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Spawn   Listen
verb
Spawn  v. i.  
1.
To deposit eggs, as fish or frogs do.
2.
To issue, as offspring; used contemptuously.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Spawn" Quotes from Famous Books



... light loam. (3) When the heat of the pile no longer rises above 100 to 125 degrees (as indicated by a thermometer) put into the beds, tramping or beating very firmly, until about ten inches deep. When the temperature recedes to 90 degrees, put in the spawn. Each brick will make a dozen or so pieces. Put these in three inches deep, and twelve by nine inches apart, covering lightly. Then beat down the surface evenly. After eight days, cover with two inches of light loam, firmly compacted. This may be covered with a layer of straw or other ...
— Home Vegetable Gardening • F. F. Rockwell

... its callow and helpless young that it carries about the unhatched eggs with him under his own tail, in what scientific ichthyologists pleasantly describe as a subcaudal pouch or cutaneous receptacle. There they hatch out in perfect security, free from the dangers that beset the spawn and fry of so many other less tender-hearted kinds; and as soon as the little pipe-fish are big enough to look after themselves the sac divides spontaneously down the middle, and allows them to escape, to shift for themselves ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen

... dog! Carissimo! the darling of Mme. la Comtesse de Nole's heart! Carissimo, the recovery of whom would mean five thousand francs into my pocket! Carissimo! I knew it! For me there existed but one dog in all the world; one dog and one spawn of the devil, one arch-traitor, one limb of ...
— Castles in the Air • Baroness Emmuska Orczy

... Spawn of fish, minute mollusca, the small classes of squilla and cancer, are known to voyagers as causing a discolouration of the sea in particular places. Patches and lines of these are often seen within the tropics, of a brown colour, and sometimes of a yellow, and of a ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 470 - Volume XVII, No. 470, Saturday, January 8, 1831 • Various

... treat us to strange dainties, as—a roast dog, a dish of stewed worms, a rat pie; or, perhaps, a bird's-nest. But the bird's-nest would be the best of the list, for it is not like the kind of bird's-nests which you have seen, but is made, I believe, of the spawn of fish, and looks something like isinglass. It is the nest of a sort of swallow, is about the size of a goose's egg, and is found in caverns along the sea shores; so it is not so bad as it seems at first. And the rats are as large and fat as some of our rabbits, ...
— The World's Fair • Anonymous

... extends from the north side of Cape Ann about to Portsmouth and is resorted to in winter by large schools of cod coming here to spawn. Shore soundings deepen here gradually from the land, reaching 35 to 40 fathoms at 6 or 7 miles out. Within this limit the bottom is mainly sandy, though rocky patches are numerous between Newburyport and Cape Ann. Beyond 40 fathoms the bottom is ...
— Fishing Grounds of the Gulf of Maine • Walter H. Rich

... "Spawn of a beggar! This is not merely for the chance of riches given by our dreams, though it seems, in the teeth of all I ever thought, that the devil tells truth at last. No, nor it is not quite for the blow; but it IS to close the lips that, with a single word, ...
— Stories by English Authors: Ireland • Various

... the volcanoes which ejected them. They are sometimes stranded on the banks in different parts of the river. Reflecting on this circumstance since I arrived in England, the probability of these porous fragments serving as vehicles for the transportation of seeds of plants, eggs of insects, spawn of fresh-water fish, and so forth, has suggested itself to me. Their rounded, water-worn appearance showed that they must have been rolled about for a long time in the shallow streams near the sources of the rivers at the feet of the ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates

... as enable the plant or animal to exercise its functions to greater advantage. Third, the law of Over-Production. All plants and animals tend to increase in a geometrical ratio, and therefore tend to overrun enormously the means of support. If all the seeds of a plant, all the spawn of a fish, were to arrive at maturity, in a very short time the world could not contain them. Hence, of necessity, arises a struggle for life. Only a few of the myriads born can possibly live. Fourth, here comes ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray

... dropped the affair then and there, it would reflect upon my dignity. It would be mortifying to have them think that they had one on the Tokyo-kid and that Tokyo-kid was wanting in tenacity. To have it on record that I had been guyed by these insignificant spawn when on night watch, and had to give in to their impudence because I could not handle them,—this would be an indelible disgrace on my life. Mark ye,—I am descendant of a samurai of the "hatamato" class. The blood of ...
— Botchan (Master Darling) • Mr. Kin-nosuke Natsume, trans. by Yasotaro Morri

... doctors of the Stoic fur, And fetch their precepts from the Cynic tub, Praising the lean and sallow Abstinence! Wherefore did Nature pour her bounties forth With such a full and unwithdrawing hand, Covering the earth with odours, fruits, and flocks, Thronging the seas with spawn innumerable, But all to please and sate the curious taste? And set to work millions of spinning worms, That in their green shops weave the smooth-haired silk, To deck her sons; and, that no corner might Be vacant of her ...
— L'Allegro, Il Penseroso, Comus, and Lycidas • John Milton

... genius, and which, when paid, honors the giver and the receiver, and then pleads his beggary as an excuse for his crimes. He melts with tenderness for those only who touch him by the remotest relation, and then, without one natural pang, casts away, as a sort of offal and excrement, the spawn of his disgustful amours, and sends his children to the hospital of foundlings. The bear loves, licks, and forms her young, but bears are ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell

... Nature has been more bountiful than poets. They swarm like the spawn of cod-fish, with a vicious fecundity, that invites and requires destruction. To publish verses is become a sort of evidence that a man wants sense; which is repelled not by writing good verses, but by writing ...
— Pearls of Thought • Maturin M. Ballou

... wrongs of the English nation. The Crusades had begun. Peter the Hermit had moved all Christendom by his fiery eloquence, and sent them to avenge the wrongs the pilgrims of the cross had sustained from Turkish hands, and to free the holy soil from the spawn ...
— The Rival Heirs being the Third and Last Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake

... parcel of frogs from England to Ireland, in order to propagate their species in that kingdom, and threw them into the ditches of the University Park; but they all perished. Whereupon he sent to England for some bottles of the frog-spawn, which he threw into those ditches, by which means the species of frogs was propagated in that kingdom. However, their number was so small in the year 1720, that a frog was nowhere to be seen in Ireland, except in the neighbourhood of the University Park: but within six or seven years after, ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Vol. VII - Historical and Political Tracts—Irish • Jonathan Swift

... fisheries, whose duty is to take means to increase the number of food fish in lakes and rivers. To this end the board secures from the United States commissioner of fisheries the quota of spawn allotted from time to time to the state, and from other sources spawn of such fish as seem desirable, and has them placed in such lakes and rivers as they will be most likely ...
— Studies in Civics • James T. McCleary

... the fish should be visible, and if stationary is more easily practised; but it is also effective even against small fish that swim together in large shoals, for if the hook misses one it strikes another. The most fatal time for fish is when they spawn: roach, jack, and trout alike are then within reach, and if the poacher dares to visit the water he is certain ...
— The Amateur Poacher • Richard Jefferies

... of navies burnt at seas; No noise of late spawn'd tittyries; No closet plot or open vent, That frights men with a Parliament: No new device or late-found trick, To read by th' stars the kingdom's sick; No gin to catch the State, or wring The free-born nostril of the King, We send to you; ...
— A Selection From The Lyrical Poems Of Robert Herrick • Robert Herrick

... the largest monetary returns. This fish migrates to the coast of Norway to spawn and in search of food. The best cod fisheries are in Romsdal, Nordland, and Tromsoe counties, the Lofoten islands in Tromsoe alone furnishing employment to more than four thousand men. The cod weighs from eight to twenty pounds and measures ...
— Norwegian Life • Ethlyn T. Clough

... be approximately correct, but adds that he has never yet met any one with courage enough to attempt the walk. You do, in fact, come suddenly on salt-water channels in the midst of fields at long distances from the sea, and find cockles on stretches of mud where you might expect frog spawn or black slugs. Therefore, it is quite likely that the high-tide line would really, if it were stretched out straight, reach right across Ireland and far put into St. ...
— Priscilla's Spies 1912 • George A. Birmingham

... execution was necessary of the 25th of August, 1572, on the 25th of August, 1685, it was useless. Under the second son of Henri de Valois heresy had scarcely conceived an offspring; under the second son of Henri de Bourbon that teeming mother had cast her spawn over the whole universe. You accuse me of a crime, and you put up statues to the son of Anne of Austria! Nevertheless, he and I attempted the same thing; he succeeded, I failed; but Louis XIV. found the Protestants without arms, whereas in my reign they had powerful armies, statesmen, warriors, ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac

... word for fish, but he has names for the three varieties found in the river. One, ka-cho', a very small, sluggish fish, is captured during the entire year. In February these fish were seldom more than 2 inches in length, and yet they were heavy with spawn. The ka-cho' is the fish most commonly captured with the hands. It is a sluggish swimmer and is provided with an exterior suction valve on its ventral surface immediately back of the gill opening. This valve seems to enable the fish to withstand the ...
— The Bontoc Igorot • Albert Ernest Jenks

... cast out, qualified in all ways for the hangman, and growing up to be hanged. Put the case that pretty nigh all the children he saw in his daily business life he had reason to look upon as so much spawn, to develop into the fish that were to come to his net,—to be prosecuted, defended, forsworn, made ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens

... been subjected to successful cultivation; though there can be little doubt that all or most of the terrestrial-growing sorts would submit to the same process, if their natural habitats were sufficiently studied, and their spawn collected and propagated. In this way, the Common Mushroom was first brought ...
— The Field and Garden Vegetables of America • Fearing Burr

... money-eaters, the petty despots, the bribe-takers, the men who wring gold out of infamy, who traffic in tyrannies, who plunder under official seals, who curse Algiers with avarice, with fraud, with routine, with the hell-spawn of civilization. It is the 'Bureaucracy,' as your tongue phrases it, that is the spoiler and the oppressor of the soil. But—we endure only for a while. A little, and the shame of the invader's tread will be washed out in blood. Allah is great; we ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]

... inferiors." Hence, we have it what we see it, a translucent flood down from the topmost founts of time. So we revere it. "Qua man and woman," the Diet says, by implication, "do as you like, marry in the ditches, spawn plentifully. Qua prince and princess, No! Your nuptials are nought. Or would you maintain them a legal ceremony, and be bound by them, you descend, you go forth; you are no reigning sovereign, you are a private person." His Serene Highness the prince was thus prohibited from ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... and had grown alive and struck root like a tree. For this is the truth behind the old legal fiction of the servile countries, that the slave is a "chattel," that is a piece of furniture like a stick or a stool. In the spiritual sense, I am certain it was never so unwholesome a fancy as the spawn of Nietzsche suppose to-day. No human being, pagan or Christian, I am certain, ever thought of another human being as a chair or a table. The mind cannot base itself on the idea that a comet is a cabbage; nor can ...
— Eugenics and Other Evils • G. K. Chesterton

... always running. The grasses were peculiarly rich, and the old English fruit-trees, which we had brought with us from New Zealand, throve there with an exuberant fertility, of which the mother country, I am told, knows nothing. He had imported pheasants' eggs, and salmon-spawn, and young deer, and black-cock and grouse, and those beautiful little Alderney cows no bigger than good-sized dogs, which, when milked, give nothing but cream. All these things throve with him uncommonly, so that it may be declared of him that his lines had fallen in pleasant places. But ...
— The Fixed Period • Anthony Trollope

... and left him. That shows two things—first, that you've never been a trader in the islands; second, that you cannot at all comprehend how—well, how stunning he was. Sitting there, a single fortnight removed from cotton pants and the beach, crime-stained, imperturbable, magnificent! Spawn of the White Lights! Emperor ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... never be well till we had Queen Elizabeth's Protestants again in fashion." He was aware of all the evils arising out of a population beyond the means of subsistence, and dreaded an inundation of men, spreading like the spawn of cod. Hence he considered marriage, with a modern political economist, as very dangerous; bitterly censuring the clergy, whose children, he said, never thrived, and whose widows were left destitute. An apostolical life, according to Audley, required only ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli

... recent rain and melting snow had made the water of the river so fresh that the fish had been driven back toward the sea. "But they reascend," he said, "as soon as the freshet subsides. They are a sea fish, and only ascend fresh-water streams for shelter in winter, and to breed in spring. They spawn in May, and by August the little fish will weigh a quarter of a pound. A good many are taken with seines after the ice breaks up, but I never had any luck with pole and line in the river. While striped bass are found all along the coast from Florida to Cape ...
— Nature's Serial Story • E. P. Roe

... at all, like mushroom spawn, Tables sprang up all over the lawn; Not furnish'd scantly or shabbily, But on scale as vast As that huge repast, With its loads and cargoes Of drink and botargoes, At the Birth of ...
— The Poetical Works of Thomas Hood • Thomas Hood

... wise, do not make them merry at thy cost. We are not to be paganised any more. Having struck from our calendars, and unnailed from our chapels, many dozens of decent saints, with as little compunction and remorse as unlucky lads throw frog-spawn and tadpoles out of stagnant ditches, never let us think of bringing back among us the daintier divinities they ousted. All these are the devil's imps, beautiful as they appear in what we falsely call works of genius, which really and ...
— Citation and Examination of William Shakspeare • Walter Savage Landor

... most hideous of batrachians. It is remarkable on account of the extraordinary way in which its young are developed. The skin of the female is separated, as is the case with others of its family, from the muscles of the back, and is nearly half an inch thick. She deposits her eggs, or spawn, at the brink of some stagnant water, when the male manages to take them up in his paws and places them on her back, where they adhere by means of a glutinous secretion, and are pressed into cells which, at that time, are open ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston

... sometimes sealed firmly to a loose stone, you may find an object in form and structure resembling an elongated, coreless pineapple, composed of a leathery semi-gelatinous, semi-transparent substance, dirty yellow in colour. It is the spawn case or the receptacle of the ova (if that term be allowable), and the cradle of what is commonly known as the bailer shell (CYMBIUM AETHIOPICUM) the "Ping-ah" of the blacks, one of the most singular and interesting features that these reefs have for the sight-seer. In ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield

... cannot be produced, the lobster must have been too long kept. When boiled, the tail preserves its elasticity if fresh, but loses it as soon as it becomes stale. The heaviest lobsters are the best; when light they are watery and poor. Hen lobsters may generally be known by the spawn, or by ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous

... leanest. The disadvantage is that products, in the eagerness of competition for a market, are accepted which are of a character to harm and not help the development of the contemporary mind in moral and intellectual strength. The public expresses its fear of this in the phrase it has invented—"the spawn of the press." The author who writes simply to supply this press, and in constant view of a market, is certain to deteriorate in his quality, nay more, as a beginner he is satisfied if he can produce something that will sell without regard to its quality. Is it extravagant to speak of a tendency ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... Christ;" page 179, American edition, where he makes the Gnostics say to the Christians, "You poor ignorant idiots; you have mistaken the mysteries of old for modern history, and accepted literally all that was only meant mystically." To which the Christians responded, "You spawn of Satan, you are making the mystery by converting our accomplished facts into your miserable fables; you are dissipating and dispersing into thin air our only bit of solid foothold in the world, stained with the red drops of Calvary. You are giving a satanic ...
— Astral Worship • J. H. Hill

... enough to let the ape and tiger die, but it is hardly fair to kill off the natural and courageous apes and tigers and allow the spawn of cowardly apes and tigers to live. The prize-fighting apes and tigers will die all in good time in the course of natural evolution, but they will not die so long as the cowardly, somnambulistic apes and tigers club and scratch and slash. This is not a brief for the ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London

... life,—Flustrae, Sertulariae, Serpulae, Anomiae, Modiolae, Astarte, Annelida, Crustacea, and Radiata. Among the Crustaceans I found a female crab of a reddish-brown color, considerably smaller than the nail of my small finger, but fully grown apparently, for the abdominal flap was loaded with spawn; and among the Echinoderms, a brownish-yellow sea-urchin about the size of a pistol-bullet, furnished with comparatively large but thinly-set spines. There is a dangerous rock in the Kyle Rhea, the Caileach stone, on which the Commissioners for the Northern Lighthouses have stuck a bit ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller

... unattainable without immense application and fastidiousness. If patience be genius,—"La patience cherche et le genie trouve,"—and if execution be its chariot, what possible fame can there be for the slipshod writers of to-day, who spawn columns and volumes at so much a minute, regardless of the good name of their mother tongue, devoid of ideas, which are the product only of brains that have been ploughed up and sown with fruitful seed? An author's severest critic should be himself. To be carried ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various

... fish is found in the lake, and nearly all were new to us. The mpasa, or sanjika, found by Dr. Kirk to be a kind of carp, was running up the rivers to spawn, like our salmon at home: the largest we saw was over two feet in length; it is a splendid fish, and the best we have ever eaten in Africa. They were ascending the rivers in August and September, and furnished active and profitable employment to many fishermen, who did ...
— A Popular Account of Dr. Livingstone's Expedition to the Zambesi and Its Tributaries • David Livingstone

... indignation, "this joke or this impudence on your part, has gone far enough—listen to me. What did I or my family do, I ask my own conscience in the name of God—what sin did we commit—whom did we oppress—whom did we rob—whom did we persecute—that a scoundrel like you, the bastard spawn of an unprincipled profligate, remarkable only for drunkenness, debauchery, and blasphemy—what, I say, did I and my family do, that you, his son, who were, and are to this day, the low, mean, willing scourge of every ...
— Valentine M'Clutchy, The Irish Agent - The Works of William Carleton, Volume Two • William Carleton

... that I know not what god of fools and drunkards preserved her from being cut down! Not many have ridden out at me from ambush and lived to tell of it! But I saw who she was in time, and sheathed my steel again, and cursed her for the gipsy that she half is. The other half is spawn ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy

... horse on the standing crop, their men on the garnered grain, 15 The thatch of the byres will serve their fires when all the cattle are slain. But if thou thinkest the price be fair,—thy brethren wait to sup. The hound is kin to the jackal spawn,—howl, dog, and 20 call them up! And if thou thinkest the price be high, in steer and gear and stack, Give me my father's mare again, and I'll fight my own way ...
— Story Hour Readings: Seventh Year • E.C. Hartwell

... waters recede during October, after the rains have ended, each runlet and purling stream becomes a scene of slaughter on a most reckless and improvident scale. The innumerable shoals of spawn and small fish that have been feeding in the rice fields, warned by some instinct seek the lakes and main streams. As they try to get their way back, however, they find at each outlet in each ditch ...
— Sport and Work on the Nepaul Frontier - Twelve Years Sporting Reminiscences of an Indigo Planter • James Inglis

... were surprised, on the 19th of March, to see the waves changed to a red colour for seven or eight leagues, though on sounding we had no ground at 170 fathoms; but on drawing up some of the water, we found the colour owing to a vast quantity of fish-spawn, swimming on the surface. We were now in lat. 16 deg. 11' S. having passed the three famous ports of Arica, Ylo, and Arequipa. The 22d March we were off the harbour of Callao de Lima, when we saw two ships steering for that port, to which ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume X • Robert Kerr

... length of six or seven feet, and is said to be much larger in the more Northern seas. It usually frequents the deep parts of the sea, but comes among the marine plants of the coast in spring, to deposit its spawn. It swims rather slowly, and glides along with somewhat of the ...
— Captain Mugford - Our Salt and Fresh Water Tutors • W.H.G. Kingston

... and knew old man Packard who would have suggested that he was not a good and thorough-going hater. His enemy and all of his enemy's household, wife and child, maid-servant and man-servant were all as the spawn of Satan. ...
— Man to Man • Jackson Gregory

... cried in a loud, clear voice, "and touch not the innocent child. Spawn of Satan, would you do murder to appease the devils whom you worship? Well shall they repay you, people of Zimboe. Oh! mine eyes are open and I see," he went on, shaking his thin arms above his head ...
— Elissa • H. Rider Haggard

... body of Hope, the spotless lamb Thou threwest into the high priest's slaughtering-room, And by the child Despair born red therefrom As, thank the secret sire picked out to cram With spurious spawn thy misconceiving dam, Thou, like a worm from a town's common tomb, Didst creep from forth the kennel of her womb, Born to break down with catapult and ram Man's builded towers of promise, and with breath ...
— Two Nations • Algernon Charles Swinburne

... the greater number of the Crioceris-larvae we find, adhering firmly to the skin, certain white specks, very small and of a china-white. Can these be the sowing of a bandit, the spawn of a Midge? ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre

... the shades of night, Whilst scarce distinguished in the black profound, Stairs, aqueducts, great pillars, gleamed around, And ruined capitals: then was seen a group Of granite elephants 'neath a dome to stoop, Shapeless, giant forms to view arise, Monsters around, the spawn of hideous ties! Then hanging gardens, with flowers and galleries: O'er vast fountains bending grew ebon-trees; Temples, where seated on their rich tiled thrones, Bull-headed idols shone in jasper stones; Vast halls, spanned by one block, where watch and stare ...
— Poems • Victor Hugo

... then went on deck about ten and found the wind abated, but quite ahead. The Captain said he was quite sick of it. The curious phenomenon yesterday of the coloured water, is explained by some of the seamen supposing it to be the spawn of ...
— A Journey to America in 1834 • Robert Heywood

... certainly, however, difficult to explain the motives by which the early spring salmon are actuated in ascending rivers, seeing that they never spawn till autumn at the soonest. We must remember, at the same time, that they are fresh-water fishes, born and bred in our own translucent streams, and that they have an undoubted right to endeavour to return there when it suits their own inclination. ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various

... sloth and idleness, stood up and spake thus: "I am the great prince of listlessness and sloth, who have great influence upon millions of all sorts and conditions of men; I am that stagnant pond where the spawn of every evil is bred, where the dregs of every corruption and baleful slime grows rank. What good wouldst thou be, Asmodai, or ye, chief damned evils, were I not? I, who keep the windows open and unguarded that ye may enter into the man when ye will, ...
— The Visions of the Sleeping Bard • Ellis Wynne

... had been dispelled by this attempt to promote a rival to the post of honour; "I am ready, sir:" muttering, however, soon afterwards to himself, as the difficulties of the way increased, "He thinks no more of his life than if he were a sprat or a spawn." No other word was breathed by either of the adventurers, as they threaded the giddy path, until about midway, when the elder paused and exclaimed, "A-hoy there, boy! there are two steps wanting; you had better indeed go back. To me, the track has been ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall

... the "polwe" and "lopatakwao," all go up the Chambeze to spawn when the rains begin. Casembe's people make caviare of the ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume II (of 2), 1869-1873 • David Livingstone

... The result was predicted about a quarter of a century ago in the pages of this Magazine; and many attempts were then made to suppress the nuisance at its fountainhead. Much good was accomplished: but our efforts at that time were only partially successful; for nothing is so tenacious of life as the spawn of frogs—nothing is so vivacious as corruption, until it has reached its last stage. The evidence before us shows that this stage has been now at length attained. Mr Coventry Patmore's volume has reached the ultimate terminus of poetical ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 347, September, 1844 • Various

... chattering cricket, Hear, you spawn of the sod, The strange strong cry in the darkness Of ...
— Poems • G.K. Chesterton

... and surely it is the spawn of Cathedral Instruments plaid on by Babylonish Minstrels, ...
— The Works of Aphra Behn - Volume IV. • Aphra Behn

... populous part of creation. To say nothing of other tribes, a census of the herring would find us far in the minority. And what life is to us,—sour or sweet,—so is it to them. Like us, they die, fighting death to the last; like us, they spawn and depart. We inhabit but a crust, rough surfaces, odds and ends of the isles; the abounding lagoon being its two-thirds, its grand feature from ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville

... it for a shop of witchcraft, to find in it the fat of serpents, spawn of snakes, Jews' spittle, and their young children's ordure; and all these for the face. I would sooner eat a dead pigeon taken from the soles of the feet of one sick of the plague, than kiss one of you fasting. Here are two of you, whose sin of your youth is the very patrimony ...
— The Duchess of Malfi • John Webster

... Burgundian camp. Duke Philip wished to see her. When he drew near to her, there were certain of his clergy and his knighthood who praised his piety, extolled his courage, and wondered that this mighty Duke was not afraid of the spawn of Hell.[2020] ...
— The Life of Joan of Arc, Vol. 1 and 2 (of 2) • Anatole France

... graceful trees about them. Now and then the riders saw some dusty peasants—brown and sun-dried men wearing the fustanella, and shoes with turned-up toes ornamented with big black tassels; women with dingy handkerchiefs tied over their heads; children who looked almost like the spawn of the sun in their healthy, bright-eyed brownness. And these people had cheerful faces. Their rustic lot seemed enviable. Who would not shed his sorrows under these pine trees, in the country where the solitudes radiated happiness, and even bareness ...
— In the Wilderness • Robert Hichens

... it," his one overmastering thought was. "Thank heaven, I did it! I held my temper and my tongue, didn't kill that spawn of Hell, and saved the whole situation. I'm out of a job, true enough, and out of the plant; but after all, I'm free—and I know what's in ...
— The Air Trust • George Allan England

... and thieves, who pass their nights in raising children and their days in coveting legacies. And there is not an insult they do not heap upon the powerful tribe of Floche, seized with that bitter rage of nobles, decimated, ruined, who see the spawn of the bourgeoisie master of their rents and of their chateau. The Floches, on their side, naturally have the insolence of those who triumph. They are in full possession, a thing to make them insolent. Full of contempt for the ancient ...
— The Fete At Coqueville - 1907 • Emile Zola

... but once put these hands on your bloodstained carcass, and if the mother that bore ye will know her spawn again, my name's not Bill Gibbs! Ha! you miserable swab, with your soft words and white hands! when I get out of this hole I'll blow you and your infarnal hounds to ——! Give me fair play, and, even on one of my legs, ...
— Captain Brand of the "Centipede" • H. A. (Henry Augustus) Wise

... were walking on the banks of the great pond, where the water was alive, it alone wakeful in the slumber of the woods, for the moon, which shone in a cloudless sky, sowed a myriad of goldfish, and this luminous spawn, fallen from the planet, mounted, descended, sparkled in a thousand little points of fire, of which the wind as it ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans

... the bay raced like a steeplechaser tight on the heels of the hounds, leadin' even the master, for Lory could no more hold him than his own glee at the grand way they were takin' gates and walls. But suddenly that bay divil's-spawn swerves from the course, dashes up and stops bang broadside against a barn; and there, with ears laid back tight to his head and muzzle half upturned, for four mortal hours the bay held Lory's off leg ...
— The Red-Blooded Heroes of the Frontier • Edgar Beecher Bronson

... -igxi. frequent : ofta; vizitadi. fringe : frangxo. fritter : fritajxo. frock : vesteto. "-coat," surtuto. frog : rano. frolic : petoli. frown : sulk'o, -igi. frugal : sxparema, fruit : frukto. "-ful," fruktodona. fry : friti, (spawn) frajo, "-ing" "pan," pato, fritilo. fuel : brulajxo, hejtajxo. fulfil : plenumi. fun : sxercado. function : funkcio. funeral : enterigiro. funnel : funelo. funny : ridinda. fur : felo; "—coat" pelto. furnace : fornego. furnish : mebli, provizi. furrow : sulko. further ...
— The Esperanto Teacher - A Simple Course for Non-Grammarians • Helen Fryer

... IV, panted for the freedom of Italy as it existed in the fifteenth century; he wanted to accomplish his wishes by an alliance with France; he would place French princes on the thrones of Milan and Naples. The Spaniards he pronounced as the spawn of Jews and Moors, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 1-20 • Various

... inches, the top of the siding, so that the water shall make a continuous surface the whole length of the trough. Each trough is filled with round river stones or pebbles washed clean, on which the spawn is laid. The water is let out of the mill-race upon these troughs through a wire-cloth filter, covering them about two inches deep above the stones. At the bottom, a lateral channel or race, running at right angles to the troughs, conducts the waste ...
— A Walk from London to John O'Groat's • Elihu Burritt

... think that the dabchick likes insects and fish spawn better than fish, or at least more prudently dines upon them. "That fish are taken we have positive evidence from examples having been repeatedly picked up dead by the fishermen of the Thames, with a bull-head or miller's ...
— Love's Meinie - Three Lectures on Greek and English Birds • John Ruskin

... hope it will meet the same fate as I think will befall the first. I will own that he has sworn to it. But how? On a piece of stick made in the shape of a thing they name a cross, said to be blest and sanctified by the polluted words & hands of a wretched priest, a spawn of the whore of Babylon, who is a monster of nature & a servant to the Devil, who for a real will pretend to absolve his followers from perjury, incest, or parricide, and canonize them for cruelties committed upon we heretics, as they ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 48, October, 1861 • Various

... N. posterity, progeny, breed, issue, offspring, brood, litter, seed, farrow, spawn, spat; family, grandchildren, heirs; great-grandchild. child, son, daughter; butcha[obs3]; bantling, scion; acrospire[obs3], plumule[obs3], shoot, sprout, olive-branch, sprit[obs3], branch; off-shoot, off-set; ramification; descendant; heir, heiress; heir-apparent, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus

... swirling rapids—a favorite resort of the salmon, which leaped high in the spring, and were caught in the box-traps that hung on long beams over the water. Now the salmon had small chance of shedding their spawn in the cool, bright mountain pools, for they could not leap the dams, and if by chance one got into the mill-race, it had a hopeless struggle against a current that would have carried an elephant off his feet. Bonnyboy, who more than once had seen the beautiful silvery fish spring right ...
— Boyhood in Norway • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen

... choose to use his chisel. That little drab we have noticed now and then, our way taking us often past the end of the court, there was nothing by which to distinguish her. She was not over-clean, could use coarse language on occasion—just the spawn of the streets: take care lest the cloak of our child should ...
— The Second Thoughts of An Idle Fellow • Jerome K. Jerome

... spawn," she continued; "but then Maria Carlton, what you call Lady Doncaster, came and frightened them; I ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madam D'Arblay Volume 2 • Madame D'Arblay

... often born an infant in the regular way, and requires time to mature it: and often it sees the light in its full growth, but dwindles away by degrees. Sometimes it is of noble birth; and sometimes the spawn of a stock-jobber. Here, it screams aloud at the opening of the womb; and there, it is delivered with a whisper. I know a lie that now disturbs half the kingdom with its noise, which though too proud and great at present ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IX; • Jonathan Swift

... out then, still possessed with the foolish greed to reach London, and after getting the engine to rights, went off under a clear black sky thronged with worlds and far-sown spawn, some of them, I thought, perhaps like this of mine, whelmed and drowned in oceans of silence, with one only inhabitant to see it, and hear its silence. And all the long night I travelled, stopping twice ...
— The Purple Cloud • M.P. Shiel

... Gentleman had been provided with a Horse by the Sheriff, and, as he rode by the cart where I and Drum and the Girl were jogging on, he spies me under the Tilt, and in his cruel manner makes a cut at me with his riding wand, calling me a young spawn of Thievery and Rebellion. ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 1 of 3 • George Augustus Sala

... taken up, fellow, as a vagrant," a third would observe; "and if I ever catch you coming up my avenue again, depend upon it, I will slip my dogs at you and your idle spawn." ...
— Phelim O'toole's Courtship and Other Stories • William Carleton

... Phil Blake, ye needn't be winkin' at me that way; it's little I care for the spawn of the ould serpent. [Here great cheers greeted the speaker, in which, without well knowing why, I heartily joined.] I'm going to give a toast, boys,—a real good toast, none of your sentimental things about wall-flowers or the vernal equinox, or that kind of thing, ...
— Charles O'Malley, The Irish Dragoon, Volume 1 (of 2) • Charles Lever

... aloft, sucking the juices from the fettered flies, teaching its spawn to prey and feed; content in squalor and in plenitude; in sensual sloth, and in the increase of ...
— Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida - Selected from the Works of Ouida • Ouida

... and Miriam had already run to all the likely places in the quarter, even to those marshy alleys where every overflow of the Tiber left deposits of malarious mud, where families harbored, ten in a house, where stunted men and wrinkled women slouched through the streets, and a sickly spawn of half-naked babies swarmed under the feet. They had had trouble enough, but never such a trouble as this. Manasseh and Rachel, with this queer offspring of theirs, this Joseph the Dreamer, as he had been nicknamed, this handsome, reckless black-eyed ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill

... about the natural history of pilchards; the fishermen did not appear to trouble their heads on the matter. Some said that they went away to far off regions during February, March, and April, to deposit their spawn; others, that they went in search of food; but where they went to, none of ...
— A Yacht Voyage Round England • W.H.G. Kingston

... way before them along the dusty road, Brother Archangias was angrily saying to the priest: 'Let be! Monsieur le Cure, they're spawn of damnation, those toads are! They ought to have their backs broken, to make them pleasing to God. They grow up in irreligion, like their fathers. Fifteen years have I been here, and not one Christian have I been able to turn out. The minute they quit my hands, good-bye! ...
— Abbe Mouret's Transgression - La Faute De L'abbe Mouret • Emile Zola

... down the stream, now and then pausing at a likely place to take some trout for dinner, and with an eye out for a good camping-ground. Many of the trout were full of ripe spawn, and a few had spawned, the season with them being a little later than on the stream we had left, perhaps because the water was less cold. Neither had the creek here any such eventful and startling career. It led, indeed, quite a humdrum sort of life under the ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs

... "misbegotten spawn of the late High Priestess Nlui-Mok, and now Most Glorious Air Lord of All the Hans." He rolled out these titles with a bow of exaggerated respect toward the west, and in a tone of mockery. Those of his men who were near enough to ...
— The Airlords of Han • Philip Francis Nowlan

... Episcopalian books and Anabaptist books, arguments for Tithes and arguments against Tithes, Fifth Monarchy tracts, Quaker Tracts and Anti-Quaker Tracts, in extraordinary profusion. Prynne would publish one day The Quakers unmasked and clearly detected to be but the spawn of Romish frogs, Jesuits and Franciscan Friars, sent from Rome to seduce the intoxicated giddy-headed English nation, and George Fox would print the next day The Unmasking and Discovery of Antichrist, with all the False Prophets, by the true light which comes from Christ Jesus. Nor, of ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson

... islands are peculiarly well fitted for these animals; for frogs have been introduced into Madeira, the Azores, and Mauritius, and have multiplied so as to become a nuisance. But as these animals and their spawn are known to be immediately killed by sea-water, on my view we can see that there would be great difficulty in their transportal across the sea, and therefore why they do not exist on any oceanic island. But why, on the theory of creation, they should not have been ...
— On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection • Charles Darwin

... young gentleman who had been fishing down with flies (the blue dun and Greenwell were on the cast), and had filled his basket. There were some fish of three-quarters and half a pound, but the bulk were smaller. These trout were not in good condition, for they spawn early in these parts, but they were not so bad as one ...
— Lines in Pleasant Places - Being the Aftermath of an Old Angler • William Senior

... yet acquired the full strength of democracy. This is part secret of that disorganisation which is causing such wonder upon the continent of Europe. Moreover, Colonial England has caught the disease of non-interference and the infection of economy, the spawn of Liberalism; while her savings, made by starving her establishments, are of the category popularly described as penny-wise and pound-foolish. France has adopted the contrary policy. She spends her money freely in making ports and roads and in opening ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton

... thee safe in harbour again; and yet I tell a d—d lie; I would I could keep afloat until I should see a lusty boy of thy begetting. Odds my timbers! I love thee so well, that I believe thou art the spawn of my own body; though I can give no account of thy being put upon the stocks." Then, turning his eyes upon Pipes, who by this time had penetrated into his apartment, and addressed him with the usual salutation of "What cheer?" "Ahey," cried he, "are you there, you herring-faced son of a ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett

... Topham; "here might have been a second Sir Edmondsbury Godfrey's matter.—Oh, thou real spawn of the red old dragon! for he too would have resisted the House's warrant, had we not taken him something at unawares.—Master Bridgenorth, you are a judicious magistrate, and a worthy servant of the state—I would we had many such sound Protestant justices. Shall ...
— Peveril of the Peak • Sir Walter Scott

... of blandishments others whiles they all chode with him, a murrain seize the dolt, what a devil he would be at, thou chuff, thou puny, thou got in peasestraw, thou losel, thou chitterling, thou spawn of a rebel, thou dykedropt, thou abortion thou, to shut up his drunken drool out of that like a curse of God ape, the good sir Leopold that had for his cognisance the flower of quiet, margerain gentle, advising also the time's occasion as most sacred and most worthy to be ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce

... still harder to understand; but archaeologists were few, and even though they had made researches (which they may or may not have done), their labours had never reached the masses. What wonder, then, that the mushroom spawn of myth, ever present in an atmosphere highly charged with ignorance, had germinated in a soil so favourably ...
— Erewhon Revisited • Samuel Butler

... the discovery that this great product of man's spiritual nature is nothing but the spawn of his self-conceit: that it is purely gratuitous, groundless, superfluous, and therefore in the deepest possible sense lawless, Mr. Buckle follows his master, for such Comte really is. Proclaiming Law everywhere else, and, from his extreme partiality to the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... are usually grass green in color. This green variety is often seen as a spongy coating to the surface of stagnant pools, which goes by the name of "frog spawn" or "pond scum." One of this description, Spirogyra, has done thousands of dollars' worth of damage by smothering the life out of young water-cress plants in artificial beds constructed for winter propagation. When the cress is cut the ...
— The Home Medical Library, Volume V (of VI) • Various

... year, and before that for some time by his daughter. Is most consistent, trying to do simply what is right. The other day was benighted on Saturday, on his way to spend the Sunday at Metlakahtla, seven miles off. Would not come on, nor let his people gather herring spawn, close under their feet, he rested the Lord's Day, ...
— Metlakahtla and the North Pacific Mission • Eugene Stock

... is thus, a He and a She Pike will usually go together out of a River into some ditch or creek, and that there the Spawner casts her eggs, and the Melter hovers over her all that time that she is casting her Spawn, but touches her not. I might say more of this, but it might be thought curiosity or worse, and shall therefore forbear it, and take up so much of your attention as to tell you that the best of Pikes are noted to be in Rivers, then those in great Ponds ...
— The Complete Angler 1653 • Isaak Walton

... for the life of this Demetrios, this arch-foe of our Redeemer, this spawn of Satan, who has sacked more of my towns than I have fingers on this wasted hand! Now, now that God has singularly favoured me—!" Theodoret snarled and gibbered like a frenzied ape, and had no longer the ...
— Domnei • James Branch Cabell et al

... got some body's old two-hand sword, to mow you off at the knees; and that sword hath spawn'd such a dagger!—But then he is so hung with pikes, halberds, petronels, calivers and muskets, that he looks like a justice of peace's hall: a man of two thousand a-year, is not cess'd at so many weapons as he has on. There was never fencer challenged at so many several foils. You would think he ...
— Epicoene - Or, The Silent Woman • Ben Jonson

... a woman of few phrases, she repeated these as often as she had occasion for speech, and divided the world simply into two classes: two or three individuals, including herself, were human beings; the rest of mankind she denounced, in a voice which shook the walls, as spawn. One does not like to ...
— The Chase Of Saint-Castin And Other Stories Of The French In The New World • Mary Hartwell Catherwood



Words linked to "Spawn" :   do, lay, spawner, egg, roe, cause, make, breed



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