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Invertebrate   Listen
adjective
Invertebrate  adj.  (Zool.) Destitute of a backbone; having no vertebrae; of or pertaining to the Invertebrata.
Age of invertebrates. See Age, and Silurian.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Invertebrate" Quotes from Famous Books



... Schmidt in his Contribution to the comparative Anatomy of the Invertebrate animals, &c., (translated in Taylor's Scientific Memoirs, vol. v, p. 1,) says that in young Crustacea, "we find plain primitive fibres, which subsequently acquire the ...
— A Monograph on the Sub-class Cirripedia (Volume 1 of 2) - The Lepadidae; or, Pedunculated Cirripedes • Charles Darwin

... ghosts and the skeletons, side by side. You remember that slinking black satin snakelike sheath that Gita Morini wore in "Little Eyolf"? There it dangles, limp, invertebrate, yet how eloquent! No other woman in the world could have worn that gown, with its unbroken line from throat to hem, its smooth, high, black satin collar, its writhing tail that went slip-slip-slipping after her. In it she had looked like a sleek and wicked python that had fasted ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber

... the shell becomes too tight, it sallies forth and takes up its abode in a larger one. This the creature does of its own accord, without a savant to measure it or a teacher to choose a new shell for it. But to us and to scientists, a child is inferior to this lowly invertebrate! ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori

... Linnaeus: the modern conception of biology, as a science, and of its relation to climatology, geography, and geology, are, as largely, rooted in the results of the labours of Buffon; comparative anatomy and palaeontology owe a vast debt to Cuvier's results; while invertebrate zoology and the revival of the idea of evolution are intimately dependent on the results of the work of Lamarck. In other words, the main results of biology up to the early years of this century are to be found in, or spring out of, the ...
— Lectures and Essays • Thomas Henry Huxley

... love envisaged by the Lambeth Conference is an invertebrate, joyless thing—not worth the having. Fortunately it is in contrast to the real thing as ...
— Birth Control • Halliday G. Sutherland

... and sap and hopes upward. During the succeeding weeks I watched trunk and branches swell and bud out new trunks, new branches, guided, controlled, by gravity, light, and warmth; and just beyond the reach of the tides, leaves sprouted, flowers opened and fruit ripened. Weeks after the last slow invertebrate plodder had made his escape shorewards, the taut liana strand was again crowded with a mass of passing life—a maze of vines and creepers, whose tendrils and suckers reached and curled and pressed onward, fighting for gangway to shore, through ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe

... varies greatly, from forms a few millimetres in length to Gigantorhynchus gigas, which measures from 10 to 65 cms. The adults live in great numbers in the alimentary canal of some vertebrate, usually fish, the larvae are as a rule encysted in the body cavity of some invertebrate, most often an insect or crustacean, more rarely a small fish. The body is divisible into a proboscis and a trunk with sometimes an intervening neck region. The proboscis bears rings of recurved hooks arranged ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... You may look on it as a test, Bertie. If you have the resource and courage to carry this thing through, I will take it as evidence that you are not the vapid and shiftless person most people think you. If you fail, I shall know that your Aunt Agatha was right when she called you a spineless invertebrate and advised me strongly not to marry you. It will be perfectly simple for you to intercept the manuscript, Bertie. It only requires ...
— A Wodehouse Miscellany - Articles & Stories • P. G. Wodehouse

... of rats and mice should be included. Among birds there are pigeons, fowls, peacocks, and guinea-fowl, and aquatic birds such as swans, geese, and ducks, whilst the only really domesticated passerine bird is the canary. Goldfish are domesticated, and the invertebrate bees and silk-moths must not be forgotten. It is not very easy to draw a line between domesticated animals and animals that are often bred in partial or complete captivity. Such antelopes as elands, fallow-deer, roe-deer, and the ostriches of ostrich farms are ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park

... my husband to-day that Poppsy and I were going back to Casa Grande. And that, surely, ought to have been the Big Moment in the career of an unloved invertebrate. But the situation declined to take ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer

... "That invertebrate, Arnold," he muttered, "represents to her the old, happy life; I, her present life, and it's my luck always to appear when things are at their worst. After to-night she will shudder with apprehension whenever she sees ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe

... some large class, such as 'Animal,' and subdivide it deductively into Vertebrate and Invertebrate, yet the principle of division (namely, central structure) has first been reached by a comparison of examples and by generalisation; if, on the other hand, beginning with individuals, we group them inductively into classes, and ...
— Logic - Deductive and Inductive • Carveth Read

... outlook characterizing early tillers of the soil. All these qualities the nomad possesses. Hence the union of these two elements, imperious pastor superimposed upon peaceful tiller, has made the only stable governments among savage and semi-civilized races.[1097] The politically invertebrate peoples of dark Africa have secured the back-bone to erect states only from nomad conquerors. The history of the Sudan cannot be understood apart from a knowledge of the Sahara and its peoples. All the Sudanese states were formed by invaders from ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple

... late Anthony Trollope, would willingly give it that rank), it is unquestionably his greatest work in its particular kind, for its sequel, The Virginians, however admirable in detached passages, is desultory and invertebrate, while Denis Duval, of which the promise was "great, remains unfinished. With Vanity Fair, the author's masterpiece in another manner, Esmond cannot properly be compared, because an imitation of the past ...
— De Libris: Prose and Verse • Austin Dobson

... ostensibly in the interest of Slavery, in order to get rid of the power of Congress over that subject; but the real source of it was the cowardice of those invertebrate and timorous politicians who desired to evade the responsibility of expressing opinions concerning this power. General Cass was the putative father of it, and it might well have come from one of his pliancy and calibre; but as Slavery itself, embodied in the person of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various

... the invertebrate branches we find representatives which interest us chiefly because they appear to have reached their present condition by retrograde evolution. Barnacles are really crustacea, but they have lost their ...
— The Doctrine of Evolution - Its Basis and Its Scope • Henry Edward Crampton

... saw the pistols stuck there for mutineers. I looked at Santos. He answered me with his neutral shrug, and, by my soul, he struck a match and lit a cigarette in that hour of life and death! Then last I looked at Ready; and he leant invertebrate over the rail, gasping pitiably from his exertions in regaining the poop, a dying man once more. I pointed ...
— Dead Men Tell No Tales • E. W. Hornung

... military point of view, as Napoleon found to his cost in 1812. She has no vital parts, such as France has in Paris or Germany has in Silesia or Westphalia, upon which the life of the whole State organism depends; she is like some vast multi-cellular invertebrate animal which it is possible to wound but not to destroy. Russia has much to gain from a great European war and ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,

... who the girl of the moment might be, she could not hope to or even seek to hold his perambulatory affections. "He's a single example of a great New York class," reflected Brock. "The futile, priggish rich! There are thousands like him in my dear New York—conscienceless, invertebrate, sybaritic sons of idleness, college-bred and under-bred little beasts who can buy and then cast off at their pleasure. They have no means of knowing how to fall in love with a good girl. They have not been trained to it. It is not for their scrambled intellects to ...
— The Husbands of Edith • George Barr McCutcheon

... as it were, out of the ground. I should like to see, and we all want to see, an Irish Brigade—or, better still, an Irish Army Corps. Don't let them be afraid that by joining the colours they will lose their identity and become absorbed in some invertebrate mass, or what is perhaps equally repugnant, be artificially redistributed into units which have ...
— John Redmond's Last Years • Stephen Gwynn

... of fifty years Stothard stands pre-eminent in illustrated literature. Measuring time by poets, he may be said to have lent something of his fancy and amenity to most of the writers from Cowper to Rogers. As a draughtsman he is undoubtedly weak: his figures are often limp and invertebrate, and his type of beauty insipid. Still, regarded as groups, the majority of his designs are exquisite, and he possessed one all-pervading and un-English quality—the quality of grace. This is his dominant note. Nothing can ...
— The Library • Andrew Lang

