"Prehistoric" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Mantagazza, a distinguished Italian scientist, in his Physiognomy and Expression, writes as follows: "As long as I live I shall never see anything equal to the loving tenderness of two snails, who, having in turn launched their little stone darts (as in prehistoric times), caress and embrace each other with a grace that might arouse the envy of ...
— The Dawn of Reason - or, Mental Traits in the Lower Animals • James Weir
... A prehistoric elephant has recently been discovered at Chatham and is now mounted in the British Museum. In palaeontological circles the report that the monster's death was occasioned by the consumption of too much seed-cake is regarded as going far to prove that ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 15, 1916 • Various
... 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 ...
— The Seven Plays in English Verse • Sophocles
... a precise affected mode of talk, and one a boy cousin of whom no one took the slightest notice. The fourth was a striking figure, a man of about forty in appearance, tall and a little stout, with a rugged face which in some way suggested a picture of a prehistoric animal in an old natural history she had owned. The high cheek-bones, large nose, and slightly protruding eyes had an unfinished air about them, as if their owner had escaped prematurely from a mould. A quantity of bushy black hair—which he wore longer than most men-enhanced the dramatic air of ...
— The Half-Hearted • John Buchan
... rude comfort, and poverty is practically unknown, except in the towns. A peculiarly interesting feature in Bulgarian agricultural life is the zadruga, or house-community, a patriarchal institution apparently dating from prehistoric times. Family groups, sometimes numbering several dozen persons, dwell together on a farm in the observance of strictly communistic principles. The association is ruled by a house-father (domakin, stareishina), and a house-mother (domakinia), who assign to the members ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... not know about that," Roderick said, discreetly; perhaps he knew that his opinions about prehistoric man ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black
... PREHISTORIC RELICS.—Within the last half century, in various countries of Europe, and in other countries, also, which have been, earlier or later, seats of civilization, there have been found numerous relics of uncivilized races, which, at periods far remote, ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... force on the same terms as the oldest and proudest regiment there. I make no apology for talking of them as "old" regiments. There are regiments in this war, not three years old, which have seen as much terrible fighting as others whose record goes back over hundreds of years. Ages ago, prehistoric ages, the "Dinkums" became a title for men to be intensely proud of. Men who were through the first fortnight at Pozieres need never be ashamed to compare their experiences with those of any soldiers in the world, for it is the literal truth that there has never ...
— Letters from France • C. E. W. Bean
... sacredness which long clung to it, and finally led, singularly enough, to its becoming a centre of idolatrous worship. The rude circle of unhewn stones without inscription was, no doubt, exactly like the many prehistoric monuments found all over the world, which forgotten races have raised to keep in everlasting remembrance forgotten fights and heroes. It was a comparatively small thing; for each stone was but a load for one man, and it would seem mean enough by the side of Stonehenge or Carnac, just as Israel's ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... 'Delineations of the Ox Tribe' 1851 page 127, says the zebu has four, and common ox five, sacral vertebrae. Mr. Hodgson found the ribs either thirteen or fourteen in number; see a note in 'Indian Field' 1858 page 62.) than do the fossil and prehistoric European species, namely, Bos primigenius and longifrons, from each other. They differ, also, as Mr. Blyth (3/33. 'The Indian Field' 1858 page 74 where Mr. Blyth gives his authorities with respect to the ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication - Volume I • Charles Darwin
... rises on the desert climbs to the mountain's ridge and rustling among silvery needles, rattles the cones on boughs and twigs—the tree-giant whispers with resinous breath, bemoaning the fate of a prehistoric civilization, and lisps of the mystery and romance of a humanity long extinct, mourning for races forgotten ...
— Tales of Aztlan • George Hartmann
... crush them. Boniface was of Anagni, a city of prehistoric walls and ancient memories which belonged to the Caetani; and there, in the late summer, he was sojourning for rest and country air, with his cardinals and his court and his kinsmen about him. Among the cardinals was ...
— Ave Roma Immortalis, Vol. 1 - Studies from the Chronicles of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford
... a picture of the country as nature made it. There is an account of early plant life, prehistoric animals, paleoliths, and prehistoric man. The early inhabitants are then given more detailed treatment. Attention is directed to the Bushman, the Hottentot, and the Bantu as each figured in South Africa. An ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 5, 1920 • Various
... the scientist. "But great heat and pressure are necessary to create the gems. In nature this was probably obtained by prehistoric volcanic fires, and by the terrific pressure of immense rocks. It is possible to make diamonds in the laboratory of the chemist, but they are so minute as ...
— Tom Swift Among The Diamond Makers - or The Secret of Phantom Mountain • Victor Appleton
... an intoxicated pterodactyl," said Mr. Lonergan, who had some knowledge of prehistoric ...
— Philo Gubb Correspondence-School Detective • Ellis Parker Butler
... man," I exclaimed. "He'd love you; he's not a bit more like a prize-fighter than he is like a Professor, he's more like a sort of prehistoric man in ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley
... about the superficial area of Asia. They found no trace of the great monsters that had been so numerous on the mainland, though there were plenty of smaller and gentle-looking creatures, among them animals whose build was much like that of the prehistoric horse, with undeveloped toes on each side of the hoof, which in the modern terrestrial horse have disappeared, the hoof being in reality but a rounded-off ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor
... 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 Bell-Ringer of Angel's and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... 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 it ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 21, August, 1891 • Various
... parallel changes of vegetation required an explanation, and until a better one could be given, Iventured to suggest that such changes of meaning were as the shadows cast on language by real, though prehistoric, events. ...
— Chips from a German Workshop - Volume IV - Essays chiefly on the Science of Language • Max Muller
... that it would add to the political power of the churches. It may cease to be true that in England the Christian day of rest, in spite of the recorded protest of the founder of Christianity, is still too much hedged about by the traditions of prehistoric taboo to be available for the most solemn act of citizenship. It might again be possible to lend to the polling-place some of the dignity of a law court, and if no better buildings were available, at least to clean and decorate the dingy schoolrooms now used. But ...
— Human Nature In Politics - Third Edition • Graham Wallas
... they tell of rebellions against the fading power of Egypt, and of the fear of the advancing Hittites. The earliest kings, those that built the pyramids, appear before us real in their personality, emerging out of misty legend or myth, and, earlier still, even the prehistoric races that antedated the very beginning of civilization. Whence came that first dynasty? Who invented writing? Were they autochthons? Hardly. These are questions left for further explorers to answer. Probably ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord
... with the purely Egyptian god Set or Setesh, though the two were identified. Probably they were one in {64} prehistoric ages; but Set was the god known to the Egyptians, while Sutekh was the god of the Hittites from Armenia, where he was ...
— The Religion of Ancient Egypt • W. M. Flinders Petrie
... wagon-circle at Mountain Meadows. In a single ten-days' bout in the jacket I have gone back and back, from life to life, and often skipping whole series of lives that at other times I have covered, back to prehistoric time, and back of that to ...
— The Jacket (The Star-Rover) • Jack London
... of the Royal College of Surgeons, reporting on the skeleton of a prehistoric twelve-year-old boy recently discovered near Ipswich, pronounces his stature to be much the same as the average height of a modern boy of the same age, but the size of the head is remarkably large. The professor states that he and his ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, July 29, 1914 • Various
... day that I was ashore in the cove with Mrs. Stevenson and the ship's cook. Except for the Casco lying outside, and a crane or two, and the ever-busy wind and sea, the face of the world was of a prehistoric emptiness; life appeared to stand stock-still, and the sense of isolation was profound and refreshing. On a sudden, the trade wind, coming in a gust over the isthmus, struck and scattered the fans of the palms above the den; and, behold! ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and grass-blades. Only one conical hill close by showed an odd artificial patterning, like the work of huge ants who had scarred it with criss-cross ridges. We were told that these were French trenches, but they looked much more like the harmless traces of a prehistoric camp. ...
— Fighting France - From Dunkerque to Belport • Edith Wharton
... pen-and-ink sketches, here inserted by way of rough and ready illustration. The whole letter is printed in its integrity as desired, and tells its own archaeological tale, though rather voluminously; but in the prehistoric era before Rowland Hill arose, to give us cheap stamps for short notes, it was an economy to make a letter as long as possible to pay for its exorbitant postage: for example, my letters to and from Oxford used to cost eightpence—or double if in ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... the breakers and furnaces are the squalid huts and ramshackle cottages of the operatives; there too, a little removed from the river are the caves in which the Huns and Scandinavians dwell, even as their prehistoric ancestors dwelt before the light of ...
— The Transgressors - Story of a Great Sin • Francis A. Adams
... very popular editor. He was not by any means naturally fitted for that position. He was the best man in the world for founding papers; but many people wished that he could have been buried under the foundations, like the first builder in some pagan and prehistoric pile. He called the Daily News into existence, but when once it existed, it objected to him strongly. It is not easy, and perhaps it is not important, to state truly the cause of this incapacity. It was not in the least what ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... that stained the stones on its edges black. Here was the frame of a new boat about which some carpenters were pounding, and from a distance the skeleton of unpainted timber looked like the remains of some prehistoric saurian. Across the drain, some rope-walkers, hanks of hemp about their waists, were backing away from the lathe, letting the yellow strands revolve between their deft fingers. And then the Cabanal, so called from the miserable ...
— Mayflower (Flor de mayo) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... and simplest means by which a living being can utter itself is gesture—action. It is not necessary to speculate on prehistoric conditions. We need only observe the world around us, the behaviour of our friends and acquaintances, particularly those of South-European blood, to recognize how direct and eloquent is the expression of gesture. On the stage a simple series of dramatic actions ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... without historical alloy; such a Teutonism as we can construct by letting the imagination work back from the most forceful qualities of the historical German to those which representatives of the same race may have had in a prehistoric age. The period of Wagner's tetralogy, it must be remembered, is purely mythical. The ruggedness of the type which we obtain by such a process is the strong characteristic of Herr Niemann's treatment of Wagner's musical and literary text. It is, like the drama itself, an exposition of the German ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... the Glacial epoch, which, by Dr. Croll's calculations, must most probably have ceased to plague our earth some eighty thousand years ago. Modern America, however, has no respect for antiquity: and it is at present engaged in using up this palaeocrystic deposit—this belated storehouse of prehistoric ice—in the manufacture of gin slings ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen
... "what's got into you? I can't for the life of me see what is so entertaining in that prehistoric book." "Oh, go way. Don't bother me," was the surly reply. But I wouldn't be put off that way. Quickly I snatched the book from his grasp and threw it out ...
— The Scientific American Boy - The Camp at Willow Clump Island • A. Russell Bond
... on the slope immediately below the only known entrance to the Meydum Pyramid; one might say that it lay in the shadow of the building. There are tumuli in the neighbourhood—part of a prehistoric cemetery—and it was work in connection with this which had detained Ali Mohammed in that part of the Fayum. Last night about ten o'clock he was awakened by an unusual sound, or series of sounds, he reports. He came out of the tent into the moonlight, and looked up at ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer
... edges of a ridge of blackish-gray rock from which he had stripped great rolls of damp, green moss. The rock lay exposed and glistening, its polished surface scarred with the scratches of hard stones that once lay embedded in the feet of prehistoric glaciers, but Fisette, screwing his bushy brows over a tiny magnifying glass and peering at the sparkling fragments in his palm and balancing their weight, cared nothing for glaciers. He only knew he had found that which he had been seeking ...
— The Rapids • Alan Sullivan
... the 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 fact helps exegesis ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... the sandstone cliffs reared their yellow masses against the cloudless sky. Worn by the ebbing floods of a prehistoric sea, carved by the winds and rains of ages, they presented ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... Figure, therefore, my chagrin when I discovered that the character of Vladimir Igorievich had been cut clean out of the text of the actual opera. I could much more easily have dispensed with the buffooneries of a couple of obscure players upon the goudok (or prehistoric hurdy-gurdy), who wasted more than enough of such time as could ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, June 17, 1914 • Various
... haunted only by the so-called Mountain Wanderers, the dragoons that came in chase of them, the women that wept on their dead bodies, and the wild birds of the moorland that have cried there since the beginning. It is a land of many rain-clouds; a land of much mute history, written there in prehistoric symbols. Strange green raths are to be seen commonly in the country, above all by the kirkyards; barrows of the dead, standing stones; beside these, the faint, durable footprints and handmarks of the Roman; and an antiquity older perhaps than any, ...
— Lay Morals • Robert Louis Stevenson
... English anthropologist, tells us in his interesting volume, "Prehistoric Man," that "there was not, so far as we are aware, any carnivorous creature in the ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Eleventh Annual Meeting - Washington, D. C. October 7 AND 8, 1920 • Various
... up yonder you will presently see some of the primitive habits of the genus bos, and the spectacle may be the more interesting because the beast will if possible head away up that valley into fastnesses where only a prehistoric man with a ...
— Alton of Somasco • Harold Bindloss
... been 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 judge to-day's inhabitants of the ...
— The Treasury of Ancient Egypt - Miscellaneous Chapters on Ancient Egyptian History and Archaeology • Arthur E. P. B. Weigall
... danger, but are disagreeable and repulsive to good taste. They consist of fantastic forms, in accordance with the spirit of an inferior civilization, reminding one of the misshapen and gigantic prehistoric animals, whose bones astound us, and which disappeared from our ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... a grand new song evolved from a 'cute young pate, Of a fine old Atom-Molecule of prehistoric date; In size infinitesimal, in potencies though great, And self-formed for developing at a prodigious rate— Like a fine old Atom-Molecule, ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 8, August, 1880 • Various
... unlikeness, physical and mental, of the sexes is not constant, then, supposing all races have diverged from one original stock, it follows that there must have been transmission of accumulated differences to those of the same sex in posterity. If, for instance, the prehistoric type of man was beardless, then the production of a bearded variety implies that within that variety the males continued to transmit an increasing amount of beard to descendants of the same sex. This limitation of heredity by sex, shown us in multitudinous ways throughout ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... apple-tree goes back to the Middle Ages and perhaps farther, then whence comes the apple originally? No one can surely answer. Carbonized apples are found in the remains of the prehistoric lake dwellings of Switzerland. When recorded history begins, apples were well known and widely distributed. The apple-tree is wild in many parts of Europe, but it is difficult to determine whether, in a given region, ...
— The Apple-Tree - The Open Country Books—No. 1 • L. H. Bailey
... the earliest discoveries are indeed prehistoric. The great diurnal movement of the heavens, and the annual revolution of the sun, seem to have been known in times far more ancient than those to which any human monuments can be referred. The acuteness of the early observers enabled them to single out the more important of ...
— Great Astronomers • R. S. Ball
... of the characteristics of the wild, prehistoric animal, among them the full, upright ears of the wild dog which are such a great help to it. She was a fine, alert, upstanding dog, hardy, fierce, and literally untiring, of a tawny light brown like a lioness, ...
— The Dream Doctor • Arthur B. Reeve
... it that blew The Aryan's wicker-work canoe Which brought the shell to English land? What prehistoric man or woman's hand, With what intent, consigned it to this grave— This barrow set in sound of the ...
— From a Cornish Window - A New Edition • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... northern coast of Africa, the Canaanites traced their ancestry to the Persian Gulf, the Philistines had sailed from the harbours of the Greek seas. Canaan had been inhabited, however, before any of them had found their way to it, and this prehistoric population of the country was known to the Hebrews by the name of Rephaim. In the English translation of the Bible the word is usually rendered "giants;" it seems, however, to have been a proper name, which ...
— Early Israel and the Surrounding Nations • Archibald Sayce
... that no housewife who has ever stuffed a Thanksgiving turkey, a Christmas goose or ducks or chickens with home-grown, home-prepared herbs, either fresh or dried, will ever after be willing to buy the paper packages or tin cans of semi-inodorous, prehistoric dust which masquerades equally well as "fresh" sage, summer savory, thyme or something else, the only apparent difference ...
— Culinary Herbs: Their Cultivation Harvesting Curing and Uses • M. G. Kains
... 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 their bearing on our problem is not ...
— Ancient Town-Planning • F. Haverfield
... Troad. The same 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 ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... is Magic against Magic As Garry Connell Bluffs for His Life with a Prehistoric Savage in the ...
— Astounding Stories, March, 1931 • Various
... mendacity 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 ...
— A Lecture on the Study of History • Lord Acton
... of which Augustine spoke, who do long for the old feasts and formalities of the childhood of the world. William Morris and his followers showed how much brighter were the dark ages than the age of Manchester. Mr. W. B. Yeats frames his steps in prehistoric dances, but no man knows and joins his voice to forgotten choruses that no one but he can hear. Mr. George Moore collects every fragment of Irish paganism that the forgetfulness of the Catholic Church has left or possibly her wisdom preserved. There are innumerable persons ...
— Heretics • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... ax and arrow the wilderness of the Blue Ridge teemed with wild animal life. The bones of mastodon and mammoth remained to attest their supremacy over an uninhabited land thousands upon thousands of years ago. Then, following the prehistoric and glacial period, more recent fauna—buffalo, elk, deer, bear, and wolf—made paths through the forest from salt lick to refreshing spring. These salt licks that had been deposited by a receding ocean centuries before came ...
— Blue Ridge Country • Jean Thomas
... 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 Ainos, and I know not ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland
... shovel, with the same zest as at home. Child-nature changes little with locality. So recently from the great unknown, it is not yet seamed and crusted by environment. I suppose that children fairly represent the prehistoric man. Impulse, appetite, passion,—all the gusts of the moment sway them. We quell our emotions so uniformly, as we grow on, that we finally hardly feel their struggles. The children have richer life than we, in ...
— A Midsummer Drive Through The Pyrenees • Edwin Asa Dix
... held as—humanly 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
... of its appearances, it came to be thought of as something distinct from all of them and underlying them. But by the principle of Occam's razor, if the class of appearances will fulfil the purposes for the sake of which the thing was invented by the prehistoric metaphysicians to whom common sense is due, economy demands that we should identify the thing with the class of its appearances. It is not necessary to deny a substance or substratum underlying these appearances; it is merely expedient to abstain from asserting this unnecessary entity. ...
— Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays • Bertrand Russell
... its low, irregular, patched and weather-beaten roof, and its rough-boarded and storm-beaten walls half hidden in a tangle of vines and bushes, the little hut looks, from a distance, as though it might once have been the strange habitation of some gigantic winged creature of prehistoric ages. The place may be reached from a seldom-used road that leads along the steep hillside, a quarter of a mile back from the edge of the precipice, but the principal connecting link between the queer habitation and the world is that flight of ...
— Helen of the Old House • Harold Bell Wright
... of the first decade of the Sacrificial Odes of Ku. To him the kings of Ku traced their lineage. Of Kiang Yan, his mother, our knowledge is very scanty. It is said that she was a daughter of the House of Thi, which traced its lineage up to Shan-nung in prehistoric times. From the first stanza of this piece it appears that she was married, and had been so for some time without having any child. But who her husband was it is impossible to say with certainty. As the Ku surname was Ki, he must have been ...
— The Shih King • James Legge
... his burrow. It is impossible to describe the look of terrific awe on the faces of these quaint savages. Let us imagine our own feelings on being, without warning, confronted by a caravan of strange prehistoric monsters; imagine an Easter holiday tripper surrounded by the fearful beasts at the Crystal Palace suddenly brought to life! What piercing shrieks they gave forth, as, leaving their hunting implements, they raced away, to drop, all at once, behind a low bush, where, like the ostrich, they hid ...
— Spinifex and Sand - Five Years' Pioneering and Exploration in Western Australia • David W Carnegie
... reporters to give the feminine view of the finish of drinking; publishers would fall over one another in their eagerness to secure the 'Memoirs of the Last Publican'; the Salvation Army would put the last drunkard in the British Museum as a prehistoric specimen; on the death of this National Hero, the Dean of Westminster would politely offer the Abbey for a memorial service, with no tickets for ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... language on the rocks of Glacier National Park is unexcelled in sublimity in the history of mankind. The story of Yellowstone's making multiplies many times the thrill occasioned by its world-famed spectacle. Even the simplest and smallest rock details often tell thrilling incidents of prehistoric tunes out of which the enlightened imagination reconstructs the romances and the tragedies of earth's ...
— The Book of the National Parks • Robert Sterling Yard
... 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
... earliest periods of sex-differentiation; and, as this division of labor was a necessary step in the evolutionary processes, the rate of progress depended largely on the subsequent adjustment of these two primary elements or forces. A comprehensive study of prehistoric records shows that in an earlier age of existence upon the earth, at a time when woman's influence was in the ascendancy over that of man, human energy was directed by the altruistic characters which originated in and have been ...
— The God-Idea of the Ancients - or Sex in Religion • Eliza Burt Gamble
... 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 the territory.[1] The ruins of ancient habitations in these regions had been ...
— Archeological Expedition to Arizona in 1895 • Jesse Walter Fewkes
... they had skirted the marble-edged pool where the goldfish swam and glimmered, and where the great prehistoric beast had come down to bathe and drink. The water flashed white diamonds in the moonlight, and Gerald alone of them all saw that the scaly-plated vast lizard was even now rolling and wallowing there among ...
— The Enchanted Castle • E. Nesbit
... his lips seemed to be permanently parted in a good-humoured smile. His name was Charlie Orgreave, but at school he was invariably called "the Sunday"—not "Sunday," but "the Sunday"—and nobody could authoritatively explain how he had come by the nickname. Its origin was lost in the prehistoric ages of his childhood. He and Edwin had been chums for several years. They had not sworn fearful oaths of loyalty; they did not constitute a secret society; they had not even pricked forearms and written certain words ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... and beard, untrimmed now, unkempt and red. Clad in his ragged fur garment, bare legged and bare armed, with the grass-cloth sack slung over his sinewy shoulder and the heavy stone-ax in his hand, he looked the very image of prehistoric man—as she, too, seemed the woman of that ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... known; and I observe the distinction, in one of the smaller collections printed by Warner, between the tartlet formed of meat and the tartlet de fritures, of which the latter approaches more nearly our notion. The imperfect comprehension of harmonies, which is illustrated by the prehistoric bag-pudding of King Arthur, still continued in the unnatural union of flesh with sweets. It is now confined to the cottage, whence Arthur may have himself introduced it at Court and to the Knights of ...
