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Prehistoric   /prˌihɪstˈɔrɪk/   Listen
Prehistoric

adjective
1.
Belonging to or existing in times before recorded history.  Synonym: prehistorical.  "Prehistoric peoples"
2.
Of or relating to times before written history.
3.
No longer fashionable.



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"Prehistoric" Quotes from Famous Books



... over from a prehistoric era," Frank Merrill explained, shaking with excitement. "No vulture or eagle or condor could be as big as that at this distance. At least I think so." He paused here, as one studying the problem in the scientific spirit. "Often in the Rockies I've confused a nearby chicken-hawk, ...
— Angel Island • Inez Haynes Gillmore

... great population once on these plains was evident from ancient cemeteries with elaborate monuments of an early but unknown people, of whom they are the only remains. The tombs were rudely worked and decorated in prehistoric manner with devices of war or the chase; one device, which I copied, being of an archer shooting a wild goat, another of a warrior with a long broadsword and large square shield. On some tombs were ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume II • William James Stillman

... of his convalescence was passed within its walls. There he read with avidity all that he could find concerning the Lake Superior copper region, and mining in general. Particularly was he interested in everything pertaining to the prehistoric mining of copper by a people, presumably Aztecs or their close kin, who possessed the art, long since ...
— The Copper Princess - A Story of Lake Superior Mines • Kirk Munroe

... The tables ring with noisy follies? Whose deep-lunged laughter oft would shake The ceiling with its thunder-volleys? Are we the youths with lips unshorn, At beauty's feet unwrinkled suitors, Whose memories reach tradition's morn,— The days of prehistoric tutors? ...
— The Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

... time of the cave-dweller, who was clothed in shaggy hair instead of in broadcloth or silk, prehistoric man learned that the best arrow or spear was that tipped with the best piece of flint. In brief, to do good work, you must have good tools. Translated into the terms of today, this means that the expert or specialist must be preferred to the untrained. ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer

... prevent the leaks falling on ourselves, our food or our clothing and bags. And so every tin was brought into use and hung from leaky spots, while water chutes came into their own. As the stove cooled so did the drip cease, and in no prehistoric cavern did more stalactites and ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard

... intimacy with the fairest and best part of the creation, are as far above those of the ordinary, unmitigated undergraduate life, as the British citizen of 1860 is above the rudimentary personage in prehistoric times from whom he has been gradually improved up to his present state of enlightenment and perfection. But each state has also its own troubles as well as its pleasures; and, though the former are a price which no decent ...
— Tom Brown at Oxford • Thomas Hughes

... old prehistoric myth," Ernestine proclaimed from safety, "that once he, that wretched semblance of a man-thing prone in the dirt, captained ...
— The Little Lady of the Big House • Jack London

... that a history of such a subject would be a life study in itself, and be quite barren of results except those of a professional kind. It would include the characteristics of carvings from every country under the sun, from the earliest times known. Engravings on boars' tusks found in prehistoric caves, carvings on South Sea Island canoe paddles, Peruvian monstrosities of terror, the refined barbarity of India and China, the enduring and monumental efforts of Egyptian art, and a hundred others, down to times and countries more within reach. In fact, ...
— Wood-Carving - Design and Workmanship • George Jack

... I am living stands almost on the spot where some particularly precious skeletons, attributed to prehistoric men and women, were dug up about twenty years ago, when the late Mr. Christy was here busily disturbing the soil that had been allowed to remain unmoved for ages. The overleaning rock, which is separated from my temporary home only by a few yards, probably afforded ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker

... possessed a considerable number of implements of their own manufacture, some of wood and others of bone, etcetera, which proved them to be possessed of much ingenuity and taste. The description of their weapons reminds one of those remains of prehistoric man which we find treasured in our museums, for they had arrows barbed with horn, flint, iron, and copper, spears shod with bone, daggers of horn and bone, and axes made of brown or grey stone. The latter were from six to ...
— The Pioneers • R.M. Ballantyne

... Semitic affinity, as Professor Adolf Erman showed years ago. The anatomical examination by Professor Elliot Smith of a large number of skeletons, dated by careful excavations, has given us a further clue. There is a prehistoric race found in the earliest cemeteries—neither Negroid nor Asiatic in characteristics. In the late predynastic and the early dynastic periods, when the great development began, this primitive race had become modified by an infiltration of broad-headed people from the ...
— The Egyptian Conception of Immortality • George Andrew Reisner

... think of this desert as a sea of sand, but as an interminable green plain with only occasional, very slight undulations. The Arabs call it Bahr, the sea, and the caravans proceed in an absolutely straight line, taking their direction from artificial mounts which rise above the plain like prehistoric graves. They indicate that once upon a time a village existed here, and that, therefore, a well or a spring must be nearby. But the mounts often are six, ten or even twelve hours distant the one from the other. The villages have disappeared, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke

... prepared to seize, repair, reconstruct, work, and fight such an important element in the new social machinery as a railway system. Such a business, in the next European war, will be hastily entrusted to some haphazard incapables drafted from one or other of the two prehistoric arms.... I do not see how this condition of affairs can be anything but transitory. There may be several wars between European powers, prepared and organized to accept the old conventions, bloody, vast, distressful encounters ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells

... pomp and pride mainly through the sublime accident of the Crusades. That black cone also rises above the crowd with something of the immemorial majesty of a pyramid; and rightly so, for it is typical of the prehistoric poetry by which these places live that some say it is a surviving memory of Ararat ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton

... unmistakable ape, or an unmistakable man, and not something between the two. One could fill a museum with discarded missing links; and yet men refuse to learn caution, and repeat their shoutings every time a new find is announced. It will be instructive to pass in review a few of the more famous prehistoric remains of man which have at one time and another been declared undeniable proof of a development, through intermediate stages, of the human body from ...
— Evolution - An Investigation and a Critique • Theodore Graebner