... yer receivin' clandecent bundles and letters, eh?" he began. Flip sent one swift, withering look of contempt at the Postmaster, who at once becoming invertebrate and groveling, mumbled that he must "get on" to the Crossing, and rose to go. But the old man, who had counted on his presence for moral support, and was clearly beginning to hate him for precipitating this scene with his daughter, whom ...
— Frontier Stories • Bret Harte

... defunct periodical I am going to reprint one of my own papers. The poor little piece is all tail-foremost. I have done my best to straighten its array, I have pruned it fearlessly, and it remains invertebrate and wordy. No self-respecting magazine would print the thing; and here you behold it in a bound volume, not for any worth of its own, but for the sake of the man whom it purports dimly to represent and some of whose sayings it preserves; ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson

... this land of splendid eyes, a straight nose, a very fine mouth, and beautiful teeth, a mass of wavy, almost curly hair, and a complexion not so brown as to conceal the mantling of the bright southern blood in his cheeks. His figure is lithe, athletic, and as pliable as if he were an invertebrate animal, capable of unlimited doublings up and contortions, to which his thin white shirt and blue cotton trousers are no impediment. He is almost a complete savage; his movements are impulsive and uncontrolled, and his ...
— The Hawaiian Archipelago • Isabella L. Bird

... (Haemosporidiida) are of the most interest to us because the parasites that cause the malarial fevers and various other diseases belong here. These are dependent on two hosts for their existence, the sexual generation usually occuring in an insect or other invertebrate and the asexual generation ...
— Insects and Diseases - A Popular Account of the Way in Which Insects may Spread - or Cause some of our Common Diseases • Rennie W. Doane

... laboratory of invertebrate paleontology of Quaternary age, with a corps of paleontologists, Mr. Wm. H. Dall ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 484, April 11, 1885 • Various

... there was a gulf between him and his old love far wider than any that had been dug by that ceremonial in the parish church of Barlingford. Philip Sheldon had awakened to the consciousness that life in his native town was little more than a kind of animal vegetation—the life of some pulpy invertebrate creature, which sprawls helplessly upon the sands whereon the wave has deposited it, and may be cloven in half without feeling itself noticeably worse for the operation. He had awakened to the knowledge that there was a wider and ...
— Birds of Prey • M. E. Braddon

... production which results of art. The highest point is reached in Tom Jones, which is the earliest definite and authoritative manifestation of the modern novel. Its relation to De Foe is that of the vertebrate to the invertebrate: to Richardson, that of the real to the ideal—one might almost add, the impossible. It can be compared to no contemporary English work of its own kind; and if we seek for its parallel at the time of publication we must go beyond literature to art—to the masterpiece ...
— Fielding - (English Men of Letters Series) • Austin Dobson

... note-issuing business would once more have to be regulated on banking principles and controlled by the price asked, for advances, instead of expressing the helplessness and improvidence of an impecunious and invertebrate Government. In this manner the new departure might be a convenient halfway-house on the way from chaos back to sanity. But probably it is too revolutionary and goes too straight in the teeth of the Bank of England's privilege to receive much ...
— War-Time Financial Problems • Hartley Withers

... pulpit grown in spiritual power since those days? Have the churches thriven whose pastors have become more invertebrate in their theology? ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler

... sexes externally alike and only distinguished by their sexual organs, as in mouse, rabbit, hare, and many other Rodents, most Equidae, kingfisher, crows and rooks, many parrots, many Reptiles, Amphibia, Fishes, and invertebrate animals. In the majority of fishes, in which fertilisation is external and no care is taken of the eggs or young, there are no somatic sexual differences. Moreover, somatic sexual characters where they do occur have no common characteristics either in structure or position ...
— Hormones and Heredity • J. T. Cunningham

... development of animated nature runs parallel with the biological or historical, or as it were recapitulates it, only the continuity of the idea is far closer and more intimate than that of the reality. Thus, for instance, in the development of the human embryo, the transition from the invertebrate to the vertebrate may be represented in the reality by the isolated amphioxus, which remains stationary where vertebrate man begins, and can make no step forward, while the human embryo advances farther and farther till it ...
— The Silesian Horseherd - Questions of the Hour • Friedrich Max Mueller

... the first Darwin of antiquity, for he is said to have begun his creation from below, and after passing from the invertebrate to the sub-vertebrate, from thence to the backbone, from the backbone to the mammalia, and from the mammalia to the manco- cerebral, he compounded man of each ...
— Samuel Butler's Canterbury Pieces • Samuel Butler

... bungled one of their military enterprises more thoroughly than another, it was the Nile Expedition of 1884-5. What began as a forlorn hope ended in complete failure, and in three short months French experienced the miseries of retreat, of failure, and of work under an invertebrate War Office. ...
— Sir John French - An Authentic Biography • Cecil Chisholm

... The Vicar's wife obviously lacked sufficient backbone to quarrel on the subject. She was wont to say that she detested invertebrate women. ...
— The Bars of Iron • Ethel May Dell

... manners or abolish My most distinct disinclination For calling on a rich relation! In her house—(bulwark built between The life man lives and visions seen)— The sunlight hiccups white as chalk, Grown drunk with emptiness of talk, And silence hisses like a snake— Invertebrate and rattling ache.... Then suddenly Eternity Drowns all the houses like a sea And down the street the Trump of Doom Blares madly—shakes the drawing-room Where raw-edged shadows sting forlorn As dank dark nettles. Down the horn Of her ear-trumpet I convey The news that ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various

... babe in her womb, and entering the shelter offered by the amorous Turk. And I can picture her during the fourteen years of her imprisoned life, the disillusion, the heart-break, the despair. No wonder the invertebrate soul could do no more for her daughter than teach her monosyllabic English and the rudiments of reading and writing. Doubtless she babbled of western life with its freedom and joyousness for women; but four years have elapsed since her death, and her stories are ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke

... scientists and inventors in the methods of investigation which they adopted to solve the many problems with which their names are coupled. Among these may be cited Copernicus' theory of the earth's movement, Lamarck's classification of vertebrate and invertebrate animals, the laws of friction, the laws of combustion and respiration, the elevation of the continents, the laws of gravitation, the undulatory theory of light and heat, steam as a motive power in navigation, flying machines, the invention of the camera obscura, magnetic ...
— Leonardo da Vinci • Maurice W. Brockwell

... conventional novels appear to be the only studies of the majority. Apparently the would-be contributor says to himself, or herself, "well, I can do something almost on the level of this or that maudlin and invertebrate novel." Then he deliberately sits down to rival the most tame, dull, and illiterate compositions that get into print. In this way bad authors become the literary parents of worse authors. Nobody but a reader of MSS. knows what myriads ...
— How to Fail in Literature • Andrew Lang

... have a lemon, cut in two," she had said, feeling suddenly stifled with fear. For hours she had lain despairing, watching the slowly swaying walls of her cabin or sinking with closed eyes through invertebrate dipping spaces. Before each releasing paroxysm she told herself "this is like death; one day I shall die, it will be ...
— Pointed Roofs - Pilgrimage, Volume 1 • Dorothy Richardson

... not specially his own was remarkable. In the biological sciences his doctrines make themselves felt so widely that there was something interesting to him in most departments of it. He read a good deal of many quite special works, and large parts of text books, such as Huxley's 'Invertebrate Anatomy,' or such a book as Balfour's 'Embryology,' where the detail, at any rate, was not specially in his own line. And in the case of elaborate books of the monograph type, though he did not ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin



Words linked to "Invertebrate" :   poriferan, woodborer, brachiopod, brute, echinoderm, sea moss, zoophyte, sponge, sipunculid, comb jelly, spineless, animate being, parazoan, beast, worm, entoproct, foot, vertebrate, lampshell, invertebrate foot, shellfish, lamp shell, zoology, animal, ctenophore, fauna, arthropod, mollusc, peristome, rotifer, cnidarian, sea mat, peanut worm, exoskeleton



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