— Old Cookery Books and Ancient Cuisine • William Carew Hazlitt
... as is their habit, the deer began to feed up wind. The wounded stag seemed loth to stir. By degrees the last watchful hind fed quietly out of sight. With throbbing pulse and with the instincts of a fox - or prehistoric man, 'tis all the same - I crawled and dragged myself through the peat bog and the pools of water. But nearer than two hundred yards it was impossible to get; even to raise my head or find a tussock whereon to rest the rifle would have started any deer ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... the shingled roof—red. A strongly-guyed flagstaff jutting out from one gable, and copies of the "Game" and "Fire Acts" tacked on the door gave the abode an unmistakable official aspect. Over the doorway was nailed a huge, prehistoric-looking buffalo-skull, bleached white with the years—the time-honoured insignia of the R.N.W.M.P. being a buffalo-head, which is also stamped on ...
— The Luck of the Mounted - A Tale of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • Ralph S. Kendall
... varieties. Ritter's Anthropogeography has opened a useful line of research. But on the other hand, it is urged that, in explaining the course of history, these principles do not take us very far, and that it is chiefly for the primitive ultra-prehistoric period that they can account for human development. It may be said that, so far as concerns the actions and movements of men which are the subject of recorded history, physical environment has ceased to act mechanically, and in order to affect their actions must affect their wills first; ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... in a far corner, and, being lined with black velvet, 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 Man of the Forty Faces • Thomas W. Hanshew
... between us and our dogs is a most satisfactory relation. Since prehistoric times, the hunter has taken advantage of the comradeship and on it rests the mutual dependence ...
— Hunting with the Bow and Arrow • Saxton Pope
... to Nonnezoshe gave me the opportunity to see also Monument Valley, and the mysterious and labyrinthine Canyon Segi with its great prehistoric cliff-dwellings. ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey
... above 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 ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... crude indeed, compared with the creations of your world's foremost artists today. But in a relative sense only, for the state of your art is as far behind the art of the Martians as are the carvings of your prehistoric cavemen behind the productions of your Michael Angelos. As man unfolds spiritually there is a corresponding advance in his ...
— The Planet Mars and its Inhabitants - A Psychic Revelation • Eros Urides and J. L. Kennon
... different yellow or white races have split up these Negrito populations, which formerly occupied a continuous area, and mixing with them, have profoundly altered them. The present condition of things is the final result of strifes and mixtures, the most ancient of which may be referred back to prehistoric times." The invasions above mentioned having in the past driven many of the races from the mainland to the islands, and those which remained on the continent having undergone greater modification by crossing with taller and alien races, we may expect to find the ...
— A Philological Essay Concerning the Pygmies of the Ancients • Edward Tyson
... an excavation produced by internal cataclysms or by the imperceptible action of the rushing sea and the soaking rain? Or was it a superhuman work executed by human beings, Gauls, Celts, prehistoric men? ...
— The Hollow Needle • Maurice Leblanc
... mass quartered over the ground like some unwieldy prehistoric reptile. Houck knew that if he lost his footing he was done for. Once, as the cluster of fighters swung downhill, the outlaw found himself close to the edge of the group. He got his arms free and tried to beat ...
— The Fighting Edge • William MacLeod Raine
... He had become bad company and men avoided him. It amused him grimly to learn that a new strike had been made in Nome, the biggest discovery in the camp's history, and to realize that he had fled just in time to miss the opportunity of profiting by it. He heard talk of a prehistoric sea-beach line, a streak of golden sands which paralleled the shore and lay hidden below the tundra mud. News came of overnight fortunes, of friends grown prosperous and mighty. Embittered anew, Folsom turned again to ...
— Laughing Bill Hyde and Other Stories • Rex Beach
... contained therein, and possibly adapted for the storage of grain. Of equal interest are the so-called "dew ponds," of which a number are scattered here and there close to the edge of the northern escarpment. Undoubtedly of prehistoric origin, the art of making the pond has become traditional and some have been built by shepherds still living. These pools of clear cool water high up on the crest of a hill gain a mysterious air by their position, but their existence is capable of a scientific explanation. ...
— Seaward Sussex - The South Downs from End to End • Edric Holmes
... of a Desert Plain; Use of a Prehistoric Canal; Moving Upon the Mesa Townsite; An Irrigation Clash That Did Not Come; Mesa's Civic Administration; Foundation of Alma; Highways Into the Mountains; Hayden's Ferry, Latterly Tempe; Organization of the Maricopa Stake; A Great Temple to ...
— Mormon Settlement in Arizona • James H. McClintock
... the greedy hunter that more food was to be attained by breeding cattle than by killing them all at once; that meat kept better when alive. What mental labor, what arduous conflict between that prehistoric ant and grasshopper! ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... wooding-up gave an illusion of speed to the boat herself, and in what seemed no time at all the empty scows were dropping away astern; but it was farewell for good and all to the Westwood, the Antelope. And now Cat Island, its bend, its chute; Cow Island, its bend, its chute; Horn Lake, a prehistoric loop of twelve miles, reduced to three ...
— Gideon's Band - A Tale of the Mississippi • George W. Cable
... faithfully as with his pen. He had it in him to be not only a writer, but an excellent draughtsman, and even a great painter. He has reproduced in water-colour, with loving care, the decorations of the specimens of prehistoric pottery which his excavations have revealed, and which he has endeavoured to reconstruct, with all the science of an archaeologist. He has displayed the same skill in water-colour in that astonishing iconography, in which he has ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... there was a club of college undergraduates which called itself the Lost Digamma. The digamma, I am informed, is a letter that was lost in prehistoric times from the Greek alphabet. A prudent alphabet would have offered a reward at once and would have beaten up the bushes all about, but evidently these remedies were neglected. As the years went on the other letters gradually assumed its duties. The philological chores, so to speak, ...
— Chimney-Pot Papers • Charles S. Brooks
... still believe that old prehistoric myth," Ernestine proclaimed from safety, "that once he, that wretched semblance of a man-thing prone in the dirt, captained Berkeley ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London
... keep to the firm land. Many of them swam and on the backs of some were naked men, stark naked, with hair falling to their shoulders and streaming behind them like manes. They shouted war-cries and waved their clubs. Rouletabille stopped short before this prehistoric invasion. He would never have imagined that a few miles from the Newsky Prospect he could have found himself in the midst of such a spectacle. These savages had not even a loin-cloth. Where did they come ...
— The Secret of the Night • Gaston Leroux
... belief in immortality is that which is shown to us by the burial customs of the primitive race,—the prehistoric Egyptian race. ...
— The Egyptian Conception of Immortality • George Andrew Reisner
... the Dr. Leet that was in the party? I remember dancing a cotillon with a very good looking youth of that name in the prehistoric ages. He was a senior at Yale, very rich and very good looking. I wore his fraternity pin over my heart for a ...
— Lady of the Decoration • Frances Little
... 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 majorum [Lat.]; O call back yesterday, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... large yellow flowers grew along the banks, while, 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
... principal stages of the development of the individual from lower forms of life, so the growing male must pass through the stages of psychical development through which the race has passed. The gynecocratic government of prehistoric time is revived in the nursery, where the mother rules supreme and the sisters dominate. The normal, healthy school-boy, preferring the company of his school-fellows to all others, shunning his mother and ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... Vedantan idea. The Christian idea. Did Jesus teach the kingdom of God on earth? Is there a basis for belief in physical immortality? A new explanation. The perilous paths. Those who "will see God." Evolution of consciousness from prehistoric man to the ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad
... was dry land, a tribe of what you call prehistoric men lived here. They was pagans—sun worshippers, an' such. They built the stones in a circle as a kinder temple, same's them chaps you told me of that built Stonehenge. What? Ain't that ...
— Kiddie the Scout • Robert Leighton
... of a man quite as much as wings are the mark of an angel. Wheels are the things that are as old as mankind and yet are strictly peculiar to man, that are prehistoric ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... upright, or letter Tau, may be shown to be a sex symbol, the union of the oval with the upright being of symbolic significance. The crux ansata is found in the hand of most of the Egyptian deities. It is found in the Assyrian temples and throughout the temples of India as well. Prehistoric monuments of Ireland have the same design. Priests are portrayed in adoration of the crux ansata before phallic monuments. This symbol, from which our modern cross is doubtless derived, originated with the religions of antiquity. ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... our country from prehistoric days to the time of Washington, most of the book is devoted to the early exploration and settlement of North and South America. The second chapter contains an account ...
— A Mother's List of Books for Children • Gertrude Weld Arnold
... will pledge the repose of the spirits of his venerated ancestors practically back to prehistoric times," agreed Lao Ting readily. "From the third to the ninth day he will be absent from the city and will take no part in anything therein. Should he eat his words, may his body be suffocated beneath five cart-loads of books and his weary ghost chained to that ...
— Kai Lung's Golden Hours • Ernest Bramah
... sacrifices this rough circle of prehistoric monoliths might have witnessed, I looked up into my companion's face with an unspoken question. But he read my thought and ...
— Three John Silence Stories • Algernon Blackwood
... widely distributed in the animal kingdom, both in domestic species and in wild animals in the natural state such as the larger carnivora and the gorilla; evidence of it has also been found in the bones of animals buried with prehistoric man. ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... that 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 eating roots ...
— Worldly Ways and Byways • Eliot Gregory
... spark of life in the pathetic old society was its real interest in the antediluvian and prehistoric. For the life that was dead it had a perfect passion, and it sometimes held conversaziones to gaze at it through microscopes. Occasionally it would waken up to literature with a paper on Akenside. In everything that didn't ...