... he writes, "is like a great museum of prehistoric fauna. The house roofs, denuded of tiles and the joists left naked, have tilted forward on to the sidewalks, so that they hang in mid-air like giant vertebrae.... One house only of the whole village ...
— Kings, Queens And Pawns - An American Woman at the Front • Mary Roberts Rinehart

... the Scottish law courts for Tynedale held their sittings. The mound called the Mote Hill, near the river, marks the spot where, in all probability, the ancient Celtic inhabitants met together to administer the rude justice of prehistoric times, and to make the laws of their little settlement, which grew to much greater proportions in later years. In fact, it is supposed that the Kirkfield marks the site of a church which stood in the midst of the ...
— Northumberland Yesterday and To-day • Jean F. Terry

... 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 ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher

... criticising. The hypocrisy of the thing sickens me; no one ever looks any question straight in the face, denuded of its man-made sophistries. And few realise that a woman is a creature to be fought for—it is prehistoric instinct, and if she can't be obtained in fair fight then you secure her by strategy. And if a man cannot keep her once he has secured her, it is up to him. If I had a wife, I should take good care that she desired no other man—but if I bored her, or was a cold and ...
— The Price of Things • Elinor Glyn

... impatient curiosity impelled our steps; crackling and rattling, our feet were trampling on the remains of prehistoric animals and interesting fossils, the possession of which is a matter of rivalry and contention between the museums of great cities. A thousand Cuviers could never have reconstructed the organic remains deposited in ...
— A Journey to the Interior of the Earth • Jules Verne

... legs of their trousers, grew pale, and glanced apprehensively at each other. If ever Socialism did come to pass, they evidently thought it very probable that they would have to walk about in a sort of prehistoric highland costume, without any ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell

... argument, and the difficulty here is that there is no way of testing which is a master race except by asking which is your own race. If you cannot find out, (as is usually the case,) you fall back on the absurd occupation of writing history about prehistoric times. But I suggest quite seriously that if the Germans can give their philosophy to the Hottentots there is no reason why they should not give their sense of superiority to the Hottentots. If they can see such fine shades between the Goth and the Gaul, there is no reason why similar shades ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various

... products of modern civilisation. But in the whole room there are but three things living: myself, my dog, and the fire in my grate. And of these lives the third is very much the most intensely vivid. My dog is descended, doubtless, from prehistoric wolves; but you could hardly decipher his pedigree on his mild, domesticated face. My dog is as tame as his master (in whose veins flows the blood of the old cavemen). But time has not tamed fire. Fire is as wild a thing as when Prometheus snatched it from the empyrean. Fire in my grate is as fierce ...
— Yet Again • Max Beerbohm

... accepted that, wherever our Pomeranian originated, he is a Northern or Arctic breed. Evidence goes to show that his native land in prehistoric times was the land of the Samoyedes, in the north of Siberia, along the shores of the Arctic Ocean. The Samoyede dog is being gradually introduced into England, and good specimens can be frequently seen at the principal shows. The similarity between our ...
— Dogs and All About Them • Robert Leighton

... are very slightly changed From the semi-apes who ranged India's prehistoric clay; Whoso drew the longest bow, Ran his brother down, you know, As we run ...
— Departmental Ditties and Barrack Room Ballads • Rudyard Kipling

... subject of domes in general. The idea had come from the bees, from the shape of their hives. Prehistoric man used for a dwelling-place a hut shaped like a hive, as well as an imitation of a bird's nest. In formal architecture, the dome showed itself early. The Greeks knew it; but they didn't use it much. The greatest users of the dome were the Byzantines. It was all dome with them. ...
— The City of Domes • John D. Barry

... skin of a freshly killed black cat was applied as a remedy for an ailment that had refused to yield to the prescribed drugging! And only a few years ago some one applied to the Liverpool museum for permission to touch a sick child's head with one of the prehistoric ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking

... distributed over all northern Asia, Europe, and North America. The mammoth was larger than the elephant of the present day, had tusks as much as 13 feet long, a thick fur suitable for a cold climate, and quite a luxuriant mane on the back of the head and neck. That prehistoric man was a contemporary of the mammoth is proved by ancient rude drawings ...
— From Pole to Pole - A Book for Young People • Sven Anders Hedin

... of the tuatara (Hatteria) lizard, the unique species of an ancient family now surviving only in New Zealand. The swan is identical with an extinct species found in caves and kitchen-middens in New Zealand, which was contemporaneous with the prehistoric Maoris and was largely used by them for food. One of the finest of the endemic flowering plants of the group is the boraginaceous "Chatham Island lily" (Myositidium nobile), a gigantic forget-me-not, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 1 - "Chtelet" to "Chicago" • Various

... were called to the great house (now finished—recall your earlier letters) to see a royal kava. This function is of rare use; I know grown Samoans who have never witnessed it. It is, besides, as you are to hear, a piece of prehistoric history, crystallised in figures, and the facts largely forgotten; an acted hieroglyph. The house is really splendid; in the rafters in the midst, two carved and coloured model birds are posted; the only thing of the sort I have ever ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... the virtuoso. Berlioz, I suspect, was a magnified virtuoso. His orchestral technique is supreme, but his music fails to force its way into my soul. It pricks the nerves, it pleases the sense of the gigantic, the strange, the formless, but there is something uncanny about it all, like some huge, prehistoric bird, an awful Pterodactyl with goggle eyes, horrid snout and scream. Berlioz, like Baudelaire, has the power of evoking the shudder. But as John Addington Symonds wrote: "The shams of the classicists, the spasms of the romanticists have alike to be abandoned. Neither on ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker

... possible. By pouring on water from time to time the soft wood was to be ultimately wet through, the wicks leading the moisture constantly inward, and in the end the great block must inevitably be split into halves. It is the prehistoric method, and there never was any other way of cleaving very hard stone until gunpowder first brought in blasting. It is slow, but ...
— The Heart of Rome • Francis Marion Crawford

... is one, so is humanity. Its unity of species points to some degree of communication through a long prehistoric past. Universal history is not entitled to the name unless it embraces all parts of the earth and all peoples, whether savage or civilized. To fill the gaps in the written record it must turn to ethnology and geography, which by tracing the distribution and movements of primitive peoples ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple

... the bush and the men of the north looked down at the brief history written in the mud—a story only a week old, yet ancient as human life itself—primitive man and ferocious brute destroying each other as in the prehistoric days when saber-toothed tiger and troglodyte hunted and slew for the right to live. And as it had been then, so it was now. The living read the tale of tragedy and passed on, leaving the bones behind them. ...
— The Pathless Trail • Arthur O. (Arthur Olney) Friel

... one day she couldn't bear it any more. Without saying a word to any one she went to London. A thick orange fog greeted her, a wonderful, mysterious fog, creating immense prehistoric silhouettes, a fog which freed you from old accustomed sights and sounds so that your individuality seemed at last to be released and to belong ...
— Balloons • Elizabeth Bibesco

... revels in a pedigree, The sprouting of a noble tree 'Way back in prehistoric times; And for the "Family Record" true Of scions all that ever grew Would give a ...
— Poems - Vol. IV • Hattie Howard

... 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 ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel

... was regarded as a madman, and used as a madman; but my opinion is the more philosophical—that, by an arrest of development, into the middle of the ladies and gentlemen of the family came a veritable savage, and one out of no darkest age of history, but from beyond all record—out of the awful prehistoric times." ...
— Donal Grant • George MacDonald

... occasionally impose upon and dispossess the green woodpecker. In the process of nature in such cases the stronger of the two birds would retain the nest, and thus assume the duties of foster-parent. Starting from this reasonable premise concerning the prehistoric cuckoo, it is not difficult to see how natural selection, working through ages of evolution by heredity, might have developed the habitual resignation of the evicted bird, perhaps to the ultimate entire abandonment of the ...
— My Studio Neighbors • William Hamilton Gibson

... happens that the modern notion indicates the continuance of conceptions more ancient than a mass of connected ideas which have wholly perished. The former endure, because, being simple in their nature, they represent a human impulse, an impulse which animated the prehistoric ancestor as well as the modern descendant. When this tendency ceases to operate, the plant suddenly withers. So it is that an elimination of these beliefs, which formed the science of remote antiquity, has taken place in our own century, which has worked a change greater ...
— Current Superstitions - Collected from the Oral Tradition of English Speaking Folk • Various

... people who have left evidence of their existence near Canterbury belong to the Palaeolithic Age; but as it is not known whether this remote prehistoric population occupied the actual site, or even whether the valley may not have then been a salt-water creek, it is wiser in this brief sketch to pass over these primitive people and the lake-dwellers who, after a considerable ...
— Beautiful Britain • Gordon Home

... ft. above Lake Michigan on a deep layer of sand, once the bed of the lake, which in prehistoric time extended several miles farther inland. The city has a splendid harbour which has been extended by the use of the two rivers—the Grand and the Little Calumet—both of which have been dredged and enlarged. The heart of the town is at the intersection of Broadway and Fifth ...
— The Greatest Highway in the World • Anonymous

... not a page of the whole volume but is full of interest, and the many splendid photographs of the existing and prehistoric mammals add greatly to the value of the book. One lays it down with reluctance and with the feeling that the author has added largely to the sum of ...
— Kings in Exile • Sir Charles George Douglas Roberts

... remains the decoration. This is the work of patient after-touches which perfect the curves and leave on the soft loam a series of stippled impressions similar to those which the potter of prehistoric days distributed over his big-bellied jars with the ball of ...
— The Glow-Worm and Other Beetles • Jean Henri Fabre

... consort of Baal, was the great female deity of the ancients, and so an appeal to the moon for the purpose of removing interferences with beauty, such as skin excrescences, was quite appropriate. Moon worship was practised in this country in prehistoric times. Bailey, in his Etymological Dictionary, under article "Moon," says, "The moon was an ancient idol of England, and worshipped by the Britons in the form of a beautiful maid, having her head covered, with two ears standing out. The common people ...
— Folk Lore - Superstitious Beliefs in the West of Scotland within This Century • James Napier

... interest we look upon the first germs of art among these primitive men. They have left its rude sketches on pieces of ivory and flakes of bone, and carvings, of the animals contemporary with them. In these prehistoric delineations, sometimes not without spirit, we have mammoths, combats of reindeer. One presents us with a man harpooning a fish, another a hunting-scene of naked men armed with the dart. Man is the only animal who has the propensity of depicting ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper

... nature, the touch and shadow vanished simultaneously. But the hillock had lost its attractions for me, and, rising hastily, I dashed down the decline and hurried homewards. I discovered no reason other than solitude, and the possible burial-place of prehistoric man, for the presence of the occult; but the next time I visited the spot, the same thing happened. I have been there twice since, and the same, always the same thing—first the shadow, then the touch, then the shadow, then the arrival of some form or ...
— Byways of Ghost-Land • Elliott O'Donnell

... no need to insist further on the point that the task of the Grail hero is in this special respect no mere literary invention, but a heritage from the achievements of the prehistoric ...
— From Ritual to Romance • Jessie L. Weston

... VALLEY which mainly centres round Hankow because the vast alluvial plains of the lower reaches of this greatest of rivers were once the floor of the Yellow Sea, the upper provinces of Hupeh, Hunan, Kiangsi being the region of prehistoric forests clothing the coasts, which once looked down upon the slowly- receding waste of waters, and which to-day contain all the coal and iron. Hitherto every one has always believed that the Yang ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale

... had been roasted in 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 ...
— Spinifex and Sand - Five Years' Pioneering and Exploration in Western Australia • David W Carnegie

... the military situation which (apart from geographical conditions) is the same everlasting situation that has prevailed since the times of Hannibal and Scipio, and further back yet, since the beginning of historical record—since prehistoric times, for that matter; by the conventional expressions of horror at the tale of maiming and killing; by the rumours of peace with guesses more or less plausible as to its conditions. All this is made legitimate by the consecrated custom of writers in such time as ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad

... as do many other eminent scientists, that nuts were a staple in the diet of primitive man. Professor Elliot, of Oxford University, in his work, "Prehistoric Man," calls attention to the fact that in the early ages of his long career, man was not a flesh eater; and the famous Professor Ami, editor of the Ethnological History of North America, and other paleontologists, ...
— Northern Nut Growers Report of the Proceedings at the Twenty-First Annual Meeting • Northern Nut Growers Association

... cultivation nor selection has been carried on for a sufficiently long time. In North America, however, where there was evidently a very ancient if low form of civilisation, as indicated by the remarkable mounds, earthworks, and other prehistoric remains, maize was cultivated, though it was probably derived from Peru; and the ancient civilisation of that country and of Mexico has given rise to no fewer ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace

... back that the words were Egyptian or a kindred Hamite tongue. Consulting the college library, he had discovered that the ancient Egyptian name for Atlantis was Kami. That Theni was the name of a very ancient prehistoric city, its location unknown. That pehu meant an overflowed land; un, uncultivated land; and the word tash, tribe; the others he was unable ...
— Chit-Chat; Nirvana; The Searchlight • Mathew Joseph Holt

... 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 to have names. Big Bone ...
— Blue Ridge Country • Jean Thomas

... dhivara, 'fisherman') are the same caste as the Kahars, or 'bearers'. The boats used by them are commonly 'dugout' canoes, exactly like those used in prehistoric Europe, ...
— Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official • William Sleeman

... you like it?' And he asked me, as he often does, 'Why do you do it?' He seems to have some sense missing in his make-up. He can't coordinate the actions of men. Perhaps that is the key to his character. D'Aubigne, who used to paint, as a student, vast canvases depicting Prehistoric Man fighting a mammoth, or Perseus chopping up Gorgons, said it was a good plate and wished he had gone in for etching. I fear he is like many painters—he doesn't realize the drudgery and technical labour involved. Let me know your ...
— Aliens • William McFee

... 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 in history ...
— Letters from France • C. E. W. Bean

... with the cross. To the naked pride of the new men nations simply were not. The struggling populations of two vast provinces were simply carried away like slaves into captivity, as after the sacking of some prehistoric town. France was fined for having pretended to be a nation; and the fine was planned to ruin her forever. Under the pressure of such impossible injustice France cried out to the Christian nations, one after another, and by name. Her last cry ...
— The Crimes of England • G.K. Chesterton

... courtyard were designed by him. In the centre stands a bronze statue of Louis XIV as a Roman conqueror, by Coysevox, which once stood on the Place de Greve before the old Hotel de Ville. The museum, which contains a collection,[233] historic and prehistoric, relating to the city of Paris, is especially rich in objects, all carefully labelled, illustrating the great Revolution, and is of profound interest to students of that period: the second floor is devoted to the last siege of ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey

... has studied English and American literature. Dr. Daniel Wilson, since he has made Canada his home, has continued to illustrate the versatility of his knowledge and the activity of his intellect by his works on 'Prehistoric Man,' and 'Recollections of Edinburgh,' besides his many contributions to the proceedings of learned societies and the pages of periodicals, Mr. Fennings Taylor, an accomplished official of Parliament, has given us a number of gracefully-written ...
— The Intellectual Development of the Canadian People • John George Bourinot

... nervous. Not at all. I never was. What I know is, there are two sides to everybody, and one's always the business side. The other may be anything. Sometimes it's good, sometimes it's bad. Sometimes it cares for a woman, sometimes it's a collector of art things, Babylonian glass, and Etruscan toys and prehistoric dolls. It may gamble, or drink, or teach a Sunday school, or read Dante, or shoot, or fish, or anything that's of no use. But one side's always ...
— The Primadonna • F. Marion Crawford

... greenish undulating waves; And huge saurian and reptilian shapes Amphibious and pelagic, swim and crawl, Cleaving the waters with tremendous strokes, Writhing with foul contortions in disport, Splashing and laving in the thermal seas Of the remote and prehistoric past; Thou who hast seen them fail and pass away Shalt also ...
— Mountain idylls, and Other Poems • Alfred Castner King

... to think of some far-off race keeping track of the earth's progress. If Redell was right, it might even have started in prehistoric time; a brief survey, perhaps once a century or even further spaced, then gradually more frequent observation as cities appeared ...
— The Flying Saucers are Real • Donald Keyhoe

... better the pictures. Years before good picture-books there were good stories, and these, whether they be the classics of the nursery, the laureates of its rhyme, the unknown author of its sagas, the born story-tellers—whether they date from prehistoric cave-dwellers, or are of our own age, like Charles Kingsley or Lewis Carroll—supply the text to spur on the artist to ...
— Children's Books and Their Illustrators • Gleeson White

... perfection. Midway between the river and the high hills was a narrow ridge which ran parallel with the river. This natural backbone of land reached its greatest height on Mr. LeMonde's farm. But the highest point of all had been increased in size by artificial means. In prehistoric times a race of people living in this region had added earth to this hill until they had made an almost circular mound, which became a conspicuous object in the valley. Mr. LeMonde's father, who bought the farm many years before, called the hill "Mount Pisgah." He was a descendant of the ...
— The Kentucky Ranger • Edward T. Curnick

... editors would be sending lady 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 ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke

... bend in its middle just sufficient to shut out the view of one end of it from the other. This defile was simply a cleft in the stupendous mass of rock that formed a great spur of the mountain on the left-hand side of the path, and was undoubtedly the result of some terrific natural convulsion of prehistoric times, which had rent the living rock asunder, leaving a vertical wall on either side, the indentations in the one wall accurately corresponding to the projections on the other. At the lower extremity—that ...
— The Cruise of the Thetis - A Tale of the Cuban Insurrection • Harry Collingwood

... its vivid light upon the physical history of the Roman plain; and the researches of the archaeologist have brought into the daylight of modern knowledge, and by a wider comparison and induction have invested with a new significance, the prehistoric objects, customs, and traditions which make primeval Rome and the surrounding sites so fascinating to the imagination. But these results are not to be found in the books which the English visitor usually consults. In the following chapters I have endeavoured to supply ...
— Roman Mosaics - Or, Studies in Rome and Its Neighbourhood • Hugh Macmillan

... him, if she chooses, the same prematrimonial purity that he exacts of her. But questions of this kind are never settled on the basis of equity. The sentiments by which they are determined have long and intricate roots in the prehistoric past; and we are yet very far from the millennial condition of absolute equality between the sexes. According to Herbert Spencer there is a hereditary transmission of qualities which are confined exclusively ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen

... early settlers in this country must have experienced something of this dread of apprehension from the Indians. Many African tribes now live in the same state of constant fear of the slave-catchers or of other hostile tribes. Our ancestors, back in prehistoric times, must have known fear as a constant feeling. Hence the prominence of fear in infants and children when compared with the youth or the grown person. Babies are ...
— Squirrels and Other Fur-Bearers • John Burroughs

... straight above them; her nose was straight, at first glance, but showed a slight arch in profile; her mouth was a little too full, and her chin slightly retreated. She came in late, and stopped at the door of the office, and bent upon Cornelia a look at once prehistoric and fin de siecle, which lighted up with astonishment, interest and sympathy, successively; then she went trailing herself on up stairs with her strange Sphinx-face over her shoulder, and turned upon Cornelia as long as she ...
— The Coast of Bohemia • William Dean Howells

... sing you 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, Of the ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 8, August, 1880 • Various

... 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 most ...
— The Dawn of Reason - or, Mental Traits in the Lower Animals • James Weir

... continuity about any subject in which he happened to be interested. He listened to no comment; he demanded no criticism. If he conversed about his parishioners or his fellow-parsons or his country neighbours, it was not uninteresting; but when it was genealogy or folklore or prehistoric remains, it was merely a tissue of scraps, clawed out of books and imperfectly remembered. Howard found himself respecting the Vicar more and more; he was so kindly, so unworldly, so full of perfectly guileless satisfaction: he was conscious too of his own irrepressibility. He said ...
— Watersprings • Arthur Christopher Benson

... first words with which the world greeted her, or should I say civilization did; already both her native mountains and the cavern of oranges belonged to a prehistoric age. 'Why don't you ask him to come this afternoon?' Allegre's voice suggested gently. 'He knows the ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad

... customary fashion, with the walls—white, and 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 regimental badge ...
— The Luck of the Mounted - A Tale of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • Ralph S. Kendall

... are sea-plant life and its animal evolution. The piers, arches, reeds and columns bear legendary decorative motifs of the transition of plant to animal life in the forms of tortoise and other shell motifs;—kelp and its analogy to the prehistoric lobster, skate, crab and sea urchin. The water-bubble motif is carried through all vertical members which symbolize the Crustacean Period, which is the ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber

... knowledge, other than what is to be found in the yellowed pages of his manuscript; and these afford no evidence that this "Gentleman Adventurer" possessed any information derived from books regarding those relics of a prehistoric people, which are widely scattered throughout the Middle and Southern States of the Union and constitute the grounds on which our century has applied to the race ...
— Prisoners of Chance - The Story of What Befell Geoffrey Benteen, Borderman, - through His Love for a Lady of France • Randall Parrish

... ever be covered with snow. It was in connection with this very mountain that we first conceived the idea of making the ascent of Ararat. Here and there, on some of the most prominent peaks, we could distinguish little mounds of earth, the ruined watch-towers of the prehistoric Hittites. ...
— Across Asia on a Bicycle • Thomas Gaskell Allen and William Lewis Sachtleben

... but without ever getting quite to the source. His mind must have been open to impressions very early, but it must also have closed early, for the politics of the day have little interest for him, while he is fiercely excited about questions which are entirely prehistoric. He shakes his head when he speaks of the first Reform Bill and expresses grave doubts as to its wisdom, and I have heard him, when he was warmed by a glass of wine, say bitter things about Robert Peel and his abandoning ...
— Round the Red Lamp - Being Facts and Fancies of Medical Life • Arthur Conan Doyle

... serves several purposes and indicates several objects, the 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

... and culture had achieved a relatively high position, they were still purely local, and from this fact subject to violent shocks. Modern research has shown the existence in prehistoric or, at least, protohistoric times of many peoples who, in given localities, achieved a high and peculiar culture, a culture that was later so completely destroyed that it is difficult to say what, if any, ...
— African and European Addresses • Theodore Roosevelt

... one other thing to do," said Darwin. "Munchausen claims to be able to speak Simian. He might seek out some of the prehistoric monkeys and ...
— A House-Boat on the Styx • John Kendrick Bangs

... Mound Builders is known as Fort Ancient. Its colossal size, ingenuity in design and perfection in construction give it first rack in interest among all prehistoric fortifications, and it represents the highest point attained by this lost race in their earth-work structures. Why make a journey to Europe to see the old forts when we have in Ohio one so old we have no record of its building? Truly we were more impressed while rambling over this old ...
— See America First • Orville O. Hiestand

... very wide, but it was generally exact; indeed, the accuracy with which he grasped facts that belonged to the realm of history proper was sometimes in strange contrast to the fanciful way in which he reasoned from them, or to the wildness of his conjectures in the prehistoric region. For metaphysics strictly so called he had apparently little turn— his reading did not go far beyond those companions of his youth, Aristotle and Bishop Butler; and philosophical speculation interested him only so far as it bore on Christian doctrine. Neither, in spite of his eminence ...
— William Ewart Gladstone • James Bryce

... missionaries, the only philanthropic workers who earned my admiration; and they, of course, belonged to a properly organised corps, working on salary) know something of these people; but the big, bright, busy world of cleanly, educated folk know less of them than they know of prehistoric fauna. ...
— The Record of Nicholas Freydon - An Autobiography • A. J. (Alec John) Dawson

... that," Roderick said, discreetly; perhaps he knew that his opinions about prehistoric man ...
— Prince Fortunatus • William Black

... the thousands there had a knife in evidence, but the arena guards had magazine rifles well as Khyber tulwars. Nobody else wore firearms openly. Some of the arena guards bore huge round shields of prehistoric pattern of a size and sort he had never seen before, even in museums. But there was very little that he was seeing that night of a kind that ...
— King—of the Khyber Rifles • Talbot Mundy

... Deluge. "Without either stem or stern, quite round like a shield"—so Herodotus described the kuffah of his day;2() so, too, is it represented on Assyrian slabs from Nineveh, where we see it employed for the transport of heavy building material;(3) its form and structure indeed suggest a prehistoric origin. The kuffah is one of those examples of perfect adjustment to conditions of use which cannot be improved. Any one who has travelled in one of these craft will agree that their storage capacity is immense, for their circular form and steeply curved side allow every inch of ...
— Legends Of Babylon And Egypt - In Relation To Hebrew Tradition • Leonard W. King

... a special attraction apart from scenery and geology. In the museum was the skeleton of a prehistoric man that had been found in the breccia of the neighbourhood, associated with the remains of the rhinoceros, elephant, and other extinct mammals. My father's sketch-book contains drawings of these bones and of ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley

... elaborately in a separate book, entitled "The Testimony of Tradition," worked it out and fortified it with an array of arguments philological, historical, topographical, and traditional. He claims to have established that the fairies of the Celtic and Teutonic races are neither more nor less than the prehistoric tribes whom they conquered and drove back, and whose lands they now possess. He identifies these mysterious beings with the Picts of Scotland, the Feinne of the Scottish Highlands and of Ireland, and the Finns and Lapps of Scandinavia. And he suggests ...
— The Science of Fairy Tales - An Inquiry into Fairy Mythology • Edwin Sidney Hartland

... on, are the so-called 'production of thousands of things by the Three.' This was the time when people lived in eaves or wandered in the wilderness, and knew not the use of fire. As it belongs to the remote past of the prehistoric age, previous to the reigns of the first three Emperors, the traditions handed down to us are neither clear nor certain. Many errors crept into them one generation after another, and consequently no one of the statements given in the ...
— The Religion of the Samurai • Kaiten Nukariya

... to be loved, and not enslaved. My consideration for the welfare of our women exceeds that for our men, because man is so constituted as to be more able to take care of himself." So much was this old prehistoric chief away ahead of his dark, heathen times. But this masculine weakness of his was nearly his undoing with his warriors, as ...
— Skookum Chuck Fables - Bits of History, Through the Microscope • Skookum Chuck (pseud for R.D. Cumming)

... what were the relations between man and the gods we must first notice the conceptions of the nature of man. In the prehistoric days of Egypt the position and direction of the body was always the same in every burial, offerings of food and drink were placed by it, figures of servants, furniture, even games, were included in the grave. It must ...
— The Religion of Ancient Egypt • W. M. Flinders Petrie

... naturally, are veiled in obscurity. We can trace the system in full work at the outset of the Empire; we cannot trace the steps by which it grew. Evidences of something that resembles town-planning on a rectangular scheme can be noted in two or three corners of early Italian history—first in the prehistoric Bronze Age, then in a very much later Etruscan town, and thirdly on one or two sites of middle Italy connected with the third or fourth century B.C. These evidences are scanty and in part uncertain, ...
— Ancient Town-Planning • F. Haverfield

... lives in these asylums, and 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 ...
— Worldly Ways and Byways • Eliot Gregory

... far back—I suppose some people will say "not in history," for the time I am speaking of is what would be called "prehistoric"—when the great Lords from the planet Venus came to our globe to guide and train the humanity which just then had come to the birth, we find a group of Teachers and Rulers, not belonging to our humanity at all, but, as I said, ...
— London Lectures of 1907 • Annie Besant

... a weird scene; an anachronism. To the south, the nineteenth century was reeling off the few years of its last decade; here flourished man primeval, a shade removed from the prehistoric cave-dweller, forgotten fragment of the Elder World. The tawny wolf-dogs sat between their skin-clad masters or fought for room, the firelight cast backward from their red eyes and dripping fangs. The woods, in ...
— The Son of the Wolf • Jack London

... Company owned a square league of prehistoric titles on the western slope of the foot-hills,—land enough for the preservation of a natural park within its own boundaries where fire-lines were cleared, forest-trees respected, and roads kept up. Wherever the company erected a board fence, gate, ...
— A Touch Of Sun And Other Stories • Mary Hallock Foote

... edition of that work a chapter on 'History and Fable' was inserted because of its bearing on the author's general views 'regarding the elementary commixture of fable and fact in ages that may be called prehistoric.' In this chapter the author made a rapid survey of the 'kinship between history and fable,' tracing it through the times of myth and romance to the period of the historic novel. 'At their birth,' he says, 'history and fable were twin sisters;' and again, 'There is always a certain quantity ...
— Studies in Literature and History • Sir Alfred Comyn Lyall

... reverence for law is made the first principle of man's social training. The moment he lifts his individual will against the embodied experience of humanity, he is once more the elemental beast of the prehistoric jungle—the Hunter. ...
— The Man in Gray • Thomas Dixon

... The new troops, who have arrived too late, are doing their best to find some more of this silver by digging up gardens and breaking down houses. Marchese P——, of the Italians, who always pretends that he has been a mining engineer in some prehistoric period of his existence, calls it ...
— Indiscreet Letters From Peking • B. L. Putman Weale

... not be some prehistoric sort of creature like the mammoths of the north pole or the dinosauras, or huge flying-lizard?" ...
— The Boy Aviators' Polar Dash - Or - Facing Death in the Antarctic • Captain Wilbur Lawton

... fault, if one has that disposition. There was once a man who, not being able to find any other fault with his coal, complained that there were too many prehistoric toads in it. ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... indeed, over the course of anthropology and prehistoric archaeology, much of which lies in the years since 1870, and nearly all of it since 1815, the first thing which strikes us now is the frequency and delicacy of its response to contemporary thoughts and aspirations. A ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various

... an armoured train in the railway-yard, with a Maxim and a Hotchkiss. We have a Nordenfeldt, a couple of Maxims more, four seven-pounder guns of almost prehistoric date, slow of fire, uncertain as regards the elevating-gear, and, I tell you plainly, as dangerous, some of 'em, to be behind as to be in front of! One or two more we've got that were grey-headed in the seventies. By the Lord! I wish one or two Whitehall heads I ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves

... connect the divine power with visible objects; the allegorical laudation and deification of eminent men leads to a completed polytheism. That this and not (mono-) theism was the original form of religion, Hume assumes to be a fact for historical times, and a well-founded conjecture for prehistoric ages. Those who hold that humanity began with a perfect religion find it difficult to explain the obscuration of the truth, endow immature ages with a developed use of the reason which they can scarcely ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg

... is now held by some and good authorities that the prehistoric paintings of cave-dwelling man had also a ritual origin; that is, that the representations of animals were intended to act magically, to increase the "supply of the animal or help the hunter to catch him." But, as this question is still pending, I prefer, tempting though ...
— Ancient Art and Ritual • Jane Ellen Harrison

... 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 off those clinging to him. Out of the melee ...
— The Fighting Edge • William MacLeod Raine

... were built of the sod itself, and were only the unescapable ground in another form. The roads were but faint tracks in the grass, and the fields were scarcely noticeable. The record of the plow was insignificant, like the feeble scratches on stone left by prehistoric races, so indeterminate that they may, after all, be only the markings of glaciers, and not a record of ...
— O Pioneers! • Willa Cather

... history of medicine will show three fairly well defined periods. The beginning of the first is hidden in the uncertain days of prehistoric ages and the period continues down to early Christian times—perhaps the end of the second century when Galen died. The second period extends from this time to the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries, and the third period embraces the last three or four centuries. The second period was almost wholly ...
— Three Thousand Years of Mental Healing • George Barton Cutten

... shelf in my home along with Albrecht, McCarrison, and Howard. Price, a dentist with strong interests in prevention, wondered why his clientele, 1920s midwest bourgeoisie, had terrible teeth when prehistoric skulls of aged unlettered savages retained all their teeth in perfect condition. So he traveled to isolated parts of the Earth in the early 1930s seeking healthy humans. And he found them—belonging to every race ...
— Organic Gardener's Composting • Steve Solomon

... 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 ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various

... 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 is called ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton

... the tribal conscience, and who was eager to see society organized, off-hand, on what he thought a rational method. In the absence of history, we must fall back on that branch of hypothetics which is known as prehistoric science. We must reconstruct the Romance of the First Radical from the hints supplied by geology, and by the study of Radicals at large, and of contemporary savages among whom no Radical reformer has yet appeared. In the following little apologue no ...
— In the Wrong Paradise • Andrew Lang

... of our worthy ancestors. Prehistoric man lived thickly on the moor, and as no one in particular has lived there since, we find all his little arrangements exactly as he left them. These are his wigwams with the roofs off. You can even see his hearth ...
— Hound of the Baskervilles • Authur Conan Doyle

... shore to-day and addressing the real sea in these words and accents! Fancy the poet doing it! The mood and the mentality are prehistoric. I would not mind Mr. Noyes putting himself lyrically into the woaded skin of our ancestors. But I do think he might have got a little nearer the mark in indicating the "throne of her fame." Because I expect Mr. Noyes knows as well ...
— Books and Persons - Being Comments on a Past Epoch 1908-1911 • Arnold Bennett

... on everything useful. Anyway, from the sound 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 tail ...
— Alton of Somasco • Harold Bindloss

... He told Captain Hotham to anchor alongside of him in the narrowest part of the channel, and fight his vessel till she sank. "I have taken the depth of the water," added he, "and when the VENERABLE goes down, my flag will still fly." And you observe this is no naked Viking in a prehistoric period; but a Scotch member of Parliament, with a smattering of the classics, a telescope, a cocked hat of great size, and flannel underclothing. In the same spirit, Nelson went into Aboukir with six colours flying; so that even if five were shot away, it should not be imagined he had struck. ...
— Virginibus Puerisque • Robert Louis Stevenson

... magnificently with the dignity of the situation. But are we quite sure that the poor minister made the river rise? That is the question the tenant ought to consider. Was it the landlord's fault? I repeat that rivers will rise at times, generally at storm times. The Nile and the Tigris used to rise in prehistoric times. It is a way rivers have. I really think that it will be as well to say no more about it. Try to smooth down the ruffled feathers and forget. It may not have been his fault; and, anyhow, we shall be saying ...
— Mushrooms on the Moor • Frank Boreham

... furnished the subjects to which the reader's attention is chiefly directed. Such styles as those of India, China and Japan, which lie quite outside this series, are noticed much more briefly; and some matters—such, for example, as prehistoric architecture—which in a larger treatise it would have been desirable to include, have been entirely left out for ...
— Architecture - Classic and Early Christian • Thomas Roger Smith

... man groaned. "I know," he mourned. "I've lost my birth-land; it's as extinct as the prehistoric lizards whose bones we used to find sticking in the old gully banks on Table Mesa. By the way, that reminds me: are there any of those giant fossils left? I was telling Professor Anners about them the other day, and he ...
— The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush • Francis Lynde

... seemingly sheer declivity; the even sky-line was indented in two places—one where it was cracked into a fanciful resemblance to a human profile, the other where it was curved like a bowl. Need it be said that one was distinctly recognized as the silhouette of a prehistoric giant, and that the other was his drinking-cup; need it be added that neither lent the slightest human suggestion to the solitude? A toy-like pier extending into the loch, midway from the barren shore, only heightened the desolation. And ...
— The Bell-Ringer of Angel's and Other Stories • Bret Harte

... of Coins has 200,000 specimens, many very old and rare; and that of Northern Antiquities illustrates with great fulness the prehistoric and Roman periods. The Cabinet of Engravings is extremely interesting, and has some specimens of very great value; but it is open to the general public for a few hours on Sunday only, and even then the greater part of its collections is ...
— In and Around Berlin • Minerva Brace Norton

... an announcement was made in a weekly paper that some prehistoric remains had been found near the Church of San Francisco, Florence. The note was reproduced in an evening paper and in an antiquarian monthly with words in both cases implying that the locality of the find was San Francisco, California. It is a common mistake of those who have heard of Grolier bindings ...
— Literary Blunders • Henry B. Wheatley

... country to be seen from the summit; the beauty of its steep and precipitous canons; the Indian pottery; the mysterious deposit of oyster shells, high on the mountain-side, proving conclusively that Ajedrez Mountain had risen from the depths of some prehistoric sea; ending with a vivid description of the obstacles to be surmounted by each of the alternate projects for the wagon road up to the mine, ...
— Copper Streak Trail • Eugene Manlove Rhodes

... 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 our neolithic ancestors ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 15, 1916 • Various

... be stated here that the copper, so often mentioned in The Kalevala, when taken literally, was probably bronze, or "hardened copper," the amount and quality of the alloy used being not now known. The prehistoric races of Europe were ...
— The Kalevala (complete) • John Martin Crawford, trans.

... cart-horses at work in one ploughed field. They were all in pairs, harnessed to harrows, rollers, and ploughs, and out of the twenty, nineteen were dark-coloured. Huge great horses, broad of limb, standing high up above the level surface of the open field, great towers of strength, almost prehistoric in their massiveness. Enough of them to drag a great cannon up into a battery on the heights. The day before, passing the same farm—it was Sunday—a great bay cart-horse mare standing contentedly in a corner of the yard looked round to ...
— Field and Hedgerow • Richard Jefferies

... been noted that the extinction of species has been preceded by a great increase in their size, for example, the case of the great reptilia of prehistoric time. That possibly represented pituitary stabilization, and so an abeyance of the ability to vary, necessary for fresh adaptation to a changing environment. Indeed, endocrine instability appears the fundamental condition ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.

... scarf, and cap, socks more like anklets for holes, and a pair of split boots; bedraggled hat, frowsy jacket, blouse and skirt, squashy boots, and perhaps a patchy "pelerine" or mangy "boa"—such is accepted as the natural costume for the heirs of all the ages. Prehistoric man, roaming through desert and forest in his own shaggy pelt, was infinitely better clad. So is the aboriginal African with a scrap of leopard skin, or a single bead upon a cord. To judge by clothing, ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson

... Crane. "And as for their being bald, this was one time, Mart, when those two phenomenal heads of hair our two little girl-friends are so proud of didn't make any kind of hit at all. They probably regard that black thatch of Peg's and Dot's auburn mop as relics of a barbarous and prehistoric age—about as we would regard the hirsute hide of ...
— Skylark Three • Edward Elmer Smith

... mood that comes once to every man—to some men more frequently—a mood in which the prehistoric memory of the soul is stirred, and an intolerable longing arises for the ancient nomadic freedom of the race; when the senses surfeited by civilization cry out for the strong meat of the jungle—for the ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow

... half extended on either side, with the hands raised to a level with the shoulders. They wear around their loins skirts of red sunlight, adorned with sunbeams. They have ear pendants, bracelets, and armlets, blue and red (of turquoise and coral), the prehistoric and emblematic jewels of the Navajo. Their forearms and legs are black, showing in each a zigzag mark to represent lightning on the surface of the black rain clouds. In the north god these colors are, for artistic reasons, reversed. Each bears, attached to his ...
— The Mountain Chant, A Navajo Ceremony • Washington Matthews

... I seen a stranger sight than that of a swarm of Penguins at work. They looked like a brood of prehistoric birds of enormous size, with wings too short for flight. Most unwieldy birds they were, driven by, or more accurately, driving beginners in the art of flying; but they ran along the ground at an amazing speed, zigzagged this way and that, ...
— High Adventure - A Narrative of Air Fighting in France • James Norman Hall

... ropes, and rings. Even this make-shift was short-lived, for in 1868 the class of '70 erected a "gymnasium in embryo" described by a graduate of '75 as "two uprights with a cross-beam and ropes dangling from eye-bolts—the remains of some prehistoric effort towards muscular development," which was to be found "back of the Museum";—otherwise the old North Wing. Mark Norris, '79, thus pictures the comparatively primitive state of athletics in the University of ...
— The University of Michigan • Wilfred Shaw



Words linked to "Prehistoric" :   unstylish, unfashionable, past, prehistoric culture, colloquialism, prehistory



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