"Fossil" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... pepper-box turrets, and machicolated towers. And in truth these Bad Lands are an immense ossuary where lie bleaching in the sun myriads of fragments of pachyderms, chelonians, and even, some would have us believe, fossil men, overwhelmed by unknown cataclysms ages and ...
— Rubur the Conqueror • Jules Verne
... thirty-three commissioners, representing twenty-one States, of which fourteen were non-slave-holding, met at Washington and continued in session, sitting with closed doors, until the 27th. It was a body of great dignity—a "fossil convention," the Tribune called it—whose proceedings, because of the desire in the public mind to avoid civil war, attracted wide attention. David Dudley Field represented New York on the committee on resolutions, which ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... gainsaid. God's truth must agree, whether discovered by looking within upon the soul or without upon the world. A truth written upon the human heart to-day in its full play of emotions or passions, cannot be at any real variance even with a truth written upon a fossil whose poor life was gone millions of years ago. And this being so, it would also seem a truth irrefragable; that the search for each of these kind of truths must be followed out in its own lines, by its own methods, to its own results, without any interference from investigators along ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various
... and construction are provided in a manner not yet noticed. The Pastoral may seem to be the most obsolete, the most of a mere curiosity. But the singular persistence and, in a way, universality of this apparently fossil convention has been already pointed out; and it is perhaps only necessary to shift the pointer to the fact that the novels with which one of the most modern, in perhaps the truest sense of that word, of modern novelists, though one of the eldest, Mr. Thomas Hardy, began to make his mark—Under ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 1 - From the Beginning to 1800 • George Saintsbury
... being drawn up in large leathern buckets, by mule power, attached to a windlass. Such portions as were deemed sufficiently rich were at once conveyed to the smelting furnace, where the pure ore was melted down and extracted from the virgin fossil. If of inferior quality, it was submitted to the process ...
— The Young Trail Hunters • Samuel Woodworth Cozzens
... This fossil record has given us our best knowledge of the course by which the present living world has been brought into its existing condition. But its accuracy is largely confined to the recent periods. Of the very early history fossils tell us little or nothing. All the early rocks, which we may believe ...
— The Story of the Living Machine • H. W. Conn
... break his glasses, nor scratch his dome of thought. There's ideas in that dome go back to the time of Anthony J. Chaucer. But—he's always talking about that literature chair of his—why couldn't he stay at home and sit in it? Anyhow, I got the bundle all right, all right. I wonder what the little fossil ...
— Seven Keys to Baldpate • Earl Derr Biggers
... letter.)—1. and 2. Garnetiferous quartz rock. 3 and 4. Micaceous quartz rock. 5. Granite. 6. Basalt with traces of chalcopyrite.—L. C. G.—They are fossil sharks' teeth, common in marl beds.—J. E. C.—1. Iron sulphide and lead sulphide. 2. Quartzite, with traces of galena and molybdic sulphide. 3 and 4. Dolomite. 5. Fossiliferous argillaceous limestone, containing ...
— Scientific American, Volume XLIII., No. 25, December 18, 1880 • Various
... from political communion with those who hold the reins and prescribe the policy to be pursued. Slavishness to party and obsequiousness to the popular whims go hand in hand. Political independence only occurs in a fossil state; and men's opinions grow out of the acts they have been constrained to do or sanction. Flattery, either of individual or people, corrupts both the receiver and the giver; and adulation is not of more service to the people ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike
... history of all the molluscs which live upon its soil or in its waters. (3/3.) He collected all the shells he could procure. He analysed, described, classed, and co-ordinated not only the marine species, but the terrestrial and freshwater shells also, extant or fossil. He asked his brother to collect for him all the shells he could find in the marshes of Lapalud, in the brooks and ditches of the neighbourhood of Orange. In his enthusiasm he tried to convince him of the immense interest ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... flummery. If you knocked at his door with the original Sleeping Beauty on your arm he'd only fuss round her with cushions and hope that she'd had a good night. Found a seed once—chipped it out of an old fossil, and grew it in a pot in his study. About the most dilapidated weed you ever saw. Talked about it as if he had re-discovered the Elixir of Life. Even if he didn't say anything in actually so many words, there was the way he went about. That of ...
— Malvina of Brittany • Jerome K. Jerome
... his Moorish and Syrian slave-boys as they played knuckle-bones on the beach, his enjoyment of the cool breeze which swept through his villa even in summer or of the cool plash of water from the fountain in the peristyle, his curiosity about the big fossil bones dug up in the island which he sent to Rome to be placed in the galleries of his house on the Palatine, his fun in quizzing the pedants who followed him by Greek verses of his own making. But in the midst of his ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... the lias clay there are large numbers of a fossil shell, Gryphea incurva, known locally as "devils claws"; they certainly have a demoniac claw-like appearance, and worry the drainers by catching on the blade of the draining tool, and preventing its penetration into ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... remaining property, with orders that everybody should return on the following day. At this height the temperature of the air was very delightful, the range at noon being only 79o. I spent the whole day specimen-hunting, and found the rocks were full of fossil shells. I killed a new snake or variety of Psammophis sibilans, and shot an interesting little antelope, Oreotragus saltatrix, the "klip-springer" of the Cape Colonist, as well as hyraxes and various small birds, ...
— What Led To The Discovery of the Source Of The Nile • John Hanning Speke
... find" is known in science by the name of Pithecanthropus, which means the ape-man. Whether we look upon this fossil as a serious find or not, it is very certain that in the caves of Europe belonging to the Quaternary period we find abundant evidences of primitive man. The older these evidences are, the more likely they are to be ...
— The Meaning of Evolution • Samuel Christian Schmucker
... all men will be destroyed when the earth sinks into the sea and becomes mud, and that the race will begin anew from the beginning; and this transformation takes place for all worlds."(7) Here, then, we see this earliest of paleontologists studying the fossil-bearing strata of the earth, and drawing from his observations a marvellously scientific induction. Almost two thousand years later another famous citizen of Italy, Leonardo da Vinci, was independently to think out similar conclusions from like observations. But not until the nineteenth ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... Girdlestone was approached by two doors, one of oak with ground-glass panels, and the other covered with green baize. The room itself was small, but lofty, and the walls were ornamented by numerous sections of ships stuck upon long flat boards, very much as the remains of fossil fish are exhibited in museums, together with maps, charts, photographs, and lists of sailings innumerable. Above the fire-place was a large water-colour painting of the barque Belinda as she appeared when on a reef ...
— The Firm of Girdlestone • Arthur Conan Doyle
... New England. A Report on the Sandstone of the Connecticut Valley, especially its Fossil Footmarks, made to the Government of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. By Edward Hitchcock, Professor in Amherst College. Plates, etc. Boston. William White, Printer to ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... heaved while Wes stood on the shore and pushed. Suddenly it occurred to me that if Tunemah made up his silly mind to come, he would probably do it all at once, in which case the Tenderfoot and I would have about as much show for life as fossil formations. I didn't say anything about it to the Tenderfoot, but I hitched my six-shooter around to the front, resolved to find out how good I was at wing-shooting horses. But Tunemah declared he would die for his convictions. ...
