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Spawn   Listen
noun
Spawn  n.  
1.
The ova, or eggs, of fishes, oysters, and other aquatic animals.
2.
Any product or offspring; used contemptuously.
3.
(Hort.) The buds or branches produced from underground stems.
4.
(Bot.) The white fibrous matter forming the matrix from which fungi.
Spawn eater (Zool.), a small American cyprinoid fish (Notropis Hudsonius) allied to the dace.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Spawn" Quotes from Famous Books



... genius, and which when paid, honours the giver and the receiver: and then he pleads his beggary as an excuse for his crimes. He melts with tenderness for those only who touch him by the remotest relation; and then, without one natural pang, casts away as a sort of offal and excrement, the spawn of his disgustful amours, and sends his children to the hospital of foundlings. The bear loves, licks, and forms her young; but ...
— Letters of Horace Walpole, V4 • Horace Walpole

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

... mention another fortunate circumstance by which new stores for the winter were laid in. Shoals of salmon entered the Mercy, and ascended the country for several miles. It was the time at which the females, going to find suitable places in which to spawn, precede the males and make a great noise through the fresh water. A thousand of these fish, which measured about two feet and a half in length, came up the river, and a large quantity were retained by fixing dams across the stream. More than a hundred were thus taken, which were salted ...
— The Mysterious Island • Jules Verne

... As sure as a gun, For old Peter Patch is departed; And Eyres and Delaune, And the rest of that spawn, Are ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift

... Of the developmental history of these we have hitherto been acquainted with only isolated fragments. The tracing of the development in the egg is rendered difficult by the circumstance, that the Mantis-shrimps do not, like the Decapoda, carry their spawn about with them, but deposit it in the subterranean passages inhabited by them in the form of thin, round, yellow plates. The spawn is consequently exceedingly difficult to procure, and unfortunately it becomes spoilt in a day when it is removed ...
— Facts and Arguments for Darwin • Fritz Muller

... a somewhat lower stage of organization we may find like examples. Some land-crabs of the West Indies and North America combine in large swarms in order to travel to the sea and to deposit therein their spawn; and each such migration implies concert, co-operation, and mutual support. As to the big Molucca crab (Limulus), I was struck (in 1882, at the Brighton Aquarium) with the extent of mutual assistance which these clumsy animals are capable of bestowing upon ...
— Mutual Aid • P. Kropotkin

... more rocky islands were observed, with a few trees growing on the very top—their outline having the appearance of a cock's comb. It was noticed that the water here was streaked for many miles with a brown scum supposed to be fish-spawn. At evening one of the Cumberland Islands, named Pure Island, provided an anchorage for the three ships; possibly the Lady Nelson alone had been in these waters previously, and it will be remembered, that it was hereabouts ...
— The Logbooks of the Lady Nelson - With The Journal Of Her First Commander Lieutenant James Grant, R.N • Ida Lee

... at that cry, and the darkness once more closed in around. A horde of hideous thoughts, the very spawn of hell, swarmed like vermin in my mind; there was the breath as of a host of contending fiends upon my face; a hundred hungry hands seemed to lay hold on me, and to strive to drag me down and down to a bottomless pit that opened at my very feet, and into which I felt myself slipping. ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.

... islands; second, that you cannot at all comprehend how—well, how stunning he was. Sitting there, a single fortnight removed from cotton pants and the beach, crime-stained, imperturbable, magnificent! Spawn of the White Lights! Emperor of ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... and curses and threats Kishimoto San's voice rang out. "Stop! you crawling vipers of the swamp! How dare you brawl before this sacred place? How dare you touch one of my blood! My granddaughter accounts to me, not to the spawn of the earth—such as you! Disperse your dishonorable bodies ...
— The House of the Misty Star - A Romance of Youth and Hope and Love in Old Japan • Fannie Caldwell Macaulay

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

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

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

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

... may find a good deal on the shore. In the spring Doris bilineata comes to the rocks in thousands, to lay its strange white furbelows of spawn upon their overhanging edges. Eolides of extraordinary beauty haunt the same spots. The great Eolis papillosa, of a delicate French grey; Eolis pellucida (?) (Plate X. fig. 4), in which each papilla on the back is beautifully coloured with a streak of pink, ...
— Glaucus; or The Wonders of the Shore • Charles Kingsley

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

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

... she cried, "wisely did thy mother prophecy. Surely the Holy Spirit, the Knepth, was in her, O thou conceived by a God! See the omen. The lion there—he growls within the Capitol at Rome—and the dead man, he is the Ptolemy—the Macedonian spawn that, like a foreign weed, hath overgrown the land of Nile; with the Macedonian Lagidae thou shalt go to smite the lion of Rome. But the Macedonian cur shall fly, and the Roman lion shall strike him down, and thou ...
— Cleopatra • H. Rider Haggard

