"Saurian" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... more freely on the trunk than that of any fish of our days. To his great delight, when the first living specimen of the gar-pike, or modern Lepidosteus, was brought to him, it moved its head to the right and left and upward, as a Saurian does and as no ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz
... place, above the red sandstone, shews the recurrence of circumstances favourable to animal life, and we accordingly find in it not only zoophytes, conchifera, and a few tribes of fish, but some faint traces of land plants, and a new and startling appearance—a reptile of saurian (lizard) character, analogous to the now existing family called monitors. Remains of this creature are found in cupriferous (copper-bearing) slate connected with the mountain limestone, at Mansfield and Glucksbrunn, in Germany, which may ...
— Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation • Robert Chambers
... are admittedly of higher rank than common fishes. They dominated until reptiles appeared, when they mostly gave place to (or, as the derivationists will insist, were resolved by divergent variation and natural selection into) common fishes, destitute of reptilian characters, and saurian reptiles—the intermediate grades, which, according to a familiar piscine saying, are "neither fish, flesh, nor good red-herring," being eliminated and extinguished by natural consequence of the struggle for existence which Darwin ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... him; if this were not to be obtained, he wore himself out with a nervous impatience—"beating his dear head," as Mrs Browning describes it, "against the wall, simply because he sees a fly there, magnified by his own two eyes almost indefinitely into some Saurian monster." Now he was well and even exultant—"nothing ever," he declared, "made him so happy before." Of advancing years—Browning was now nearly forty-nine—the only symptoms were that he had lost his youthful slightness of figure, ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden |
