"Prehistoric" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... are like that, my friend, they must expand and grow. Nothing can long restrain them. A new method of producing wealth broke up the primitive communism of prehistoric man; another change in the methods of production hurled the feudal barons from power and forced the establishment of a new social system. And now, we are on the eve of another great change—nay, we are in the very midst of the change. Capitalism ...
— The Common Sense of Socialism - A Series of Letters Addressed to Jonathan Edwards, of Pittsburg • John Spargo
... around them lay the desolate Adirondack wilderness. The wire fence of a game preserve obstructed their advance. It was almost three-quarters of a mile to the nearest hotel. Here and there in the forest immense boulders reared their prehistoric bulk. Many bore the inscription: "Votes ...
— The Gay Rebellion • Robert W. Chambers
... The prehistoric ape, we are justified in assuming, struggled upright upon a cane. The cane, so to speak, with which primitive man wooed his bride, defended his life, liberty and pursuit of happiness, and brought down his food, was (like all canes which are in good taste) admirably chosen ...
— Walking-Stick Papers • Robert Cortes Holliday
... coal barges, lighters, fire boats, tugs, scows, and all the other kinds of vessels that crowd the river-harbor of a great lake port. Viewed from below, the steel structure of the viaduct over the river stretched out like the monstrous skeleton of some prehistoric beast. Whistles shrieked deafeningly in their ears and trains pounded jarringly over railroad bridges. A jack-knife bridge began to descend over their very heads. Over where the new bridge was being constructed men stood on slender ...
— The Camp Fire Girls at School • Hildegard G. Frey
... the last [eighteenth] century was the calumny known as mercheta mulierum, now known as a malignant fable popularized by novelists and playwrights. Another suggestion is that it is a custom that has survived from some prehistoric race; a third that it has grown up at different points...." Mr. Peacock regards the last as the most likely. "It is only when the population becomes relatively dense that land, apart from what it produces, is of ...
— The Customs of Old England • F. J. Snell
... story of the ancient town of PICKERING in Yorkshire from Prehistoric times up to the year of our Lord Nineteen ...
— The Evolution Of An English Town • Gordon Home
... summit is nothing but an extended plateau, in places from 2 to 3 m. wide. They have, however, even on the top a certain picturesqueness, for the undulating tableland is relieved by copses, and diversified by little wooded "bottoms," scooped out by prehistoric torrents. Nearer the sea the uplands become more desolate, the "bottoms" are replaced by rocky combes, like the gorges at Cheddar and Burrington; villages become less frequent; and traces of discarded mines give a weirdness to the solitude. The moors are, however, healthy, and nowhere lacking ...
— Somerset • G.W. Wade and J.H. Wade
... greater refinement, contributed the minutely-worked iron railings, the doors of lace-like stonework, the pictures, and the jewels which made its sacristy a veritable treasure house. The gestation of the giantess had lasted for three centuries; it seemed like those enormous prehistoric animals who slept so long in their mother's womb ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... ox-beef and bread; they suffered much from chronic dyspepsia, due in part, at least, no doubt, to the monotony of their food, their life, their interests. One could hardly believe one was still in the nineteenth century; these people had the calm, the local seclusion of the prehistoric epoch. For them, Europe did not exist; they knew it merely as a place where settlers came from. What the Czar intended, what the Kaiser designed, never disturbed their rest. A sick ox, a rattling tile on the ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen
... unprogressive classes retain many of the beliefs and ways of savages, just as the Hebridean people use spindle-whorls of stone, and bake clay pots without the aid of the wheel, like modern South Sea Islanders, or like their own prehistoric ancestors. {11a} The student of folklore is thus led to examine the usages, myths, and ideas of savages, which are still retained, in rude enough shape, by the European peasantry. Lastly, he observes that a few similar customs and ideas survive ...
— Custom and Myth • Andrew Lang
... was not, perhaps, very wide, but it was generally exact; indeed, the accuracy with which he grasped facts that belonged to the realm of history proper was sometimes in strange contrast to the fanciful way in which he reasoned from them, or to the wildness of his conjectures in the prehistoric region. For metaphysics strictly so called he had apparently little turn— his reading did not go far beyond those companions of his youth, Aristotle and Bishop Butler; and philosophical speculation interested him only so far as it bore on Christian doctrine. Neither, in spite of his eminence as ...
— William Ewart Gladstone • James Bryce
... this sudden awakening of nature, the touch and shadow vanished simultaneously. But the hillock had lost its attractions for me, and, rising hastily, I dashed down the decline and hurried homewards. I discovered no reason other than solitude, and the possible burial-place of prehistoric man, for the presence of the occult; but the next time I visited the spot, the same thing happened. I have been there twice since, and the same, always the same thing—first the shadow, then the touch, then the shadow, then the arrival of some form or other of joyous ...
— Byways of Ghost-Land • Elliott O'Donnell
... fertilizer. But we long ago used up all the buffalo bones we could find on the prairies and our packing houses could not give us enough bone-meal to go around, so we have had to draw upon the old bone-yards of prehistoric animals. Deposits of lime phosphate of such origin were found in South Carolina in 1870 and in Florida in 1888. Since then the industry has developed with amazing rapidity until in 1913 the United States produced over three million tons of phosphates, nearly half of which ...