... was necessary of the 25th of August, 1572, on the 25th of August, 1685, it was useless. Under the second son of Henri de Valois heresy had scarcely conceived an offspring; under the second son of Henri de Bourbon that teeming mother had cast her spawn over the whole universe. You accuse me of a crime, and you put up statues to the son of Anne of Austria! Nevertheless, he and I attempted the same thing; he succeeded, I failed; but Louis XIV. found the ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac

... swarm of orphan children down in the by-streets and outskirt alleys of the capital—children of whom no one has any account, and no one takes any account, who swarm down there only one floor higher, so to speak, than the spawn and small fry which are floating below in the sea among the quay piles, and which will one day become large ...
— One of Life's Slaves • Jonas Lauritz Idemil Lie

... depends on contact of the prey with the tentacle. Its stomach is distensible in an extraordinary degree, and not rarely fishes have been taken out quite as large and heavy as their destroyer. It grows to a length of more than 5 ft.; specimens of 3 ft. are common. The spawn of the angler is very remarkable. It consists of a thin sheet of transparent gelatinous material 2 or 3 ft. broad and 25 to 30 ft. in length. The eggs in this sheet are in a single layer, each in its own little cavity. The spawn is free in the sea. The larvae are free-swimming and have ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 2, Part 1, Slice 1 • Various

... enthusiastic still. Therefore I do not recommend that idea, unless it be supplemented by some effective method of combating a grave disadvantage. My own may not commend itself to every one. Each spring I entrust some casual little boy with a pail; he brings it back full of frog-spawn and receives sixpence. I speculate sometimes with complacency how many thousand of healthy and industrious batrachians I have reared and turned out for the benefit of my neighbours. Enough perhaps, but certainly no more, remain to serve ...
— About Orchids - A Chat • Frederick Boyle

... standing crop, their men on the garnered grain, The thatch of the byres will serve their fires when all the cattle are slain. But if thou thinkest the price be fair, and thy brethren wait to sup, The hound is kin to the jackal-spawn,—howl, dog, and call them up! And if thou thinkest the price be high, in steer and gear and stack, Give me my father's mare again, and I'll fight my own way back!' Kamal has gripped him by the hand and set him upon his feet. 'No talk shall be of dogs,' said he, 'when wolf and grey wolf meet. May ...
— Lyra Heroica - A Book of Verse for Boys • Various

... some barnacles on the boat's rudder, very similar to the spawn of an oyster, which filled him with greater hopes of being near land. He unshipped the rudder, and scraping them off with his knife, found they were of a salt fishy substance, and eat them; he was now so weak, the boat having a ...
— Thrilling Narratives of Mutiny, Murder and Piracy • Anonymous

... of John Grimthorpe, the same that was condemned on my evidence; and an infernal scamp he was, too! Spawn of the devil, both of them! This tattooed one is a murderous ruffian, and he swore to have my blood after that trial. It's seven year ago, and he's following me yet; I know he is, though he lies low and keeps dark. He came up to me in ...
— My Friend The Murderer • A. Conan Doyle

... by attaching itself to a stone forms a drill, by which it furrows the shoal for the deposit of its spawn.] ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 204, September 24, 1853 • Various

... mutes were standing, as I passed and saw this group at the door. The charity-boy with the hoop is the son of the jolly-looking mute; he admires his father, who admires himself too, in those bran-new sables. The other infants are the spawn of the alleys about Our Street. Only the parson and the typhus fever visit those mysterious haunts, which lie crouched about our splendid houses like Lazarus at ...
— The Christmas Books • William Makepeace Thackeray

... evil brood of rage That slumber, tongueless, in their cage; I stabbed in turn with silent oaths The hook-nosed kite of carrion clothes, The snaky usurer, him that crawls And cheats beneath the golden balls, Moses and Levi, all the horde, Spawn of the race that slew ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... more animated. "Do you know how I picture God myself?" he said. "As an enormous, creative organ beyond our ken, who scatters millions of worlds into space, just as one single fish would deposit its spawn in the sea. He creates because it is His function as God to do so, but He does not know what He is doing and is stupidly prolific in His work and is ignorant of the combinations of all kinds which are produced by His scattered germs. The human mind is a lucky little local, passing ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant

... shrinks the vital current. Of her sands Let Lybia vaunt no more: if Jaculus, Pareas and Chelyder be her brood, Cenchris and Amphisboena, plagues so dire Or in such numbers swarming ne'er she shew'd, Not with all Ethiopia, and whate'er Above the Erythraean sea is spawn'd. ...
— The Divine Comedy, Complete - The Vision of Paradise, Purgatory and Hell • Dante Alighieri

... came to an umbrella-shaped mound with little cracks on top, we would carefully lift the dirt with a stick and uncover big clusters of buttons of all sizes. We always broke the large buttons off with the greatest care and settled the spawn back in the loose dirt for a future harvest. We often found large mushrooms above ground, and these were delicious baked with cream sauce. They would be about the size of an ordinary saucer, but tender and full of rich flavor—and the buttons would vary in size from a twenty-five-cent ...
— Army Letters from an Officer's Wife, 1871-1888 • Frances M.A. Roe

... the dark cave of metaphysics, a numerous and ugly spawn of monstrous sects; unnatural children of the same foul mother, who never met but for mutual destruction. Religion became what is called the study of Theology; and they all attempted to reduce the worship of God into a system! and the ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 1 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli

... an animal after the taking in and digestion of the food. For we never see an egg formed immediately of mud, for it is produced in the bodies of animals alone; but a thousand living creatures rise from the mud. What need of many instances? None ever found the spawn or egg of an eel; yet if you empty a pit and take out all the mud, as soon as other water settles in it, eels likewise are presently produced. Now that must exist first which hath no need of any other thing that it may exist, and that after, which cannot be without the concurrence of ...
— Essays and Miscellanies - The Complete Works Volume 3 • Plutarch

... smoked, each of us sang a different song, more or less in tune. It sounded not unmelodious upon the large waters. At intervals we asked one another where the 'gert bodies of herrings' had gone off to. Eastwards, westwards, to the offing, or down to the bottom to spawn? ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds

... with yellow parchment, had become sharp and haglike, though her dark eyes still burned with their ancient fire. The man, Hague Simon, or the Butcher, scoundrel by nature and spy and thief by trade, one of the evil spawn of an age of violence and cruelty, boasted a face and form that became his reputation well. His countenance was villainous, very fat and flabby, with small, pig-like eyes, and framed, as it were, in a fringe of sandy-coloured whiskers, running from the throat to the temple, ...
— Lysbeth - A Tale Of The Dutch • H. Rider Haggard

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

... service has a monopoly on bravery. Every milieu, every nationality seems to spawn, on occasion, a man capable of action above and beyond the ...
— The Colors of Space • Marion Zimmer Bradley

... beast; for to see any rampant thing so suddenly stricken with fear, when there was not the least danger nor any intent of harm, was pitiful to see. He wished to assure the buckskin that he was only a boy, a frail boy at that, and not what the animal had apparently taken him to be,—a spawn of Darkness and Terror. He followed up the trembling beast, trying to reassure him and to get near and pet him; but the creature fled wildly at every advance, and when not pursued stood with head aloft, ears cocked, and nostrils ...
— The Spinner's Book of Fiction • Various

... Your Lieutenant became your master; you found it convenient to believe his version of every thing, and to justify him in every thing, and you ended in making all his devilments your own, and adopting the whole infernal spawn and brood, with additions of ...
— The American Indian as Participant in the Civil War • Annie Heloise Abel

... Troth I commend his valour in evadin' such a rabble o' hell-spawn! An' what from did he escape,—th' ...
— The Maid of the Whispering Hills • Vingie E. Roe

... one. I believe man has been wronged; he has wronged himself. He has almost lost the light that can lead him back to his prerogatives. Men are become of no account. Men in history, men in the world of to-day, are bugs, are spawn, and are called "the mass" and "the herd." In a century, in a millennium, one or two men;[72] that is to say, one or two approximations to the right state of every man. All the rest behold in the hero or the poet their own green and crude being,—ripened; yes, and are content to be less, ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson

... Dark Rosaleen, the country that holds men's hearts more than any prosperous mother-land of them all. His name is a name never mentioned in Ireland without a black, bitter curse, for he was a famous informer and spy, own brother to such evil spawn as Corydon, Massey, and Nagle. But 'tis too long a story to tell how the spy masqueraded as Black Shawn, and I think I'll keep it for ...
— An Isle in the Water • Katharine Tynan

... order of the Star Chamber, but who had not, apparently, learned charity to others through his own sufferings, published a pamphlet that was spread abroad throughout England. It was called 'The Quakers unmasked, and clearly detected to be but the Spawn of Romish Frogs, Jesuits and Franciscan Friars, sent from Rome to seduce the intoxicated giddy-headed English Nation.' George Fox called the pamphlet in which he answered this charge by an almost equally uncharitable title: 'The Unmasking and Discovery of Antichrist, with all the false ...
— A Book of Quaker Saints • Lucy Violet Hodgkin

