the strike, not after. He told me things, and even with a liberal discount for exaggeration, they ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston

... pipe he went, gorilla-like, segment by segment, until he reached what he knew to be the hotel's third floor. Here he rested for a moment or two against the wall, feeling inwardly grateful that a Mediterranean climate still made possible Monaco's primitive outside plumbing—to the initiated, he inwardly remarked, such things had always their unlooked-for advantages. He also felt both relieved and grateful to see that the two windows between him and his destination had been ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer

... of these patriotic presentations there occurred an episode that stands out among the many picturesque incidents in the romantic story of Kosciuszko's Rising. Three Polish boatmen came to the town hall to offer Kosciuszko twenty of their primitive flat-bottomed barges. Hearing of their arrival, Kosciuszko pushed his way through the crowds thronging the building, till he reached the ante-room where stood the peasants in their rough sheepskin coats and mud-stained top-boots, "Come near me, Wojciech Sroki, ...
— Kosciuszko - A Biography • Monica Mary Gardner

... atavism. We were in the process of changing our tree-life to life on the ground. For many generations we had been going through this change, and our bodies and carriage had likewise changed. But Red-Eye had reverted to the more primitive tree-dwelling type. Perforce, because he was born in our horde he stayed with us; but in actuality he was an atavism ...
— Before Adam • Jack London

... tobacco, or some smokable substitute, is as old as primitive man. Almost all nations of the earth are adepts in this particular habit. It is, of course, an acquired taste, as also are washing and tomatoes. We are born with appetites which are static and unchangeable, but we are also born with a yearning for pleasure ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens

... to go to the Helmhaus, and examine the collection of lake-dwelling remains. In fact, there is a delightful little model of a lake-dwelling itself, and an appliance to show you how those primitive people could make holes in their stone implements, before they knew the use of metals. The ancient guild houses of Zurich are worth a special study. Take, for instance, that of the "Zimmerleute," or carpenter with its supporting arches and little ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume VI • Various

... amount of evil suffered makes nice equation with the total amount of evil done; the extent of human suffering tallies precisely with the extent of human guilt. Of course you must take original sin into account, 'which explains all, and without which you can explain nothing.' 'In virtue of this primitive degradation we are subject to all sorts of physical sufferings in general; just as in virtue of this same degradation we are subject to all sorts of vices in general. This original malady therefore [which is the correlative of original sin] has no other name. It is only the capacity of ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Essay 4: Joseph de Maistre • John Morley

... ponderously of stone, but having far more the aspect of huts than of castle-hails. They were evidently the dwellings of peasantry, and people engaged in rustic labor; and no doubt they have burrowed into the primitive structures of the castle, and, as they found convenient, have taken their crumbling materials to build barns and farm-houses. There was space and accommodation for a very considerable population; but the men were probably at work in the fields, and the ...
— Passages From the French and Italian Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne

... Blast," and the judge and I were looking deep into the coals of the grate and crying softly and unconsciously together. You see it wasn't only the songs. Every damned one of us was Scotch-Irish and we just sat there and were transported back to the beginning of ourselves in the bare old primitive homes of us in farm and village, saw the log and coal fires of infancy blazing up again, and heard the voices of our mothers crooning and caressing those marvelous lines, and behind them their mothers crooning and wailing the same back in the unbroken line to Ayrshire and the Pentland ...
— The Dead Men's Song - Being the Story of a Poem and a Reminiscent Sketch of its - Author Young Ewing Allison • Champion Ingraham Hitchcock

... discussion That sensitive Russian Compiled on the U. S. A. Was read by the maid, As she carelessly played With her beautiful hair one day. "The talk you hear in that primitive land," He wrote, "nobody can understand." "Somebody who guffed him," She said, "has stuffed him, And easily bluffed ...
— Grimm Tales Made Gay • Guy Wetmore Carryl

... the gentle rule of a fatherly lord paramount, redawned upon the tribes: their household lares, after so 25 harsh a translation to distant climates, found again a happy reinstatement in what had, in fact, been their primitive abodes: they found themselves settled in quiet sylvan scenes, rich in all the luxuries of life, and endowed with the perfect loveliness of Arcadian beauty. But from 30 the hills of this favored land, and even from the level grounds as they approach ...
— De Quincey's Revolt of the Tartars • Thomas De Quincey

... laugh so sympathetically, and Bob joins them so gently, and yet with a tone, I know, that can be changed so quickly to my further discomfiture, that I arise at once and read, without apology or excuse, this primitive and very callow poem recovered here to-day ...
— Complete Works of James Whitcomb Riley • James Whitcomb Riley

... suffer, than to give growth to the passions of revenge, or by open resistance to become the occasion of loss of life to others. And, secondly, on the example of Jesus Christ, and of the apostles and primitive Christians, all of whom patiently submitted to the pains and penalties inflicted upon them by the governments of their respective times for the exercise of ...
— A Portraiture of Quakerism, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Clarkson

... meagre comfort, and Annie did not follow the primitive psychology of it. She only knew that into her happiness there had come again the darkening of a fear, fear that was to be her devil, no less terrible because his presence was for the most ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various

... other, the one is impalpable, the other bulky and substantial, and so the torrent of his zealous rage unconsciously turns against the very substance of that which he set himself lovingly to purge and restore to its primitive purity. Indeed, I sometimes find that, while he has successfully wrecked the garment, he has overlooked the dirt! Greater and better men than the Dhobie are employed ...
— Behind the Bungalow • EHA

... not bring myself to dive into the pool again, but set about devising some other means of getting the diamonds. An empty gourd, cut into the shape of a bowl, and lashed to a stick, solved the difficulty, and with this primitive dredge I brought up diamonds sufficient for a king's ransom; so many indeed that long before night even I was satisfied. Large lustrous stones they were, of splendid water, and several of them were blue, though none were as fine as ...
— A Rip Van Winkle Of The Kalahari - Seven Tales of South-West Africa • Frederick Cornell

... critic will say—would have been uncongenial to him. The scientist is careful to explain everything and to omit nothing; he aims at completeness. But Daudet is an artist, not a scientist. He is a poet in the primitive sense of the word, or, as he styled himself in one of his books, a "trouvere." He has creative power, but he has at the same time his share of the minor gift of observation. He had to write for a public ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various

... the ancient cities to which I have referred is described by one of the prophets as being held as within the coils of a serpent, by which he means the various bendings and twistings of the Euphrates, which encompassed Babylon, and made it so hard to be conquered. The primitive city of Paris owed its safety in the wild old times when it was founded, to its being on an island. Venice has lived through many centuries, because it is girded about by its lagoons. England is what it is, largely because of 'the ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren

... from her own Observation and little Reading, in the Course of her Attendance on her excellent Mistress and Benefactress, could, after having a Taste of Ease and Plenty in a higher Sphere of Life than what she was born and first brought up in, resolve to return to her primitive Poverty, rather than give up her Innocence.} I say, it is surprising, that a young Person, so circumstanced, could, in Contempt of proffer'd Grandeur on the one side, and in Defiance of Penury on the other, so happily and prudently conduct herself thro' such a ...
— Samuel Richardson's Introduction to Pamela • Samuel Richardson

... both Presbyters of Christ's Church, ordained after the order of primitive times, and there are laid on us certain heavy charges and responsibilities from which we may not shrink, as we shall answer to the Lord at the ...
— Kate Carnegie and Those Ministers • Ian Maclaren

... notwithstanding, and in many places the stones have evidently been piled together rather for the sake of symmetry than from a sense of danger. The points thus protected were already impregnable. When we look more nearly we see that however much Nature may have aided these primitive constructors, the wall is mainly due to the agency of man. There is no doubt that in many places the stupendous masses of conglomerate have been hurled to their places by earthquake, but the entire girdle of stone, of pyramidal size and strength, shows ...
— In the Heart of the Vosges - And Other Sketches by a "Devious Traveller" • Matilda Betham-Edwards

... truly amazed now. When he had finally admitted interest in what Nadine had hinted to be a subversive organization, he'd had in mind some secretive group, possibly making their headquarters in a hidden cellar, complete with primitive printing press, and possibly some weapons. He most certainly hadn't expected to be introduced to the secretary of the Foreign Minister, and the working head of the North American Bureau ...
— Frigid Fracas • Dallas McCord Reynolds

... let him feel at a disadvantage with Nate, although his friend was five years older. Now he began to appreciate that Nate was indeed a man grown, and had become sophisticated in the ways of his primitive world by his association with the other ...
— Down the Ravine • Charles Egbert Craddock (real name: Murfree, Mary Noailles)

... chose, and danced over the Trant prejudices and the Trant principles as if they'd been a ball-room floor; and all without apparent offence to her solemn husband and his cloud of cousins. I believe her frankness and directness struck them dumb. She moved like a kind of primitive Una through the virtuous rout, and never got a ...
— The Long Run - 1916 • Edith Wharton

... felt no difficulty in his sharp, positive mind. He traced all the wrongs of society to the egoism of priests and kings; and, since he did not assume the fundamental goodness of human nature, it troubled none of his theories to accept the crude primitive fact of self-interest. What Shelley would really have said in answer to a question about the origin of evil, if we had found him in a prosaic mood, it is hard to guess, and the speculation does not ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford

... about—long rifles and primitive flint-locks; kanat spears of Indian male-bamboo tipped with steel and decorated with tufts of black ostrich-feathers; and jambiyehs, or crooked daggers, with ...
— The Flying Legion • George Allan England

... fought out their own battle, as once before they had had to fight, and herein their native fortitude strove on their behalf. For days they saw no one but the little priest who remained ever at their call. The primitive in their lives demanded for them that none should witness their hurt. They asked neither sympathy nor pity, wherein shone forth the mother's wondrous courage which had ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum

... feudal system of government has been but little improved upon today over its primitive status, for you still draw well-defined lines of class distinction between God's children—lines of demarcation based on wealth and natal origin. With your inhabitants, communal standing and social distinction is proportionate to the wealth of ...
— The Planet Mars and its Inhabitants - A Psychic Revelation • Eros Urides and J. L. Kennon

... spiritual tales, or 'Memorable relations,' as he called them, begins thus: 'I see the spirits assembling, they have hats upon their heads.' In another of these Memorabilia he receives from heaven a bit of paper, on which he saw, he says, the hieroglyphics of the primitive peoples, which were composed of curved lines traced from the finger-rings that are worn in heaven. However, perhaps I am wrong; possibly the material absurdities with which his works are strewn have spiritual significations. Otherwise, how shall we account ...
— Seraphita • Honore de Balzac

... the last visible sign of our independence as a nation. It is our hand-grasp with the past. Our little nation is the only Norse nation now on earth that can shake hands with the days of the Sagas, and the Sea-Kings. Then let him who will laugh at our primitive ceremonial. It is the badge of our ancient liberty, and we need not envy the man who ...
— The Little Manx Nation - 1891 • Hall Caine

... great divisions of society, namely, High Life, Low Life, and Middle Life, are subdivided, or more properly, sub-classed, into the Superior, Transition, and Metamorphic classes. Lower still than these in the social scale is the Primitive Formation—which may be described as the basis and support of all the other classes. The individuals comprising it may be distinguished by their ragged surface, and shocking bad hats; they effervesce strongly with gin or Irish whiskey. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, October 16, 1841 • Various

... the substances whose magnificent conjunction produced your body, and are so dazzling in that of Madame, would not resolve themselves after your death each into its own element, water to water, fire to fire, metal to metal, just as the elements of my coal, when burned, return to their primitive molecules. If you believe that a certain part of us survives, we do not survive; for all that makes our actual being perishes. Now, it is this actual being that I am striving to continue beyond the limit assigned to ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac

... rivers. The brook trout are the fish which mostly inhabit them, and, a singular fact, in many of these streams this kind of fish treat the presence of a man with perfect indifference, which has led me to believe, that in their primitive state, the "shy trout" fear neither man nor beast. The Indians catch them, and it may be that this fish is first frightened by them. In the Rocky Mountains, south of the head waters of the Arkansas, ...
— The Life and Adventures of Kit Carson, the Nestor of the Rocky Mountains, from Facts Narrated by Himself • De Witt C. Peters

... "I need an English and Latin dictionary very much in the work. Will you buy one—a good one—for me?" "Will you kindly buy Hyde's work on 'Venereal Diseases,' not on Skin, for I have that." Or "I should like very much to have a work on Hygiene. You know the Chinese have such primitive ideas on that subject, and if I can get a good standard book I can pick out and translate for the benefit of the people. Then if there is still anything left, I would like a small book on bandaging and massage, for I want to train new nurses. Occasionally, ...
— Notable Women Of Modern China • Margaret E. Burton

... formations. With these, and the knowledge of the Professor, they finally succeeded in making iron and copper tools and implements, built a water wheel, erected a sawmill, and eventually turned out a primitive pistol ...
— The Wonder Island Boys: Exploring the Island • Roger Thompson Finlay

... of Spirit. The beautiful, good, and pure constitute his ancestry. His origin is not, like that of mortals, in brute instinct, nor does he pass through material conditions prior to reaching intelligence. Spirit is his primitive and ultimate source of being; God is his Father, and Life is the law of his ...
— Retrospection and Introspection • Mary Baker Eddy

... things might mean. "The Christian—in speculative belief—fails under the challenge of life as often as other men. Surely it depends on something infinitely more primitive and fundamental than Christianity?—something out of which Christianity itself springs? But this something—does it really exist—or am I only cheating myself by fancying it? Is it, as all the sages have said, the pursuit ...
— The Marriage of William Ashe • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... have to face much modern prejudice. On the one hand there is still rife in the Church of England the Puritan spirit, which condemns in one and the same category things essentially Roman, and things which are really primitive, but which have been retained by Rome. On the other hand, there undoubtedly exists an occasional reaction from this Puritan spirit, which has produced a prejudice in favour of things—whether primitive or not—simply because they are Roman. The Conference ...
— Ritual Conformity - Interpretations of the Rubrics of the Prayer-Book • Unknown

... the aim of the present book makes it both superfluous and inappropriate to discuss the vexed problems connected with the origins of the Religion of Israel, its aspects in primitive times, its passage through a national to an ethical monotheism, its expansion into the universalism of the second Isaiah. What concerns us here is merely the legacy which the Religion of Israel bequeathed to Judaism as we have defined ...
— Judaism • Israel Abrahams

... grasped the clash of individualities, or the real interests and tastes of the nations that fought and made laws and treaties. It was all a dealing with records and monuments, just the things that happened to survive decay—as though one's study of primitive man were to begin and end with ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson

... "We are somewhat primitive, but the Colonies in time will make amends for whatever they maybe lacking now," Mr. Adams responded, sipping his wine. "The people who came to this Western world did so mainly for conscience sake, and the time will come when this country will be the seat of empire. Society here is established ...
— Daughters of the Revolution and Their Times - 1769 - 1776 A Historical Romance • Charles Carleton Coffin

... tortured school days without her. After she died he would not go to school. He was not in any sense educated. His father and grandfather had been illiterate men and he had inherited their underdeveloped brain cells. But he loved poetry and read all he could get of it. It overlaid his primitive nature with a curious iridescence of fancy and furnished him with ideals and hungers his environment could never satisfy. He loved beauty in everything. Moonrises hurt him with their loveliness and he could sit for hours gazing at a white narcissus—much to ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1909 to 1922 • Lucy Maud Montgomery

... those heights where it will unlock the mystery of life itself to us. I have seen many strange things in my forty-odd years in the wilderness, and not the least of these have been the achievements of the primitive mind. And it seems to me, Roger, that Yellow Bird told you much that has come true. And ...
— The Country Beyond - A Romance of the Wilderness • James Oliver Curwood

... mother; she wouldn't understand it. She'd think it was sense. And, you see, I'm interested in my husband. I suppose it's the proper thing to take an interest in your husband. If you won't take an interest in your husband, what will you take an interest in? It's natural—not to say primitive. Do you know, he says I'm the most primitive person he ever came across. Should you say I was primitive? Don't answer that. I don't think he'd like me to talk about him quite so much. He thinks I never know where to draw the line. But I never see any lines to ...
— The Tysons - (Mr. and Mrs. Nevill Tyson) • May Sinclair

... lost in a labyrinth of legends. From the researches of undoubted authorities, we know that Cyprus possessed a written character peculiarly original, and that it was occupied by a people highly civilised according to the standard of the early world at so primitive an era, that all records have disappeared, and we are left in ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker

... from a heaven without a cloud, by the same mysterious terror that visits it at times in the silent hours of the night. One can understand here the manner of life of the patriarchs of old, and of the primitive shepherds and heroes; and the visions and apparitions that appeared to them of nymphs, of gods, and of angels, in the ...
— Pepita Ximenez • Juan Valera

... the product of a more cultivated age, these characteristics appear more strongly than in the primitive epic. The Homeric poems are still legendary narratives, though narratives unconsciously transmuted by the highest art. Tragedy, on the contrary, has no extraneous elements. It implies a conscious effort of the spirit, made for its own sake, to re-create human life according to spiritual ...
— An Estimate of the Value and Influence of Works of Fiction in Modern Times • Thomas Hill Green

... something to improve the condition of Hebrew women by founding aid societies, primary schools, and normal schools. The Bulgarian women of the country enjoy an agricultural and pastoral life, and those of the city are simple and primitive in their habits and customs. But little has been done for woman's instruction, though some worthy attempts have been made to establish schools. The hope of the regeneration of the Oriental woman lies in the influence of Greek civilization. The emancipation ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various

... any rate, the douanier needed no freeing. Such science as he acquired in the course of his life was a means to expressing himself and not to picture-making. As for his vision, that was as direct and first-hand as the vision of a Primitive or a child; and to a Primitive his admirers were in the habit of likening him, to a child his detractors. His admirers were right: his art is not childish. Primitives, because they are artists, have to grapple with the artistic problem. They have, that is, to create ...
— Since Cezanne • Clive Bell

... the principal motive of his inquiry into the properties of madder, the colouring principle of which he succeeded in extracting directly, by a perfectly simple method, which for a time very advantageously replaced the extremely primitive methods of the old dyers, who used a simple extract of madder; a crude preparation which necessitated long ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros

... scarcely the light of the sun could penetrate, and tenanted only by the wolf, the bear, the boar, and the stag. Now these forests have disappeared from the eastern and western skirts of the chain, and are to be found in primitive luxuriance only in the centre, where civilisation and the destroying step of man have not made their way. Here the original forest is still to be seen in all its pride; untouched, untrimmed, unheeded by ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 378, April, 1847 • Various

... materials of which stones are composed, you would have seen a feast of which I should like to have heard some news. I was not there myself either; but learned men in these latter days have succeeded in breaking the bonds which united oxygen with the primitive substances in certain fragments of stone, and with these substances thus freed, and consequently able to remarry, they have been enabled to give us, in miniature, the spectacle of the festivities of a fresh wedding. And I can assure you it is enough ...
— The History of a Mouthful of Bread - And its effect on the organization of men and animals • Jean Mace

... to fall back upon this venerable subject (which should only be broached in the wilds of Cornwall, or other equally primitive spots), of course you can speak of a hard frost being "an ice day for a hunting-man, although he is sure to swear at it." If the weather breaks, you may observe, "You thaw so," but not when you have to shout the quibble through the ear-trumpet of a deaf old maid. And ...
— Punch, or The London Charivari, Vol. 100., Jan. 17, 1891 • Various

... it difficult; the Monastery fire-escape was a series of steep flights of iron steps, instead of the primitive vertical ladder of round iron rungs in more general use. There was even a guard-rail at the outside of each flight. Consequently, P. Sybarite gained the ...
— The Day of Days - An Extravaganza • Louis Joseph Vance

... from the River Platte under a jury rudder. We talked of wrecks, of short rations and of heroism—or at least of what the newspapers would have called heroism at sea—a manifestation of virtues quite different from the heroism of primitive times. And now and then falling silent all together we gazed at the sights ...
— Falk • Joseph Conrad

... Lord Monboddo's strange speculation on the primitive state of human nature[760]; observing, 'Sir, it is all conjecture about a thing useless, even were it known to be true. Knowledge of all kinds is good. Conjecture, as to things useful, is good; but conjecture as to what it would be useless to know, such as whether ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 2 • Boswell

... Democritus, because he first attained, though a little at a distance, the right and sound understanding of the truth, and that in general all the treatise concerning natural things was called Democritean, because Democritus was the first who happened upon the principles and met with the primitive foundations of Nature. And Metrodorus says openly of philosophy, If Democritus had not gone before and taught the way, Epicurus had never attained to wisdom. Now if it be true, as Colotes holds, that to live according to the opinions ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch

... would ask me to be his wife as soon as it was proper to do so. This was sooner than any steward or missions mother in his church would have suspected. For, once a man is in love, his sense of propriety becomes naively obtuse and primitive. ...
— A Circuit Rider's Wife • Corra Harris

... one, on account of his fault, be deprived of a favor bestowed on him the privation of that favor is a punishment of that fault. Now as we stated in the First Part (Q. 95, A. 1; Q. 97, A. 1), God bestowed this favor on man, in his primitive state, that as long as his mind was subject to God, the lower powers of his soul would be subject to his rational mind, and his body to his soul. But inasmuch as through sin man's mind withdrew from subjection to God, the result was that neither were his lower powers wholly subject to his reason, ...
— Summa Theologica, Part II-II (Secunda Secundae) • Thomas Aquinas

... this place, where I'm fed and clothed just like a mistress, and where I'm not beaten by day, nor abused by night! Besides, though now father be no more, you two have anyhow by putting things straight again, so adjusted the family estate that it has resumed its primitive condition. And were you, in fact, still in straitened circumstances, and you could by redeeming me back, make again some more money, that would be well and good; but the truth is that there's no such need, and what would be the use for you to redeem ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin

... I wonder why professional detectives are so primitive. They wear their calling cards and their business shingles on their figures and faces. Surely the crooks must know them all personally. I read detective stories, in rest moments, and every one of the sleuths lives in some well-known apartment, or on ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball

... engage in the fight for the cruiser quit trimming their beards. Later, when it was time for the Gerns to appear, they would discard their woolen garments for ones of goat skin. The Gerns would regard them as primitive inferiors at best and it might be of advantage to heighten the impression. It would make the awakening of the Gerns a ...
— Space Prison • Tom Godwin

... week afterwards, when out at rest, we heard that the second battle of Ypres had begun, and learnt with horror and disgust of the famous first gas attack and its ghastly results. Within a few days the first primitive respirators arrived and were issued; they were nothing but a pad of wool and some gauze, and would have been little use; fortunately we did not know this, and our confidence in them was quite complete. On the 10th May, just ...
— The Fifth Leicestershire - A Record Of The 1/5th Battalion The Leicestershire Regiment, - T.F., During The War, 1914-1919. • J.D. Hills

... well knew that the common people were no philosophers. There is reason also, to think that a great part of the idolatries were not sanctioned by the Druids, but afterwards introduced by the Phoenician colony. But it would be impossible to say how far the primitive Druids accommodated themselves to vulgar superstition, or to separate their exterior doctrines and ceremonies from the fables and absurd rites of subsequent times. It would be vain to attempt to enumerate their gods: in the eye of the vulgar they defied everything ...
— Thaumaturgia • An Oxonian

... mould of the child's temperament and had drawn on a vocabulary that to some extent had been supplied in other ways. The style of her version is in some respects even better than the style of Miss Canby's story. It has the imaginative credulity of a primitive folktale; whereas Miss Canby's story is evidently told for children by an older person, who adopts the manner of a fairy tale and cannot conceal the mature mood which allows such didactic phrases as "Jack ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller

... Picture Gallery was a principal centre of attraction to young Boston people and their visitors. Many of us got our first ideas of art, to say nothing of our first lessons in the comparatively innocent flirtations of our city's primitive period, in that agreeable resort ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... Another, from Tennessee, had lost a part of his thigh,—and so on. The amputations were my greatest dread, lest I might displace bandages and set an artery bleeding. So I dared not remove the cloths, but used an instrument invented by one of our surgeons, as may be imagined, of primitive construction, but which, wetting the tender wounds gradually by a sort of spray, gave great relief. Of course, fresh cloths were a constant necessity for suppurating wounds, but for those nearly healed, or simply inflamed, ...
— Memories - A Record of Personal Experience and Adventure During Four Years of War • Fannie A. (Mrs.) Beers

... of Early Village Life," 1883, Mr. Gomme devotes a chapter to "Early Domestic Customs," and quotes Henry's "History of Great Britain" for a highly curious clue to the primitive mode of dressing food, and partaking of it, among the Britons. Among the Anglo-Saxons the choice of poultry and game was fairly wide. Alexander Neckani, in his "Treatise on Utensils (twelfth century)" gives fowls, cocks, peacocks, the cock of ...
— Old Cookery Books and Ancient Cuisine • William Carew Hazlitt

... of Arqua. It was a modest feast, but, being a friend to oil, I found it savory, and the wine was both good and strong. While we lingered over the repast we speculated somewhat carelessly whether Arqua had retained among its simplicities the primitive Italian cheapness of which you read much. When our landlord leaned over the table and made out our account on it with a bit of chalk, the ...
— Italian Journeys • William Dean Howells

... that of roses. In one corner stood the Virgin Mary, newly-painted and gilt; in the opposite one, Saint John the Baptist, whom the imager had made with such patent whites to his eyes, set in a bronzed complexion, that the effect was rather startling. A very small selection of primitive culinary utensils lay on a shelf close to the hearth. Much was not wanted, when the most sumptuous meal to be had was boiled ...
— One Snowy Night - Long ago at Oxford • Emily Sarah Holt

... species that she fitted into all the generalizations on the sex. But he had regarded this generalization as merely typical of the triumph of tradition over experience. Maternity was no doubt the supreme function of primitive woman, the one end to which her whole organism tended; but the law of increasing complexity had operated in both sexes, and he had not seriously supposed that, outside the world of Christmas fiction and anecdotic art, such truisms had ...
— The Descent of Man and Other Stories • Edith Wharton

... with reproductions from old maps—old primitive maps, with a real Adam and Eve standing in the Garden of Eden, with Pillars of Hercules guarding the Straits of Gibraltar, with Paradise in the east, a realistic Jerusalem in the centre, the island of Thule in the north, and St. Brandon's Isles of ...
— A Book of Discovery - The History of the World's Exploration, From the Earliest - Times to the Finding of the South Pole • Margaret Bertha (M. B.) Synge

... regular street bazar, but to a bazar at which crowds of peasants from different provinces congregate once a week for the sale of silver and turquoise jewelry, which is mostly exhibited on their persons, supplemented by a small bundle which is carried; but the transactions are very primitive and unlike those at any other bazar. Then there are the quaint things they wear,—artistic chatelaines with articles generally suspended and thrown over the shoulder, instead of worn around the waist, immense earrings, finger-rings, bracelets, ...
— Travels in the Far East • Ellen Mary Hayes Peck

... and tender feeling for home. The tradition was neither cold nor dead,—thus it had passed through the ages, one light kindling another. Moreover, the ancient form of the Menorah had excited his interest. When was the primitive structure of this candlestick fashioned? Clearly the design was suggested by the tree—in the centre the sturdy trunk, on right and left four branches, one below the other, in one plane, and all of equal height. ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various

... the primitive savage of the American continent carried masses of pipe-stone from the sacred quarry in Minnesota across the vast wilderness of plains, to trade with the people of the far Southwest, over the same route that long afterward became the Santa Fe Trail; therefore, it ...
— The Old Santa Fe Trail - The Story of a Great Highway • Henry Inman

... spy. (The spy mania! Dear Lord, what absurd, bloody, and abominable stories I could write of this madness which has Europe by the throat, this madness which is only another form of war hysteria.) A reversal to barbarism; you and the man who was your friend have gone back to the fear and hatred of primitive savages, meeting at the corner of a dark wood. All of humanity we have acquired in the slow way of evolution ...
— The New York Times Current History: the European War, February, 1915 • Various

... growth is characteristic of the individual life, so gradual, progressive change, or evolution, has characterized the history of life upon the planet. The evolution of the organic kingdom from its primitive germinal forms to the complex and highly organized fauna-flora of to-day may be compared to the growth of some noble oak as it rises from the acorn, spreading loftier and more widely ...
— The Elements of Geology • William Harmon Norton

... interested only in what is prehistoric. And this disaster has befallen a large proportion of the learned who grope in the darkness of unrecorded epochs for the roots of their favourite race or races. The wars, the enslavements, the primitive marriage customs, the colossal migrations and massacres upon which their theories repose, are no part of history or even of legend. And rather than trust with entire simplicity to these it would be infinitely wiser to trust to legend of the loosest and ...
— A Short History of England • G. K. Chesterton

... image he so richly bears. He is a stronger proof of the immortality of the soul, than any that philosophy ever produced. A mind like his can never die. Let the worshipful squire H. L., or the reverend Mass J. M. go into their primitive nothing. At best, they are but ill-digested lumps of chaos, only one of them strongly tinged with bituminous particles and sulphureous effluvia. But my noble patron, eternal as the heroic swell of magnanimity, ...
— The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. • Robert Burns and Allan Cunningham

... very likely by and by be called for. In the lecture on the Town-meeting I have adopted the views of Sir Henry Maine as to the common holding of the arable land in the ancient German mark, and as to the primitive character of the periodical redistribution of land in the Russian village community. It now seems highly probable that these views will have to undergo serious modification in consequence of the valuable evidence lately brought forward by my friend ...
— American Political Ideas Viewed From The Standpoint Of Universal History • John Fiske