— Creative Chemistry - Descriptive of Recent Achievements in the Chemical Industries • Edwin E. Slosson
... impelled our steps; crackling and rattling, our feet were trampling on the remains of prehistoric animals and interesting fossils, the possession of which is a matter of rivalry and contention between the museums of great cities. A thousand Cuviers could never have reconstructed the organic remains deposited in ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne
... Electrician had one of those extraordinarily sweet, extraordinarily vital, strangely mysterious, utterly unexplainable masculine faces that fill your senses with an odd, impersonal disquietude, an itching unrest, like the hazy, teasing reminder of some previous existence in a prehistoric cave, or, more tormenting still, with the tingling, psychic prophecy of some amazing emotional experience yet to come. The sort of face, in fact, that almost inevitably flares up into a woman's startled vision at the one ...
— The Indiscreet Letter • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... That grows upon the great stone flags, The dark tree-ferns, the staghorn ferns, The prehistoric, antlered stags That carven stand and stare ...
— Georgian Poetry 1916-17 • Various
... more active than in Egypt during the last half century, and the contributions which his spade and pick have offered to history are of first-rate importance to that study as a whole. The eye may now travel down the history of the Nile Valley from prehistoric days to the present time almost without interruption; and now that the anthropologist has shown that the modern Egyptians, Mussulman and Copt, peasant and townsman, belong to one and the same race of ancient Egyptians, one may surely ...
— The Treasury of Ancient Egypt - Miscellaneous Chapters on Ancient Egyptian History and Archaeology • Arthur E. P. B. Weigall
... animal bones, and flints, Supposed to prove his presence, let's abandon; But on some subjects we should like some hints; When did he come, and what has Sapient Man done To justify his advent? Take him now, Apart from retrospection prehistoric, What is the being of the lifted brow Doing at present? Strange phantasmagoric Pictures of his proceedings flit before The vision of alert imagination; Playing the brute, buffoon, "bounder," or bore, In every climate, and in every nation! Homo—here wasting half ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99, September 13, 1890 • Various
... Mr Button would shake his lethargy off, and rise and look round for "seagulls," but the prospect was sail-less as the prehistoric sea, wingless, voiceless. When Dick would fret now and then, the old sailor would always devise some means of amusing him. He made him fishing tackle out of a bent pin and some small twine that happened to be in the boat, and told him to fish for "pinkeens"; and Dick, with ...
— The Blue Lagoon - A Romance • H. de Vere Stacpoole
... the fact that this jar was made by a prehistoric race, we should then have four generations in this lovely valley:-the amiable Pre-Historic people (whose gentle descendants were probably killed by the Spaniards in the West Indies); the Red Indians; the Keene Flaters (from Vermont); and the Summer Boarders, to say nothing of the various races ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... sold fresh. The existence of salmon in this inland salt sea, which lies eighty-four feet below the level of the ocean, is supposed to be due to its connection with the open sea having been cut off by a great upheaval in the prehistoric time. ...
— Persia Revisited • Thomas Edward Gordon
... Horace, and, rising, he indulged in the prehistoric turkey-trot of a year ago, with burlesque hip-snaps and poultry-yard scrapings ...
— In a Little Town • Rupert Hughes
... that of the other. Indeed, Miss Beekman's friend, Prof. Abelard Samothrace, of Columbia University, probably would have admitted that just as the two had lived in the same house—albeit at different levels—on Fifth Avenue, so their forebears at some prehistoric period had, likely as not, occupied the same cave and had in company waded on frosty mornings the ice-skimmed swamps of Mittel Europa in pursuit of the cave bear, the mastodon and the woolly rhinoceros, ...
— By Advice of Counsel • Arthur Train
... the Siouan habitat, as thus outlined, ran far into the prehistoric age. As already noted, the Siouan Indians of the plains were undoubtedly descended from the Siouan tribes of the east (indeed the Mandan had a tradition to that effect); and reason has been given for supposing that ...
— The Siouan Indians • W. J. McGee
... Atlantean ideas these spirits were:—Vice Elementals; Morbas (or Disease Elementals); Clanogrians (or malicious family ghosts, such as Banshees, etc.); Vampires; Barrowvians, i.e. a grotesque kind of phantasm that frequents places where prehistoric man or beast has been interred; Planetians, i.e. spirits inimical to dwellers on this earth that inhabit various of the other planets; and earthbound spirits of such dead human beings as were mad, imbecile, cruel and vicious, together with the phantasms of vicious and mad beasts, and ...
— The Sorcery Club • Elliott O'Donnell
... will not forget that "clairvoyance is strictly limited to the perception of human personality," according to the role so well formulated by Dr. Osty. Experiments have been made in which a psychometer, on touching the tooth of a prehistoric animal, saw the landscapes and the cataclysms of the earth's earliest ages displayed before his eyes; in which another medium, on handling a jewel, conjured up, it would seem with marvellous exactness, the games and processions of ancient ...
— The Unknown Guest • Maurice Maeterlinck
... physical history of the Roman plain; and the researches of the archaeologist have brought into the daylight of modern knowledge, and by a wider comparison and induction have invested with a new significance, the prehistoric objects, customs, and traditions which make primeval Rome and the surrounding sites so fascinating to the imagination. But these results are not to be found in the books which the English visitor usually consults. In the following chapters I have endeavoured ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... thickened, until, in the Renaissance, the art of exposing falsehood dawned upon keen Italian minds. It was then that history as we understand it began to be understood, and the illustrious dynasty of scholars arose to whom we still look both for method and material. Unlike the dreaming prehistoric world, ours knows the need and the duty to make itself master of the earlier times, and to forfeit nothing of their wisdom or their warnings,[15] and has devoted its best energy and treasure to the sovereign purpose of detecting error and ...
— A Lecture on the Study of History • Lord Acton
... the younger generation holds no suffrage; and is not slow to declare that the Primordial is rightly named, characterizing the individual members of the Board of Governors as antediluvians, prehistoric monsters who have never learned that laughter lends a savor to existence. And so it is that the younger generation, (which is understood to include Maitland and Bannerman), while it religiously pays its dues and has the name ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... I take you.—Yes, up with the old fellows. I have no time to-day for prehistoric research. All over sixty, pass on! What's the matter with them? They don't hear me; they are deaf with age. I think you will have to pick them up, like the babies, and get ...
— Works, V1 • Lucian of Samosata
... speaking—convictions can be, these sacrifices, as I see them, are destined to create a great and powerful Greece, which will bring about not an extension of the state by conquest, but a natural return to those limits within which Hellenism has been active even from prehistoric times. ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... peoples of Borneo, the Philippines and other remote regions where low types still persist. The countenance might have been that of a cross between Pithecanthropus, the Java ape-man, and a daughter of the Piltdown race of prehistoric Sussex. A wooden cudgel lay ...
— The Land That Time Forgot • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... signed with the cross. To the naked pride of the new men nations simply were not. The struggling populations of two vast provinces were simply carried away like slaves into captivity, as after the sacking of some prehistoric town. France was fined for having pretended to be a nation; and the fine was planned to ruin her forever. Under the pressure of such impossible injustice France cried out to the Christian nations, one after another, and by name. Her last cry ...
— The Crimes of England • G.K. Chesterton
... civilizations, to reconstruct societies and peoples, and to trace the occupancy of countries to periods far anterior to that of which history takes cognizance. The general fact seems to be settled that, in prehistoric times, Europe passed through four distinct eras. These were the Rude Stone Age, when man was the contemporary in Europe of the extinct hairy elephant and the cave bear; the Polished Stone Age; ...
— The Nation in a Nutshell • George Makepeace Towle
... prehistoric," rejoined my lord. "A lot of blood has flowed under the razor since the ...
— A Thief in the Night • E. W. Hornung
... as fresh, in appearance, as during the monster's lifetime, countless ages ago. Some grasses found in the mouth had been carefully preserved, and have since been analysed with the view of ascertaining the age of the prehistoric monster. Time was now of the greatest importance to Dr. Herz, for everything depended upon the arrival of his treasure in European Russia in a frozen condition. A few days of warm muggy weather nearing Europe might render futile the task of many months of ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... and a mountain of grey smoke leaped into being in front of him. Jimmie stared, and saw out of a little clump of bushes a long black object thrust itself out, like the snout of a gigantic tapir from some prehistoric age. It was a ten-inch gun, coming back from its recoil; and Jimmie, smelling its fumes, struggled back to the road with his machine, before the monster should speak again and ...
— Jimmie Higgins • Upton Sinclair
... stream flashed quickly by. Close at hand to the right the hard-beaten prairie road meandered over the sod. There had been a ridge or two and some sharp curves just west of town, and now, as they rounded the last of these and flew out upon an almost level track, the bottom of some prehistoric mountain lake, the eyes of two of the three silent occupants of the cab were strained along the gleaming rails ahead, and almost at the same instant the same thought sprang to the lips of each—Big Ben, with his left hand at the throttle, hunched up on his shelf, ...
— To The Front - A Sequel to Cadet Days • Charles King
... he appears to receive as indubitable. This would not, so far as I can see, make the slightest difference in the so-called dignity of mankind. If man had a prehensile tail, it would not detract from his worth. I myself have little doubt that there were men with tails in prehistoric or even in historic times. I go still farther and declare that if ever there should be an ape who can form ideas and words, he would ipso facto be a man. I have therefore no prejudices such as the advocates of the simian theory like to attribute to us. What I and ...
— The Silesian Horseherd - Questions of the Hour • Friedrich Max Mueller
... the boast of the English race alone. No man in England now can boast of unmixed descent, but must perforce trace his family back through many a marriage of Frank, and Norman, and Saxon, and Dane, and Roman, and Celt, and even Iberian, back to prehistoric man— ...
— Hero-Myths & Legends of the British Race • Maud Isabel Ebbutt
... was short-lived, for in 1868 the class of '70 erected a "gymnasium in embryo" described by a graduate of '75 as "two uprights with a cross-beam and ropes dangling from eye-bolts—the remains of some prehistoric effort towards muscular development," which was to be found "back of the Museum";—otherwise the old North Wing. Mark Norris, '79, thus pictures the comparatively primitive state of athletics in the University of ...
— The University of Michigan • Wilfred Shaw
... how the domesticated dog, by inherited memory, turns round on the hearthrug before he curls up to sleep! He is unconsciously remembering the long grasses in which his wild ancestors dwelt. Also observe this boy, who has retained an unconscious recollection of the earliest creed of prehistoric man. Behold him instinctively, and I may say automatically, cherishing fetich stones (instead of marbles, like other boys) and adoring that green insect in the glass bottle! Oh Science,' he added rapturously, ...
— 'That Very Mab' • May Kendall and Andrew Lang
... desk he sits, At times about the room he flits— Folks interrupt his perfect ease By asking questions such as these: "How tall was prehistoric man?" "How old, I ...
— More Toasts • Marion Dix Mosher
... remarkable how completely this Celtic leaven—the true history of which is lost in the depths of prehistoric darkness—succeeded in impressing not only its language but its culture and spirit upon the various peoples with whom it came into contact. To impose a special type of civilization upon another race must always prove a ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... most folk-tales that they, in their original forms, were framed centuries upon centuries ago; while of some of them it is supposed that they may be traced back through successive ages to those myths in which, during a prehistoric period, the oldest of philosophers expressed their ideas relative to the material or the ...