— The Mountains • Stewart Edward White
... Living and Fossil, containing Descriptions of every species, British and Foreign, the methods of procuring and viewing them, &c., illustrated by numerous Engravings. By ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 234, April 22, 1854 • Various
... The sacred beetle, bound upon the breast Of the blind heathen! Snatch the curious prize, Give it a place among thy treasured spoils Fossil and relic,—corals, encrinites, The fly in amber and the fish in stone, The twisted circlet of Etruscan gold, Medal, intaglio, poniard, poison-ring, —Place for the Memphian beetle ...
— The Poet at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... of the former Soviet republics in territory, possesses enormous untapped fossil fuel reserves as well as plentiful supplies of other minerals and metals. It also has considerable agricultural potential with its vast steppe lands accommodating both livestock and grain production. Kazakhstan's industrial sector rests on the extraction ...
— The 1999 CIA Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... The country possesses no marble, and has not even any stone of a fine grain. The cretaceous limestone, which is the principal geological formation, is for the most part so pierced with small holes and so thickly sown with fossil shells as to be quite unsuited for the chisel; and even the better blocks, which the native sculptors were careful to choose, are not free from these defects, and in no case offer a grain that is satisfactory. To meet these difficulties, the Phoenician sculptor occasionally ...
— History of Phoenicia • George Rawlinson
... experienced in a perceptible manner all the effects of different causes of degeneration. Only it should be remarked in regard to these greater species, such as the elephant and hippopotamus, that in comparing their fossil remains with the existing forms we find the earlier ones to have been larger. Nature was then in the full vigour of her youth, and the interior heat of the earth gave to her productions all the force and all the extent of which they were capable ... if there have been lost species, that is to say ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... of huge fossil animals, as Mrs. Jameson says, on the high authority of Professor Owen, may have modified our ancestors' notions of dragons: but in the old serpent worship we believe the real explanation of these stories is to be found. There is no doubt that human victims, and even young ...
— Literary and General Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... after-studies and the sphere of his scientific exploits. There he worked and lectured, and obtained the office of assistant to the aged professor of comparative anatomy. In the year of his appointment, he made a mark in the study which he rendered so famous, by a memoir on the Megalonyx, a fossil animal known by a few of its bones, and which, contrary to received opinion, he boldly proved to have been a gigantic sloth. This was the first of those able comparisons of the fossil with the present world which revolutionized geology, ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 4 of 8 • Various
... carried thither by the currents of the streams beside which those trees grew, or by the land on which they stood being submerged in some of the ancient changes and convulsions to which the world has been frequently subject. In the lapse of ages this gum, being indestructible in water, became a fossil beneath the waves, and being in later times cast up by storms on the shores of the Baltic and other seas, was found and gathered by men, and being beautiful, finally came to be cut into various forms and ...
— Steam Steel and Electricity • James W. Steele
... he was an undeniable contemporary of Addison and Steele, a veritable member of the Kit-Cat Club. We may reasonably anticipate that the next investigation of this penetrative ethnologist may result in the appropriation to us of that fossil of nineteenth-century literature, Martin Farquhar Tupper, an intellectual quid pro quo, which will doubtless be received gratefully by a public already supposed to be lamenting the unexpected loss ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. I. February, 1862, No. II. - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... layers of the coal ground appears the anthracite, which, being almost destitute of volatile matter, contains the greatest quantity of carbon. In the higher beds are found, on the contrary, lignite and fossil wood, substances in which the quantity of carbon is infinitely less. Between these two beds, according to the degree of pressure to which they have been subjected, are found veins of graphite and rich or poor coal. It may be asserted that it is for want of sufficient pressure that beds of peaty ...
— The Underground City • Jules Verne
... strange story? so utterly unlike anything which we see now;—so utterly unlike anything which we ought to see now? And yet it may have been good in its time. It looks out on us from the dim ages, like the fossil bone of some old monster cropping out of a quarry. But the old monster was good in his place and time. God made him and had need of him. It may be that God made those three poor monks, and had need ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... centuries ago, men began to find fossil remains of animals in the rocks, a severe shock was given to the prevailing doctrine of the recent creation of the earth. The adherents of the old theology made strenuous efforts to explain away this unwelcome circumstance. The shells found had been ...
— Man And His Ancestor - A Study In Evolution • Charles Morris
... Del Rio's "Account of Palenque," copied into Nott and Gliddon's "Types of Mankind," p. 440. They show that the receding forehead was a natural characteristic of the ancient people of Central America. The same form of head has been found even in fossil skulls. We may therefore conclude that the skull-flattening, which we find to have been practised in both the Old and New Worlds, was an attempt of other races to imitate the form of skull of a people whose likenesses are found on the monuments of Egypt and of America. It has been ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... Teeth, bone and wood don't last long in their original state. However, buried materials decompose, leaving a film of carbon as a fossil. This results in a leaf tracery, or the outlines of some simple animal. On a gigantic scale, this process of forming carbon has resulted in ...
— Let's collect rocks & shells • Shell Oil Company
... account of the marriage of the tulasi shrub (Ocymum sanctum) with the salagram stone, or fossil ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman
... of the natural world, and that if any one has come really into contact with its productions, and is familiar with them, and what they mean and represent, then he has a knowledge of all that exists on the earth. It holds good even of Australia; for palaeontologists produce fossil remains of marsupials or kangaroos. As for the polar conditions, when going round for snipes I constantly saw these in miniature. The planing action of ice was shown in the ditches, where bridges of ice had been formed; ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies
... is not to results such as these that the teachers of St. Sulpice attach the highest value. St. Sulpice is, above all, a school of virtue. It is chiefly in respect to virtue that St. Sulpice is a remnant of the past, a fossil two hundred years old. Many of my opinions surprise the outside world, because they have not seen what I have. At Sulpice I have seen, allied as I admit, with very narrow views, the perfection of goodness, politeness, ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... Several beautiful specimens of fossil saurians, or animals of the lizard tribe, have, as our scientific readers are aware, been found at Lyme, in Dorsetshire; but the world would to this day have remained ignorant of the treasures England possessed, but for the patient labours of three female pioneers in this service, viz. Mary ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 382, July 25, 1829 • Various
... crust. Teeth found in the floor. A third cavern. Breccia on the surface. Similar caverns in other parts of the country. At Buree. At Molong. Shattered state of the bones. Important discoveries by Professor Owen. Gigantic fossil kangaroos. Macropus atlas. Macropus titan. Macropus indeterminate. Genus Hypsiprymnus, new species, indeterminate. Genus Phalangista. Genus Phascolomys. Ph. mitchellii, a new species. New Genus Diprotodon. Dasyurus laniarius, a new species. General results of Professor ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 2 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell
... consequential affairs of the urgent world have diminished to their right proportions because we see them distantly from another and a more tranquil place in the heavens where duty, honour, witty arguments, controversial logic on great questions, appear such as will leave hardly a trace of fossil in the indurated mud which presently will cover them—the mind ...
— Old Junk • H. M. Tomlinson
... to see Daisy's face at this statement, though outwardly he kept perfectly grave. Daisy's own simple orbs were so full and intent. She looked from him to the fossil. ...
— Melbourne House • Elizabeth Wetherell
... analogous to that of an evolutionist who can only point to a few more or less useless peculiarities in the anatomy of man without being able to show resemblances between them and the corresponding portions of fossil or actually existing anthropoids. He calls them "vestiges[197]" and insists that homo is descended from a generalised anthropoid. The mere assertion of the vestigial character of such bones or organs would hardly carry conviction unless they could be ...
— Kinship Organisations and Group Marriage in Australia • Northcote W. Thomas
... are results of special creation has no scientific standard whatever. There is not one fact tending to prove special or separate creation; the evidence, which is overwhelming, is all of it on the other side. The hypothesis of special creation is a mere fossil of the past. Evolution is the only theory which is in harmony with facts and with all branches of science: life is dynamic, ...
— Manhood of Humanity. • Alfred Korzybski
... folk—the Cubans or Siboneyes—have vanished, save in the instance of the temple remains near Cobre, and an occasional caney or mound of the dead, a truncated cone of earth and broken stones. Some fossil skeletons found in caves, and of an alleged age of fifty thousand years, denote an ancient race of large, strong people. There are other skeletons of Siboneyes, Chinese, and negroes in the caves,—victims of herding, slavery, fever, ...
— Myths & Legends of our New Possessions & Protectorate • Charles M. Skinner
... cave, or, what is more likely, with an idea of finding treasure, is not known; nothing is certain but that his candle was burnt out while he was still far from the entrance, and that he died there. I said no fossil remains had been found, but the level floors of the great halls are continually being raised by fresh layers of stalagmite from the water dropping from the roof, and no one knows what may lie under them. These floors are in many places covered with little loose concretions like marbles, and ...
— Anahuac • Edward Burnett Tylor
... period. But there is a class of ancient marbles in Rome of much more recent geological origin—belonging indeed to the Miocene epoch—which are called Lumachella, from the Italian word signifying snail, on account of the presence in all the species of fossil shells. They vary in colour from the palest straw to the deepest purple. Some of them are exceedingly beautiful and valuable, and they are nearly all more or less rare, being found chiefly in small fragments of ancient pavements. ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan
... I went through the halls of fossil remains,—which I care little for, though one of them is a human skeleton in limestone,— and through several rooms of mineralogical specimens, including all the gems in the world, among which is seen, not the Koh-i-noor itself, but a fac-simile of it in crystal. I think the ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... and the next sound that was heard was, "Have you any good fossils about you?" in a tone as if he doubted whether so small a boy knew what a fossil meant; but little Felix was equal to ...
— The Long Vacation • Charlotte M. Yonge
... What fossil Saurians in thy time have been? How many Mammoths crumbled into mold? What geologic periods hast thou seen, Long as the tail ...
— The Humourous Poetry of the English Language • James Parton
... Western-style capitalist economy, with a per capita GDP at the level of the highly industrialized West European countries. Rich in natural resources, Australia is a major exporter of agricultural products, minerals, metals, and fossil fuels. Commodities account for 57% of the value of total exports, so that a downturn in world commodity prices can have a big impact on the economy. The government is pushing for increased exports of manufactured goods, but competition in international markets ...
— The 1998 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... thank Professor E. Raymond Hall and Dr. Robert W. Wilson for their permission to examine this material and for critical comments and advice on the manuscript. The drawings were made by Miss Lucy Remple. The specimens are a part of the collection of fossil vertebrates formerly belonging to the California Institute of Technology, but now the property of the Los Angeles County Museum. The specimens had been lent by the late Professor Chester Stock to Professor Hall and Dr. Wilson for study and report. All ...
— Pleistocene Pocket Gophers From San Josecito Cave, Nuevo Leon, Mexico • Robert J. Russell
... contemporary races of elephants, the market is extensively supplied by the fossil ivory derived from the tusks of the great mammoth or fossil elephant of the geologist. The remains of this gigantic animal are abundantly distributed over the whole extent of the globe. They exist in large masses in the northern ...
— Chambers' Edinburgh Journal, No. 421, New Series, Jan. 24, 1852 • Various
... variety of fruits, the tropical fruit-trees, Oranges, Bananas, etc., the shade- and cluster-trees, so important to the comfort and shelter of man, are added to the vegetable world during these epochs. The fossil vegetation of the Tertiaries is, indeed, most interesting from this point of view, showing the gradual maturing and completion of those conditions most intimately associated with human life. The earth had already its seasons, its spring and summer, its autumn ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... fossil," replied Van Dorn in a hollow, dead voice, rising and patting his tie and adjusting his coat and collar, "I'm no fool. I know what I'm doing. I know how far to go, and when to stop. But this game is interesting; and I'm only a man," he straightened up again, ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White
... and there was a curious look about her whole figure. It seemed as if shrinking from something, twisting itself rigidly, as a fossil tree might shrink in a wind that ...
— Jane Field - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... therefore, of a more general introduction of steam power into that new region, connected with a highway across the isthmus of Panama, no one can calculate. The experiment along the shores of Chili and Peru has already commenced; and the cheap rate at which fossil fuel can be had has proved a great facility. Under circumstances so peculiarly propitious, to what an extent, then, may not steam navigation be carried on the smooth expanse of the Southern ocean? If there are two sections of the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... land he made collections of its greatest curiosities in art, literature, science, natural history, and politics. A sphinx, an obelisk, a winged bull from Nineveh, stuffed porcupines, live monkeys, fossil remains, a pinchbeck president of the United States, and many rare specimens even more curious, did he collect, and after years of wandering, by land and by sea, carry with him to his native village. ...
— The Magician's Show Box and Other Stories • Lydia Maria Child
... features of the dragon and its history. But when the Keeper of the Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities in the British Museum, in a book that is not intended to be humorous,[135] seriously claims Dr. Andrews' discovery of a gigantic fossil snake as "proof" of the former existence of "the great serpent-devil Apep," ...
— The Evolution of the Dragon • G. Elliot Smith
... an interesting and delightful nature lesson that is a little out of the ordinary, get, if you can, a fossil fern. If you are in the city, doubtless you can get one from the museum, or, better yet, you may find that among your pupils there is someone who has such a specimen carefully treasured away. In some localities where the limestone rock comes to the ...
— Journeys Through Bookland, Vol. 10 - The Guide • Charles Herbert Sylvester
... It is a very instructive book, containing much curious matter, is worthy of better adornment in the form of its presentation to the world, and ought to have a title more suggestive of its antiquarian lore. I should call it "Fossil Remains of Old Maryland Law, with Notes by ...
— Atlantic Monthly Vol. 6, No. 33, July, 1860 • Various
... us nothing with regard to the origin of the Chiroptera, all the known fossil species, some of which date back to the Oligocene, being more or less closely allied to existing types, and therefore of comparatively little interest. The origin of the order from primitive insectivorous mammals must have taken place at least as early as the Lower Eocene. It is, however, noteworthy ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 2 - "Chicago, University of" to "Chiton" • Various
... given up, but between vertebrate and invertebrate animals. So that the famous ascidian mollusc, with a semi-vertebral larval stage, which nourished in the writings of Darwin and others, is no longer needful. The fossil referred to is an ancient fish-like worm, or worm-like fish, to which the name of Entomicthys amphisoma has been provisionally given. It is still more remarkable than the amphioxus or lancelet, ...
— 1931: A Glance at the Twentieth Century • Henry Hartshorne
... received the very best training to be had in Switzerland, France and Germany, and early attracted attention for original work of the most important description. He came to be recognized as the greatest authority on fishes in Europe, and his work on fossil fishes, published in 1843, was a contribution to science of the ...
— American Men of Mind • Burton E. Stevenson
... philosophy, who are obnoxious to the Baconian censure now. No true geologist ever professes to deduce his geology from Scripture. It is from the earth's crust, with its numerous systems, always invariable in their order, and its successive groups of fossil remains, always (in accordance with their place and age) of a certain determinable character,—not in a revelation never intended by its Divine Author to teach any natural science as such,—that he derives the materials with which he builds. Had there been no Divine Revelation, geology would ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... long since I was at Whitby, and I am not sure whether Turner is right in giving so monotonous and severe verticality to the cliff above which the abbey stands; but I believe it must have some steep places about it, since the tradition which, in nearly all parts of the island where fossil ammonites are found, is sure to be current respecting them, takes quite an original form at Whitby, owing to the steepness of this rock. In general, the saint of the locality has simply turned all the serpents to stone; but at Whitby, St. Hilda drove them over ...
— The Harbours of England • John Ruskin
... were the last of the three groups, of which we have taken types, to appear upon the earth, and that the fishes preceded, the amphibia. Workers in an entirely independent province, that of palaeontology, completely endorse this supposition. The first Vertebrata to appear in the fossil history of the world are fishes; fish spines and placoid scales (compare dog-fish) appear in the Ordovician rocks. In the coal measures come the amphibia; and in the Permo-triassic strata, reptile-like mammals. In the Devonian rocks, which come between the Silurian and the coal measures, we find ...
— Text Book of Biology, Part 1: Vertebrata • H. G. Wells
... embryology and geology, and to a farther extent accounted for by the meagreness of the geological record. Natural selection for survival necessarily implies extinction of all that are not selected to survive, so that fossil remains are now the only procurable evidence that any of these latter that have long been extinct ever existed. But very many organic beings are incapable of being preserved in a fossil condition, while of those which can be so preserved 'the number of specimens in all ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... ages of the Tertiary period monkeys must have been very abundant and very varied, yet it is but rarely that their fossil remains are found. This, however, is not difficult to explain. The deposits in which mammalian remains most abound are those formed in lakes or in caverns. In the former the bodies of large numbers of terrestrial animals were annually deposited, ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 344, August 5, 1882 • Various
... nothing could be finer or more beautiful to see Than the first six months' proceedings of that same Society, Till Brown of Calaveras brought a lot of fossil bones That he found within a tunnel near the tenement ...
— Complete Poetical Works of Bret Harte • Bret Harte
... mineralogy and geology to which he had devoted a large share of his attention. But even in his works we look in vain for a satisfactory treatise on the mountain-rocks of Palestine, on the geognostic formation of that interesting part of Western Asia, or on the fossil treasures which its strata are understood to envelop. We are therefore reduced to the necessity of collecting from various authors, belonging to different countries and successive ages, the scattered notices which appear in their works, and of arranging ...
— Palestine or the Holy Land - From the Earliest Period to the Present Time • Michael Russell
... smashed the glass accordingly. But the odour of camphor was unmistakable. In the universal decay this volatile substance had chanced to survive, perhaps through many thousands of centuries. It reminded me of a sepia painting I had once seen done from the ink of a fossil Belemnite that must have perished and become fossilized millions of years ago. I was about to throw it away, but I remembered that it was inflammable and burned with a good bright flame—was, in fact, an excellent candle—and I put it in my pocket. I found no explosives, however, ...
— The Time Machine • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... it is with the utmost reluctance that long established specific distinctions are surrendered, as is illustrated in the case of the mammoth, which is acknowledged by some of the very best authorities to be really indistinguishable from the modern Asiatic elephant. Several fossil bears were long listed in scientific books; but they are all acknowledged now to be identical with the modern grizzly, and as we have already intimated all the modern ones ought to be put together. These modern rationalizing methods have made but a slight impression on the vast ...
— Q. E. D., or New Light on the Doctrine of Creation • George McCready Price
... broken English, about this little revolution that has been slumbering around the region of the Magdalena River of late. You have a hunch that we may just be unlucky enough to run across some of those ragged chaps, who want to upset the present government of Colombia, and seat some old ex-president fossil in the chair again." ...
— The Aeroplane Boys on the Wing - Aeroplane Chums in the Tropics • John Luther Langworthy
... because it was comprehensible to the minds that sprang from it; there were mysteries in it, but mysteries that enticed rather than baffled, for they unfolded new glories with every discovery that man could make; even inanimate objects, the fossil, the electric current, the far-off stars, these were dust thrown off by the Spirit of the World—fragrant with His Presence and eloquent of His Nature. For example, the announcement made by Klein, the astronomer, twenty ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson
... I believe, is the first example in which a State Government in our country has erected a museum for the exhibition of its natural resources, its mineral and rock, its plants and animals, living and fossil. And this seems to me the most appropriate spot in the country for placing the first geological hall erected by the Government; for the County of Albany was the district where the first geological survey was undertaken, on this side of the Atlantic, and, ...
— The Uses of Astronomy - An Oration Delivered at Albany on the 28th of July, 1856 • Edward Everett
... human society and its institutions; and the time seems not distant when students of man's culture will turn hither for evidence needed to fill gaps or to explain phases in the development of art,—art in form, in colour, and in melody,—for, it has been well said, America is the "fossil bed" where are preserved stages of progress unrecorded in ...
— Indian Story and Song - from North America • Alice C. Fletcher
... medical profession. As surgeon in the Army Medical Department from 1848 to 1873, he utilized his opportunities for the study of natural history in India and Kashmir, in Egypt, Malta, Gibraltar and Canada. His observations on the fossil vertebrata of the Maltese Islands led him eventually to give special study to fossil elephants, on which he became an acknowledged authority. In 1872 he was elected F.R.S. In 1873 he was chosen professor of zoology in the Royal College of Science, ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... attracted the man appeared to be the fact that its shores are literally covered by bones, and consequently by fossil ivory. He had conceived the plan of establishing himself there, and of collecting, during the summer months, all the ivory that he could find; then when, in winter, the arm of the sea which connects Ljakow with the continent should be frozen over, to transport in a sleigh this treasure ...
— The Waif of the "Cynthia" • Andre Laurie and Jules Verne
... resided in bachelor retirement. My host described a mammal's tooth that weighed nearly fourteen pounds, which had been taken from a phosphate mine; it had been sent to a public room at Beaufort, South Carolina. A fossil shark's tooth, weighing four and a half pounds, was also found, and a learned ichthyologist has asserted that the owner of this remarkable relic of the past must have been ...
— Voyage of The Paper Canoe • N. H. Bishop
... home chemistry, devoting his first lecture to bread-making? and why might not a batch of bread be made and baked and exhibited to the class, together with specimens of morbid anatomy in the bread line,—the sour cotton bread of the baker; the rough, big-holed bread; the heavy, fossil bread; the bitter bread of too much yeast,—and the causes of their defects pointed out? And so with regard to the various articles of food,—why might not chemical lectures be given on all of them, one after another? In short, it ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... is the correct thing, but if that is beyond the artist, he may content himself with a lion or a pig. The beast-killing principle has been carried out everywhere with a relentless monotony, which makes some parts of Berlin look like a fossil slaughter-house. ...
— The Life and Letters of Lewis Carroll • Stuart Dodgson Collingwood
... the Christian era. This looks like an extraordinarily long period of time, but it must be remembered that geologists claim that the remains of man found in the caves of Europe date back 500,000 years; and the fossil Calaveras skull was found deep under the base of Table Mountain, California, the whole mountain having been formed since the man to whom it ...
— The Antediluvian World • Ignatius Donnelly
... ivory throughout Northern Russia," says Lyell, Principles, vol. 1, p. 183, "that, according to Tilesius, thousands of fossil tusks have been collected and used ...
— The Christian Foundation, April, 1880
... exist a well-developed uterus containing a full-sized foetus, and yet that the arch of the pelvis should be too small to allow the foetus to pass. And were the only mammal having a very small pelvic arch, a fossil one, it would have been inferred, on the Cuvierian method, that the foetus must have been born in a rudimentary state; and that the uterus must have been proportionally small. But there happens to be an extant mammal having an undeveloped ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... 29th the Spaniards attack three men and a boy who are ashore boiling the fossil pitch; kill one man, and carry off the boy. Raleigh, instead of going up to Port of Spain and demanding satisfaction, as he would have been justified in doing after this second attack, remains quietly where he is, expecting ...
— Sir Walter Raleigh and his Time from - "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... come from a Phoenician word, meaning a serpent, and the Greeks called this isle of serpents, which is all in favor of the truth of the story. But, on the other hand, such traditions often are prompted by the sight of the fossil skeletons of the dragons of the elder world, and are generally to be met with where such minerals prevail as are found in the northern part of Rhodes. The tale is disbelieved by many, but it is hard to suppose it an entire invention, though the ...
— A Book of Golden Deeds • Charlotte M. Yonge
... cynic, and he, the one of his day, the iridescent Irishman, whose remembered repartees are a feast, sharp and ringing, at divers tables descending from the upper to the fat citizen's, where, instead of coming in the sequence of talk, they are exposed by blasting, like fossil teeth of old Deluge sharks in monotonous walls of our chalk-quarries. Nor are these the less welcome for the violence of their introduction among a people glad to be set burning rather briskly awhile by the most unexpected of digs in the ribs. Dan Merion, to give an ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... 4. "A fossil flat-iron." This antediluvian relic was found imbedded in a Sandy deposite opposite ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, September 25, 1841 • Various
... of man. Doctrines of heredity and congenital transmission. Teratology, or the production of varieties and monstrosities. Ethnic and racial anatomy. Evolution of man. Comparative anatomy of man and anthropoids. Simian and lemurian analogies. Fossil remains of man. ...
— Anthropology - As a Science and as a Branch of University Education in the United States • Daniel Garrison Brinton
... collections, the useful arts, and biological sciences. Its work in the department of paleontology is particularly noteworthy as it has extended the boundaries of knowledge through its many explorations in the western fossil fields. The success of the Museum is largely due to the energy and erudition of Dr. W. J. Holland, its amiable director. In the music-hall, a symphony orchestra is maintained, and free recitals are given on the great organ twice every week ...
— A Short History of Pittsburgh • Samuel Harden Church
... island of Jolo a piece [of amber] which weighed more than eight arrobas, of the best kind that exists, which is the gray [el gris]." Retana and Pastells regard Combes's ambar as meaning amber, the vegetable fossil; but it is possible that all these writers mean rather ambergris, which is supposed to be a morbid secretion of the sperm whale, and has been used ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898 - Volume 41 of 55, 1691-1700 • Various
... seems to me to be, if I may sum it up in my own words, that the modern pre-historic men—those of whom we have collected so many remains, and to whom are due the ancient, strange customs of historical nations (the fossil customs, we might call them, for very often they are stuck by themselves in real civilisation, and have no more part in it than the fossils in the surrounding strata)—pre-historic men in this sense were 'savages ...
— Physics and Politics, or, Thoughts on the application of the principles of "natural selection" and "inheritance" to political society • Walter Bagehot
... was Sam's closest friend, McCloud. It's good to see him getting the recognition he deserves, isn't it? Do you know, I send him an annual every year? Yes, sir! And one year I had the whole blooming faculty out here on a fossil expedition; but, by Heaven, McCloud, some of them looked more like megatheriums than ...
— Whispering Smith • Frank H. Spearman
... register the progressive advancement of human thought and knowledge in the world of mind, as the geological strata bear testimony to the progressive development of the material world. "Language," says Trench, "is fossil poetry, fossil history," and, we will add, fossil philosophy. Many a single word is a concentrated poem. The record of great social and national revolutions is embalmed in a single term.[857] And the history of an age of philosophic ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... god easy to break to pieces. His austerity—for them without fullness—his meagre output, his solemn reiterated code of "perfect taste," moved them to a facile but intense aggression. He it was that had turned to fossil stone the living matter of the sixteenth century: He that had stifled and killed the spirit ...
— Avril - Being Essays on the Poetry of the French Renaissance • H. Belloc
... been reported, that coal had been found upon the banks of George's river, the governor visited the place, and on examination found many indications of the existence of coal, that useful fossil, of which, shortly after, a vein was discovered on the west-side of Garden ...
— An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, Vol. 2 • David Collins
... red soil, resembling more the chaos of some primary elemental upheaval than the work of man; while, half-way down, a long flume straddled its narrow body and disproportionate legs over the chasm, like an enormous fossil of some forgotten antediluvian. At every step smaller ditches crossed the road, hiding in their sallow depths unlovely streams that crept away to a clandestine union with the great yellow torrent below, and here and there were the ruins of some cabin with ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. X (of X) - America - II, Index • Various
... New Year's Day, 1838, is a much pleasanter looking spot than Port Galant. The usual hydrographical surveys were there brought to a satisfactory issue by the officers under the direction of Dumoulin. A boat was despatched to Cape Remarkable, where Bougainville said he had seen fossil shells, which, however, turned out to be nothing but little pebbles imbedded in ...
— Celebrated Travels and Travellers - Part III. The Great Explorers of the Nineteenth Century • Jules Verne
... well, it was years ago, and 'tisn't as vivid now as it was when they were fresh. That sort of words doesn't keep, in the kind of climate we have out here. Professor Marsh said those skeletons were fossils. So that makes me part blue grass and part fossil; if there is any older or better stock, you will have to look for it among the Four Hundred, I reckon. I am satisfied with it. And am a happy horse, too, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... resembling the French burr occurs in abundance on Butcher's-fork of Powell's river, about twenty miles northwardly of the Natural Tunnel. Fossils are more or less abundant, in these and other rocks. Fossil bones, of an interesting character, have been found in several places. Saltpetre caves are numerous. Coves, sinks, and subterranean caverns, are strikingly characteristic, not only of the country circumjacent to the Natural Tunnel, but of the region ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 583 - Volume 20, Number 583, Saturday, December 29, 1832 • Various
... view of the advisability of not having any organic or combustible material near the generator, the solid substances just mentioned may preferably be replaced by one of those partially inorganic compositions sold for "lagging" steam-pipes and engine-cylinders, such as "Fossil meal." Indeed, the exact nature of the lagging matters comparatively little, because the active substance in retaining the heat in the acetylene generator or the steam-pipe is the air entangled in the ...
— Acetylene, The Principles Of Its Generation And Use • F. H. Leeds and W. J. Atkinson Butterfield
... in the mass, David, and no one living can do it better. I am like most women, I think: I deal with the individual. That is all the difference. When do the Annerses go out to the fossil-beds?" ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde
... fossil resin of a pine tree, was found in Sicily, the shores of the Baltic, and other parts of Europe. It was a precious stone then as now, and an article of trade with the Phoenicians, those early merchants of the Mediterranean. The attractive power might enhance the value of the gem ...
— The Story Of Electricity • John Munro
... "cops;" while the next had the appearance of having been impressed into the posse; then at the tail end of the procession came Farmer Trotter, carrying an old musket that may have done duty in the Civil War, half a century back, for it looked like a fossil. ...
— Afloat - or, Adventures on Watery Trails • Alan Douglas
... rough the nether millstone. Glazed pipes and earthenware used in smelting iron, show that iron was smelted in the remotest ages in Africa. These earthenware vessels, and fragments of others of a finer texture, were found in the delta of the Zambesi and in other parts in close association with fossil bones, which, on being touched by the tongue, showed as complete an absence of animal matter as the most ancient fossils known in Europe. They were the bones of animals, as hippopotami, water hogs, antelopes, crocodiles, ...
— The Last Journals of David Livingstone, in Central Africa, from 1865 to His Death, Volume II (of 2), 1869-1873 • David Livingstone
... to believe that Europe—at least in its southern and western portions—was occupied in early times by a race having many of the characteristics, physical and mental, of the American aborigines. The evidences which lead to this conclusion are well set forth in Dr. Dawson's recent work on "Fossil Man." Of this early European people, by some called the Iberian race, who were ultimately overwhelmed by the Aryan emigrants from central Asia, the Basques are the only survivors that have retained their original ...
— The Iroquois Book of Rites • Horatio Hale
... quite an old fossil," dowager lady Chia observed. "I'm no good whatever. My eyesight is dim; my ears are deaf, my memory is gone. I can't even recollect any of you, old family connections. When therefore any of our relations come on a visit, I don't see them ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book II • Cao Xueqin
... My theory would give zest to recent & Fossil Comparative Anatomy: it would lead to study of instincts, heredity, & mind heredity, whole metaphysics, it would lead to closest examination of hybridity & generation, causes of change in order to know ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume II • Francis Darwin
... call their own. And a reminiscence of his first wife seemed to haunt all Mr. Arnold's contemplations of Lady Emily, and all his attentions to her. These were delicate in the extreme, evidently bringing out the best life that yet remained in a heart that was almost a fossil. Hugh made some fresh efforts to do his duty by Harry, and so far succeeded, that at least the boy made some progress — evident enough to the moderate expectations of his father. But what helped Harry as much as anything, was the motherly ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald
... by guess and by tradition. A general diffusion of scientific knowledge saves the community from innumerable wasteful and foolish mistakes. In England, not many years ago, the partners in a large mining company were ruined from not knowing that a certain fossil belonged to the old red sandstone, below which coal is never found. In another enterprise, L20,000 were lost in the prosecution of a scheme for collecting the alcohol that distils from bread in baking, all of which might have been saved, ...
— In the School-Room - Chapters in the Philosophy of Education • John S. Hart
... dig down into the bowels of the earth. Let them rive asunder the massive rocks, and unfold the history of creation as it lies written on the pages of their piled up strata. Let them gather up the fossil fragments of a lost Fauna, reproducing the ancient forms which inhabited the land or the seas, bringing them together, bone to his bone, till Leviathan and Behemoth stand before us in bodily presence and in their ...
— McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader • William Holmes McGuffey
... surrounding objects receive a powerful shock and continue to vibrate for centuries. Those who have developed their inner senses can thus witness the scene which is continually repeating itself, or rather, is happening all the time.[252] Thus, psychometrists,[253] in presence of a portion of a fossil, are enabled to bring back scenes that this fragment has witnessed ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... different licks. One, long named Big Bone Lick, was famous because there were scattered about it in incredible quantity the gigantic remains of the extinct mastodon; the McAfees made a tent by stretching their blankets over the huge fossil ribs, and used the disjointed vertebrae as stools on which to sit. Game of many kinds thronged the spaces round the licks; herds of buffalo, elk, and deer, as well as bears and wolves, were all in sight at once. The ground round about ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume One - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1769-1776 • Theodore Roosevelt
... nothing so interesting as Geology, even to common and ignorant people, especially when you have a bank or the side of a cutting, studded with fossil fish and things and oysters that were stale when Adam was fresh to illustrate by. (Remark made by Steelman, professional wanderer, to ...
— While the Billy Boils • Henry Lawson
... the whole is treated in the light of the latest facts. Many novelties, apart from the simple, homely, almost humorous method of handling a truly scientific subject, characterize the volume. Nowhere else is so intelligently traced the relation between the past (fossil history) and the present of the families in this most important of all animal tribes; nowhere else will be found explained many curious customs, such as the origin of the habit of storing winter food, how the opossum came to ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts
... pill-box. "So far as I am a judge this human bone is the analogue of the one which you hold in your hand. That will give you some idea of the size of the creature. You will observe from the cartilage that this is no fossil specimen, but recent. What do you ...
— The Lost World • Arthur Conan Doyle
... our northern states. Their family has come down practically unchanged from the steaming days of the Carboniferous period, when ferns grew one hundred feet high, and thronged with other rank tropical growths in matted masses to form the coal measures. The fossil remains of cycads in the rocks of that period prove that they once flourished in the tropic swamps where now are the hills of ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... spears from the Island of Cozumel. Next follow fossil shells, collected by Mrs. Alice Le Plongeon from an excavation at Chichen-Itza, which may be useful in a scientific ...
— The Mayas, the Sources of Their History / Dr. Le Plongeon in Yucatan, His Account of Discoveries • Stephen Salisbury, Jr.
... Jim, on'y I guess Jake Bond's that same deaf mule you spoke of. He's too fond of gettin' at youngsters, the old fossil. I told 'im as I 'card suthin', an' 'e told me as I was a tenderfoot and didn't know wot ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum
... with a long flight of steps leading up to it from the harbor along which the people go, and when there is a funeral the coffin has to be slung in order to be carried up the steps. Whitby is famous for its jet, which is worked into numerous ornaments: this is a variety of fossil wood, capable of being cut and taking a high polish. It is also celebrated for its production of iron-ore, which indeed is a product of all this part of Yorkshire; while at night, along the valley of ...
— England, Picturesque and Descriptive - A Reminiscence of Foreign Travel • Joel Cook
... Jack, whimsically. "I haven't the advantage of being a girl with a brother and a baker's dozen of beaux in bell buttons and gray. I'm only an old fossil of a 'cit,' with a scamp of a nephew and that limited conception of the delights of West Point which one can derive from running up there every time that versatile youngster gets into a new scrape. You'll admit my opportunities have ...
— Starlight Ranch - and Other Stories of Army Life on the Frontier • Charles King
... at dawn, with a mattock and a pick, they made an attack on their fossil, whose covering cracked. It was an ammonite nodosus, corroded at the ends but weighing quite six pounds; and ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert
... believing that the appearance of fossil horses with a diminishing number of toes is caused by the creation at separate periods of a four-, a three-, a two-, and a one-toed horse are, he says, "personal, philosophical, historical," and he opposes them with the utmost ...
— Reflections and Comments 1865-1895 • Edwin Lawrence Godkin
... characterises the real lovers of science, and knowledge of what is worthy of being collected. They are such collections as would be made by school-boys and school-girls, not those of erudite professors and scientific men. Side by side with the most interesting and valuable specimens, such as the fossil mammoth, etcetera, you have the greatest puerilities and absurdities in the world—such as a cherry-stone formed into a basket, a fragment of the boiler of the Moselle steamer, and Heaven knows what besides. ...
— Diary in America, Series One • Frederick Marryat (AKA Captain Marryat)
... fossils of Solenhofen to be sold in Bavaria; the best in existence, containing many specimens unique for perfectness, and one, unique as an example of a species (a whole kingdom of unknown living creatures being announced by that fossil). This collection, of which the mere market worth, among private buyers, would probably have been some thousand or twelve hundred pounds, was offered to the English nation for seven hundred; but we would not give seven hundred, and the whole series would ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... ago the writer was startled by hearing, casually dropped by an old man visiting a shop in Royston, the strange remark—"My grandfather was chairman to the Marquis of Rockingham." The remark seemed like the first glimpse of a rare old fossil when visiting an old quarry. Of the truth of it further inquiry seemed to leave little doubt, and the meaning of it was simply this: The Marquis of Rockingham, Prime Minister in the early years of George III., ...
— Fragments of Two Centuries - Glimpses of Country Life when George III. was King • Alfred Kingston
... wherein I would derive "Ambrosia." Ambergris was long supposed to be a fossil, a vegetable which grew upon the sea-bottom or rose in springs; or a "substance produced in the water like naphtha or bitumen"(!): now it is known to be the egesta of a whale. It is found in lumps weighing several ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... Bonneville's company first looked upon the lake from near the mouth of the Ogden River, in 1833. His name has been given to a great fossil lake, whose shore line may now be seen throughout the neighbouring valleys, and of which the Great Salt Lake is ...
— The Great Salt Lake Trail • Colonel Henry Inman
... Mississippi. He now proceeded to make those remarkable solitary explorations of Kentucky which have given him immortality—through the valley of the Kentucky and the Licking, and along the "Belle Riviere" (Ohio) as low as the falls. He visited the Big Bone Lick and examined the wonderful fossil remains of the mammoth found there. Along the great buffalo roads, worn several feet below the surface of the ground, which led to the Blue Licks, he saw with amazement and delight thousands of huge ...
— The Conquest of the Old Southwest • Archibald Henderson
... woman with any sense would take to Miss Mariner. If I told you how near I came to spilling the sauce-boat accidentally over that old fossil's head, you'd be surprised, Ellen. She just sat there brooding like an old eagle. If you ask my opinion, Miss Mariner's a long sight too good for ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... it was a grindlestone, another he said "Nay; It's nought but an' owd fossil cheese, that somebody's roll't away." Look ...
— R. Caldecott's First Collection of Pictures and Songs • Various
... insufferably complacent. It was the look to be forgiven a man only when he wears it in the presence of his first-born. If snapshots tell anything at all, these told that Oswald was the father of a mammoth sauropod and had merely dug up the baby in a fossil bed somewhere. ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson
... time the discovery of the first known (?) fossil monkey, but its tail was missing. "Depend upon it, Daniel O'Conell's got hold of it!" said 'Adam' briskly.[15] Yule was very happy with Mr. Hamilton and his kind wife, but on his tutor's removal to Cambridge other arrangements ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo Volume 1 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... tongue, his first form of speech—as, indeed, it is his last—whereby he was able to say what else he could not have uttered. Such is the fact, and even the language in which we state it is "a dictionary of faded metaphors," the fossil poetry ...
— The Builders - A Story and Study of Masonry • Joseph Fort Newton
... progress in this group—we already have tropical land-crabs—and as far as we know there is no reason why in the future these creatures should not increase in size and terrestrial capacity. In the past we have the evidence of the fossil Paradoxides that creatures of this kind may at least attain a length of six feet, and, considering their intense pugnacity, a crab of such dimensions would be as formidable a creature as one could well ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... universal, the double part of the bridle is prolonged by a single strap; this strap is used as a whip, and hence the whip of the Hussar attached to the reins; hence, also, as I imagine, the Austrian driving rein described page 54. When fossil remains of the extinct postboy shall be discovered, it will be seen that he used the short rein, and with great propriety; since his horse may be said to have been always "au trot," and needed only one ...
— Hints on Horsemanship, to a Nephew and Niece - or, Common Sense and Common Errors in Common Riding • George Greenwood
... is this? The sacred beetle, bound upon the breast Of the blind heathen! Snatch the curious prize, Give it a place among thy treasured spoils, Fossil and relic,—corals, encrinites, The fly in amber and the fish in stone, The twisted circlet of Etruscan gold, Medal, intaglio, poniard, poison-ring,— Place for the Memphian beetle ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... Some facts may not be obtainable that are necessary to show the connection of others: as, for example, the hypothesis that all species of animals have arisen from earlier ones by some process of gradual change, can be only imperfectly verified by collecting the fossil remains of extinct species, because immense depths and expanses of fossiliferous strata have been destroyed. Or, again, the general state of culture may be such as to prevent men from tracing the consequences of an hypothesis; for which reason, apparently, the doctrine that ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read
... excavation must have been made, at a great expense, out of the solid cliff, and in making it some of the most curious specimens of petrifaction and fossil remains were found. You see that the roof is vaulted, and that it is only now and then a lump of chalk has fallen in, or a great piece of flint; and now we come to one of ...
— Varney the Vampire - Or the Feast of Blood • Thomas Preskett Prest
... the mantle envelops the body, and the gills are on either side of it;—the stomach with its winding canal, the liver, and heart occupy the centre of the body, as in the two other classes. This class includes all the Cuttle-Fishes, Squids, and Nautili, and has a vast number of fossil representatives. Many of these animals are destitute of any shell; and where they have a shell, it is not coiled from right to left or from left to right as in the spiral of the Gasteropoda, but from behind forwards as ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various
... Melbourne to Wood Bay, and examine the neighbourhood geologically and geographically. The sledge team found some remarkable ice structures and new and interesting glaciers. They had, a crop of small adventures, and found sandstone rock containing fossil wood and many other excellent fossils, garnets, etc., besides which Campbell did good work surveying. A new glacier was named after Priestley and ...
— South with Scott • Edward R. G. R. Evans
... Shropshire are less known to the lovers of fine scenery than their great beauty deserves, though they are familiar to most geologists as the typical region of the lowest fossil-bearing deposits. Of this group of hills the highest is the Long Mynd, a mountain district of very remarkable character, and many miles in extent. It is about ten miles long, and from three to four miles in breadth. Its summit is a wide expanse of table land, ...
— A Night in the Snow - or, A Struggle for Life • Rev. E. Donald Carr
... of St. Lawrence detached bowlder stones appear, some of enormous size, many tons in weight; they must have come from a great distance, for nowhere in that region is there any rock of similar material. In the upper strata of the country are abundant fossil remains of distinct animal existences now unknown; they are blended with the ...
— The Conquest of Canada (Vol. 1 of 2) • George Warburton
... the eighteenth century a learned gentleman had taken much pains to gather together this account of the town. He began with the story of Brutus, and showed that one of the monarchs descended from the illustrious Trojan founded a city here. Some fossil shells, indeed, that had been dug up furnished him with conclusive proof that the Deluge had not left the site uncovered, since no how else could they have got there: an argument commonly accepted in his day. ...
— Round About a Great Estate • Richard Jefferies
... quarry, which a few clumps of trees spotted with dark green. Of the ancient city one could see the sunburnt tower of the Capitol, the black cypresses of the Palatine, and the ruins of the palace of Septimius Severus, suggesting the white osseous carcase of some fossil monster, left there by a flood. In front, was enthroned the modern city with the long, renovated buildings of the Quirinal, whose yellow walls stood forth with wondrous crudity amidst the vigorous crests of the garden trees. And to right and left on the Viminal, beyond the palace, the new ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... upward, it brought to my mind the huge glistening backs of elephants bathing in Indian streams; and this resemblance is not wholly fantastic. Not far from the oldest Egyptian ruins, excavations have brought to light ruins millions of years more ancient—the fossil bones of great creatures as strange as any that live in the realm of fairyland or fiction. Among them was revealed the ancestry of elephants, which was also that of manatees. Far back in geological times the tapir-like Moeritherium, which wandered through Eocene swamps, had within itself the ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... an exact contrast. A learned Pharisee, conscious of a power that would one day place the highest dignities at his disposal, he was a man of great and manifold possessions. A curious and interesting inventory of his goods has been preserved like a fossil in the Scriptures (Phil. iii. 5, 6). These things he highly valued and fondly loved; but another and opposing love came against them, and the strong man succumbed to the stronger. "What things were gain to me, these I counted loss for Christ:" he parted with all and purchased the newly ...
— The Parables of Our Lord • William Arnot
... my whole time to arranging my huge pile of notes, to observing, and to experimenting in relation to the transmutation of species. During the voyage of the Beagle I had been deeply impressed by discovering in the pampean formation great fossil animals covered with armor like that on the existing armadillos; secondly, by the manner in which closely allied animals replace one another in proceeding southward over the continent; and thirdly, by the South American character of most of the productions of the Galapagos ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 17 • Charles Francis Horne
... on the Great Desert. But in addition to African geography, all these explorations have added to our knowledge of African geology. A vast portion of the interior is supposed to have been an inland sea, of which Ngami and other lakes are the remains; fossil bones of most peculiar character have been found, but only of terrestrial and fresh-water animals. A name is already given to a creature of a remote secondary period; Professor Owen, from the examination of a few relics, pronounces it to be a Dicynodon. According to Sir B. Murchison, such ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 452 - Volume 18, New Series, August 28, 1852 • Various
... countries. But in getting paraffins that melt at 136, 137 or 138 degrees we have a rather definite crystalline element. Mr. Bixby has suggested the use of the earth wax which is mined in Australia. It is really a fossil paraffin and is not so granular. I found that it is not to be had in this country at the present time, however, although various dealers told me that they had it, and I obtained from a firm in New York City a misbranded specimen called ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Fourteenth Annual Meeting • Various
... scribe remarks, parenthetically and in all seriousness, that the way that lank, pin-headed young man revived the soul of that old, worn-out harpischord, digging into its ribs, kicking at its knees with both feet, hand-massaging every one of the keys up, down, and crossways, until the ancient fossil fairly rattled itself loose with the joy of being alive once more, was altogether the most astounding miracle he has ever had to record. And Pestler with his violin was ...
— Felix O'Day • F. Hopkinson Smith
... that the suns were "fictions of mythological astronomy, modified either by obscure reminiscences of some great revolution suffered by our planet, or by physical hypotheses, suggested by the sight of marine petrifactions and fossil remains,"[216-1] while the Abbe Brasseur, in his late works on ancient Mexico, interprets them as exaggerated references to historical events. As no solution can be accepted not equally applicable to the same myth as it appears in Yucatan, ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... a pamphlet demonstrating that all these bones were derived from an antediluvian world: that they were fossil bones, accumulated there in a sort of funnel during the universal flood—that is to say, four thousand years before Christ, and that, consequently, one might consider them as nothing but stones, and that it was needless to be disgusted. ...
— Library of the World's Best Mystery and Detective Stories • Edited by Julian Hawthorne
... Burgundy, and an Alpine eagle caught in the Jura. Gourdon also possessed a collection of lepidoptera,—a word which led society to hope for monstrosities, and to say, when it saw them, "Why, they are only butterflies!" Besides these things he had a fine array of fossil shells, mostly the collections of his friends which they bequeathed to him, and all the minerals ...
— Sons of the Soil • Honore de Balzac |