... such circumstances, loath to leave it, poking up the sticks, throwing in the burnt ends, adding another branch and yet another, and looking back as he turns to go to catch one more glimpse of the smoke going up through the trees! I reckon it is some remnant of the primitive man, which we all carry about with us. He has not yet forgotten his wild, free life, his arboreal habitations, and the sweet-bitter times he had in those long-gone ages. With me, he wakes up directly at the smell of smoke, of burning branches in the open air; and all his old love ...
— Winter Sunshine • John Burroughs

... primitive Christianity had very early taken root. The gospel received by the Britons in the first centuries, was then uncorrupted by Romish apostasy. Persecution from pagan emperors, which extended even to these far-off shores, was the only gift that the first churches ...
— The Great Controversy Between Christ and Satan • Ellen G. White

... are anti-Victorian And, scorning the coo of the dove, Hold the roar of the primitive Saurian The final expression of love, You may have, if you choose, an alternative shy At a tear in the throat and a lump in ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, March 24, 1920. • Various

... when coal is over seven dollars a ton. We couldn't afford such extravagant hospitality as that. You might arrange those carnations in the vase if you will, while I attend to the cooking. You will find the china, and the silver, in that chest. I won't apologize for the primitive character of our entertainment because you see when we came down here we stored most of our things in Mrs. Burke's barn. It is awfully nice to have somebody with me; I am so much alone; you came just in time to ...
— Hepsey Burke • Frank Noyes Westcott

... pages of the world's history. The notion of sacrifice can hardly be viewed as a product of unassisted human nature, and must therefore be traced to a higher source and viewed as a divine revelation to primitive man." ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage

... great discovery; but after the meal was finished, Miss Davis desired Hetty to fetch her her drawings that she might see them. Hetty went to her own room immediately, and returned bringing about a dozen drawings in a very primitive portfolio made of several newspapers ...
— Hetty Gray - Nobody's Bairn • Rosa Mulholland

... I am not a cautious reader myself, yet I confess with some concern to the absence of much documentary evidence in support of the singular incident I am about to relate. Disjointed memoranda, the proceedings of ayuntamientos and early departmental juntas, with other records of a primitive and superstitious people, have been my inadequate authorities. It is but just to state, however, that though this particular story lacks corroboration, in ransacking the Spanish archives of Upper California I have met with many more surprising and incredible stories, ...
— Legends and Tales • Bret Harte

... repeated the same phrases over and over. The burden—sometimes senseless to our modern understanding—to be found in the present form of many of our ballads may be the survival of a survival from those primitive iterations. The "Blaw, blaw, blaw winds, blaw" of The Elfin Knight is not, in this instance, inappropriate to the theme, yet we can almost hear shrilling through it a far cry from days when men called directly upon the powers of nature. Such refrains ...
— Ballad Book • Katherine Lee Bates (ed.)

... learned further that the umbrella carried by DANIEL was a blue cotton umbrella—undoubtedly the most primitive type of the umbrella. ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 2, April 9, 1870 • Various

... servant (left, during the usual month of warning, to take care of the house) opened the door to me when I knocked. Although the hour was already a late one in primitive Dimchurch, the man showed no signs of ...
— Poor Miss Finch • Wilkie Collins

... told him all—that they had no friend or relative—that she had fled with the old man, to save him from a madhouse and all the miseries he dreaded—that she was flying now, to save him from himself—and that she sought an asylum in some remote and primitive place, where the temptation before which he fell would never enter, and her late sorrows and distresses could ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens

... singularly little during the seven thousand years in which he is known to have been cherished for his speed, and kept by men for running down the gazelle or coursing the hare. The earliest references to him are far back in the primitive ages, long before he was beautifully depicted by Assyrian artists, straining at the leash or racing after his prey across the desert sands. The Egyptians loved him and appreciated him centuries ...
— Dogs and All About Them • Robert Leighton

... Ireland was as well wooded as watered, though hardly a tree of the primitive forest now remains. One of the earliest names applied to it was "the wooded Island," and the export of timber and staves, as well as of the furs of wild animals, continued, until the beginning of the seventeenth century, to be a thriving ...
— A Popular History of Ireland - From the earliest period to the emancipation of the Catholics • Thomas D'Arcy McGee



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