— Russian Fairy Tales - A Choice Collection of Muscovite Folk-lore • W. R. S. Ralston
... OF MAN AND PREHISTORIC ARCHAEOLOGY. I. The Thunder-stones. Early beliefs regarding "thunder-stones" Theories of Mercati and Tollius regarding them Their identification with the implements of prehistoric man Remains of man found in caverns Unfavourable influence on scientific activity ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... sheer declivity; the even sky-line was indented in two places—one where it was cracked into a fanciful resemblance to a human profile, the other where it was curved like a bowl. Need it be said that one was distinctly recognized as the silhouette of a prehistoric giant, and that the other was his drinking-cup; need it be added that neither lent the slightest human suggestion to the solitude? A toy-like pier extending into the loch, midway from the barren shore, only heightened the desolation. And when the little steamboat that occasionally entered the loch ...
— The Bell-Ringer of Angel's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... points to animism as the pervading idea of the worship of the peoples of the Babylonian states in the prehistoric period—the attribution of life to every appearance of nature. The question is, however, Is the evidence of the inscriptions sufficient to make this absolutely certain? It is hard to believe that such intelligent people, as the primitive Babylonians naturally were, believed that such things ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Theophilus G. Pinches
... sculptured by wind and rain. Above the red grit, weathered into a thousand queer shapes, stood strata of chloritic sand, a pale yellow-green, and capping it rose the usual dull-brown carbonate of lime. Large fossil oysters lay in numbers about the base, suggesting a prehistoric feast of the Titans. Amongst them is the monstrous Tridacna (gigantea), which sometimes attains a growth of a yard and a half; one of these is used as a benitier at the church of Saint Sulpice, Paris. Amongst the layers were wavy bands of water-rolled crystals, jaspers, bloodstones, iron-revetted ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... stages several hundred feet. An incline of forty-five degrees led up to the cave, while up beyond that was the great stratum of solid rock that extends for miles along the south of Mount Elgon and which is honey-combed with hundreds of prehistoric cave-dwellings. A determined foe stationed at the mouth of any one of the caves could defend it against an enormous ...
— In Africa - Hunting Adventures in the Big Game Country • John T. McCutcheon
... jamboree. It looks like a trademark, but that is only an accident and not intentional. It is prehistoric and extinct. It used to roam the earth in the Old Silurian times, and lay eggs and catch fish and climb trees and live on fossils; for it was of a mixed breed, which was the fashion then. It was very fierce, and the Old Silurians were afraid of it, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... the name of spinning, it is obvious that a considerable number of processes are involved, and an immense amount of work has to be done before the actual process of spinning is attempted. The nomenclature is due to custom dating back to prehistoric times when the conversion of fibre to yarn was conducted by much simpler apparatus than it is at present; the established name to denote this conversion of fibre to yarn now refers only to one of a large number of important processes, each one ...
— The Jute Industry: From Seed to Finished Cloth • T. Woodhouse and P. Kilgour
... a diving-suit for forty days would have stopped most men but Grant had solved that too. If he had not, he never could have gone to the Red Lava Range after the fabulous gizzard-stones of Venus's prehistoric echindul. ...
— The Wealth of Echindul • Noel Miller Loomis
... round the bottoms of the legs of their trousers, grew pale, and glanced apprehensively at each other. If ever Socialism did come to pass, they evidently thought it very probable that they would have to walk about in a sort of prehistoric highland costume, without any trousers or ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... recommended to make inquiries in this respect before leaving England); the libraries will provide the literature dealing with the routes he proposes to take; and such a collection as the type-series of pottery and the Finlay collection of prehistoric antiquities at the British School at Athens may be useful to supplement his previous studies at museums, and enable him to observe with intelligence the potsherds, &c., that he may find on an ancient site. In return, he will be expected to report his results either ...
— How to Observe in Archaeology • Various
... seen a stranger sight than that of a swarm of Penguins at work. They looked like a brood of prehistoric birds of enormous size, with wings too short for flight. Most unwieldy birds they were, driven by, or more accurately, driving beginners in the art of flying; but they ran along the ground at an amazing speed, zigzagged this way and ...
— High Adventure - A Narrative of Air Fighting in France • James Norman Hall
... diminished metabolism of the hysterical, had already compared them to hibernating animals, while Babinsky states that the hysterical are in a state of subconsciousness, a state, as Metchnikoff remarks (Essais optimistes, p. 270), reminiscent of our prehistoric past. ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... was a magnified virtuoso. His orchestral technique is supreme, but his music fails to force its way into my soul. It pricks the nerves, it pleases the sense of the gigantic, the strange, the formless, but there is something uncanny about it all, like some huge, prehistoric bird, an awful Pterodactyl with goggle eyes, horrid snout and scream. Berlioz, like Baudelaire, has the power of evoking the shudder. But as John Addington Symonds wrote: "The shams of the classicists, ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... contemporary ideas, and the refinements of the artist's own fancy. The same indulgence must be extended to dramatic art. The tragedy of King Lear is not rude or primitive, although the subject belongs to prehistoric times in Britain. Nor is Goethe's Faust mediaeval in spirit as in theme. So neither is the Oedipus Rex the product of 'lawless and uncertain thoughts,' notwithstanding the unspeakable horror of the story, but is penetrated by the most profound estimate ...
— The Seven Plays in English Verse • Sophocles
... one as a land destitute of ambition. In the cities there are infrequent signs of progress; in the country none. The peasants support life on as little as they can, they rest as much as possible and their carts and implements are prehistoric. They may believe in their gods, but fatalism is their true religion. How little they can be affected by civilisation I learned from a tiny settlement of bush-dwellers not twenty miles from Bombay, close to that beautiful lake which has been transformed into a reservoir, ...
— Roving East and Roving West • E.V. Lucas
... from paganism, while renouncing the forms which they had of necessity abjured, were disposed to attribute to Christian symbols some of the virtues which they had believed to inhere in heathen emblems and tokens.[8:1] The amulets and charms used by prehistoric man were silent appeals for protection against the powers of evil, the hostile forces which ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... the great house (now finished - recall your earlier letters) to see a royal kava. This function is of rare use; I know grown Samoans who have never witnessed it. It is, besides, as you are to hear, a piece of prehistoric history, crystallised in figures, and the facts largely forgotten; an acted hieroglyph. The house is really splendid; in the rafters in the midst, two carved and coloured model birds are posted; the only thing of the sort I have ever remarked in Samoa, the Samoans ...
— Vailima Letters • Robert Louis Stevenson
... brought into ghastly prominence the suspended shape of a human skeleton contained within—"I say! What the dickens is this? Looks like a doctor's specimen, b'gad. You haven't let anybody—I mean, you haven't been buying any prehistoric bones, ...
— Cleek, the Master Detective • Thomas W. Hanshew
... a denudation actually occurred is of course within the bounds of geological possibility, if we take the precaution to date the incident far enough back, to remote and prehistoric days. There is little credence to be attached to the local traditions, which affirm that fishermen on a calm, clear day, have seen the ruins of house and castle, cottage and farm, covered with dulse instead of stonecrop; or the shattered spires ...
— The Cornish Riviera • Sidney Heath
... obloquy, picturing his ideas as prehistoric, even antediluvian; but Bismarck stood the prick of honor; as King's Man he insisted in numberless arguments, far and wide, that behind the Divine-right idea was not only a sentimental but a practical side. At any rate, the King's Man was ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel
... land of Russia appears to us when the mists of prehistoric time first begin to lift. Half-formed figures appear, rising, vanishing, showing large through the vapor; stirring, interwoven, endlessly coming and going; a phantasmagoria which it is impossible more than half to understand. At ...
— Historic Tales, Vol. 8 (of 15) - The Romance of Reality • Charles Morris
... thoroughness, and the great progressive plans of God. Evolution has become a spiritual formula. The scientist looks out over the earth and sky and sun and star. Against his little years are meted out vast prehistoric spans; against his mastery of a few forms of life, stands Life itself. Back of all, there looms up the great Figure of the Originator of life, and of the forms of life; the Maker and Ruler of them all. Each scientific ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... Rovinanek, editor of the Pittsburg Slovak Daily, they constitute the trunk of the great Slavonic national tree, from which have branched so many of the Slav people, at the head of whom now stands the powerful Russian empire. From prehistoric time they were celebrated as a peaceful, industrious people, fond of agricultural and pastoral life. The immigration has been from the agricultural class, and at first settlement was made in the mining regions of Pennsylvania. Farming ...
— Aliens or Americans? • Howard B. Grose
... other. This defile was simply a cleft in the stupendous mass of rock that formed a great spur of the mountain on the left-hand side of the path, and was undoubtedly the result of some terrific natural convulsion of prehistoric times, which had rent the living rock asunder, leaving a vertical wall on either side, the indentations in the one wall accurately corresponding to the projections on the other. At the lower extremity—that is to say, the extremity which the fugitives ...
— The Cruise of the Thetis - A Tale of the Cuban Insurrection • Harry Collingwood
... precursor of the Calicurgi (The Calicurgus, or Pompilus, is a Hunting Wasp, feeding her larvae on Spiders. Cf. "The Life and Love of the Insect": chapter 12.—Translator's Note.) dwelling in the prehistoric coal-forests. Her prey was some hideous Scorpion, that first-born of the Arachnida. How did the Hymenopteron master the terrible prey? Analogy tells us, by the methods of the present slayer of Tarantulae. It disarmed ...
— Bramble-bees and Others • J. Henri Fabre
... Room had in prehistoric times been added to by taking in a superfluous passage, and so not only had the advantage of two doors, but enabled us to get to the head of the stairs without passing the chamber wherein our dragon-aunt lay couched. It ...
— The Golden Age • Kenneth Grahame
... to me in making a plan for archeological field work in 1895, that the prehistoric cliff houses, cave dwellings, and ruined pueblos of Arizona afforded valuable opportunities for research, and past experience induced me to turn my steps more especially to the northern and northeastern parts of ...
— Archeological Expedition to Arizona in 1895 • Jesse Walter Fewkes
... dull, stubborn prejudice; bigotry, if you like. I will only remark just this—that Mrs Lawford and I, in our inmost hearts, know. You, my dear Danton, forgive the freedom, merely incredulously grope. Faith versus Reason—that prehistoric Armageddon. Some day, and a day not far distant either, Lawford will come back to us. This—this shutter will be taken down as abruptly as by some inconceivably drowsy heedlessness of common Nature it has been put up. He'll win through; and of his own sheer will and courage. But ...
— The Return • Walter de la Mare
... driven for a space we came to something that lay by the roadside that was a fitting occupant of such a spot. It was like the skeleton of some giant creature of a prehistoric age, incredibly savage even in its stark, unlovely death. It might have been the frame of some vast, metallic tumble bug, that, crawling ominously along this road of death, had come into the path of a Colossus, and been stepped upon, ...