— The Romance of Zion Chapel [3d ed.] • Richard Le Gallienne
... the recorded ages of Sumerian and Hebrew patriarchs are strangely alike. It may be added that in Egypt a new fragment of the Palermo Stele has enabled us to verify, by a very similar comparison, the accuracy of Manetho's sources for his prehistoric period, while at the same time it demonstrates the way in which possible inaccuracies in his system, deduced from independent evidence, may have arisen in remote antiquity. It is clear that both Hebrew and Hellenistic traditions were modelled ...
— Legends Of Babylon And Egypt - In Relation To Hebrew Tradition • Leonard W. King
... no area of equal extent that can approach Mexico in wealth of natural resources, variety of climate, grandeur of scenery, prehistoric ruins, and romantic history," writes the ...
— Bobby of the Labrador • Dillon Wallace
... absence of inflections in verbs, causing the child to use only the infinitive. But no one would maintain that "for this reason" we ought to restrict the child artificially to such primitive language, to enable him to pass through his prehistoric period easily. ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... grows; but the records of our primal fellows have grown dim and uncertain as the centuries rolled over them. There exists, however, within the lofty, lonely kingdom of the granite, a chain of human evidences extending from prehistoric ages to the ruined shepherd's cot of yesterday. At many spots a spectator may perceive in one survey the stone ruin of the Danmonian's habitation, and hypaethral temple or forum, the heather-clad debris left ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... tens of thousands of Saturnian years, and since in that long period there has been no measurable change in us, few of us have believed in the legends at all. They have been thought the surviving figments of a barbarous, prehistoric worship of the sun. However, such a condition is not in conflict with the known facts of cosmogony, and since there actually exists such a humanity as yours—a humanity whose bodily tissues actually are composed ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith
... met by a demand for the production of a signed, sealed, and delivered contract, or at least for evidence that such a contract was ever made. But Rousseau says—with a good sense and modesty which dealers in "prehistoric" history would do well to copy—that he does not know how government in fact arose. Nor does anyone else. What he maintains is that the moral sanction of government is contractual, or, as Jefferson puts it, ...
— A History of the United States • Cecil Chesterton
... 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 ...
— The Poison Belt • Arthur Conan Doyle
... appeared—not in the distance, but close at hand. He was passing Sylvia's gate. He had a natural taste for geology, it seemed, and he had chosen this hour to walk out beyond Eagle Pass to examine the rock formations which had been cast up to the surface of the desert by prehistoric cataclysms. ...
— Children of the Desert • Louis Dodge
... such a tragedy in the dim recesses of that prehistoric cave? Who could say? Perhaps the men had been prospecting together, and one had found the ruby and hidden in the cave, where his companion had found him and cut off his right hand with some primitive idea of making his vengeance fit the crime. Then, perhaps, they had been unable to escape ...
— The Hand in the Dark • Arthur J. Rees
... of the paths of our inland commerce, we must look far back into the dim prehistoric ages of America. The earliest routes that threaded the continent were the streams and the tracks beaten out by the heavier four-footed animals. The Indian hunter followed the migrations of the animals ...
— The Paths of Inland Commerce - A Chronicle of Trail, Road, and Waterway, Volume 21 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Archer B. Hulbert
... dear, you are gloriously alive. I'm of the past, as 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
... skeleton remains have by way of exception been preserved in a fossil state. From these naturally but a very imperfect and hypothetical representation can be formed of the soft bodies with which they were once clothed. And even then it remains forever doubtful whether the progeny of the prehistoric creature, the scant remains of which we study, has not become entirely extinct, so that it can in no way be regarded as the progenitor of any creature living at present." I should like to know wherein this ...
— At the Deathbed of Darwinism - A Series of Papers • Eberhard Dennert
... of "Erycina ridens," she was worshipped as Aphrodite by the Greeks, and as Astarte or Ashtaroth by the Phoenicians. Hardly any vestige of a temple can now be made out, but the remains of the Pelasgic walls that protected the city in prehistoric ages are still to be seen near the Trapani gate. The late Samuel Butler (author of Erewhon) wrote The Authoress of the Odyssey (Longmans, 1897) in support of his view that the Odyssey was written by a woman who lived at Trapani and upon the mountain, and who in the poem described ...
— Diversions in Sicily • H. Festing Jones
... mind and turn south—come and see these extraordinary caves. Are you interested in palaeontology?" (David hesitates) "What careless people call 'prehistoric animals' or 'prehistoric man.' They have been ridiculously misled by comic artists in Punch who imagine a few thousand years of Prehistory would take us back to the Cretaceous period; really four or five ...
— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston |