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

... a billion dollars a year. The reason for this is that at least 70 percent of coastal fishes spend some essential part of their life cycle within an estuary—spawning there, or passing through on their way to spawn in running fresh streams, or moving in as fry from the rivers or the open sea to find a "nursery" in one of the varied estuarine habitats—bays, marshes, sandy shorelines, mudflats, tidal ...
— The Nation's River - The Department of the Interior Official Report on the Potomac • United States Department of the Interior

... the complaint indeed is that the rights of the public have been encroached upon. The too exclusive preservation of fish is in a measure responsible for the destruction of water-fowl, which are cleared off preserved places in order that they may not help themselves to fry or spawn. On the other hand, the societies may claim to have saved parts of the river from being entirely deprived of fish, for it is not long since it appeared as if the stream would be quite cleared out. Large quantities of fish have also been placed in the river ...
— The Open Air • Richard Jefferies

... for nearly a hundred miles of its course an impetuous, roaring mountain stream, abounding in trout at all seasons, and in June, July, and August filled with salmon which have come up here through the Golden Gates from the ocean to spawn. The stage-road follows almost to its source the devious course of the river, and you ride along sometimes nearly on a level with the stream, and again on a road-bed cut out of the steep mountain ...
— Northern California, Oregon, and the Sandwich Islands • Charles Nordhoff

... manner of herbs as before, and beaten almond, stamp them with the spawn of pike or carp and strain them with the crumb of a fine manchet, sugar, and rose-water, and fry ...
— The accomplisht cook - or, The art & mystery of cookery • Robert May

... tread thee in the dust, thou spawn of Hell! And O that I could trample with these feet The witch herself! Haha! I was to take thee Unto his father, unto Samarkand? I fancy That Samarkand will never ...
— Turandot, Princess of China - A Chinoiserie in Three Acts • Karl Gustav Vollmoeller

... "Spawn of the viper, how dare ye come hither to seek for shelter beneath my roof?" exclaimed the woman in a voice which made the young men start, so shrill and fierce did it sound, high above the roar of the ...
— Won from the Waves • W.H.G. Kingston

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

... out to a great length, and bent into the form of a hook at the end. On the outer side was observed a fleshy streak, bordered by a close row of small paunches: these paunches, which were externally open, contained a great quantity of brown atoms, apparently spawn, and evidently in motion. With respect to the Rhizophysae, it has been discovered that they are of the same genus as the Physsophora, the hard part being torn away in the act of catching them; upon this occasion also, several of these separated ...
— A New Voyage Round the World, in the years 1823, 24, 25, and 26, Vol. 2 • Otto von Kotzebue

... the egg; and in this the chick in the egg differs from the fetus in the womb, as there is in the egg no circulating maternal blood for the insertion of the extremities of its respiratory vessels, and in this also I suspect that the eggs of birds differ from the spawn of fish; which latter is immersed in water, and which has probably the extremities of its respiratory organ inserted into the soft membrane which covers it, and is in contact ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin

... still the wild deer sip thy springs, The wild duck haunt thy coves, And all the year the fisher fleets Bask o'er thine oyster groves; The strange new bass thy trout pursue. And where the herring spawn, The blue sky opens to let through Thine ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend

... what point of the coast separated the rivers containing different kinds of fish. In these ponds we caught only some very small fry, and the question could not be satisfactorily determined, although the natives declared that none of them were the spawn of cod-perch. ...
— Three Expeditions into the Interior of Eastern Australia, Vol 2 (of 2) • Thomas Mitchell

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

... smaller, smoother pair between; the great teeth, or mandibles; the carapace with its projecting rostrum, the jointed abdomen with the tail-fins at the end, and the little flaps below on which the female drops her spawn. In more or less detail these things are severally described, and the many limbs severally enumerated, in one kind after another. The descriptions of the lobster and the langouste are particularly minute, ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various

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

... and the spawn of a mollusk! Before you have solved their mysteries, this earth where you first saw them may be a vitrified slag, or a vapor diffused through the planetary spaces. Mysteries are common enough, ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)

... an insect breeze Is but a mungrel prince of bees, That falls before a storm on cows, And stings the founders of his house; From whose corrupted flesh that breed 5 Of vermin did at first proceed. So e're the storm of war broke out, Religion spawn'd a various rout Of petulant Capricious sects, The maggots of corrupted texts, 10 That first run all religion down, And after ev'ry swarm its own. For as the Persian Magi once Upon their mothers got their sons, That were incapable t' enjoy 15 That empire any other ...
— Hudibras • Samuel Butler

... 'And the spawn of the lamprey, brought from the Carpathian Sea,' pursued the Doctor, in his severest voice; 'when we read of costly entertainments such as these, and still remember, that ...
— Dombey and Son • Charles Dickens

... taken a pride in not giving in, or crying out for pain; and the ancient habit acquired in a worse cause, came to his help. He scarcely recollected the cause of his resistance; all his powers were concentrated in holding out, and when after another "Now, vile prelatic spawn, is thy heart still hardened? Yes or no?" the terrible whip came stinging and biting down on his shoulders and back, only protected by his shirt, he was entirely bound up in the determination to endure the pain ...
— Under the Storm - Steadfast's Charge • Charlotte M. Yonge

... are as manna fallen from heaven," boomed a deep, resonant voice, surprising in its volume. "I take heart anew, young man, for surely thou art not the spawn of the scarlet woman, but, verily, one of the chosen people ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish

... "Spawn of a pig, wilt never have done irking me? See, I scratch thee off me!" Maso drove home his gibe with a dramatic performance. The trattoria was agape. Every table held its three craning necks and ...
— Earthwork Out Of Tuscany • Maurice Hewlett

... most experienced hunters have difficulty in finding them. Of bears there are two species, the black and the large brown, the former by far the more common of the two. On the shaggy bottom-lands where berries are plentiful, and along the rivers while salmon are going up to spawn, the black bear may be found, fat and at home. Many are killed every year, both for their flesh and skins. The large brown species likes higher and opener ground. He is a dangerous animal, a near relative of the famous grizzly, and wise ...
— Steep Trails • John Muir

... somewhat corresponding range in the assumption of the first signal change, and the consequent movement to the sea. They return under the greatly enlarged form of grilse, as already stated, and these grilse spawn that same season in common with the salmon, and then both the one and the other re-descend into the sea in the course of the winter or ensuing spring. They all return again to the rivers sooner or later, in accordance, as we believe, with the time they had previously left it after spawning, early ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various

... taken, when he bare office in his parish, for an honest man. The spawn of a decayed shopkeeper begets this fry; out of that dunghill is this serpent's egg hatched. It is a devil made sometime out of one of the twelve companies, and does but study the part and rehearse ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various

... his normal state, Pelet's worn out frame could not have stood against my sound one. I got him up-stairs, and, in process of time, to bed. During the operation he did not fail to utter comminations which, though broken, had a sense in them; while stigmatizing me as the treacherous spawn of a perfidious country, he, in the same breath, anathematized Zoraide Reuter; he termed her "femme sotte et vicieuse," who, in a fit of lewd caprice, had thrown herself away on an unprincipled adventurer; directing the point of the last appellation by a furious blow, obliquely ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell

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

... were changelings, grotesque abortions. It was as if the brute in him, like some malicious witch, had stolen away the true offspring of his mind, putting in their place these deformed dwarfs, its own hideous spawn. ...
— Vandover and the Brute • Frank Norris

... a jaundiced hue, his soft brown eyes set slightly aslant. Although lame, he had an alertness and poise unusual in the sea's spawn of these beaches. In Tahitian, Marquesan, and French, with now and then an English word, he explained that he, a Tahitian marooned on Hiva-oa from a schooner because of a broken leg, wished to pass the tedium of his exile in an innocent game ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien

... SPAWN AND MILK—Have the water boiling fast. Salt to taste, then holding a handful of meal high in the left hand, let it sift slowly between the fingers into the bubbling water, stirring all the time with the right hand. Stir ...
— Good Things to Eat as Suggested by Rufus • Rufus Estes

... round bowls five or six inches in depth and about two feet in diameter, in which their eggs were deposited. And with what beautiful, unweariable devotion they watched and hovered over them and chased away prowling spawn-eating enemies that ventured within a rod or two ...
— The Story of My Boyhood and Youth • John Muir

... out of place here to translate into simple English the terms of the Covenant. It denies the claim of Ireland to self-government and the capacity of Irishmen to govern Ireland. It asserts that the Catholics of Ireland are the spawn of the devil; that they are ruthless savages and dangerous criminals with only one object in life—the wiping out of Protestants. It claims for the Protestant Unionist majority of four Ulster counties a monopoly of Christianity, public and private morality, and clean successful business ...
— Is Ulster Right? • Anonymous

... indeed it seems that islands are peculiarly fitted for these animals; for frogs have been introduced into Madeira, the Azores, and Mauritius, and have multiplied so as to become a nuisance. But as these animals and their spawn are immediately killed (with the exception, as far as known, of one Indian species) by sea-water, there would be great difficulty in their transportal across the sea, and therefore we can see why they do not exist on strictly oceanic islands. But why, on the theory of creation, they should ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin

... of spawn has been greater than could be hatched there, and supplies were sent to responsible persons in every State in the Union to be experimented with. At the date of issuing the report the supply of stock fish at the hatchery embraced, it was estimated, a thousand ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 363, December 16, 1882 • Various

... Cock, there be divers fishes that cast their spawn on flags or stones, and then leave it uncovered, and exposed to become a prey and be devoured by vermin or other fishes. But other fishes, as namely the Barbel, take such care for the preservation of their ...
— The Complete Angler • Izaak Walton

... more highly prized than any other kind found in our waters, being decidedly the most delicious in a fresh state, and when packed command a higher price than any other by $1 per bbl. They are found in the Straits and all the Lakes. They spawn in the fall, in the Straits, and in shoals and on reefs about the Lakes. They are caught in seines, gill nets, trap nets, and with spears; never with hooks. Those found in Detroit river come up from Lake Erie regularly in the fall to deposit ...
— Old Mackinaw - The Fortress of the Lakes and its Surroundings • W. P. Strickland

... is sliding towards the dawn, And upturned hills crouch at autumn's knees. A torn moon flees Through the hemlock trees, The hours have gnawed it to feed their spawn. ...
— Sword Blades and Poppy Seed • Amy Lowell

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

... sun comes forth and many reptiles spawn, He sets and each ephemeral insect then Is gathered unto death without a dawn, And the ...
— A Collection of Stories, Reviews and Essays • Willa Cather

... no mean books. Shun the spawn of the press on the gossip of the hour. Do not read what you shall learn without asking, in the street and the train. Dr. Johnson said, "he always went into stately shops"; and good travellers stop at the best hotels; for, though they cost more, they ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I., No. 3, January 1858 - A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics • Various

... rushing hoarsely along, clear and full, between his ruined temple-columns of basalt, as of old. "What a grand salmon-river this would be, Major!" said I; "what pools and stickles are here! Ah! if we only could get the salmon-spawn through the tropics without its germinating.—Can you tell me, Doctor, why these rocks should take the form of columns? Is there any particular reason for ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley

... must have been electricity; it could not be attributed to a bank of fish spawn, nor to a crowd of those animalculae that give phosphorescence to the sea, and this showed that the electrical tension of the atmosphere ...
— Rubur the Conqueror • Jules Verne

... and sharp. Grows to a great size; as I am informed by the natives, that they often spear individuals weighing sixty or seventy pounds. This fish enters the fresh-water periodically, like the Salmon of Europe, to spawn, and it is the only fish in this country which I have distinctly made out to do so. It is tolerably good eating. The specimen was caught at the mouth of Oyster Harbour by a hook, on the 30th August, 1841. ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre

... the ranks of steel broke of the Persian host: craven, we hated them then: now we would count them Gods beside these, spawn ...
— American Poetry, 1922 - A Miscellany • Edna St. Vincent Millay

... very soon that animal life does exist of so transparent a texture that to all intents and purposes it is invisible. The spawn of frogs, the larvae of certain fresh-water insects, many marine animals, are of so clear a tissue that they are seen with difficulty. In the tropics a particular inhabitant of smooth seas is as invisible as a piece of glass, ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 10 • Various

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

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

... made, the planters find it stocked with a variety of fishes; but in what manner they breed, or whence they come, they cannot tell, and therefore leave that matter to philosophical inquirers to determine. Some think that the spawn of fishes is exhaled from the large lakes of fresh water in the continent, and being brought in thunder-clouds, falls with the drops of rain into these reservoirs of water. Others imagine that it must have remained every where among the ...
— An Historical Account Of The Rise And Progress Of The Colonies Of South Carolina And Georgia, Volume 2 • Alexander Hewatt

... Well, he's Nikola, and that's all I can tell you. If you're a wise man you'll want to know no more. Ask the Chinese mothers nursing their almond-eyed spawn in Peking who he is; ask the Japanese, ask the Malays, the Hindoos, the Burmese, the coal porters in Port Said, the Buddhist priests of Ceylon; ask the King of Corea, the men up in Thibet, the Spanish priests in Manilla, ...
— A Bid for Fortune - or Dr. Nikola's Vendetta • Guy Boothby

... "salmon come up from the sea and ascend our rivers to spawn, and in time the little ones go to sea. As they grow up they continue to come every year to the same river where they were born, and nobody knows where they ...
— The Land of the Long Night • Paul du Chaillu

... forms rise from the ground and spring, disordered, into a firmament which satanizes. The clouds swell into breasts, divide into buttocks, bulge as if with fecundity, scattering a train of spawn through space. They accord with the sombre bulging of the foliage, in which now there are only images of giant or dwarf hips, feminine triangles, great V's, mouths of Sodom, glowing cicatrices, humid vents. This landscape ...
— La-bas • J. K. Huysmans

... chimneys, and the pumps in the oil wells kept up their dolorous whining and complaining, like great insects battening upon an abandoned world. In South Harvey the lights of the saloons and the side of the dragon's spawn glowed and beckoned men to death. Money tinkled over the bars, and whispered as it was crumpled in the claws of the dragon. For money the scurrying human ants hurried along the dark, half-lighted streets from the ant hills over the mines. For money the cranes of the pumps creaked their ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White

... coat, "and call me a lubberly clout like yourself, and we will see which is the better clout." I put off the longsleeved jacket, and faced him with my fists doubled, crying: "I'll teach you, you spawn of a dunghill, to speak ill ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

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

... have been taken by net and trap, to the profit of the salmon packers and the satisfaction of those who cannot get fish save out of tin cans. The salmon swarmed in millions on their way to spawn in fresh-water streams. They were plentiful and cheap. But even before the war came to send the price of linen-mesh net beyond most fishermen's pocketbooks, men had discovered that salmon could be taken commercially by trolling lines. The lordly spring, which attains to seventy ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair

... hand In love to the old Mother Land! Bob Boyle, "I thank thee" that thy name Hath stirred the patriotic flame, In days like these, when treason's veil Drops when passions fierce assail, And leaves exposed to public view The traitor double-dyed in hue! Hear, spawn of disaffection's thrall! Rouge, Annexationist and all This—ere the Union Jack shall fall, The path of treason red with blood Shall sink beneath a crimson flood, While o'er it from the highest crag, Will wave the glorious meteor flag! I've wandered somewhat from my track, But quietly I now ...
— Recollections of Bytown and Its Old Inhabitants • William Pittman Lett

... "They come up at certain seasons of the year to spawn. There are only three places on the coast south of the Golden Gate where they run. For three or four nights now while the tide is high and the moon full they'll be swept up on this beach and left to lay their eggs in the wet sand. If you ...
— El Diablo • Brayton Norton

... 6.25 North, and in longitude 88.25 East, we began to encounter a great deal of drift wood, many large trees, branches, plants, leaves, nautilus shells, back-bones of cuttlefish, and, in addition, large quantities of yellow spawn, evidently deposited by some fish of large size. The spawn appeared to be of a very solid, consistent character, like large yellow grapes, connected together in a sort of gelatinous mass. It formed a continuous wide yellow streak perhaps half a mile in ...
— A Voyage in the 'Sunbeam' • Annie Allnut Brassey

... young fool," he said, "so there ye stand, scared like the cowardly spawn ye are. We took ye, and kept ye, and fed ye. What's more, we was friends to ye, eh mates? An' how do ye treat yer friends? Leave 'em to starve or drown on a sinkin' ship! Sneak off like a dog an' ...
— The Black Buccaneer • Stephen W. Meader

... are best some time before they begin to spawn; and are unfit for food for some time after they ...
— The Cook's Oracle; and Housekeeper's Manual • William Kitchiner

... all things, write—so that Sahibs may read, and his disgrace be accomplished—that Ram Dass, my brother, son of Purun Dass, Mahajun of Pali, is a swine and a night-thief, a taker of life, an eater of flesh, a jackal-spawn without beauty, or faith, or cleanliness, ...
— Soldiers Three • Rudyard Kipling

... foul spawn of earth, shall call Me beaten? who, that saw swoln Tiber flow Red with the blood of Trojans, ay, and all Evander's house and progeny laid low, And fierce Arcadians vanquished at a blow? Not such dead Pandarus and ...
— The Aeneid of Virgil - Translated into English Verse by E. Fairfax Taylor • Virgil

... five cents change and started for the Boul' Mich', a popular dancing resort on Forty-fifth Street. It was nearly ten but the streets were dark and sparsely peopled until the theatres should eject their spawn an hour later. Anthony knew the Boul' Mich', for he had been there with Gloria during the year before, and he remembered the existence of a rule that patrons must be in evening dress. Well, he would not go up-stairs—he would send a boy up for Bloeckman and wait for him in the lower hall. For ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald

... petition by the lord-mayor, aldermen, and commons of the city of London, a bill was brought in, and passed into a law without opposition, for the more effectual preservation and improvement of the fry and spawn of fish in the river Thames, and waters of Medway, and for the better regulating the fishery in those rivers. The two next measures taken for the benefit of the public were, first, a bill to render more effectual the several laws then in ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett

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

... met afore," said Judy, "though you do grow on me 'mazin'ly. You're the very spawn o' somebody. Phillis, who does the young ...
— Darkness and Daylight • Mary J. Holmes

... The brooks are not so liable to be suddenly muddied by heavy showers, and defiled with the washings of the roads and fields, as they are in spring and summer. The artificial breeder finds that absolute purity of water is necessary to hatch the spawn; also that shade and a low temperature ...
— A Year in the Fields • John Burroughs

... that of an impure race, nor with blood of inferiors." Hence, we have it what we see it, a translucent flood down from the topmost founts of time. So we revere it. "Qua man and woman," the Diet says, by implication, "do as you like, marry in the ditches, spawn plentifully. Qua prince and princess, No! Your nuptials are nought. Or would you maintain them a legal ceremony, and be bound by them, you descend, you go forth; you are no reigning sovereign, you are a private person." His Serene Highness the prince ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... with planks, like an eel-pot, with wings, where in the middle is also a sliding door, and with trellice work at the sides, so that between the two [dams] there is a square pool, into which the fish aforesaid come swimming in such shoals, in order to get up above, where they deposit their spawn, that at one tide there are 10,000 to 12,000 fish in it, which they shut off in the rear at the ebb, and close up the trellices above, so that no more water comes in; then the water runs out through the lower trellices, ...
— Narratives of New Netherland, 1609-1664 • Various

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

... the fishermen of Ramsey had been over on Saturday. Their season was a failure, and they were loud in their protests against the trawlers who were destroying the spawn. Caesar had suggested a conference at his house on the following Saturday of Ramsey men and Peel men, and recommended Philip as an advocate to advise with them as to the best means to put a stop to the enemies of the herring. Philip promised ...
— The Manxman - A Novel - 1895 • Hall Caine

... was a woman supposed to have a brood of frogs in her stomach, owing to drinking water containing frogs' spawn. She thought she could feel three of them, and that she and those beside her could hear them croak. Her uneasiness was alleviated by drinking brandy. Salt had no effect in killing the frogs, and even nux vomica, which ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume 19 - Travel and Adventure • Various

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

... species assume conventional form, and lose the wild irregularities of growth that charm us in Nature's garden. Indians believed, what is an obvious fact, that when this bush whitens the swampy river banks, shad are swimming up the stream from the sea to spawn. Then, too, the nighthawk, returning from its winter visit south, booms forth its curious whirring, vibrating, jarring sound as it drops through the air at unseen heights, a dismal, weird noise which the red man thought proceeded from the shad spirits come to ...
— Wild Flowers, An Aid to Knowledge of Our Wild Flowers and - Their Insect Visitors - - Title: Nature's Garden • Neltje Blanchan

... the Susquehannah, and sat down near the water's edge to rest awhile. There I was forcibly struck at seeing with what industry the sun-fish heaped small stones together to make secure places for their spawn; and all this labor they did with their mouth and body, without hands. Presently a little bird, not far from me, raised a song, and while I was looking to see the little songster, its mate, with as much grass as it could hold in its bill, passed close ...
— Anecdotes for Boys • Harvey Newcomb

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

... conceiving how these trade-calculations can consist with a great deal of true love. And what was Amilcare's trade? His trade was politics, the stock whereof was the people of Nona, the shifty, chattering, light-weight spawn of one of those little burnt-brick and white cities of the Lombard Plain—set deep in trees, domed, belfried, full of gardens and fountains and public places—which owed their independence to being too ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett

... neighborhoods perfidious, sneaking, dastardly, filthy, calumnious, vermin-infested wretches, spewed up from perdition, whose joy it is to write letters with fictitious signatures. Sometimes they take the shape of a valentine, the fourteenth of February being a great outlet for this obscene spawn. If your nose be long, or your limbs slender, or your waist thick around, they will be pictorially presented. Sometimes they take the form of a delicate threat that if you do not thus or so there will be a funeral at your house, yourself ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage

... and well known at our tables for its fine taste and utility in sauces. These plants do not produce seeds that can be saved; they are therefore cultivated by collecting the spawn, which is found in old hot-beds and in ...
— The Botanist's Companion, Vol. II • William Salisbury

... dim yearning of divided life, and the soils and smirches and frenzies put upon it by the spawn of multitudinous generations. There is your love, the whole history of it. There is no intrinsic shame in the thing itself, but the shame lies in that we are ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London



Words linked to "Spawn" :   make, breed, do, engender, spawner, spat, cause



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