— A Minstrel In France • Harry Lauder
... the stately survival of that strange Monophysite heresy which perpetuated itself in pomp and pride mainly through the sublime accident of the Crusades. That black cone also rises above the crowd with something of the immemorial majesty of a pyramid; and rightly so, for it is typical of the prehistoric poetry by which these places live that some say it is a surviving memory of Ararat and ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... known of their origin. That earliest man used cordage of some kind and by his ingenuity succeeded in tying the material together, is indisputable, for the most ancient carvings and decorations of prehistoric man show knots in several forms. Doubtless the trailing vines and plants first suggested ropes to human beings; and it is quite probable that these same vines, in their various twistings and twinings, gave man his first idea ...
— Knots, Splices and Rope Work • A. Hyatt Verrill
... the system in full work at the outset of the Empire; we cannot trace the steps by which it grew. Evidences of something that resembles town-planning on a rectangular scheme can be noted in two or three corners of early Italian history—first in the prehistoric Bronze Age, then in a very much later Etruscan town, and thirdly on one or two sites of middle Italy connected with the third or fourth century B.C. These evidences are scanty and in part uncertain, and ...
— Ancient Town-Planning • F. Haverfield
... need to insist further on the point that the task of the Grail hero is in this special respect no mere literary invention, but a heritage from the achievements of the prehistoric ...
— From Ritual to Romance • Jessie L. Weston
... verge of that tawny piece of antiquity such a glittering novelty as this pleasure city had chosen to spring up. Within the space of a mile from its outskirts every irregularity of the soil was prehistoric, every channel an undisturbed British trackway; not a sod having been turned there since the days of the Caesars. Yet the exotic had grown here, suddenly as the prophet's gourd; and had drawn ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... of a Turk rather than of an enlightened American citizen. You've not seen my sister-in-law yet, Mr. Craven," he turned to the Englishman. "She's a peach! Smartest little girl in N'York. Leader of society—dollars no object—small wonder she didn't fall in with Jermyn's prehistoric notions. You're a cave man, elder brother—I put my money on Nina every time. Hell! isn't it hot?" He sank down again full length, flapping his handkerchief ...
— The Shadow of the East • E. M. Hull
... the unnecessary martyrdom of imagining that he had been superseded by Dicky Dod. On reflection, I thought it would be safer to start Mr. Mafferton on the usual lines, and I nerved myself to ask him whether he could tell me anything about the prehistoric appearance of these ...
— A Voyage of Consolation - (being in the nature of a sequel to the experiences of 'An - American girl in London') • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... considers himself in all his relations, thinks, feels, states, expresses, concerns himself with spiritual, rather than material, problems. With the Industrial Revolution begins the third act. Again human intelligence and ingenuity concentrate on the prehistoric problem—the perfecting of the instrument. For a hundred years Europe marches merrily back towards barbarism. Then, at the very moment when she is becoming alarmed and self-critical, at the very moment when she is wondering how she is to reconcile her new material ambitions with the renascent ...
— Since Cezanne • Clive Bell
... is very satisfactory, as it testifies to what was unquestionably an actual phantasm of the dead—of a dead horse—albeit that horse was prehistoric; and such horses are all the more likely to be earth-bound on account ...
— Animal Ghosts - Or, Animal Hauntings and the Hereafter • Elliott O'Donnell
... many respects Casa Grande ruin is one of the most noteworthy relics of a prehistoric age and people remaining within the limits of the United States. It was discovered, already in a ruinous condition, by Padre Kino in 1694, and since that time it has been a subject of record by explorers and historians. Thus its history is exceptionally extended and ...
— The Repair Of Casa Grande Ruin, Arizona, in 1891 • Cosmos Mindeleff
... world, as important as Europe or Asia, as Africa or the two Americas? To my mind, it is quite possible that all these islands, emerging from this vast ocean, are but the summits of a continent, now submerged, but which was above the waters at a prehistoric period." ...
— The Mysterious Island • Jules Verne
... the wind, melting away here to be re-erected yonder; mounding themselves, perhaps, above a living and struggling human being, to move forward, anon, leaving where he was a little heap of withered bones. A fearful place is this broad abyss, where once murmured the waters of a prehistoric sea. Let us return to the cool and fragrant security of ...
— The Golden Fleece • Julian Hawthorne
... "Did you talk to that little Minna Haskins, Hedwig, or hear her talk? Her imagination is worse than mine ever was, but memory is her specialty. There's nothing she doesn't remember. She's only eight, but she goes back to the prehistoric without a blink. She certainly ...
— Miss Gibbie Gault • Kate Langley Bosher
... newspaper man Allison prided himself on never having involved any of his papers in a libel suit, though he was usually the man who wrote the "danger-stuff." He had complaints, yes; libel suits, no. Dick Ryan, known in prehistoric newspaper circles in Louisville as "Cold Steel," because his mild blue eyes hardened and glinted when his copy was cut—the typical police court reporter who could be depended upon for a sobbing "blonde-girl story" when news was off—always said that when a party came in to complain of ...
— The Dead Men's Song - Being the Story of a Poem and a Reminiscent Sketch of its - Author Young Ewing Allison • Champion Ingraham Hitchcock
... enough to hold the entire family if need should come. When finished the entrance was gained by raising a large flat stone which was a part of the hearth. But the winter came without any alarm to the Hardings, and drew its slow length across the green hills and valleys like some albino monster of prehistoric times. The firs were snow-crowned and the white mantle lay deep in the hollows. Bryce and Enoch added generously to the family larder by the fruit of their hunting-trips, for there was plenty of time for such sport now. They had learned to weave snow-shoes in Indian fashion, too, and ...
— With Ethan Allen at Ticonderoga • W. Bert Foster
... we see how strikingly similar were the life, methods of agriculture, and the results obtained from the sturdy New Englander, who represented the best blood, bone and sinew of the old world, with its almost prehistoric civilization, to that of the American Negro, whose intellectual star is just beginning to rise above the horizon. Over two centuries and a half ago the Negro found his way as a slave to America, in a little Dutch trading vessel, cheap labor being the chief motive which prompted such a gigantic ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... thousands more in America know no other homes, but move from one hotel to another, while the same outlay would procure them cosy, cheerful dwellings, it does seem as if these modern Arabs, Holmes's "Folding Bed-ouins," were gradually returning to prehistoric habits and would end by ...
— Worldly Ways and Byways • Eliot Gregory
... entitled "The Testimony of Tradition," worked it out and fortified it with an array of arguments philological, historical, topographical, and traditional. He claims to have established that the fairies of the Celtic and Teutonic races are neither more nor less than the prehistoric tribes whom they conquered and drove back, and whose lands they now possess. He identifies these mysterious beings with the Picts of Scotland, the Feinne of the Scottish Highlands and of Ireland, and the Finns and Lapps of Scandinavia. And he suggests that the Eskimo, ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... (p. 7) enumerates the same list almost word for word, and the Targum of Ben Uzziel develops the tradition still further, while the Targum Yerushalmi fixes the date of the origin of the seven prehistoric wonders at "two thousand years before the creation of ...
— Hebraic Literature; Translations from the Talmud, Midrashim and - Kabbala • Various
... at the northern end of the Rue de la Republique contains some very interesting prehistoric remains; a quantity of Merovingian relics, such as axe-heads, finger-rings, lance-points, necklaces, buttons, buckles, needles, combs, and pottery; the standard measures of Rouen from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century; lead crosses with ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... stage of Spirit's self-revelation. [Footnote: The three phases of Spirit are (1) subjective; (2) objective; (3) absolute. Psychology, e.g., is included in (1), law and history in (2), religion in (3).] In the second place, Hegel ignores the primitive prehistoric ages of man, and sets the beginning of his development in the fully-grown civilisation of China. He conceives the Spirit as continually moving from one nation to another in order to realise the successive stages of its self-consciousness: from China to India, from India ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... Niebelungen Lied to the wholesale captivity of the French army, in the autumn of 1870, and when not thus conceived, incomplete. To those who lived in and through the period comprised between the war of the Danish Duchies and the re-conquest of Alsace-Lorraine, no item of even prehistoric times can remain absent; the spirit of German unity is everywhere, pervades everything, and those alone who thoroughly master this are capable of painting ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 21, August, 1891 • Various
... some time ago, some time since, some time back. yesterday, the day before yesterday; last year, ultimo; lately &c (newly) 123. retrospectively; ere now, before now, till now; hitherto, heretofore; no longer; once, once upon a time; from time immemorial, from prehistoric times; in the memory of man; time out of mind; already, yet, up to this time; ex post facto. Phr. time was; the time has been, the time hath been; you can't go home again; fuimus Troes [Lat.] [Vergil]; fruit Ilium [Lat.] [Vergil]; hoc erat in more ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... are very slightly changed From the semi-apes who ranged India's prehistoric clay; Whoso drew the longest bow, Ran his brother down, you know, As ...
— Departmental Ditties and Barrack Room Ballads • Rudyard Kipling
... another cause for the passing eclipse of interest in wisdom of the world. Extraordinary advances have been made in ordered knowledge of the various stages of the long prehistoric dawn of human civilisation. The man of the flint implement and the fire-drill, who could only count up to five, and who was content to live in a hut like a beehive, has drawn interest away from the man of ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... had encouraged the side, or undergrowth, which made our walking easy and pleasant; for it was like walking on a heavy Turkey carpet though much more springy. The absence of trees and bushes enabled us to distinguish the presence of ancient earth-works, but whether they were prehistoric, Roman, Dane, or Saxon we did not know. Occasionally we came to sections of the downs that were being brought under cultivation, the farms appearing very large. In one place we saw four ploughs at work each with three horses, while the farmer ...
— From John O'Groats to Land's End • Robert Naylor and John Naylor
... dhivara, 'fisherman') are the same caste as the Kahars, or 'bearers'. The boats used by them are commonly 'dugout' canoes, exactly like those used in prehistoric Europe, and now ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... faculty of thoroughness, and the ability to captain a large business—managing men to his own advantage, and theirs—made his work in Greece a success. Schliemann's discoveries at Mount Athos, Mycenae, Ithaca and Tiryns turned a searchlight upon prehistoric Hellas and revolutionized prevailing ideas concerning the rise and the development of ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... opening out upon a balcony. The view beyond was the same as that which we had already admired from the study. Looking out, I could see no sign of disorder anywhere. There was a road curving down the side of the hill, under my very eyes. A cab from the station, one of those prehistoric survivals which are only to be found in our country villages, was toiling slowly up the hill. Lower down was a nurse girl wheeling a perambulator and leading a second child by the hand. The blue reeks of smoke from the cottages gave the whole widespread landscape ...
— The Poison Belt • Arthur Conan Doyle
... down among the underwood, giant roots rose in fantastic convolutions above ground, as if the earth were already too full, and there wasn't room for the whole of them. There was an antediluvian magnificence, a prehistoric snakiness, a sort of primeval running-to-seedness, which filled Harold and Disco with feelings of awe, and induced a strange, almost unnatural tendency to regard Adam and Eve ...
— Black Ivory • R.M. Ballantyne
... patent leather shoe, on his knee, he was immensely entertained. It was as if nobody could talk like this now, and the overshadowed eyes, the flowing white beard, the big frame, the serenity, the whole temper of the man, were an amazing survival from the prehistoric times of the world coming up to ...
— End of the Tether • Joseph Conrad
... I say. You're of the future. You, my dearest, are the embodiment of the woman of the Great War—" I smiled—"The Woman of the Great War in capital letters. What your destiny is, God knows. But it isn't to be tied to a Prehistoric Man like me." ...
— The Red Planet • William J. Locke
... of the water as possible. By pouring on water from time to time the soft wood was to be ultimately wet through, the wicks leading the moisture constantly inward, and in the end the great block must inevitably be split into halves. It is the prehistoric method, and there never was any other way of cleaving very hard stone until gunpowder first brought in blasting. It is slow, but it is ...
— The Heart of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... them a Slouch Hat and a prehistoric Firearm. They tied Red Handkerchiefs around their Necks and started for the Front, each with his Head out of the Car Window. They gave the Sioux Yell to everybody along the Track between ...
— Fables in Slang • George Ade
... notice it myself," he said. "Very likely that is because I see beyond these withered fragments into the prehistoric worlds whence they came. I sit here alone sometimes, and the curtain rolls up, and I find myself back in one of those far corners of South America, or even in a certain spot in East Africa, and I can ...
— The Black Box • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... who were lovers of his more human and companionable fiction. But I repeat that this is no more than individual prejudice, based on the fact that these Norse chronicles (of unpronounceable people in prehistoric times) leave me singularly cold. This apart, however, The Light Heart (CHAPMAN AND HALL) may be admitted an excellent sample of its kind. It is all about the friendship of Thorgar and Thormod, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, May 5, 1920 • Various
... I did!" Claire acknowledged. To both it seemed the most wonderful, the most absorbing of conversations. They were blissfully unconscious that it was old as the hills themselves, and had been repeated with ceaseless reiteration from prehistoric periods. Only once was there an interruption of the deep mutual happiness and that came without warning. Claire was smiling in blissful contentment, unconscious of a care, when suddenly a knife-like pain stabbed her heart. ...
— The Independence of Claire • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... of Herodotus, Osiris had been identified with Dionysus, and Isis with Demeter. M. Foucart has {77} endeavored to prove in an ingenious essay that this assimilation was not arbitrary, that Osiris and Isis came into Crete and Attica during the prehistoric period, and that they were mistaken for Dionysus and Demeter[8] by the people of those regions. Without going back to those remote ages, we shall merely say with him that the mysteries of Dionysus were ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... manner was determined in part at least by the nature of the typical negroes themselves. Impulsive and inconstant, sociable and amorous, voluble, dilatory, and negligent, but robust, amiable, obedient and contented, they have been the world's premium slaves. Prehistoric Pharaohs, mediaeval Pashas and the grandees of Elizabethan England esteemed them as such; and so great a connoisseur in household service as the Czar Alexander added to his palace corps in 1810 two ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... the current chronology, if we may rely upon the archaeologists, removes the difficulty by opening up a longer vista. So does the discovery in Europe of remains and implements of prehistoric races of men, to whom the use of metals was unknown—men of the stone age, as the Scandinavian archaeologists designate them. And now, "axes and knives of flint, evidently wrought by human skill, are found in beds ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... In the cold and sickly wretchedness of a cutting wind, he cursed Andrew with erudite elaboration. But when Andrew eventually landed, his dripping bathing-suit clinging close to his gigantic and bony figure, appearing to derisive eyes like the skin covered fossil of a prehistoric monster of a man, his bushy hair clotted, like ruddy seaweed, over his staring, ugly face, Bakkus forgot his woes and rolled on his back convulsed ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... clay vessels of unusually large size, which excited much interest in the minds of antiquarians, not only because of the size of the vessels indicated by the fragments, but because they appeared to have been used by some prehistoric people in the manufacture of salt and because they bore impressions made by some textile fabric. In the same immediate locality were also discovered a number of box-shaped stone graves. That the latter were the work of the people ...
— The Problem of Ohio Mounds • Cyrus Thomas
... belonging to the South American genus Chenopis, and of the tuatara (Hatteria) lizard, the unique species of an ancient family now surviving only in New Zealand. The swan is identical with an extinct species found in caves and kitchen-middens in New Zealand, which was contemporaneous with the prehistoric Maoris and was largely used by them for food. One of the finest of the endemic flowering plants of the group is the boraginaceous "Chatham Island lily" (Myositidium nobile), a gigantic forget-me-not, which grows ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various
... therefore, is seen to be both a result and a cause of certain things. As the inheritance of a fighting ancestor it is the result of millions of years of fighting in prehistoric times, and, like any other over-developed part or organ, it has an intense urge to express itself. This inherent urge is what makes the owner of that jaw "fight at the drop of the hat," and often have "a chip ...
— How to Analyze People on Sight - Through the Science of Human Analysis: The Five Human Types • Elsie Lincoln Benedict and Ralph Paine Benedict
... something was snapping in his brain, for those dusty khaki figures on the ground, the sky, the earth all seemed to be dancing madly about him. It was not yet light and Tim strained his eyes to pierce the darkness. Then he made a discovery. A dark mass, like some prehistoric monster, was gradually approaching. Tim spoke to a man next to him who was softly swearing and bandaging a shattered hand. He peered through the light and half-light of dawn, and then started to laugh in a nervous way. "Hell, mate;" he said, "the whole German ...
— War and the Weird • Forbes Phillips |
