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More "Insect" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... were woven in bright and vari-colored patterns; the figures of men and animals were depicted upon them and the bas-relief or fresco could be replaced upon the wall by a picture in tapestry. The dyes were mainly vegetable, though the kermes or cochineal-insect, out of which the precious scarlet dye was extracted, was brought from the neighborhood of the Indus. So at least Ktesias states in the age of the Persian empire; and since teak was found by Mr. Taylor among the ...
— Babylonians and Assyrians, Life and Customs • Rev. A. H. Sayce
... without mouths, who fed on the fragrance of fruits and flowers. Among the lower animals, he enumerates horned horses furnished with wings; the mantichora, with the face of a man, three rows of teeth, a lion's body, and a scorpion's tail; the basilisk, whose very glance is fatal; and an insect which cannot live except in the midst of the flames. But notwithstanding his credulity and his want of judgment, this elaborate work contains many valuable truths and much entertaining information. The prevailing character of ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... (for that was her name). Though her modesty would only suffer her to admit his eager kisses, her violent love made her more than passive in his embraces; and she often pulled him to her breast with a soft pressure, which though perhaps it would not have squeezed an insect to death, caused more emotion in the heart of Joseph than the closest ...
— Joseph Andrews Vol. 1 • Henry Fielding
... me, misguided insect that I was, to leave that life without so much as a grain of gold-dust to supply my needs in this one? And what am I going to be next? I suppose you can tell me. If it is anything good, I'll hang myself this moment from the very perch on which ...
— Works, V3 • Lucian of Samosata
... that we had hoped for was only an exchange of tormentors: our new assailant, the horse-fly, or bull-dog, ranged in the hottest glare of the sun, and carried off a portion of flesh at each attack. Another noxious insect, the smallest, but not the least formidable, was the sand-fly known in Canada by the name of the brulot. To such annoyance all travellers must submit, and it would be unworthy to complain of that grievance in the pursuit of ...
— Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea, in the Years 1819-20-21-22, Volume 1 • John Franklin
... and to Concord Church he, like the rest of mankind who accepted a material universe, remained always an insect, or something much lower — a man. It was surely no fault of his that the universe seemed to him real; perhaps — as Mr. Emerson justly said — it was so; in spite of the long-continued effort of a lifetime, he perpetually ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... the daughter of Legend. In the world of creatures, as in the world of men, the story precedes and outlives history. There are many instances of the fact that if an insect attract our attention for this reason or that, it is given a place in those legends of the people whose last care ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... been introduced, and prove most injurious, as they increase with unusual rapidity. The domestic bee was brought to Van Diemen's Land from England by Dr. T. B. Wilson, R.N., in the year 1834; and so admirably does the climate of this island suit this interesting insect that in the first year sixteen swarms were produced from the imported hive! Since that time they have been distributed all over the island, and have been sent to all the adjoining colonies; all those in Australia having ...
— The History of Tasmania, Volume I (of 2) • John West
... found only in America and chiefly in the tropics, are insect-eating birds, generally having a grayish colored plumage, sometimes adorned with a slight crest or a coronal mark of orange, red, or yellow. Only two of the species found in North America are gaudy in plumage, the Vermilion, and ...
— The Bird Book • Chester A. Reed
... disclosing, inside the cracked font, a white pudding-basin, inside which, again, reposed a species of beetle known as a "devil's coach-horse." The Archdeacon, peering in and evidently recognizing the insect and its popular designation, and looking much shocked, exclaimed with some warmth: "Dear me! I should scarcely have expected to find that thing in ...
— Grain and Chaff from an English Manor • Arthur H. Savory
... realize how unpopular such a view will be to many women. But the mother, through her closer connection with the child, must bear the deeper responsibility for its birth, a responsibility that can be traced back and back to the very lowest forms of life. The insect mother does not fail to place her offspring—the children she will never see—in a position chosen most carefully to ensure their future protection, and to achieve this good frequently she sacrifices her life. Shall the human mother, then, be held guiltless when she ...
— Women's Wild Oats - Essays on the Re-fixing of Moral Standards • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... beautiful illusion by that infinite variety of decoration in which she revels, binding tree to tree in a tangle of anaconda-like lianas, and dwindling down from these huge cables to airy webs and hair-like fibres that vibrate to the wind of the passing insect's wing. ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson
... to the peak, the lawns And winding glades high up like ways to Heaven, The slender coco's drooping crown of plumes The lightning flash of insect and of bird, The lustre of the long convolvuluses That coil'd around the stately stems, and ran Ev'n to the limit of the land, the glows And glories of the broad belt of the world, All these he saw; but what he fain had ...
— Beauties of Tennyson • Alfred Tennyson
... common name for hemipterous insects of the family Cimicidae, of which the best-known example is the house bug or bed bug (Cimex lectularius). This disgusting insect is of an oval shape, of a rusty red colour, and, in common with the whole tribe to which it belongs, gives off an offensive odour when touched; unlike the others, however, it is wingless. The bug is provided with a proboscis, which when at rest lies along the inferior ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 3 - "Brescia" to "Bulgaria" • Various
... up my shorts—but I preferred the icy wind to the stinking cattle-stalls and insect-infested straw below. We were packed in like sardines. Men were retching and groaning, cussing and growling. At last I found a coil of rope. It was a huge coil with a hole in the centre—something like a large bird's nest. I got into this hole and ...
— At Suvla Bay • John Hargrave
... which must fall ere the family may venture into the land of swamps and agues. He looks out upon the flower-beds, glowing with life and quivering in the sunshine, and listens to the incessant shrill-voiced cicada piping from the tree-tops, while the insect-drone, in the heated, languid air, seems to speak of an unending summer; but as "all things come to him who waits," so at length come ...
— Plantation Sketches • Margaret Devereux
... the fibre spun by the larvae or caterpillars of a moth, Bombyx mori, as they enter the chrysalis stage of existence. The silk-growing industry includes the care and feeding of the insect in all its stages. The leaves of the white mulberry-tree (morus alba) are the natural food of the insect, and silk-growing cannot be carried on in regions where this tree does not thrive. Not all areas that produce the mulberry-tree, however, will also grow ...
— Commercial Geography - A Book for High Schools, Commercial Courses, and Business Colleges • Jacques W. Redway
... of sprouting grass! In a blur the violets pass. Whispering from the wildwood come Mayflower's breath and insect's hum. Roses carpeting the ground; Thrushes, orioles, warbling sound: Swing me low, and swing me high, To the warm clouds ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V2 • Charles H. Sylvester
... to be gratified with the interest they expressed in me; but then it is really a bore, and one does not know what to do or say. I felt like the hippopotamus, or— to use a more modest illustration—like some strange insect imprisoned under a tumbler, with a dozen eyes watching whatever I did. By and by, Mr. Jones, the sculptor, relieved me by standing up against the mantel-piece, and telling an Irish story, not to two or three auditors, but to the whole ...
— Passages From the English Notebooks, Complete • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... possibly the rain, which has beaten upon them through unnumbered years. It is no wonder that this is a lifeless solitude; there is nothing here capable of sustaining the life of even the meanest insect. Let us return to the ship, my friends, and hasten over this part of our journey; we shall meet with nothing worthy of interest until we reach the Pole, which itself will probably prove to be merely an undistinguishable spot in just such a ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... birds loose at Portland, I wrote a letter to the Portland Advertiser, recommending the English sparrow as an insect destroyer, especially in the early spring months when the native birds are away on their migrations. This idea of picking off insects with birds commended itself to the municipal authorities of Boston and other large ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine
... while an ashy whiteness and a general smell of dampness were the abiding peculiarities of the apartment. The eyes of the owner had become possessed of a microscopic power of discovering the minutest speck that might have been envied by any scientific observer of insect life. ...
— Little Tora, The Swedish Schoolmistress and Other Stories • Mrs. Woods Baker
... region of the insect body, bearing the true legs and wings: made up of three rings, named in order, pro-, meso-, and meta-thorax: when the pro-thorax is free as in Coleoptera, Orthoptera, and Hemiptera, the term thorax is commonly used in descriptive work for that segment only: in Odonata, where the prothorax ...
— Explanation of Terms Used in Entomology • John. B. Smith
... case. I also had a revolver with 500 cartridges, a number of hunting-knives, skinning implements, wire traps of several sizes for capturing small mammals, butterfly-nets, bottles for preserving reptiles in alcohol, insect-killing bottles (cyanide of potassium), a quantity of arsenical soap, bone nippers, scalpels, and all other accessories necessary for the collection of natural-history specimens. There were in my outfit three sets of photographic cameras, and a dozen dry plates, ...
— An Explorer's Adventures in Tibet • A. Henry Savage Landor
... another time—moving spectral over the black surface of the water—they would try the lake for a change, and catch a perch as they had caught the mouse. Their catholic digestions were equally tolerant of a rat or an insect. And there were moments, proud moments, in their lives, when they were clever enough to snatch a small bird at roost off his perch. On those occasions the sense of superiority which the large bird feels every where over the small, warmed their cool blood, and set them screeching ...
— Man and Wife • Wilkie Collins
... he is only seeking to increase his own pleasure. As a matter of fact, we have here an instructive solution of the secret nature of all instinct which almost always, as in this case, prompts the individual to look after the welfare of the species. The care with which an insect selects a certain flower or fruit, or piece of flesh, or the way in which the ichneumon seeks the larva of a strange insect so that it may lay its eggs in that particular place only, and to secure which it fears neither labour nor danger, is ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... woven silk, of the finest texture, that looked perfect to the eye, when placed under the microscope appeared rough, coarse, and uneven—rather like a common door-mat, in fact; but the wing of a fly, the hair of a mouse, the eye of an insect, the scale of a fish, the dust of a moth's wing, the leaf of a plant—anything made by God, and owing nothing to the hand of man—the more it was magnified, the more beauties you discovered. Examine by the microscope the humblest and most minute of God's creations, and you will always ...
— Charlie Scott - or, There's Time Enough • Unknown
... be said to be a purely vegetable production when found in the combs, for after being collected by the insect by means of its proboscis, it is transmitted into what is called the honey bag, where it is elaborated, and, hurrying homewards with its precious load, the bee regurgitates it into the cell of the honey comb. It takes a great many ...
— A Description of the Bar-and-Frame-Hive • W. Augustus Munn
... were responsible for a good many things. They were their masters' dressers, so to speak, in that they were required to carry supplies of the greasy clay or earth with which the blacks anoint their bodies to ward off the sun's rays and insect bites; and beside this, woe betide the wives if corroboree time found them without an ample supply of coloured pigments for the decoration of their masters' bodies. One of the principal duties of the women-folk, however, was the provision of roots for ...
— The Adventures of Louis de Rougemont - as told by Himself • Louis de Rougemont
... the wood's insect-hum Invites ye; expand there, like buds in the sun; Leave schools and their studies for days that will come, And let thy first lessons from nature be won! Teachings hath nature most sage and most sweet— The music that swells in the tree-linnet's psalms; So taught, ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 455 - Volume 18, New Series, September 18, 1852 • Various
... silken goods had a world-wide fame; and the silk-worm has been cultivated there probably from the earliest days, when it was surreptitiously introduced into Europe. Groves of mulberry trees were grown especially for sericulture in the irrigated provinces of the South, the care of the insect being undertaken by the women, while the men were employed on tasks more suitable to their strength. Native-grown spun and woven silk forms such an important part in the national costumes of the people that it has attained to great perfection without attracting ...
— Spanish Life in Town and Country • L. Higgin and Eugene E. Street
... The little insect pests came around in such numbers that it was quickly decided a night ashore would not be comfortable. Nick was the only one ...
— Motor Boat Boys Down the Coast - or Through Storm and Stress to Florida • Louis Arundel
... are not so troublesome or so venomous as in many parts of the torrid zone. The white ant is perhaps as destructive as any other insect, and the greatest precaution hardly preserves one from ...
— Lives of the Three Mrs. Judsons • Arabella W. Stuart
... boys and girls at play," all mingled together pleasantly. The children were too young to explain to themselves the pleasant influences about them, of the soft sunshine and the cloudless sky, seen through the network of branches overhead, of the balmy air and sweet murmurs of bird and insect life rejoicing in the spring-time; ...
— "Us" - An Old Fashioned Story • Mary Louisa S. Molesworth
... shears, in insect guise, Behold us at your revel! That we may tender, filial-wise, Our homage ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... suffice, but can be best interpreted on the view that the male is heterozygous for a factor which is not found in the female. Such a case is that recently described by Morgan in America for the pomace fly (Drosophila ampelophila). Normally this little insect has a red eye, but white eyed individuals are known to occur as rare sports. Red eye is dominant to white. In their relation to sex the eye colours of the pomace fly {116} are inherited on the same lines as the grossulariata and lacticolor patterns of ...
— Mendelism - Third Edition • Reginald Crundall Punnett
... bare pate of a Bald Man; who, endeavouring to crush it, gave himself a heavy blow. Then said the Fly jeeringly: "You wanted to revenge the sting of a tiny insect with death; what will you do to yourself, who have added insult to injury?" {The Man} made answer: "I am easily reconciled to myself, because I know that there was no intention of doing harm. But you, worthless insect, and one ...
— The Fables of Phdrus - Literally translated into English prose with notes • Phaedrus
... there came from one side or the other a volley of rifle shots, that sounded like the crack of stock-whips, and once or twice a bullet passed over their heads with the buzz as of some vicious stinging insect. Here and there, where the bottom lay in soft and clayey soil, they walked through mud that came half-way up to the knee, and each foot had to be lifted with an effort, and was set free with a smacking suck. Elsewhere, if the ground was gravelly, the rain which for two days previously ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... There are also extensive coal-beds; hence the leading industries are mining and iron working. The eastern portion is a level, treeless plain, adapted for grazing. Agriculture, carried on with irrigation, suffers from insect plagues like the Colorado potato beetle. The climate is dry and clear, and attracts invalids. Acquired partly from France in 1804, and the rest from Mexico in 1848; the territory was organised in 1861, and admitted to the Union in 1876. The capital is Denver (107). ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... by which nature uses her materials to found islands in the midst of oceans like the Pacific, is a curious study. The insect that forms the coral rock, must be an industrious little creature, as there is reason to think that some of the reefs that have become known to navigators within the last sixty or seventy years, have since been converted into islands bearing trees, by their ...
— Afloat And Ashore • James Fenimore Cooper
... toward the east, with angry impatience one marks the unchequered darkness; the crowing of a cock, that sound of glee during day-time, comes wailing and untuneable—the creaking of rafters, and slight stir of invisible insect is heard and felt as the signal and type of desolation. Clara, overcome by weariness, had seated herself at the foot of her cousin's bed, and in spite of her efforts slumber weighed down her lids; twice or thrice she shook it off; but at length she ...
— The Last Man • Mary Shelley
... Joe suddenly awoke. The night was dark, yet it was lighter than when he had fallen asleep. A pale, crescent moon shown dimly through the murky clouds. There was neither movement of the air nor the chirp of an insect. Absolute silence prevailed. ...
— The Spirit of the Border - A Romance of the Early Settlers in the Ohio Valley • Zane Grey
... immature persons come together under the stimulus of no more complementary impulse than the blind force of chemical attraction and cohesion—an instinct, which we share in common with every form of life, from the lowest insect to man—shall they be compelled to abide by that act "as long as they both shall ...
— Sex=The Unknown Quantity - The Spiritual Function of Sex • Ali Nomad
... the settlement of Alpine was reported "devastated" and for a couple of years at Ramah the crops were so taken by grasshoppers that the men had to go elsewhere for work to secure sustenance for their families. St. Johns, Erastus and Luna all suffered severely at times from insect devastation. Winters were of ...
— Mormon Settlement in Arizona • James H. McClintock
... continued his maneuvers with so much patience, that Djalma, still sleeping, but no longer able to bear this vague, annoying sensation, raised his right hand mechanically to his face, as if he would have brushed away an importunate insect. But he had not strength to do it; almost immediately after, his hand, inert and heavy, fell back upon his chest. The Strangler saw, by this symptom, that he was attaining his object, and continued to stroke, with the same address, ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... certainly changed, and the naturalist of yesterday makes upon us the impression of a legendary being. I refer to the person described in George Sand's romances, marching vigorously over hills and valleys in search of a rare insect, which he pricked with delight, or of a plant difficult to reach, which he triumphantly dried and fixed on a leaf of paper bearing the date of the discovery and the name of the locality. A herbarium became a ...
— The Industries of Animals • Frederic Houssay
... Madelons. I beg you will send me the "Holly-tree," if it at all resemble this, for it must please me. I have never seen it. I love this sort of poems, that open a new intercourse with the most despised of the animal and insect race. I think this vein may be further opened; Peter Pindar hath very prettily apostrophised a fly; Burns hath his mouse and his louse; Coleridge, less successfully, hath made overtures of intimacy to a jackass, therein ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas
... busy hum when it alighted and began to work. The little ball of moist clay was laid on the edge of the cell, and then spread out around the circular rim by means of the lower lip guided by the mandibles. The insect placed itself astride over the rim to work, and, on finishing each addition to the structure, took a turn round, patting the sides with its feet inside and out before flying off to gather a fresh pellet. It worked only in sunny weather, and the ...
— The Naturalist on the River Amazons • Henry Walter Bates
... the same frog edge himself softly toward a white butterfly that was flitting about near the edge of the stream. He saw the frog lean forward, and then the butterfly vanished. It seemed like a piece of magic. The child knew that the frog had caught the butterfly, but how? The fluttering insect was more than a foot from the frog when it disappeared, and he was sure that the frog had neither jumped nor snapped at the butterfly. What he saw, he saw as plainly as you see your hand in the ...
— Types of Children's Literature • Edited by Walter Barnes
... stone being on view at Delphi long after the Christian era. Now, such stories of divine feats of swallowing and disgorging are very common, I show, in savage myth and popular Marchen. The bushmen have Kwai Hemm, who swallows the sacred Mantis insect. He is killed, and all the creatures whom he has swallowed return to light. Such stories occur among Australians, Kaffirs, Red Men, in Guiana, in Greenland, and so on. In some cases, among savages. ...
— Modern Mythology • Andrew Lang
... hill two or three inches above the surrounding level. On the top of the hill thus formed, plant twelve or fifteen seeds; and, when the plants are well up, thin them out from time to time as they progress in size. Finally, when all danger from bugs and other insect depredators is past, leave but two or three of the most stocky and promising plants to a hill. When the growth is too luxuriant, many practise pinching or cutting off the leading shoots; and, when the young fruit sets in too great numbers, a portion should ...
— The Field and Garden Vegetables of America • Fearing Burr
... sent home a portrait on which he was engaged. It was one of his best pictures; and the person for whom it was painted, lost for a while in admiration of its beauty, noticed at last that a fly, which had settled upon the forehead, remained there motionless. He stepped up to brush the insect away, and found that it was a part of the picture. This story has, since Holbein's time, been told of many painters,—among others, of Benjamin West. Such a piece of mere imitation should have added nothing to the reputation of a painter of Holbein's powers; but the story was ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... be made familiar with the best modes of planting and cultivating the various crops, and with the diseases and insect enemies which threaten them; the selection of seed; the rotation of crops, and many other practical things applying directly to their home life. School gardens of vegetables and flowers constitute another center of interest ...
— New Ideals in Rural Schools • George Herbert Betts
... growth Heartwood and sapwood Weight, density, and specific gravity Color Cross grain Knots Frost splits Shakes, galls, pitch pockets Insect injuries Marine wood-borer injuries Fungous injuries Parasitic plant injuries Locality of growth Season of cutting ...
— The Mechanical Properties of Wood • Samuel J. Record
... him as if to see what devil was whispering in his ear. He was alone. No one was there or near. Around him rose the silent bowers, and scarcely the voice of a bird or the hum of an insect disturbed the deep tranquillity. But a cloud seemed to rest on the fair and pensive brow of Ferdinand Armine. He threw himself on the turf, leaning his head on one hand, and with the other plucking the wild flowers, which he as hastily, ...
— Henrietta Temple - A Love Story • Benjamin Disraeli
... fig tree. All locusts come from eggs. In first coming from the egg, they are not winged, but look like grub worms. After a while these grubs cast off their skins, and become locusts. Now, there is a kind of locust which is seventeen years in changing from the egg to the full insect It is this kind which is so numerous every seventeen years. If you go into the field when they are coming from the ground, you will see the grass ...
— The Summer Holidays - A Story for Children • Amerel
... cabinets that Mary so well remembered; and the silk patchwork sofa-cover, the old piano, and Miss Faithfull's arm chair by the fire, her little table with her beautiful knitting, and often a flower or insect that she was copying; for she still drew nicely; and she smiled and consented, as Louis pulled out her portfolios, life-long collections of portraits of birds, flowers, or insects. Her knitting found a sale at the workshop, where the object was ...
— Dynevor Terrace (Vol. I) - or, The Clue of Life • Charlotte M. Yonge
... he had a feeling of commiseration rather than of relief. Worthless clay that the man was, it seemed petty now to have been so disturbed over his living on, for such satisfactions as his poor fragment of life gave him. Like the insignificant insect which preyed on its own petty world, he had, maybe, his rights to his prey. At all events, now that he had ceased to trouble, it was foolish to have any feeling of disgust, of reproach, of hatred. God and life had made him so, as God and life ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... disdain on all, Who listens less to Collins than St. Paul. Atheists have been but rare; since nature's birth, Till now, she-atheists ne'er appear'd on earth. Ye men of deep researches, say, whence springs This daring character, in timorous things? Who start at feathers, from an insect fly, A match for nothing—but the Deity. But, not to wrong the fair, the muse must own In this pursuit they court not fame alone; But join to that a more substantial view, "From thinking free, to be free agents too." They strive with their own hearts, and keep them ...
— The Poetical Works of Edward Young, Volume 2 • Edward Young
... Francos: did not God design That e'en the insect should his life enjoy? Indeed, his joyous song of gratitude Doth only cease that he may puncture make To meet requirements which God hath ordained. Hence it were well to nature's laws obey, For e'en this insect, as it wings its way, Hath fond desire, ...
— 'A Comedy of Errors' in Seven Acts • Spokeshave (AKA Old Fogy)
... intended that they should be destroyed, and the brutes themselves prey upon one another, and it is well for themselves and the world that they do so. What would be the state of things if every insect, bird, and worm were left to ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... expounding the political history of the intervening two centuries, drew an apt image from a seed eaten by insect parasites. First there is the original seed, ripening vigorously enough. And then comes some insect and lays an egg under the skin, and behold! in a little while the seed is a hollow shape with an active grub inside that has eaten out its substance. And then comes some secondary parasite, ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... and cedar, around which climb vines loaded with grapes. Near the sea-shores, the pine, both black and white, becomes exceedingly common, while the smaller plains and hills are covered with that peculiar species of the prickly pear upon which the cochineal insect feeds. All round the extinguished volcano, and principally in the neighbourhood of the hill Nanawa Ashtajueri e, the locality of our settlement upon the banks of the Buonaventura, the bushes are covered with a very superior ...
— Travels and Adventures of Monsieur Violet • Captain Marryat
... mine ever intentionally kill any living thing whatever—not even a louse, flea, or the most minute insect. ...
— The Siksha-Patri of the Swami-Narayana Sect • Professor Monier Williams (Trans.)
... discretion. While Dr. Carpenter likens the human organism "to a keyed instrument, from which any music it is capable of producing can be called forth at the will of the performer," he compares "a bee or any other insect to a barrel organ, which plays with the greatest exactness a certain number of tunes that are set upon it, but can do nothing else." Instinct cannot learn from experience, or improve by practice; ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... sometimes much modified in form and product, and sometimes entirely extirpated. [Footnote: Man has not only subverted the natural numerical relations of wild as well as domestic quadrupeds, fish, birds, reptile, insect, and common plants, and even of still humbler tribes of animal and vegetable life, but he has effected in the forms, habits, nutriment and products of the organisms which minister to his wants and his pleasures, changes which, more than any other manifestaion of human ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh
... passed. We had gathered, damp and disconsolate, in the only available shelter of the camp. For the long summer had ended unexpectedly to us; we had one day found ourselves caught like the improvident insect of the child's fable with gauzy and unseasonable wings wet and bedraggled in the first rains, homeless and hopeless. The scientific Lacy, who lately spent most of his time as a bar-room oracle in the settlement, was away, and from our dripping canvas we could see Captain Jim returning ...
— The Heritage of Dedlow Marsh and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... not fear him,—this creature in gray. She stood stock-still, and stared at him, so near that he could see her wink her starry eyes, with the white rings round them. She stamped one hoof, kicked an insect from her ear with another, snorted again, wheeled around, and at last broke away for the thick shelter of the trees, lightly and swiftly as a breeze which skims from one thicket ...
— Camp and Trail - A Story of the Maine Woods • Isabel Hornibrook
... cease at death, or is there some 'better thing reserved' also for them? They may be said to have a shadow or imitation of morality, and imperfect moral claims upon the benevolence of man and upon the justice of God. We cannot think of the least or lowest of them, the insect, the bird, the inhabitants of the sea or the desert, as having any place in a future world, and if not all, why should those who are specially attached to man be deemed worthy of any exceptional privilege? When we reason about such a subject, ...
— Phaedo - The Last Hours Of Socrates • Plato
... all about, and I don't like that Hallam," she said. "He's an insect. A crawling one with slimy feet, and to pin a big diamond in front of one as he does is horrible taste. Give me the book, Nellie. It reads like our cypher. Oh, yes. 'Instructions to hand. No legal improvements done and claim unrecorded. Will relocate.' Now we've nothing ...
— Alton of Somasco • Harold Bindloss
... of the fulfilment of the most yearning expectation and fulfilled desire will seem but as the winking of an eyelid when we get to estimate duration by the same scale by which He estimates it, the scale of Eternity. The ephemeral insect, born in the morning and dead when the day fades, has a still minuter scale than ours, but we should not think of regulating our estimate of long and short by it. Do not let us commit the equal absurdity of regulating the march of His providence by the swift beating ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. John Chapters I to XIV • Alexander Maclaren
... Who their every purpose ruleth, Tends it in its first conception, Baffles wholly and destroys it, Or unto completion brings it, Bringeth out its faults or virtues, Shewing where its merit lieth. Then shall every beast that liveth, Every bird and every reptile, Every fish and every insect, Raise their own peculiar voices— (Terrible, or sweet, or puny); And will testify their own way Of the powers of King Nimaera, Who their being's fire feedeth, Gives them space for life and glory, With that ...
— A Leaf from the Old Forest • J. D. Cossar
... Every sensible person considers Katterfelto as a puppy, an ignoramus, a braggadocio, and an impostor; notwithstanding which he has a number of followers. He has demonstrated to the people, that the influenza is occasioned by a small kind of insect, which poisons the air; and a nostrum, which he pretends to have found out to prevent or destroy it, is eagerly bought of him. A few days ago he put into the papers: "It is true that Mr. Katterfelto has always wished for cold and rainy weather, in order to destroy the pernicious ...
— Travels in England in 1782 • Charles P. Moritz
... in life but that of eating. It is a stomach that loads itself, digests and goes on adding to its reserves. Next comes the pupa, armed for the exit even as the primary larva was equipped for entering. When the deliverance is accomplished, the perfect insect appears, busy with its laying. The Anthrax cycle is thus divided into four periods, each of which corresponds with special forms and functions. The primary larva enters the casket containing provisions; the secondary larva consumes ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... from a lesser to a greater perfection, or vice versa, I do not mean that he is changed from one essence or reality to another; for instance, a horse would be as completely destroyed by being changed into a man, as by being changed into an insect. What I mean is, that we conceive the thing's power of action, in so far as this is understood by its nature, to be increased or diminished. Lastly, by perfection in general I shall, as I have said, mean reality in other words, each thing's essence, ...
— Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata - Part I: Concerning God • Benedict de Spinoza
... fill!) He has all he can do to understand life and forgive its existence. As a rule he digs himself in with his dream and with the arts, until the time comes when he has got used to his incarnation, and the grub has achieved its agonizing passage from larva to winged insect. What a need he has for peace and meditation during these April days so full of the trouble of maturing life! But they come after him to the bottom of his burrow, look him up, drag him from the dark while still so tender in ...
— Pierre and Luce • Romain Rolland
... Insect damage was reported as serious by eight reporters, as slight or occasional by six, and of yearly occurrence by nearly all. Others reported damage as serious ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Thirty-Fourth Annual Report 1943 • Various
... rocky places, and is very common. It is esteemed for food by the Aborigines; is much infested by an Isopode named NETTONG, or TOORT, by the natives. This insect inserts its whole body into a pocket by the side of the anus, separated from the gut by a thin membrane. The fish to which the insect adheres are yellow; those which are free from it are of a beautiful purple colour. Caught by hook, 12th ...
— Journals Of Expeditions Of Discovery Into Central • Edward John Eyre
... streets, and were in danger of being compelled to learn the art in the Reform School if they did not acquire it as a means of keeping their hands from mischief at home. In the next town, the librarian mounted and identified all the moths and butterflies that the children brought to her and gave them insect books. In the library beyond, the children were formed into a branch of the Flower Mission in the nearest city. The club need not always be for reading, but must depend on the resources or interests of the boys and girls. ...
— Library Work with Children • Alice I. Hazeltine
... could behold her without horror. She had twelve feet, six long necks, and at the end of each a monstrous head, whose mouth was provided with a triple row of teeth.' Another ancient writer says, that these heads were those of an insect, a dog, a lion, a whale, a Gorgon, and a human being. Virgil has in a great measure followed the description given by Homer. Between Messina and Reggio there is a narrow strait, where high crags project into the sea on each side. The part on the Sicilian side was called Charybdis, and that on the ...
— The Metamorphoses of Ovid - Literally Translated into English Prose, with Copious Notes - and Explanations • Publius Ovidius Naso
... tree-tops, and launching out in the high regions of the air, uttered from time to time a wild shrill scream, or hollow booming sound, as they suddenly descended to pounce with wide-extended throat upon some hapless moth or insect that sported all unheeding in mid-air, happily unconscious of the approach ...
— Lost in the Backwoods • Catharine Parr Traill
... sun, the god of their worship, a core of seeds and fringe of petals representing their best effort to mimic the flaming disc and far-flung corona of the sun. Man seeks less ardently, and so more ineffectively in his will and imagination to image God. In the reverent study of insect and animal life we gain some hint of what we have been and what we may become—something corresponding to the grub, a burrowing thing; to the caterpillar, a crawling thing; and finally to the butterfly, a ...
— Architecture and Democracy • Claude Fayette Bragdon
... deliberately shakes off his own personality, as a butterfly abandons the shelter of its chrysalis, and, following the example of that gorgeous insect, he flies away on the wings of his dreams in the guise of the being that he ...
— Poise: How to Attain It • D. Starke
... at Varallo and Crea, are still in their own way of considerable importance. The first chapel with which we need concern ourselves is numbered 4, and shows the Conception of the Virgin Mary. It represents St. Anne as kneeling before a terrific dragon or, as the Italians call it, "insect," about the size of a Crystal Palace pleiosaur. This "insect" is supposed to have just had its head badly crushed by St. Anne, who seems to be begging its pardon. The text "Ipsa conteret caput tuum" is written outside the chapel. The figures have no artistic interest. As regards dragons ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... we have reached the stage which our friend Mr. Taylor has reached with his almonds or which the almond growers have reached. We are still in our infancy and have many problems and the problems multiply as days and years go by. Fifteen years ago we would have said there were no insect pests nor any diseases of the pecan. They have certainly made themselves known in the last few years. We have a good many insect pests and we have some fungus. We do not believe that any of these will be beyond the skill of scientific investigation and ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the 13th Annual Meeting - Rochester, N.Y. September, 7, 8 and 9, 1922 • Various
... crystallisations are formed with equal quickness, and they are no sooner produced than they are destroyed together. Notwithstanding the sulphureous exhalations from the lake, the quantity of vegetable matter generated there and its heat make it the resort of an infinite variety of insect tribes, and even in the coldest days in winter numbers of flies may be observed on the vegetables surrounding its banks or on its floating island's, and a quantity of their larvae may be seen there sometimes encrusted and entirely destroyed by calcareous matter, which ...
— Consolations in Travel - or, the Last Days of a Philosopher • Humphrey Davy
... gradually through those Beings which are of a Superior Nature to him; since there is an infinitely greater space and room for different Degrees of Perfection, between the Supreme Being and Man, than between Man and the most despicable Insect. This Consequence of so great a variety of Beings which are superior to us, from that variety which is inferior to us, is made by Mr. Lock, in a Passage which I shall here set down, after having premised, ...
— The Spectator, Volumes 1, 2 and 3 - With Translations and Index for the Series • Joseph Addison and Richard Steele
... collection Balzac made many rather heavy jokes, calling the Count a "Gringalet sphynx-lepidoptere-coleoptere-ante-diluvien,"[*] but in an anxious desire to ingratiate himself with Madame Hanska's family, he often despatched magnificent specimens of the insect species from Paris ...
— Honore de Balzac, His Life and Writings • Mary F. Sandars
... brother, resuming his cigar. "I always do. It is much more agreeable for all parties. But I don't know how it is that a man's younger brothers are always so rapid and unreasonable in their movements. Instead of saving that unhappy insect, you have precipitated its fate. Poor thing—and it had no soul," said the intruder, with a tone of pathos. The scene altogether was a curious one. Snugly sheltered from the draught, but enjoying the coolness of the atmosphere which it produced, lay the figure on the sofa ...
— The Perpetual Curate • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... then with a noiseless motion passing on to the next. Another whitethroat follows immediately, and there is not a leaf forgotten nor a creeping thing that can hide from them. Every tree and every bush is visited by these birds, and others of the insect-feeders; the whole summer's day they are searching, and the caterpillar, as it comes down on a thread, slipping from the upper branches, only drops into their beaks. Birds, too, that at other periods feed on grain and seed, now live themselves, ...
— The Toilers of the Field • Richard Jefferies
... attention which began to be occupied by three great subjects of which we shall hear much anon—Fever, Tsetse, and "the Lake." Fever he considered the greatest barrier to the evangelization of Africa. Tsetse, an insect like a common fly, destroyed horses and oxen, so that many traders lost literally every ox in their team. As for the Lake, it lay somewhat beyond the outskirts of his new district, and was reported terrible ...
— The Personal Life Of David Livingstone • William Garden Blaikie
... brain hardens or softens, is what the object of reading is. It is not, I venture to think, what used to be called the pursuit of knowledge. Of course, if a man is a professional teacher or a professional writer, he must read for professional purposes, just as a coral insect must eat to enable it to secrete the substances out of which it builds its branching house. But I am not here speaking of professional studies, but of general reading. I suppose that there are three motives ...
— From a College Window • Arthur Christopher Benson
... annual visitor, the swallow, indicates, or nearly so, when fly fishing commences with some certainty of sport;[3] you will observe but few flies on the water, (and consequently no inducement to fish to be on the look out), before those great insect killers appear. The principal flies for the month, are the March Brown, the Blue Dun,[4] and small Black, ...
— The Teesdale Angler • R Lakeland
... owed, and then he would begin to put by. But, while he thus speculated, his eye fell upon his over-worked horses, and the anxious face of his old bailiff, and a vague fear crept, like a loathly insect, over the fluttering leaves of his hopes; for he had staked all on this cast; he had so mortgaged his land that at this moment he hardly knew how much of it was his own; and all this to raise still higher the social ...
— Debit and Credit - Translated from the German of Gustav Freytag • Gustav Freytag
... take the big gamble, or else we may find we have been outbid for space entirely. Let those others discover even one alien installation they can master and—" his thumb shifted from his lip, grinding down on the desk top as if it were crushing some venturesome but entirely unimportant insect—"and we are finished before ...
— The Defiant Agents • Andre Alice Norton
... five men housed under those flimsy coverings the somber hue of their nets was new. On leaving Remate de Males the insect bars had been clean white; and though they had grown somewhat soiled from daily handling, they never had approached the drab dinginess of the barriers draping the hammocks of the Peruvian rivermen. In fact, their owners had been at some pains to keep them ...
— The Pathless Trail • Arthur O. (Arthur Olney) Friel
... gaze clung to the dimpling water, there was a flash of a bronze body—a streak of light along the surface of the pool—and two widening circles showed where the master of the hole had leaped for some insect prey. ...
— Hiram The Young Farmer • Burbank L. Todd
... thought, sir, it is only a water-bug," he observed, rescuing the insect upon his thumb-nail. "You need not have been frightened, ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 25, September 17, 1870 • Various
... and unusual series of bird and insect stories for boys and girls from three to eight ...
— The Tale of Benny Badger • Arthur Scott Bailey
... a very curious plant, belonging to the fungi tribe, growing from the anus; this fungus varies from three to six inches in length, and bears at its extremity a blossom-like appendage, somewhat resembling a miniature bulrush, and evidently derives its nourishment from the body of the insect. This caterpillar when recently found, is of the substance of cork; and it is discovered by the natives seeing the tips of the fungi, which grow upwards. They account for this phenomenon, by asserting that the caterpillar, when feeding upon the rata tree overhead, swallows the ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 81, May 17, 1851 • Various
... Do you call that theft a bargain? You parasite! you bookgnat! You insect feeding on men's brains! You worm in the corpse of genius! My book, I say, or by Hector I'll tear your goose-liver from ...
— Semiramis and Other Plays - Semiramis, Carlotta And The Poet • Olive Tilford Dargan
... mirror true, The flowers which o'er its surface grew, The tints of earth—the hues of sky— That in its limpid bosom lie. And groups of happy children played Around the verge of each cascade; Or gambol'd o'er the flowery lea In wanton mirth and joyous glee; Pursuing, o'er the sparkling lawn, The insect in its airy flight, Which still eludes, but tempting on From flower to flower, with plumage bright, The hand that woos to stay its flight— Till soaring high, on pinions wild It leaves the charm'd ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various
... an elephant, whose shadow extended for miles, whose heart was bounteous as the ocean, and his hands like the clouds when rain falls to gladden the earth. The crocodile in the rolling stream had no safety from Afrasiyab. Yet when he came to fight against the generals of Kaus, he was but an insect in the grasp of Rustem, who seized him by the girdle, and dragged him from his horse. Rustem felt such anger at the arrogance of the King of Mazinderan, that every hair on his body started up like a spear. The gripe of his hand cracked ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 6, April, 1858 • Various
... Symonds, in his autobiography, describes his "insect-like" devotion to creed in the green infancy of ritualism. In his early teens at boarding-school he and his mates, with half sincerity, followed a classmate to compline, donned surplices, tossed censers, arranged altars in their studies, bought bits of painted glass for their ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... traversing the Montana never feels himself alone. Legions of beings accompany him. All of the nature to whom he owes his soul speaks to him through the noise of the wind, in the roaring of the waterfall. The insect like the bird—everything, even to the bending twig wet with dew—for him has language, distinct personality. The forest is alive in its depths, has caprices, periods of anger; it avoids the thicket under the tread of the huntsman, ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... the assignees, little Molineux returned home "honored," so he said, "by the suffrages of his fellow-citizens"; happy in the prospect of hectoring Birotteau, just as a child delights in having an insect to maltreat. The landlord, astride of his hobby,—the law,—begged du Tillet to favor him with his ideas; and he bought a copy of the commercial Code. Happily, Joseph Lebas, cautioned by Pillerault, had already ...
— Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau • Honore de Balzac
... B. Williams, of Salem, Mass., presented the "National Institute" with an insect from New Zealand, with the following description: "'The Hotte, a decided caterpillar, or worm, is found gnawing at the root of the Rota tree, with a plant growing out of its head. This most peculiar and extraordinary insect travels up both ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... more than most any creature," James told Cora, "because the insect rises above holidays and works seven days a week all ...
— The Torch and Other Tales • Eden Phillpotts
... to watch upon the surrounding hills, so that no enemy should come near; and the Owl was appointed to keep order within the camp, and especially to see that neither the Bat, the Night-hawk nor the Swallow tribe were permitted to disturb the little insect people. ...
— Wigwam Evenings - Sioux Folk Tales Retold • Charles Alexander Eastman and Elaine Goodale Eastman
... out. Far across the field, a slender, needle-nosed ship stood poised on her stabilizer fins ready for flight. She was black except for a red band painted on the hull across the forward section and around the few viewports. It gave her the appearance of a huge laughing insect. Quent eyed the vessel with a ...
— Treachery in Outer Space • Carey Rockwell and Louis Glanzman
... faces turning like his own to the summits of the mountains and the billowy splendors there. It grew so dark he could see no more. There fell a deep silence, not a sound but the occasional chirp of a bird or the faint whirr of an insect. Even the glow on the peaks was gone. ...
— His Family • Ernest Poole
... "I will penetrate into this invincible array of Drona, like an insect filled with rage entering a blazing fire. Today, I will do that which will be beneficial to both races (viz., my sire's and my mother's). I will do that which will please my maternal uncle as also my mother. Today all creatures ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... every one knows, to merely have such a thing mentioned is to feel the insect in question. Such was the case with Richard, and still holding the door with one hand he put the other up to ...
— Richard Dare's Venture • Edward Stratemeyer
... and while the mad throngs were fluttering in frenzy around the tables in his halls at Homburg, Wiesbaden and Monte Carlo, he, hoe or trowel in hand, would be training and transplanting his roses, solicitous over an opening bud or deploring the ravages of an insect; or, again, refusing all invitations, would sit down with his wife to a dinner of boiled turnips and bacon, washed down with a glass of Vichy water and milk. This was the town and these ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... Roseberry was away, and a stranger had taken his duty; no interloper from the outer world broke the peaceful monotony of our days, and the sea kept up its plaintive music night and day, and the larks sang to us, and the busy humming of insect life made an undertone of melody, and in early mornings the little garden seemed steeped in dew and fragrance. We used to rise early, and after breakfast Flurry and I bathed. There was a little bathing-room beyond the ...
— Esther - A Book for Girls • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... annoying insect, the chigoe, or "jigger," is able to bore a hole through the sole of a shoe ...
— A Little Journey to Puerto Rico - For Intermediate and Upper Grades • Marian M. George
... about eleven o'clock, with the bright insect still in her hair. When I saw her move, I said: "We are just getting to Genoa, madam," and she murmured, without answering me, as if possessed by some obstinate ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Vol. 1 (of 8) - Boule de Suif and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... insect that you do not often spy, And it isn't quite a spider, and it isn't quite a fly; It is something like a beetle, and a little like a bee, But nothing like a wooly grub that climbs upon a tree. Its name is quite a hard one, but you'll learn it soon, ...
— A Book for Kids • C. J. (Clarence Michael James) Dennis
... many-fingered Summer! We hold thee very dear, as well we may: It is the kernel of the year to-day— All hail to thee! Thou art a welcome corner! If every insect were a fairy drummer, And I a fifer that could deftly play, We'd give the old Earth such a roundelay That she would cast all thought of labour from her Ah! what is this upon my window-pane? Some sulky drooping ...
— Robert Falconer • George MacDonald
... all the town said, "What a fine flower!" One day a storm swept across the garden. One plant was injured; it was the one which people had admired and praised. Filled with grief, the lady stooped to examine the stem, and found that it had been pierced by a worm-hole. The insect had worked silently and secretly. No one saw him cutting into the heart of the tall and magnificent flower, but in a storm, under a test severe and protracted, the stem snapped and the choice beauty of the garden was a ...
— The Heart-Cry of Jesus • Byron J. Rees
... up your mind to one thing: from the first warm weather until August you must expect to cope with insect pests. The black fly will keep you busy until late afternoon; the midges will swarm you about sunset; and the mosquito will preserve the tradition after you have turned in. As for the deer-fly, and others of his piratical breed, he will bite like ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... carefully scraped the evil-smelling sulphur match torn from a flat wood strip. She settled herself comfortably again full length. All around her were the innumerable tiny noises of the desert, the hum of countless insect life, the rustling of the sand and the occasional dry crackle of the camel thorns made by the slipping of a twig or the displacing of a branch, sounds that would have been incomprehensible some weeks before. For a ...
— The Sheik - A Novel • E. M. Hull
... phenomena, "As readily can you mingle fire and frost as spirit and matter. . . . The belief that material bodies return to dust, hereafter to rise up as spiritual bodies with material sensations and desires, is incorrect. . . . The caterpillar, transformed into a beautiful insect, is no longer a worm, nor does the insect return to fraternise with or control the worm. . . . There is no bridge across the gulf which divides two such opposite conditions as the spiritual, or incorporeal, and the ...
— Modern Saints and Seers • Jean Finot
... insect, unless the body was immersed in oil or alcohol, which extinguished it presently. We found, that though oil and alcohol quickly extinguished the light, it became suddenly much brighter when fading, by plunging the insect into hot water; but we did not find that it could be restored when it had once entirely ceased, by this or any other means, as some French naturalists have affirmed; and as to its exploding a jar of hydrogen, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 62, Number 361, November, 1845. • Various
... good ear," said Benoni, still playing the same notes, so that the constant monotony of them buzzed like a vexatious insect in Nino's hearing. Still the old man sawed the bow over the same strings without change. On and on, the same everlasting chord, till Nino thought he must ...
— A Roman Singer • F. Marion Crawford
... bees. Nineteen thousand four hundred and ninety-nine are neuters or working bees, five hundred are drones, and the remaining one is the queen or mother! Every living thing, from man down to an ephemeral insect, pursues the bee to its destruction for the sake of the honey that is deposited in its cell, or secreted in its honey-bag. To obtain that which the bee is carrying to its hive, numerous birds and insects ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 13, - Issue 377, June 27, 1829 • Various
... Nayland Smith were stealthily retracing their steps, the former keeping the light directed upon the hideous insect, which now began running about with that horrible, febrile activity characteristic of the species. Suddenly came a sharp, staccato report.... Sir Lionel had scored a hit with ...
— The Hand Of Fu-Manchu - Being a New Phase in the Activities of Fu-Manchu, the Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... not here in the image of God, who created us? Have I not courage, and freedom, and strength above my inferiors? Did not our father give name to beast, bird, insect and reptile? Shall his children crouch down and kneel like the creature that crawleth? I will not obey this commandment, but I'll wreath up my altar With offerings of earth, with gold of the orange, and red of the roses, I'll ...
— Victor Roy, A Masonic Poem • Harriet Annie Wilkins
... sometimes do not require taking up every year, unless in constant use. Take out the tacks from these, fold the carpets back, wash the floor in strong suds with a tablespoonful of borax dissolved in it. Dash with insect powder, or lay with tobacco leaves along the edge, and re-tack. Or use turpentine, the enemy of buffalo moths, carpet worms and other insects that injure and destroy carpets. Mix the turpentine with pure water in the proportion ...
— The Whitehouse Cookbook (1887) - The Whole Comprising A Comprehensive Cyclopedia Of Information For - The Home • Mrs. F.L. Gillette
... which characteristically the shell is thin at the joints, and thick between them (look at the next lobster's claw you can see, without eating). You know, also, that though the crustaceous are titled only from their crusts, the name 'insect' is given to the whole insect tribe, because they are farther jointed almost into sections: it is easily remembered, also, that the projecting joint means strength and elasticity in the creature, and that all its limbs are useful to it, and cannot conveniently ...
— Proserpina, Volume 1 - Studies Of Wayside Flowers • John Ruskin
... go to a tropical forest, or, indeed, if you observe carefully a square acre of any English land, cultivated or uncultivated, you will find that Nature's text at first sight looks a very different one. She seems to say—Not the righteous, but the strong, shall inherit the land. Plant, insect, bird, what not—Find a weaker plant, insect, bird, than yourself, and kill it, and take possession of its little vineyard, and no Naboth's curse shall follow you: but you shall inherit, and thrive therein, ...
— Health and Education • Charles Kingsley
... a novel and curious invention, made by Dr. Hull, of Alton, Ill., for the purpose of jarring off and catching the curculio from trees infested by this destructive insect. It is a barrow, with arms and braces covered with cloth, and having on one side a slot, which admits the stem of the tree. The curculio catcher, or machine, is run against the tree three or four times, with sufficient force to impart a jarring motion to all its parts. ...
— Scientific American, Vol.22, No. 1, January 1, 1870 • Various
... a strange and curious mood when I ramble along the shore in the twilight. Behind me are the flat dunes, before me the vast, heaving, immeasurable ocean, and above me the sky like an infinite crystal dome. Then I seem to be a very insect; and yet my soul expands to the size of the world. The high simplicity of Nature which surrounds me, elevates and oppresses me at the same time, more so than any other scene, however sublime. There never was any cathedral dome vast ...
— High Noon - A New Sequel to 'Three Weeks' by Elinor Glyn • Anonymous
... his hand compellingly on my arm. "Who's the wizened-up little insect, with a snarl on his face?" he ...
— An Amiable Charlatan • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... new posterior, At least as good—if not superior. His Process. He cut it out a tail of card, And stuck it on with ox-gall, hard. (This he prefers to vulgar glue) And made that Wopse as good as new! Forgiveness. Until the grateful insect soared Away, with self-respect restored To find that mutilated part of his Had been so well replaced by artifice. Further proceedings of The Scientist, again complacent, the Philosopher. To pen and ink and paper hastened, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., Nov. 1, 1890 • Various
... and felt all the affliction of a humane heart, at the news of his misfortunes and deplorable distemper. She had seen him courted and cultivated in the sunshine of his prosperity; but she knew, from sad experience, how all those insect-followers shrink away in the winter of distress. Her compassion represented him as a poor unhappy lunatic, destitute of all the necessaries of life, dragging about the ruins of human nature, and exhibiting the spectacle of blasted youth to the scorn and abhorrence of his fellow-creatures. ...
— The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, Volume I • Tobias Smollett
... a moth singing its wings. Poor wee beastie! let me save it, if it be not too late." And she chased the insect most patiently until the blue-gray wings ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... the delicate bud of intelligence opening on the world, eager to adjust its awakening wonder to the realities of life, absolutely simple, truthful, and receptive, reaching out its tender faculties like the sensitive antennae of a new-born insect, that feel forth upon the unknown with the faultless instinct of eternal mind—one has only to imagine that condition to realize that the most ingenious malignity could hardly contrive anything to offer it so perplexing, cramping, and discouraging as the ...
— Society for Pure English, Tract 2, on English Homophones • Robert Bridges
... weevil. Our pathologists will find immune varieties that will resist the root disease, and the bollworm can be dealt with, but the boll weevil is a serious menace to the cotton crop. It is a Central American insect that has become acclimated in Texas and has done great damage. A scientist of the Department of Agriculture has found the weevil at home in Guatemala being kept in check by an ant, which has been brought to our cotton fields for observation. It is hoped that it may ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... did not fear him,—this creature in gray. She stood stock-still, and stared at him, so near that he could see her wink her starry eyes, with the white rings round them. She stamped one hoof, kicked an insect from her ear with another, snorted again, wheeled around, and at last broke away for the thick shelter of the trees, lightly and swiftly as a breeze which skims ...
— Camp and Trail - A Story of the Maine Woods • Isabel Hornibrook
... this bird could say. Then down he shot, bounced airily along The sward, twitched in a grasshopper, made song Midflight, perched, prinked, and to his art again. Sweet Science, this large riddle read me plain: How may the death of that dull insect be The life of yon ...
— The Poems of Sidney Lanier • Sidney Lanier
... length of pinion, it is both swift and enduring in its flight. When on a rapid course this bird is in the habit of furling its wings into a narrow compass. The greater extent of surface is probably needful for the continual variations of speed and instant stoppages for obtaining its insect food. ...
— A History of Aeronautics • E. Charles Vivian
... from fermented wine, as the stinging ants, others from the earth, others from the mud, like the frogs, others from slime, as the worms, others from donkeys, as the beetles, others from cabbage, as caterpillars, others from fruit, as the gall insect from the wild figs, others from putrified animals, as bees from bulls, and wasps from horses. Again, of those originating from intercourse of the 42 sexes, some come from animals of the same kind, as in most cases, and others from those of different ...
— Sextus Empiricus and Greek Scepticism • Mary Mills Patrick
... gathered, with its winged stem, of the smiling primrose of that inimitable tint it only wears in its own woodland nest; and when Allen lighted on a bed of wood-sorrel, with its scarlet stems, lovely trefoil leaves, and purple striped blossoms like insect's wings, she absolutely held her breath in an enthusiasm of reverent admiration. No one can tell the happiness of those four, only slightly diminished by Armine's getting bogged on his way to the golden river ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... motive than fear of present punishment, his goodness cannot be very great. A good man, Charles, always takes delight in conferring happiness on all around him; nor would he offer the smallest injury to the meanest insect that was capable of feeling. 'I am sure,' said the boy, 'I have often seen you kill wasps, and spiders too; and it was but last week that you bought a mouse-trap yourself to catch mice in, although you are so angry now with me.' 'And pray,' resumed his ...
— The Life and Perambulations of a Mouse • Dorothy Kilner
... weeks earlier; it will soon fall. The young apples begin to take shape. They show a glow of red on the cheek. They are fuzzy all over. One of them is already injured on one side, having been stung by a curculio or other insect: there are ...
— The Apple-Tree - The Open Country Books—No. 1 • L. H. Bailey
... the most widely distributed of Cactuses in the Old World-a circumstance due to their having been introduced for the sake of their edible fruits, and more especially for the cultivation of the cochineal insect. In various places along the shores of the Mediterranean, and in South Africa, and even in Australia, the Opuntias have become naturalised, and appear like aboriginal inhabitants. It is, however, only in warm sunny regions that the naturalisation ...
— Cactus Culture For Amateurs • W. Watson
... were more like an awful, gigantic kind of insect—immense, golden-winged beetles or dragonflies or things of that sort—at once ugly and beautiful—than like anything else; only that they were a thousand and a million times as big. And with all this there ...
— Myths and Legends of All Nations • Various
... their beauty. A few years since, a severe frost killed the trees to the ground, and when they sprouted again from the roots, a new enemy made its appearance—an insect of the coccus family, with a kind of shell on its back, which enables it to withstand all the common applications for destroying insects, and the ravages of which are shown by the leaves becoming black and sere, and the twigs perishing. In October last, a gale drove ...
— Letters of a Traveller - Notes of Things Seen in Europe and America • William Cullen Bryant
... dark when we arrived, and we were driven to our destination in a volante, we did not see much of the city. We could but observe that the streets were narrow, the houses irregular, most people black, and the volante, an amusing-looking vehicle, looking behind like a black insect with high shoulders, and with a little black postilion on a horse or mule, with an enormous pair of boots ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon de la Barca
... katong'ging; the first of which I apprehend to be the anggrek bunga putri (Angraecum scriptum, R.) and the other the anggrek kasturi (Angraecum moschatum, R.) or scorpion-flower, from its resembling that insect, as the former does the butterfly. The musky scent resides at the ...
— The History of Sumatra - Containing An Account Of The Government, Laws, Customs And - Manners Of The Native Inhabitants • William Marsden
... and happiness will come, said the doctor, 'days when you will think no more of Miss Pew than of an insect which once ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... bullet-riddled—stood A presence ghostly, grim and stark, With trees all withered, wasted, gray, The place of combat night and day Like marshaled skeletons to mark. Anon, a lull: the troops are spelled. No sound of guns or drums Disturbs the air. Only the insect-chorus faintly hums, Chirping around the patient, sleepless dead Scattered, or fallen in heaps all wildly spread; Forgotten fragments left in hurried flight; Forms that, a few hours since, were human creatures, Now blasted of their features, Or stamped with ...
— Dreams and Days: Poems • George Parsons Lathrop
... that has provided for them. Quite justifiably, society might annul the testamentary endowment of a hospital for fleas and lice, such as Bishop Heber, in his Indian tour, found existing at Baroach and at Surat, because those particular insect pests could scarcely be retained within the walls of their infirmary. Perhaps, too, society might be justified in similarly preventing the endowment of a hospital for superannuated dogs and cats; whether it would or not depending mainly on the awkward question whether ...
— Old-Fashioned Ethics and Common-Sense Metaphysics - With Some of Their Applications • William Thomas Thornton
... parental care. The female cod spawns about 6,000,000 eggs at a time, of which at most one-third—perhaps much less—are afterwards fertilised. An infinitesimal proportion of these escapes being devoured by fish or fowl. An insect-eating bird is said to require for its support about 250,000 insects a year, and the number of such birds must amount to thousands of millions. As a rule there is a kind of equilibrium between the forces of destruction and of reproduction. If ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... not tell his friend that a question of so great magnitude to him had been decided by the last sting which he had received from an insect so contemptible as Mr. Bonteen, but he expressed the feeling as well as he knew how to express it. "Oh, I shall be with you. I know what you are going to say, and I know how good you are. But I could not stand it. Men are beginning already to say things ...
— Phineas Finn - The Irish Member • Anthony Trollope
... a rather unfortunate kill, Willy, by your bare hand on your bare arm. You must learn to be cognizant of our insect ...
— Master of None • Lloyd Neil Goble
... various channels; the gall insects turn it into channels to suit their ends when they sting the leaf of a tree or the stalk of a plant, and deposit an egg in the wound. "Build me a home and a nursery for my young," says the insect. "With all my heart," says the leaf, and forthwith forgets its function as a leaf, and proceeds to build up a structure, often of great delicacy and complexity, to house and cradle its enemy. The current of life flows on blindly and takes any ...
— The Breath of Life • John Burroughs
... unnoticed all his worth, Denied in Heaven the soul he held in earth; While man, vain insect! hopes to be forgiven, And claims himself a sole, exclusive Heaven. Oh, man! thou feeble tenant of an hour, Debased by slavery or corrupt by power, Who knows thee well must quit thee with disgust, Degraded mass ...
— The Dog's Book of Verse • Various
... on the market is the wasp gun. In theory it is something like a letter clip; you pull the trigger and the upper and lower plates snap together with a suddenness which would surprise any insect in between. The trouble will be to get him in the right place before firing. But I can see that a lot of fun can be got out of a wasp drive. We shall stand on the edge of the marmalade while the beaters go through it, ...
— Not that it Matters • A. A. Milne
... In the great storm of 1906 it was partly blown down, and was poorly restored. It was the prey of rat and insect, dusty, neglected, but endearing. It had had a season of glory. It was built for the first modern administration office of the French Government, over sixty years before, and was painted white with blue trimmings. ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... the countess had fallen into a state of depression which made her indifferent to the count's provocations. No longer finding a soft substance in which he could plant his arrows, the man became as uneasy as a child when the poor insect it is tormenting ceases to move. He now needed a confidant, as ...
— The Lily of the Valley • Honore de Balzac
... the other. On six feet of this superior article I fixed three artificial flies,—a simple brown hackle, a gray body with scarlet wings, and one of my own invention, which I thought would be new to the most experienced fly-catcher. The trout-fly does not resemble any known species of insect. It is a "conventionalized" creation, as we say of ornamentation. The theory is that, fly-fishing being a high art, the fly must not be a tame imitation of nature, but an artistic suggestion of it. It requires ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... think I, even I (an insect compared with this creature), have set my life on casts not a millionth part of this man's. But, after all, a crown may be not worth dying for. Yet, to outlive Lodi for this!!! Oh that Juvenal or Johnson could rise from the dead! 'Expende—quot libras ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... God shall give permission. The Sun of Righteousness has been gradually drawing nearer and nearer, appearing larger and brighter as He approached, and now He fills the whole hemisphere, pouring forth a flood of glory, in which I seem to float, like an insect in the beams of the sun; exulting, yet almost trembling, while I gaze on this excessive brightness, and wondering, with unutterable wonder, why God should deign thus to shine upon a sinful worm"-(Cheever). [307] In the immediate view of heavenly felicity, Paul "desired to ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan
... about roots: I, who dug all the ditches about Spoon River. Look at my elm! Sprung from as good a seed as his, Sown at the same time, It is dying at the top: Not from lack of life, nor fungus, Nor destroying insect, as the sexton thinks. Look, Samuel, where the roots have struck rock, And can no further spread. And all the while the top of the tree Is tiring itself out, and ...
— Spoon River Anthology • Edgar Lee Masters
... duty is violating one of nature's great laws. Even the lower forms of life afford example of this supreme law. Solomon startles the sluggard with his sharp admonition to betake himself to the ant. And Sir John Lubbock points men to the insect world to learn real diligence ...
— A Fleece of Gold - Five Lessons from the Fable of Jason and the Golden Fleece • Charles Stewart Given
... monkeys and even of leopards darted among the trees. But the country—whether forest, mud-flat, or prairie—was always damp and feverish: a wet land steaming under a burning sun and humming with mosquitoes and all kinds of insect life. ...
— The River War • Winston S. Churchill
... fell into convulsions whenever he saw a spider. A waxen one was made, which equally terrified him. When he recovered, his error was pointed out to him, and the wax figure was placed in his hand without causing dread, and henceforth the living insect no longer disturbed him. Amatus Lusitanus relates the case of a monk who fainted when he beheld a rose, and never quitted his cell when that flower was in bloom. Scaliger, the great scholar, who had been a soldier a considerable portion ...
— Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine • George M. Gould
... forms, the most familiar sounds become loud and alarming. Annie slept for about an hour soundly; then she awoke, trembling with cold in every limb, startled, and almost terrified by the oppressive loneliness of the night, sure that the insect life which surrounded her, and which would keep up successions of chirps, and croaks, and buzzes, was something mysterious and terrifying. Annie was a brave child, but even brave little girls may be allowed to possess nerves under her present conditions, and when a spider ran across her face ...
— A World of Girls - The Story of a School • L. T. Meade
... compressible, and the deeper down it is thrust the more will the air be compressed. At a depth of thirty-three feet the air will be compressed to half its bulk—in other words, the glass will be half-full of water. It is clear that a fly or any small insect could live in the air thus confined although thrust to great depths under water. But it could not live long, because air becomes unfit for use after being breathed a certain time, and cannot sustain life. Hence, if we are to preserve ...
— Under the Waves - Diving in Deep Waters • R M Ballantyne
... Glave writes in the Century Magazine (LIII, 913): "Formerly [in the Congo Free State] an ordinary white man was merely called 'bwana' or 'Mzunga'; now the merest insect of a pale face earns the title of ...
— The Negro • W.E.B. Du Bois
... black with the darkness of night in their melancholy depths. The earth white; snow to the thickness of many feet on all. Life none; not a beast of the earth, nor a fowl of the air, nor the hum of an insect. Solitude. Cold—grey, pitiless cold. Night ...
— The Hound From The North • Ridgwell Cullum
... are both contained in one single expression in the text. "Even as your Father which is in Heaven is perfect." The relationship between father and son implies consanguinity, likeness, similarity of character and nature. God made the insect, the stone, the lily; but God is not the Father of the caterpillar, the ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... is. Will you decide what men shall live, what men shall die? It may be that in the sight of Heaven you are more worthless and less fit to live than millions like this poor man's child. Oh, God! to hear the insect on the leaf pronouncing on the too much life among his hungry ...
— A Budget of Christmas Tales by Charles Dickens and Others • Various
... clean pasture or common. There is in this case a risk of wireworm and black bot; but if the turf is provided in good time and is laid up in the yard ready for use, it will be searched by the small birds and pretty well cleansed of the insect larvas that may have lurked in it when first removed. Lay the turves out in a frame, grass side downwards, and give them a soaking with water in which a very small quantity of salt has been dissolved. ...
— The Culture of Vegetables and Flowers From Seeds and Roots, 16th Edition • Sutton and Sons
... wonderful machine had been here revealed to his gaze—manipulated without a word, marshaled by signs, and composed entirely of strangers! And to think that all this insect-like marvel of industry, so expeditious, and done on so huge a scale, had been going on daily under his own roof, and he had known nothing of it! So this was how his palace was cleaned for him, and why it never showed a sign of wear or the marks ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... however, we came sooner than we expected to some supplies of rain-water in a chain of pools. It is impossible to convey an idea of the dreary scene on which we entered after leaving this spot: the only vegetation was a low scrub in deep sand; not a bird or insect enlivened the landscape. It was, without exception, the most uninviting prospect I ever beheld; and, to make matters worse, our guide Shobo wandered on the second day. We coaxed him on at night, but he went to all points of the compass on the trails of elephants ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... this great man, he felt that he was no bigger than an insect. He seated himself on the shore and watched ...
— The Indian Fairy Book - From the Original Legends • Cornelius Mathews
... to "the republic" in his humble person. The phylloxera has destroyed the vineyards of this or that region, but "the republican minister of agriculture" is successfully extirpating the injurious insect. The new schoolhouses of another city owe their magnificence "to the deep solicitude of the republic for the education of the masses," while the recently constructed bridge over the river is the work of "the engineers of the republic." In a word, the farmer and his crops, the mechanic ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 23, October, 1891 • Various
... Bacilikil (Insect Powder). Veribest (Boot Blacking). Uwantit (Combined pocket twoblade penknife with ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce
... nearly allied to the living Banded Ant-eater (Myrmecobius) of Australia (fig. 158). Amphilestes and Phascolotherium (fig. 184) are also believed by the same distinguished anatomist and palaeontologist to have been insect-eating Marsupials, and the latter is supposed to find its nearest living ally in the Opossums (Didelphys) of America. Lastly, the Stereognathus of the Stonesfield Slate is in a dubious position. It may have been a Marsupial; but, upon the whole, Professor Owen is inclined ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... matter on which he works, and not the manner of his work. But it is certain that a superior Being honors the stamp of perfection even in the most limited sphere, whilst He casts an eye of pity on the vain attempts of the insect which seeks to overlook the universe. It follows from this that I am especially unwilling to agree to the proposition in your papers, which assumes that the high destiny of man is to detect the spirit of the Divine Artist in the work of creation. To express the activity of infinite perfection, ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... "one soul expressed completely in a single person, I mean, is exceedingly rare. Not often is a physical instrument found perfect enough to provide it with adequate expression. In the lower ranges of humanity—certainly in animal and insect life—one soul is shared by many. Behind a tribe of savages stands one Savage. A flock of birds is a single Bird, scattered through the consciousness of all. They wheel in mid-air, they migrate, they obey the deep intelligence called instinct—all as one. The life of any one lion is the life of ...
— Four Weird Tales • Algernon Blackwood
... painted yesterday. At the end of the room was a great chair, gilded and painted, too, three centuries before, and covered with velvet, gold-fringed, and powdered with golden grasshoppers. "That common insect here!" thought Rosa, in surprise, for she did not know that the chief of the house, long, long, long ago, when sleeping in the heat of noon in Palestine in the first crusade, had been awakened by a grasshopper lighting on his eyelids, and so had been aroused in time ...
— Bimbi • Louise de la Ramee
... who fed on the fragrance of fruits and flowers. Among the lower animals, he enumerates horned horses furnished with wings; the mantichora, with the face of a man, three rows of teeth, a lion's body, and a scorpion's tail; the basilisk, whose very glance is fatal; and an insect which cannot live except in the midst of the flames. But notwithstanding his credulity and his want of judgment, this elaborate work contains many valuable truths and much entertaining information. The prevailing character of his philosophical belief, ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... kinds of termites was cupim, but technically they are known in the Order of Neoroptera as Termes album. Another variety of insect, the Psocus domesticus, was also as destructive as the ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... vegetation of former years, and were languidly filtered out into a brook, more healthy than the vast reservoir itself. Its banks were bordered with a deep, broad layer of mud, a transition substance between the rich vegetable matter which it once had been, and the multitudinous world of insect life which it was becoming. A cloud or mist at this time was hanging over it, high in air. A harsh and shrill sound, a whizzing or a chirping, proceeded from that cloud to the ear of the attentive listener. What these indications portended was plain. "There," said Juba, "is what will tell ...
— Callista • John Henry Cardinal Newman
... a mad man would pursue?" "By Hercules," said Xenophon, "what extraordinary power you represent to be in a kiss!" "Do you wonder at this?" rejoined Socrates; "are you not aware that the Tarantula, an insect not as large as half an obolus, by just touching a part of the body with its mouth, wears men down with pain, and deprives them of their senses?" "Yes, indeed," said Xenophon, "but the Tarantula infuses something when it bites." "And do you not think, foolish man," rejoined Socrates, ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... eating her life-blood away. To her, alone, in all that party, the warm arms of the sun brandished javelins, and the calm riches of the landscape concealed jibes. The meanest field labourer seemed happier than she, the commonest insect ...
— Too Old for Dolls - A Novel • Anthony Mario Ludovici
... by some geologists, that the coral insect, instead of raising its superstructure directly from the bottom of the sea, works only on the summits of submarine mountains, which have been projected upwards by volcanic action. They account, therefore, for the basin-like form so generally observed in coral islands, by supposing that they exist ...
— Discoveries in Australia, Volume 1. • J Lort Stokes
... the web, as if fascinated. The rightful possessor was also quiescent; but a very fine ear might have caught a low, humming sound, which probably augured no hospitable intentions to the invader. Anon, the stranger insect seemed suddenly to awake from its amaze; it evinced alarm, and turned to fly; the huge spider darted forward; the boy uttered a chuckle of delight. The man's pale lip curled into a sinister sneer, and he glided back to his seat. There, leaning his face on ...
— Lucretia, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... had built up slowly, surely, ultimately, this all-absorbing passion; that upon her was the hand of the Infinite driving her of her own nature to form a link in the great Life-chain that stretches from the Whence into the Whither, to lose herself in the appointed lot as the coral insect does whose tiny ...
— The Workingman's Paradise - An Australian Labour Novel • John Miller
... to one of the servants. Not yet! When Mrs. Gallilee is angry, she doesn't get over it so soon as you seem to think. Leave her to dabble in science first," said the governess in tones of immeasurable contempt. "When she has half stifled herself with some filthy smell, or dissected some wretched insect or flower, she may be in a ...
— Heart and Science - A Story of the Present Time • Wilkie Collins
... to kill the supposed insect that troubled him, and giving vent to three or four violent sneezes, the interpreter awoke, and, growling something in Arabic, opened his eyes, which act enabled him to observe that his neighbour was awake and ...
— The Pirate City - An Algerine Tale • R.M. Ballantyne
... her thread, and letting the end twist madly up amongst the revolving iron teeth, emerging from the mist of their own speed, in which a moment before they had looked ethereal as the vibration-film of an insect's wings. ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... bright bird, insect, or gentle beast I consciously have injured, but still loved And ...
— Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle • H. N. Brailsford
... have done the most in this world for God and for men? The largely endowed men? 'Not many wise, not many mighty, not many noble are called.' The coral insect is microscopic, but it will build up from the profoundest depth of the ocean a reef against which the whole Pacific may dash in vain. It is the small gifts that, after all, are the important ones. So let us cultivate ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... suggestures. The girl stands in a pensive posture, her hands demurely clasped in front, her head poised a little on one side. Suddenly a wasp is heard to approach, and by her gestures is seen to have stung her on the breast. She then darts hither and thither in pursuit of that audacious insect, assuming all manner of provoking attitudes, until, finally, the wasp having been caught and miserably exterminated, the girl resumes her innocent smile ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce
... been displayed in the workmanship, I rapidly arrived at the conclusion that it was the most uncomfortable carpet I had ever seen. I wagged my finger at the repeated portrayals of the— to me!—unspeakable insect. ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh
... with inestimably good things; that is, the act of dying, and not merely the being dead. It is no doubt as necessary to the nature of the soul, to its psychology, its soul-life, as the changes of the worm, chrysalis, and butterfly, are to the insect. And thus, as in all other things, where sin abounded, grace much more abounds, and even death, like a cross, is turned into ...
— Catharine • Nehemiah Adams
... Rajah brought up the rear, and in this formation we marched along, alert for danger. At times the rustle of a bush in the breeze put us on our guard, and we crouched down with muscles tense and pistols raised; or the flutter of a bird over our heads, or the shrilling of an insect, or the creak of a tree sounded an alarm which would delay us. But Rajah's sense of hearing was very keen, and whenever we stopped from such sounds he would grin at us and push on ahead. We trusted a great deal to his woodcraft, for he was at ...
— The Devil's Admiral • Frederick Ferdinand Moore
... form, he had a feeling of commiseration rather than of relief. Worthless clay that the man was, it seemed petty now to have been so disturbed over his living on, for such satisfactions as his poor fragment of life gave him. Like the insignificant insect which preyed on its own petty world, he had, maybe, his rights to his prey. At all events, now that he had ceased to trouble, it was foolish to have any feeling of disgust, of reproach, of hatred. God and life had made him so, as God and ...
— The Web of Life • Robert Herrick
... obliging as to give us specimens. We never saw or heard of a firefly in Sicily. Professor Costa of Naples, though he doubted the fact of there being none, had never seen any in his frequent entomological trips to that island. This beautiful insect, so common about Florence and Rome, and in central Italy, is extremely rare about Naples; nor does this seem to be from their disliking the sea, for we never saw so many as at Pesaro, on the Adriatic;—no ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 363, January, 1846 • Various
... insects filling nostrils, ears, and eyes. Where they came from I cannot tell; the prairie seemed too small to hold them; the air too limited to yield them space. I had seen many vast accumulations of insect life in lands old and new, but never any thing that approached to this mountain of mosquitoes on the prairies of Dakota. To say that they covered the coat of the horse I rode would be to give but a faint idea ...
— The Great Lone Land - A Narrative of Travel and Adventure in the North-West of America • W. F. Butler
... know when another tore through the apples on the pommel. And he winced and ducked even lower when a third bullet, fired low, struck a stone between his horse's legs and ricochetted off through the air, buzzing and humming like some incredible insect. ...
— The Night-Born • Jack London
... only two things about you that's any good—your silence and your seamanship. Otherwise, you're a disreppitable, drunken insect." ...
— The Spoilers • Rex Beach
... monks and their legends, young man!" said Bardo, interrupting Tito impetuously. "It is enough to overlay human hope and enterprise with an eternal frost to think that the ground which was trodden by philosophers and poets is crawled over by those insect-swarms of ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... has been in the ground two years. It is worn away; it is clay to clay. Where the heart moulders, a greenish dust, the stake is thrust. Late August it is, and night; a night flauntingly jewelled with stars, a night of shooting stars and loud insect noises. Down the road to Tilbury, silence—and the slow flapping of large leaves. Down the road to Sutton, silence—and the darkness of heavy-foliaged trees. Down the road to Wayfleet, silence—and the whirring scrape of insects in the branches. Down the road to Edgarstown, silence—and stars ...
— Men, Women and Ghosts • Amy Lowell
... there till the ravens pick your bones; the anxious glance round the lake to see if the fish are moving; the still more anxious glance through your book to guess what they will choose to take; what extravagant bundle of red, blue, and yellow feathers, like no insect save perhaps some jewelled monster from Amboyna or Brazil—may tempt those sulkiest and most capricious of trout to cease for once their life-long business of picking leeches from among those Syenite cubes which will twist your ankles and ...
— Prose Idylls • Charles Kingsley
... same in kind with those of man, though so different in degree, are capable of advancement. Thus the interval between the mental powers of one of the higher apes and of a fish, or between those of an ant and scale-insect, is immense; yet their development does not offer any special difficulty, for with our domesticated animals the mental faculties are certainly variable, and the variations are inherited. No one doubts that their mental faculties are of the utmost ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIV • John Lord
... take out twenty-four thousand dollars in a day. You can make more money with us than by taking flyers in wild-cat oil schemes, etc." The poster was illustrated by a huge machine gotten up on the centipede plan; at least, it resembled that hated insect from having attached to its frame two sets of wheels of different sizes along the sides like the legs of a centipede, but with a steam boiler for a head, and a big pipe for a throat from which the salt water was disgorged to ...
— A Woman who went to Alaska • May Kellogg Sullivan
... is surely not limited to that hoped-for future time when we shall have laid aside mortality, but the pure in heart see much of God here and now—see Him in the beauty of hill and dale, in cloud and blue sky, in placid pool and running water, in flowers and insect, and in the wonderful workings of the human heart! And so Dorian Trent and Carlia Duke, being of the pure in heart, saw much of God ...
— Dorian • Nephi Anderson
... occasions that occur rarely in a lifetime, we neglect the lesser ones. We imagine that our patience is capable of putting up with great sufferings and affronts, and we give way to impatience under the sting or bite of an insect. We fancy that we could help, wait upon, and relieve our neighbour in long or severe sickness, and yet we cannot bear that same neighbour's ill-bred manner, and irritating moods, his awkwardness and incivility, ...
— The Spirit of St. Francis de Sales • Jean Pierre Camus
... Capitaine." She held out an envelope to Joan, and busied herself about the room. "Ah! but he is gentil—M'sieur le Capitaine; young and of a great air." Celeste, it may be stated, viewed Baxter rather like a noisome insect. ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... seemed to think he had some power of kicking left, for it returned to the charge in consequence of his review of Lockhart's "Life of Scott." In this article he was called a "spiteful miscreant," an "insect," a "grub," a "reptile." The "Quarterly Review" was as virulent and violent as the magazines, but the attack was more skillful as well as longer and more elaborate. By garbling extracts it cleverly insinuated a good deal more than it said, and it ...
— James Fenimore Cooper - American Men of Letters • Thomas R. Lounsbury
... and burning eye, the Strangler continued his maneuvers with so much patience, that Djalma, still sleeping, but no longer able to bear this vague, annoying sensation, raised his right hand mechanically to his face, as if he would have brushed away an importunate insect. But he had not strength to do it; almost immediately after, his hand, inert and heavy, fell back upon his chest. The Strangler saw, by this symptom, that he was attaining his object, and continued to stroke, with the same address, the ...
— The Wandering Jew, Complete • Eugene Sue
... I am going away," she said, and stared at the horizon. For a space she listened to the chirping of a cheerful insect and the small, regular noise of Halkett's breathing, but as he made no other sound she turned sharply ...
— Moor Fires • E. H. (Emily Hilda) Young
... which govern the return of the dead." His laugh died, he became very earnest and very sincere. "Now, men of science, all we ask of you is to apply your precision of handling to subjects a little more worth while than the putrid body of an insect." ...
— The Tyranny of the Dark • Hamlin Garland
... coursers that must mount the steep of noon: and he heard the morning hymn of thankfulness to Heaven from the mountains, and the valleys, and the islands of the sea; the prayer of man and woman, the praise of lisping tongues, the hum of insect joy upon the air, the sheep-bell tinkling in the distance, the wild bird's carol, and the lowing kine, the mute minstrelsy of rising dews, and that stilly scarce-heard universal melody of wakeful plants and trees, hastening to turn their spring-buds to the light—this was the anthem ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... world was in the mystery of knowledge,—and he took all nature as his province. He gave his life and his soul for the mastery of science; he observed, he studied, he pondered everything. From the sun in the heavens to the insect on the ground, nothing was so large as to impose upon him, nothing too small to escape him. Weighing, measuring, experimenting, {675} he dug deep for the inner reality of things; he spent years drawing ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... Messrs. Schneider, Schnitzel, Schnorrer & Schmidt and the commissions of their representative. Also he felt that he was assisting at the making of history. 'Orace in a bloomin' siege—Gorblimey!—and he, who had never killed anything bigger than an insect in his life, lusted to know how it felt to shove your bayonet into a feller or shoot 'im dead at short rynge. So Horace drilled with alacrity and zest, paid close attention to aiming-instruction and to such visual-training and distance-judging ...
— Driftwood Spars - The Stories of a Man, a Boy, a Woman, and Certain Other People Who - Strangely Met Upon the Sea of Life • Percival Christopher Wren
... day that was sprawling upon its back. It was kicking hard in its efforts to turn over. Lincoln stooped and set it right. "Do you know," he said to the friend beside him, "I shouldn't have felt just right if I'd left that insect struggling there. I wanted to put him on his feet and give him a chance with all the ...
— The Book of Stories for the Storyteller • Fanny E. Coe
... see why I shouldn't have a specimen too," he said to himself, as, regardless of the heat, he took off his straw hat, and crept silently on with his eyes fixed upon the spot where the beautiful insect had disappeared. He was within a yard of it, with upraised hat ready to strike, when it darted up, and he made a bound forward, striking downward with his hat at ...
— The Rajah of Dah • George Manville Fenn
... vanishing point; thinness &c 203. dwarf, pygmy, pigmy^, Liliputian, chit, pigwidgeon^, urchin, elf; atomy^, dandiprat^; doll, puppet; Tom Thumb, Hop-o'-my-thumb^; manikin, mannikin; homunculus, dapperling^, cock-sparrow. animalcule, monad, mite, insect, emmet^, fly, midge, gnat, shrimp, minnow, worm, maggot, entozoon^; bacteria; infusoria^; microzoa [Micro.]; phytozoaria^; microbe; grub; tit, tomtit, runt, mouse, small fry; millet seed, mustard seed; barleycorn; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... Nimaera, Who their every purpose ruleth, Tends it in its first conception, Baffles wholly and destroys it, Or unto completion brings it, Bringeth out its faults or virtues, Shewing where its merit lieth. Then shall every beast that liveth, Every bird and every reptile, Every fish and every insect, Raise their own peculiar voices— (Terrible, or sweet, or puny); And will testify their own way Of the powers of King Nimaera, Who their being's fire feedeth, Gives them space for life and glory, With that limit ends their being; For ...
— A Leaf from the Old Forest • J. D. Cossar
... be a great many of them," answered Arthur, "and it is supposed that new ones are constantly being formed by the labours of the coral insect. A bare ledge of coral first appears, just at the surface; it arrests floating substances, weeds, trees, etcetera; soon the sea-birds begin to resort there; by the decay of vegetable and animal matter a thin soil ...
— The Island Home • Richard Archer
... jar and daubed her glowing cheek with the cleansing cream. Everybody laughed. "And now while we leave this cream on for a minute or two I will endeavor to interest you in my various powders." She gave an animated recommendation of powders from talcum to insect. ...
— The Comings of Cousin Ann • Emma Speed Sampson
... beautiful. He affirmed it with the conviction of one arisen from the grave who returns unexpectedly to the world. Man could move freely, the same as the bird and the insect, on the bosom of Nature. There was a place for all. Why confine oneself by the bonds which others had invented, tyrannizing over the future of the men who were to come after them? The dead, ever the accursed ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... more quickly. Three steps and he had brought his foot down hard. Jerry did not enjoy killing even a spider but this time it seemed necessary, though he carefully refrained from looking at the dead insect. ...
— Jerry's Charge Account • Hazel Hutchins Wilson
... castle has ever gone to work more deliberately or fiendishly to entrap his victims while offering them hospitality, than does this plant-ogre. Attracted by the bizarre yellowish hoods of the tall, nodding flowers, the foolish insect alights upon the former and commences his exploration ...
— The California Birthday Book • Various
... of color which seizes the uninitiated at the door of a picture-gallery? So many staring hues impinge upon the eyes, so many ideas take confused shape and struggle together in the brain, that the eyes grow weary and the brain harassed. It hovers undecided like an insect in a meadow full of flowers. The buzzing remarks of the crowd add to the feeling of intoxication. They distract one's attention before it can settle anywhere, and carry it off to where some group ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... it is toil without [Greek: merimna], without thought and worry, and becomes, therefore, the very picture to us of trust in a higher Power, who has thus adjusted an unerring instinct to an unfailing end. The insect and the bird provide for the morrow, while they take no anxious thought for the morrow. "The agility which achieves it is theirs, the skill and foresight absent from them remain with God. And thus the simple life of lower natures, in its unconscious surrender to involuntary though internal ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins
... of good government or the birth of men who are to prove virtuous rulers. It has the body of a deer, the tail of an ox, and a single, soft horn. As messenger of mercy and benevolence, the Kirin never treads on a live insect or eats growing grass. Later philosophy made this imaginary beast the incarnation of those five primordial elements—earth, air, water, fire and ether of which all things, including man's body, are made and which are symbolized in the shapes of ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... wound—weary and hopeless is the king. Through the Wound-motive comes the sweet woodland music and the breath of the blessed morning, fragrant with flowers and fresh with dew. It is one of those incomparable bursts of woodland notes, full of bird-song and the happy hum of insect life and rustling of netted branches and waving of long tasseled grass. I know of nothing like it save the ...
— Parsifal - Story and Analysis of Wagner's Great Opera • H. R. Haweis
... Asano, in expounding the political history of the intervening two centuries, drew an apt image from a seed eaten by insect parasites. First there is the original seed, ripening vigorously enough. And then comes some insect and lays an egg under the skin, and behold! in a little while the seed is a hollow shape with an active grub ...
— When the Sleeper Wakes • Herbert George Wells
... suggests besides, that the universe is not rough-hewn, but perfect in its details. Nature will bear the closest inspection; she invites us to lay our eye level with the smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain. She has no interstices; every part is full of life. I explore, too, with pleasure, the sources of the myriad sounds which crowd the summer noon, and which seem the very grain and stuff of which eternity is made. ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau
... and lifted his terrible right arm to brush her from him, as he might have brushed an insect from him. ...
— Man and Wife • Wilkie Collins
... the day, and kept her informed of the thousand and one small events which fill life in Paris with variety. Her melancholy, deep and real though it was was still the melancholy of a woman rich in many ways. The Marquise d'Aiglemont was like a flower, with a dark insect gnawing at its root. ...
— A Woman of Thirty • Honore de Balzac
... thought and been taught that it was a bird," he said, "but you see so clearly and report so accurately, you almost convince me it is some large insect ...
— Moths of the Limberlost • Gene Stratton-Porter
... stood still, looking this way and that in a perfect delirium of fear. Finally he whirled around to the right, shrieking wildly (I think some nocturnal insect had brushed against him), plunged babbling up the bank to the hedge and heedless of the fact that it contained many thorns which must have cruelly lacerated his bare body, scrambled half through it and half over it into ...
— The Green Eyes of Bast • Sax Rohmer
... played on the sands as though the broken water were full of living gems. The sky was full of strange gulls with long, forked tails, and a lovely little flying lizard with transparent wings of the palest green—like those of a grasshopper—was flitting about picking up insect stragglers. ...
— Gulliver of Mars • Edwin L. Arnold
... draws up the carbon of the oil to be made into carbonic acid at the flame. All matters in process of combustion, decay, fermentation, or putrefaction, are returning to the atmosphere those constituents, which they obtained from it. Every living animal, even to the smallest insect, by respiration, spends its life in the production of this material necessary to the growth of plants, and at death gives up its body in part for such ...
— The Elements of Agriculture - A Book for Young Farmers, with Questions Prepared for the Use of Schools • George E. Waring
... disappeared shortly afterwards, when a number of large beetles, called elaters, took their place, displaying both red and green lights. The red glare, like that of a lamp, alternately flashed and vanished, as the insect turned its body in flight; and now and then a green light was displayed. The mingling of the two colours, red and green, in the evolutions of flight totally surpasses my power of description. We caught several, and had we possessed ...
— The Wanderers - Adventures in the Wilds of Trinidad and Orinoco • W.H.G. Kingston
... was not in Assuncion, but some twenty miles out in the "campo." He rarely visited the capital, except on matters of business. For a business he had; this of somewhat unusual character. It consisted chiefly in the produce of his gun and insect-net. Many a rare specimen of bird and quadruped, butterfly and beetle, captured and preserved by Ludwig Halberger, at this day adorns the public museums of Prussia and other European countries. But for the dispatch and shipment of ...
— Gaspar the Gaucho - A Story of the Gran Chaco • Mayne Reid
... were raw, but never had eggs, boiled, fried, or poached, tasted so nice before! He had just finished his meal, and was wishing that a third egg had remained in the ruined nest, when a slight sound like the buzzing of an insect made him look round, and there, within a few feet of him, was the big black weasel once more, looking strangely bold and savage-tempered. It kept staring fixedly at Martin out of its small, wicked, beady black eyes, and snarling so as to show its white sharp teeth; and very white they ...
— A Little Boy Lost • Hudson, W. H.
... was doing, then she became absorbed in her work. Then she reached for her color box and brushes, and shortly afterward tacked against the wall an extremely clever drawing of a greatly enlarged wasp. Skillfully she had sketched a face that was recognizable round the big insect eyes. She had surmounted the face by a fluff of bejewelled yellow curls, encased the hind legs upon which the creature stood upright in pink velvet Turkish trousers and put tiny gold shoes on the feet. She greatly exaggerated the wings into long trails and made them of green ...
— Her Father's Daughter • Gene Stratton-Porter
... passed in the late King's time against the felling of trees, it having been scientifically proved that trees in a certain quantity, not only purify the air from disease germs affecting the human organization, but also save the crops from many noxious insect- pests and poisonous fungi. Having learned the lesson at last, that the Almighty may be trusted to know His own business, and that trees are intended for wider purposes than mere timber, the regulations ...
— Temporal Power • Marie Corelli
... subsisted on the barilla root, a species of rush which they pound and make into cakes, and some other vegetables; their greatest delicacy being the large caterpillar (laabka), producing the gum-tree moth, an insect they procure out of the ground at the foot of those trees, with long twigs like osiers, having a small hook at the end. The twigs are sometimes from eight to ten feet long, so deep do these insects bury themselves ...
— Expedition into Central Australia • Charles Sturt
... often and keep their homes clean, their beds are apt to shock an unhappy traveller who, though he have to part with all his comforts and luggage on a krra ride, should, if he value his life, stick fast to insect powder and ammonia, and the ...
— Through Finland in Carts • Ethel Brilliana Alec-Tweedie
... The silent insect-creep of the Austrian columns towards the banks of the Inn continues to be seen till the view fades to nebulousness ...
— The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, - Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes • Thomas Hardy
... Lincoln. He passed a beetle one day that was sprawling upon its back. It was kicking hard in its efforts to turn over. Lincoln stooped and set it right. "Do you know," he said to the friend beside him, "I shouldn't have felt just right if I'd left that insect struggling there. I wanted to put him on his feet and give him a chance ...
— The Book of Stories for the Storyteller • Fanny E. Coe
... great and splendid thing you would like to do; and then, as the days go gliding by, you will find yourself unconsciously seizing the opportunities that are required for the fulfillment of your desire, just as the coral insect takes from the running tide the elements that it needs. Picture in your mind the able, earnest, useful person you desire to be, and the thought that you hold is hourly transforming you into that particular ...
— Love, Life & Work • Elbert Hubbard
... Devil, philosophically, "I never caught anybody yet who didn't say that; but tell me, ain't you getting somewhat fastidious down there? Here is one of my most popular flies, the greenback," he continued, exhibiting an emerald-looking insect, which he drew from his box. "This, so generally considered excellent in election season, has not even been nibbled at. Perhaps your sagacity, which, in spite of this unfortunate contretemps, no one can doubt," added the Devil, with a ...
— Legends and Tales • Bret Harte
... Sometimes a twig would snap, or a buzzing insect would pause, as if to look at her, but no one came ...
— Dorothy Dainty at the Mountains • Amy Brooks
... carried so far that not only pears from California, but all other fruits, from all other parts of the country, were at first put under the ban; and not only fresh but dried and preserved fruits. As a matter of fact, there was no danger whatever from the scale-insect, so far as fruit was concerned. The creature never stirs from the spot on the pear to which it fastens itself, and therefore by no possibility can it be carried from the house where the fruit is consumed to the nurseries where trees are grown. We took pains to show the facts in the case; ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... the sight of bird or beast," observed Nurse Johnson. "The stillness hath been oppressive to-day. 'Tis the hard part of winter travel. In summer there is always the hum of insect, or the song of bird to while away the monotony of a journey, but in the winter there is naught to break the quiet. 'Tis as though all Nature slept under the blanket of snow. Still, the riding hath not been hard. A sleigh is so much easier than ...
— Peggy Owen and Liberty • Lucy Foster Madison
... this situation was the boll weevil, an interloper from Mexico in 1892. The boll weevil is an insect about one fourth of an inch in length, varying from one eighth to one third of an inch with a breadth of about one third of the length. When it first emerges it is yellowish, then becomes grayish brown and ...
— A Century of Negro Migration • Carter G. Woodson
... Megahzooweneneh, n. a soldier, a man of war, or a fighting man Mahmahkahdezing, v. to boast Megoos, n. an awl Menis, n. an island Mahwewin, v. to cry Memenik, v. be quiet Mahskekeh, n. medicine Mahnedoosh, n. an insect, a worm Mahbah, this one Mesahkoodoonahgun, n. beard, the hair that grows on the lips and chin Mondahmin, n. corn Mechekahnok, n. a fence Metegoominzhe, n. an oak Mahskooda, n. plains, flats, or level ground Mahgeahyah, adj. big Mahgoobedoong, v. to squeeze Mayahgezid, n. a stranger ...
— Sketch of Grammar of the Chippeway Languages - To Which is Added a Vocabulary of some of the Most Common Words • John Summerfield
... was concerned, it might have been midday. Everybody assuming to be Anybody, was in town. The rumble of carriages passing to and fro was incessant,—the swift whirr and warning hoot of coming and going motor vehicles, the hoarse cries of the newsboys, and the general insect-like drone and murmur of feverish human activity were as loud as at any busy time of the morning or the afternoon. There had been a Court at Buckingham Palace,—and a "special" performance at the Opera,—and on account ...
— The Treasure of Heaven - A Romance of Riches • Marie Corelli
... deterioration? This one, resembling an angry snake of virulent poison, is the never-ending source of energy. In seeking to use violence towards Krishna, endued with mighty arms and unwearied by exertion, thou wilt, with all thy followers, perish like an insect ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 2 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... intimate, just as Southern fashionables from different States may meet and sing duets at Saratoga? There sounds the sweet, low, long-continued trill of the little hair-bird, or chipping-sparrow, a suggestion of insect sounds in sultry summer, and produced, like them, by a slight fluttering of the wings against the sides: by-and-by we shall sometimes hear that same delicate rhythm burst the silence of the June midnights, and then, ceasing, make stillness more still. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 • Various
... began. "Oh, yes, a miller! Is that it, Doctor Strong? Quite a curious miller. The study of insect life is no doubt—" ...
— Geoffrey Strong • Laura E. Richards
... that melts in the mouth. There are three species of the mangosteen tree, but of only one, the Garania mangostina, is the fruit edible. The others are valuable for timber, and the bark for the manufacture of a dye that resists the attacks of every sort of insect. ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 30. September, 1873 • Various
... the flame. All matters in process of combustion, decay, fermentation, or putrefaction, are returning to the atmosphere those constituents, which they obtained from it. Every living animal, even to the smallest insect, by respiration, spends its life in the production of this material necessary to the growth of plants, and at death gives up its body in part for such ...
— The Elements of Agriculture - A Book for Young Farmers, with Questions Prepared for the Use of Schools • George E. Waring
... many minutes could see nothing except a plain of waving grass higher than a man's head and almost as impenetrable as bamboo-country that carried small hope in it for man or beast, that would be a holocaust in the dry season when the heat set fire to the grass, and was an insect-haunted marsh at most other times. However, path across it there must be, for the Greeks had driven Brown's cattle that way that very morning, and Kazimoto swore he could see them in the distance, although Brown, and Will, and I—all three keen-sighted—could see nothing ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... of fern-patterns which would each contain points of distinctive interest and beauty, and of scientific truth, and yet be variable by fancy, with quite as much ease as the meaningless Indian one. Similarly, there is no form of leaf, of flower, or of insect, which might not become suggestive to you, and expressible in terms of manufacture, so as to be interesting, and ...
— A Joy For Ever - (And Its Price in the Market) • John Ruskin
... hardiness, blight resistance to the common hazel blight (known scientifically as cryptosporella anomala), freedom from the curculio of the hazelnuts (commonly known as the hazel weevil) and resistance to other insect pests. Also, considerable data had been accumulated by cataloging over 650 trees each year for five years; cataloging included varied and detailed studies of their growth, bearing habits, ability to resist blight, curculio and other insects, the size of the nut, the thinness of the shell and the ...
— Growing Nuts in the North • Carl Weschcke
... furnishes two illustrations of long-standing neglect, both well worthy of consideration for their pregnant suggestiveness. The Federal Department of Agriculture recently scored a notable success in dealing with an insect pest which was threatening the cotton-growing industry with economic ruin. The boll-weevil, like the legal and medical professions, thrives upon the follies of humanity. It attacks the cotton plants which have been weakened by bad husbandry. ...
— The Rural Life Problem of the United States - Notes of an Irish Observer • Horace Curzon Plunkett
... salesmanship fitted him to at least read signs if such signs were. He opened a bulky wallet which served him for a travelling case, and from among a litter of shaving gear, hairbrush, and spare sock-suspenders, he took a huge reading glass, purchased in Batavia with a vague idea of studying insect life in the ...
— Gold Out of Celebes • Aylward Edward Dingle
... full growth, and are not babies any more, so the weeds can not do them so much harm. Most of the bugs and worms, too, have died or been eaten by the birds. The birds are the gardener's best friend, for they eat many worms and bugs that could not be killed in any other way. So the more insect-eating birds you have around your garden the better. Even though the robins may take a few cherries they don't get paid half enough that way for the good work ...
— Daddy Takes Us to the Garden - The Daddy Series for Little Folks • Howard R. Garis
... driven even to eat the rank marshy grass. As the snow disappears, he seeks for wood-lice and other creatures in rotten trunks. Hungry as he is, he labours very patiently for his food. The prehensile form of his lips enables him to pick up with wonderful dexterity even the smallest insect or berry. As the ice breaks up in the lakes, he proceeds thither to fish for smelts and other small fish, which he catches with wonderful dexterity with his paws, throwing them out rapidly behind him. When, however, pressed by hunger, ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... summit the departure of the army. The scene was in the highest degree picturesque. Almost at their feet lay the camp, the few tents which remained unstruck glittering like bright dots on the wing of an insect, the whitewashed wall of the Fort reflecting the sunshine, while stacks of turf chimneys, lodge-poles, and rubbish marked the spots where the encampment had been abandoned. The whole valley was in commotion. Along the strips of road were winding clumsy baggage-trains; ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 18, April, 1859 - [Date last updated: August 7, 2005] • Various
... gone, sold and gone, To the rice swamp dank and lone, Where the slave-whip ceaseless swings, Where the noisome insect stings, Where the fever-demon strews Poison with the falling dews, Where the sickly sunbeams glare Through the hot and misty air:— Gone, gone, sold and gone To the rice swamp dank and lone, From Virginia hills and waters— Woe is me, ...
— My Bondage and My Freedom • Frederick Douglass
... the most obstinate young women God ever made, and that without me you would probably get yourself into a still worse hole, I'd have refused." And then followed a list of the things she was to be sure to take with her, including a pound or two of Keating's insect powder, and a hint that it might save her trouble, if she ...
— All Roads Lead to Calvary • Jerome K. Jerome
... caused their downfall in the long run. Their craving for sweets could only be satisfied by sugar and molasses in large quantities, for what is a flower to an insect with a ten-gallon stomach? One day the whole tribe flew across Lake Superior to attack a fleet of ships bringing sugar to Paul's camps. They destroyed the ships but ate so much sugar they could not fly ...
— The Marvelous Exploits of Paul Bunyan • W.B. Laughead
... to draw specific conclusions about mammals from these bird and insect experiments. Both the secretory action and the chromosome mechanisms are different. The quantitative nature of sex, and also the existence of intersexual types, between males and females, would seem to be general phenomena, ...
— Taboo and Genetics • Melvin Moses Knight, Iva Lowther Peters, and Phyllis Mary Blanchard
... the famished earth, so near at hand that the sensitive could feel it in their hair; deep thunder sent its tremor through the ground, jarring the windows of Ascalon that had looked in their day upon storms of human passion which were but insect ...
— Trail's End • George W. Ogden
... on; the pilgrim at length gained the summit of the mountain, a small and rugged table-land, strewn with huge masses of loose and heated, rock. All around was desolation: no spring, no herbage; the bird and the insect were alike mute. Still it was the summit: no loftier peaks frowned in the distance; the pilgrim stopped, and breathed with more facility, and a faint smile played over his languid ...
— Alroy - The Prince Of The Captivity • Benjamin Disraeli
... eleven stripped, he is making you look like a bale of hay that has been dumped by mistake on an athletic field. And when he gets a team in the gymnasium between halves, with the game going wrong, and stands up before them and sizes up their insect nerve and rubber backbone and hereditary awkwardness and incredible talent in doing the wrong thing, to say nothing of describing each individual blunder in that queer nasal clack of his—well, I'd rather be tied up in a great big frying-pan over a good hot stove for the ...
— At Good Old Siwash • George Fitch
... commerce is the fibre spun by the larvae or caterpillars of a moth, Bombyx mori, as they enter the chrysalis stage of existence. The silk-growing industry includes the care and feeding of the insect in all its stages. The leaves of the white mulberry-tree (morus alba) are the natural food of the insect, and silk-growing cannot be carried on in regions where this tree does not thrive. Not all areas that produce the mulberry-tree, however, will also grow the silk-worm; the latter cannot exist ...
— Commercial Geography - A Book for High Schools, Commercial Courses, and Business Colleges • Jacques W. Redway
... a rare mosquito is reported by the South-Eastern Union of Scientific Societies. It seems that the insect had worked its passage to the British Museum. We think that a sharper look-out should be kept on mosquitoes arriving ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, June 25, 1919 • Various
... went to help thresh, and all through the autumn months, the ceaseless ringing hum and the bow-ouw, ouw-woo, boo-oo-oom of the great balance wheels on the separator and the deep bass purr of its cylinder could be heard in every valley like the droning song of some sullen and gigantic autumnal insect. ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... on the summit of the Peak no trace of psora, lecidea, or other cryptogamous plants; no insect fluttered in the air. We found however a few hymenoptera adhering to masses of sulphur moistened with sulphurous acid, and lining the mouths of the funnels. These are bees, which appear to have been attracted by the flowers ...
— Equinoctial Regions of America • Alexander von Humboldt
... Righteousness has been gradually drawing nearer and nearer, appearing larger and brighter as He approached, and now He fills the whole hemisphere, pouring forth a flood of glory, in which I seem to float like an insect in the beams of the sun, exulting yet almost trembling while I gaze on this excessive brightness, and wondering, with unutterable wonder, why God should deign thus to shine upon a sinful worm. A single heart and a single tongue seem altogether ...
— The Life and Letters of Elizabeth Prentiss • George L. Prentiss
... centremost parts of her complicated heart there existed at this minute a little pang of disappointment, for a reason she would not allow herself to recognize. Oak had not once wished her free that he might marry her himself—had not once said, "I could wait for you as well as he." That was the insect sting. Not that she would have listened to any such hypothesis. O no—for wasn't she saying all the time that such thoughts of the future were improper, and wasn't Gabriel far too poor a man to speak sentiment to her? Yet he might have just hinted about that old love of his, and asked, ...
— Far from the Madding Crowd • Thomas Hardy
... uncovered one of my nests of the Fuscous ant (Formica fusca), they all began running about in search of some place of refuge. If now I covered over one small part of the nest, after a while some ant discovered it. In such a case, however, the brave little insect never remained there, she came out in search of her friends, and the first one she met she took up in her jaws, threw over her shoulder (their way of carrying friends), and took into the covered part; then both came out again, found two more friends and brought them in, ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... gently in. The web rocks like a cradle in the breeze. The house-fly feels honored to be the guest of such a big spider. We all have regard for big bugs. "But what is this?" cries the fly, pointing to a broken wing, "and this fragment of an insect's foot. There must have been a murder here! Let me go back!" "Ha! ha!" says the spider, "the gate is locked, the drawbridge is up. I only contracted to bring you in. I cannot afford to let you out. Take a ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage
... castigation and dismissal meekly, and found some interest in the ensuing negotiations toward reconciliation. No one knew better than he how to sue for forgiveness. But he was quite satisfied to have implanted the idea, for Ben Sansome was content with slow coral-insect progress. A busy man, engaged in men's occupations, would never have had the patience for this leisurely establishment of atmosphere and influence; his impatience or passion would have betrayed him to an early outbreak. But with Sansome it was the practice of ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White
... conscience, fancied that everyone saw that he had something to conceal—particularly Cargrim. In the presence of that good young man, this spiritual lord, high-placed and powerful, felt that he resembled an insect under a microscope, and that Cargrim had his eye to the instrument. Conscience made a coward of the bishop, but in the case of his chaplain his uneasy feelings were in ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume
... him his mother—gentle, pitiful, loving—come back from the dead, and the friendless youth felt no longer desolate. Then he began to ponder the meaning of the thoughts that filled his heart and brain; and God, by His silent lessons, conveyed through every bird that flies, every insect that crawls, each flower that raises its smiling beauty to the sun, helped him to understand. He had learned to read, in an imperfect sort of way, during his early years. He bought a Bible with clear type in the next village they stopped at, ...
— Two Little Travellers - A Story for Girls • Frances Browne Arthur
... sulphurous accumulations occur inland. Even the bed of the River Roseau is not free from these volcanic outbursts. Formerly the place produced very famous and high-class coffee, but this cultivation was ruined by an insect pest. Now, you shall find that sugar-cane, cocoa, and limejuice are the principal products. The manioc root, of which cassava bread is made, also grows abundantly here, and basket work is rather an important industry too. In the year 1881, there were still a hundred and seventy-three ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, April 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... unmistakable, with a typically Scots face lit up with the humorous twinkle one came to know so well. Many a time in after-years has that look been seen as he discoursed, as only he could, on the ways of man and beast, bird or insect, as one tramped with him through the jungles on the hills around Bombay during week-ends spent with him at Vehar or elsewhere. He was an ideal companion on such occasions, always at his best when acting the part of ...
— Concerning Animals and Other Matters • E.H. Aitken, (AKA Edward Hamilton)
... to have seen elsewhere. For instance, the tiger-lilies in the garden here must be above ten feet high, every bloom faultless, and, what strikes me as peculiar, every leaf on the stalk from bottom to top as perfect as if no insect existed to spoil them by a notch or speck. ...
— Life and Letters of Robert Browning • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... state of things now became so obviously apparent that he could no longer get away from the undeniable fact: Arsene Lupin was not dead! Arsene Lupin whom he had hurled into the bowels of the earth and crushed as surely as an insect is crushed with a hammer; Arsene Lupin ...
— The Teeth of the Tiger • Maurice Leblanc
... little noises of the earth Come with softest rustle; The shy, sweet feet of life; The silky mutter of moth-wings Against my restraining palm; The strident beat of insect-wings, The silvery trickle of water; Little breezes busy in the summer grass; The music of crisp, whisking, scurrying leaves, The swirling, wind-swept, frost-tinted leaves; The crystal splash of summer rain, Saturate with ...
— The World I Live In • Helen Keller
... at noon, we found the good people annoyed by a visitation which had not yet reached St. John's, namely, myriads of a winged insect called the shad-fly; these covered and crowded every building, filled the water and the air; they lodged on your clothes, rendered sight difficult, and speaking impracticable, except with closed teeth. Luckily, these ...
— Impressions of America - During The Years 1833, 1834, and 1835. In Two Volumes, Volume II. • Tyrone Power
... the world is in the wrong. But the same quenchless fever of unrest That thrilled the foremost of that martyred throng Thrilled me, and I awoke . . . and was the same Bewildered insect plunging for the flame That burns, and must burn somehow for ...
— The Children of the Night • Edwin Arlington Robinson
... that it contained no other living human creature, she sat down under one of the largest trees, with a satisfactory little sigh. Miss Jo loved the madrono. It was a cleanly tree; no dust ever lay upon its varnished leaves; its immaculate shade never was known to harbor grub or insect. ...
— Mrs. Skaggs's Husbands and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... The handwriting was that beloved of Civil Service Commissioners. Unquestionably, it was not Doris's. No sooner had his friend gone off, still intent on the dead insect, than Siddle followed. He knew that the bee would undergo scientific scrutiny at once, so gave Martin just enough time to dive into the sitting-room before ...
— The Postmaster's Daughter • Louis Tracy
... was decaying fast. In the great storm of 1906 it was partly blown down, and was poorly restored. It was the prey of rat and insect, dusty, neglected, but endearing. It had had a season of glory. It was built for the first modern administration office of the French Government, over sixty years before, and was painted white with blue trimmings. In its bare and dusty entrance-hall hung two steel engravings entitled, "The Beginning ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... through this imaginary microscope at a piece of iron, we should find to our surprise that the particles were not standing still. The iron would probably look as if it were fairly alive with millions of tiny specks moving back and forth, back and forth, faster than the flutter of an insect's wings. ...
— Common Science • Carleton W. Washburne
... all his worth, Denied in Heaven the soul he held in earth; While man, vain insect! hopes to be forgiven, And claims himself a sole, exclusive Heaven. Oh, man! thou feeble tenant of an hour, Debased by slavery or corrupt by power, Who knows thee well must quit thee with disgust, Degraded ...
— The Dog's Book of Verse • Various
... strange and unreal forms, the most familiar sounds become loud and alarming. Annie slept for about an hour soundly; then she awoke, trembling with cold in every limb, startled, and almost terrified by the oppressive loneliness of the night, sure that the insect life which surrounded her, and which would keep up successions of chirps, and croaks, and buzzes, was something mysterious and terrifying. Annie was a brave child, but even brave little girls may be allowed to possess nerves under ...
— A World of Girls - The Story of a School • L. T. Meade
... kept swinging backwards and forwards as the men walked," said Mervin. "Whenever a cork struck a fly it dashed the insect's brains out." ...
— The Red Horizon • Patrick MacGill
... overhanging shoulders testified whence came the power that had reduced many a proud Saratoga to elemental conditions, and "Happy Jack," the mammoth, soot-black, loose-jointed negro porter, placed themselves on either side of him. They made the boy look more like an insect ...
— The Mascot of Sweet Briar Gulch • Henry Wallace Phillips
... therefore bound, in justice to myself and to those whose good opinion has hitherto protected me, not to peril myself too frequently. The naturalists tell us that if you destroy the web which the spider has just made, the insect must spend many days in inactivity till he has assembled within his person the materials necessary to weave another. Now, after writing a work of imagination one feels in nearly the same exhausted state as the spider. I believe ...
— Guy Mannering, or The Astrologer, Complete, Illustrated • Sir Walter Scott
... settlement is Cape Komara, a perpendicular or slightly overhanging rock of dark granite three hundred feet high. Nothing but a worm or an insect could climb its face, and a fall from its top into the river would not be desirable. The Russians have erected a large cross upon the summit, visible for some distance up and down the river. Above this rock, which appears ...
— Overland through Asia; Pictures of Siberian, Chinese, and Tartar - Life • Thomas Wallace Knox
... elder brother, resuming his cigar. "I always do. It is much more agreeable for all parties. But I don't know how it is that a man's younger brothers are always so rapid and unreasonable in their movements. Instead of saving that unhappy insect, you have precipitated its fate. Poor thing—and it had no soul," said the intruder, with a tone of pathos. The scene altogether was a curious one. Snugly sheltered from the draught, but enjoying the coolness of the atmosphere which it produced, lay the figure on the sofa ...
— The Perpetual Curate • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... laughter-loving to look at as his successor was within. Philip rather took to the fellow at first sight, and was slow to suspect him, even when James Hornett had told his story. But the young Barter was not satisfied, as he should have been, with playing the part of one insect at a time. It was unwholesome enough, one might have thought, for him to play fly to Steinberg's spider, and yet he must needs take to playing moth to Philip Bommaney's candle, a light of danger to him, as he recognised almost from the first He ...
— Young Mr. Barter's Repentance - From "Schwartz" by David Christie Murray • David Christie Murray
... into which he would have drifted certainly if the news had been that she had killed herself. He stood appalled, looking into the green wood, aware of the mysterious life in the branches; and then lay down to watch the insect life among the grass—a beetle pursuing its little or great destiny. But he was too exalted to remain lying down; the wood seemed to beckon him, and he asked if the madness of the woods had overtaken him. Further on he came upon a chorus of finches singing in some hawthorn-trees, ...
— The Lake • George Moore
... Ezra Triplett was a hard-bitten mariner. In fact, he was, I think, the hardest-bitten mariner I have ever seen. He had been bitten, according to his own tell, man-and-boy, for fifty-two years, by every sort of insect, rodent and crustacean in existence. He had had smallpox and three touches of scurvy, each of these blights leaving its autograph. He had lost one eye in the Australian bush where, naturally, it was impossible to find it. This had been replaced ...
— The Cruise of the Kawa • Walter E. Traprock
... throngs were fluttering in frenzy around the tables in his halls at Homburg, Wiesbaden and Monte Carlo, he, hoe or trowel in hand, would be training and transplanting his roses, solicitous over an opening bud or deploring the ravages of an insect; or, again, refusing all invitations, would sit down with his wife to a dinner of boiled turnips and bacon, washed down with a glass of Vichy water and milk. This was the town and these the scenes ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... can I present the structural elements of the Mollusk plan, without reminding them of an Oyster or a Clam, a Snail or a Cuttle-Fish,—or of the Articulate plan, without calling up at once the form of a Worm, a Lobster, or an Insect,—or of the Vertebrate plan, without giving it the special character of Fish, Reptile, Bird, or Mammal. Yet I insist that all living beings are but the different modes of expressing these formulae, and that all animals have, within the limits of their own branch of the Animal ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... see, wau wau tay see, Flitting white fire insect, Waving white fire bug, Give me light before I go to bed, Give me light before I go to sleep! Come, little dancing white fire bug, Come, little flitting white fire beast, Light me with your bright white flame, Light me with your ...
— Two Indian Children of Long Ago • Frances Taylor
... Montana never feels himself alone. Legions of beings accompany him. All of the nature to whom he owes his soul speaks to him through the noise of the wind, in the roaring of the waterfall. The insect like the bird—everything, even to the bending twig wet with dew—for him has language, distinct personality. The forest is alive in its depths, has caprices, periods of anger; it avoids the thicket under the tread of the huntsman, or again presses him more closely, ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... mean time, I saw Ernest examining one of the figs very attentively. "Oh! papa!" said he, "what a singular sight; the fig is covered with a small red insect. I cannot shake them off. Can they be the Cochineal?" I recognized at once the precious insect, of which I explained to my sons the nature and use. "It is with this insect," said I, "that the beautiful and rich scarlet ...
— The Swiss Family Robinson; or Adventures in a Desert Island • Johann David Wyss
... from the region poisoned by sunshine. Next year you will find the grass growing fresh and green where the stone lay—the ground-bird builds her nest where the beetle had his hole—the dandelion and the buttercup are growing there, and the broad fans of insect-angels open and shut over their golden disks as the rhythmic waves of blissful consciousness pulsate ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... observer will notice differences among them. Some are larger than others, having grown more rapidly even though their surroundings were exactly the same; others are more skillful in their peculiar method of throwing the tongue at an insect they wish to catch. Still others will be differently colored. They might be arranged to show a considerable gradation between the lightest and the darkest of the group, though there may not be anywhere in the row a considerable gap. It is variation ...
— The Meaning of Evolution • Samuel Christian Schmucker
... animal and I study it alive; you turn it into an object of horror and pity, whereas I cause it to be loved; you labour in a torture-chamber and dissecting-room, I make my observations under the blue sky, to the song of the Cicadae (The Cicada Cigale, an insect akin to the Grasshopper and found more particularly in the south of France.—Translator's Note.); you subject cell and protoplasm to chemical tests, I study instinct in its loftiest manifestations; you pry into death, I pry into life. And why ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... could never see any living creature in distress without feeling a strong desire to relieve its sufferings. She knew that Arthur was in the habit of torturing every little insect and bird that came in his way, and had often drawn his persecutions upon herself by interfering in behalf of the poor victim; and now the thought instantly flashed upon her that this was some of his work, and that he would return ere long to carry out ...
— Elsie Dinsmore • Martha Finley
... with its tentacles. But so far are these movements from indicating of themselves the action of any instinctive principle, that they are no proof of animality; for a precisely analogous power is possessed by the sensitive plant known as the Fly-Trap of Venus (Dionoea muscipula): "any insect touching the sensitive hairs on the surface of its leaf instantly causes the leaf to shut up and enclose the insect, as in a trap; nor is this all; a mucilaginous secretion acts like a gastric juice on the captive, digests it, and renders it assimilable by the plant, which thus feeds on ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860 • Various
... governess, Miss Brown, who came to us highly recommended both as to her personal character and for ability to instruct us in arithmetic and geometry, geography, English composition, and the rudiments of French. She was barely five feet in height, and as thin and dry as an insect; and although her personal character came up to any eulogium that could be pronounced upon it, her ignorance of the "branches" specified was, if possible, greater than our own. She was particularly perplexed by geometry; she aroused our hilarity by always calling a parallelogram ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... upon your bitter Osher smile, why shut your eyes to the palpable analogy suggested? Naturalists assert that the Solanum, or apple of Sodom, contains in its normal state neither dust nor ashes, unless it is punctured by an insect (the Tenthredo), which converts the whole of the inside into dust, leaving nothing but the rind entire, without any loss of color. Human life is as fair and tempting as the fruit of 'Ain Jidy,' till stung and poisoned by ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... will bear a comparison with most of the productions of modern Spanish literature. The style is bold, free, energetic. Some of the pieces are sportive and graceful; such is the address to The Cucuya, or Cuban firefly. This beautiful insect is sometimes fastened in tiny nets to the light dresses of the Cuban ladies, a custom to which the writer gallantly alludes in the ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... seems impossible to avoid the conclusion that the active, armoured campodeiform grub differing less from its parent than an eruciform larva differs from its parent, is as a larval type more primitive than the caterpillar or maggot. A. Lameere has indeed, while admitting the adaptive character of insect larvae generally, argued (1899) with much ingenuity that the eruciform or vermiform type must have been primitive among the Endopterygota, believing that the original environment of the larvae of the ancestral stock ...
— The Life-Story of Insects • Geo. H. Carpenter
... which are being washed, put a pinch of borax in the water. It will bring any live insect to ...
— Fowler's Household Helps • A. L. Fowler
... Budd gave a brief sketch of latest methods of killing off noxious insects as followed by J.N. Dixon, of the State of Iowa, one of the greatest fruit farmers in that State or in the Northwest. He destroys the insect by sprinkling the trees with water diluted with arsenic, using one pound of white arsenic to 200 gallons of water. This has proven a great success and is not at all expensive. Some members objected ...
— Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56: No. 1, January 5, 1884. - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... level. On the top of the hill thus formed, plant twelve or fifteen seeds; and, when the plants are well up, thin them out from time to time as they progress in size. Finally, when all danger from bugs and other insect depredators is past, leave but two or three of the most stocky and promising plants to a hill. When the growth is too luxuriant, many practise pinching or cutting off the leading shoots; and, when the young fruit sets in too great numbers, a portion should be removed, both ...
— The Field and Garden Vegetables of America • Fearing Burr
... pools, and creeks, about which a child might play for a whole summer without weariness, like the Bell Rock or the Skerryvore, but one oval nodule of black-trap, sparsely bedabbled with an inconspicuous fucus, and alive in every crevice with a dingy insect between a slater and a bug. No other life was there but that of sea-birds, and of the sea itself, that here ran like a mill-race, and growled about the outer reef for ever, and ever and again, in the ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson
... walk in nature with a sense of greater space and freedom. It suggests besides, that the universe is not rough-hewn, but perfect in its details. Nature will bear the closest inspection; she invites us to lay our eye level with the smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain. She has no interstices; every part is full of life. I explore, too, with pleasure, the sources of the myriad sounds which crowd the summer noon, and which seem the very grain and stuff of which eternity is made. Who does ...
— Excursions • Henry D. Thoreau
... country, continually shifting our scene as we took the fancy, now encamping in some valley among the mountains, now by some pleasant lake or river. In fact, pic-nicing from day to day, and month to month, watching, I and my two sons, with ever new interest, all the varied life of beast, bird, and insect, and the equally varied world of trees, shrubs, and flowers. My mind was lying fallow, as it regarded my usual literary pursuits, but actually engaged with a thousand things of novel interest, both among men in the Gold Diggings, and among other creatures and phenomena ...
— Study and Stimulants • A. Arthur Reade
... lac. They plant arhar dal, u landoo, in their fields, and rear the lac insect on this plant. Last year the price of lac at Gauhati and Palasbari markets rose as high as Rs. 50 per maund of 82 lbs., it is said, but the price at the outlying markets of Singra and Boko was about Rs. 30. The price of lac has risen a good deal of late years. ...
— The Khasis • P. R. T. Gurdon
... summer long these merry little creatures played up and down the wide veranda, or chased butterflies and grasshoppers down the clover slope, offering Mark Twain never-ending amusement. He loved to see them spring into the air after some insect, miss it, tumble back, and quickly jump up again with a surprised and ...
— The Boys' Life of Mark Twain • Albert Bigelow Paine
... into the moonlight. Passionate love of animal life, intense regard for all life, even of the tiniest insect, was as much a religion with her as the worship of beauty was with Garth. She never could pretend sorrow over these accounts of shooting accidents, or falls in the hunting-field. When those who went out to inflict cruel pain were hurt themselves; ...
— The Rosary • Florence L. Barclay
... more than one species of them—two indeed there were—both about the size of ordinary gadflies; but altogether different from each other in colour and habits. One was a sort of water-beetle that swam near the surface; while the other was a winged insect that occasionally rose into the air, but more generally crawled along the water—making short runs from place to place, then stopping a moment, and then darting on again. The whole surface of the bay—and even out for some distance into the lake—fairly swarmed with these ...
— Bruin - The Grand Bear Hunt • Mayne Reid
... upper wings as though she were preparing for flight; whereupon Nilushka sought with a finger to detain her, and, in so doing, let fall the leaf, and enabled the insect to detach itself and fly away at a low level. Upon that, bending forward with arms outstretched, the idiot went softly in pursuit, much as though he himself were launching his body into leisurely flight, but, when ten paces away, stopped, raised his face to heaven, and, with arms pendent ...
— Through Russia • Maxim Gorky
... Armadillo. Fire-flies. Singular Fandango. Epiphytes. The Junta. Indian Life. Decorative Art. Horses. Jalapa. Anglo-Mexicans. Insect-life. Monte. Fate of Antonio. Scorpion. White Negress. Cattle. Artificial lighting. Vera Cruz. Further Journey. St. Thomas's. Voyage to England. ...
— Anahuac • Edward Burnett Tylor
... heart went up in gratitude to heaven! Mother and child were sleeping—so peacefully, so soundly. Mother and child! At that early period the dearest, the sweetest, the holiest link of human love—the gold without the dross, the flower without the insect, the wine without the headache, the full fruition of the feelings without the wear and tear of ...
— M. or N. "Similia similibus curantur." • G.J. Whyte-Melville
... self-approval died away with the scenes that called it forth, the cloud again settled on his brow; and again he felt that in solitude the passions feed upon the heart. As he thus walked along the green lane, and the insect life of summer rustled audibly among the shadowy hedges and along the thick grass that sprang up on either side, he came suddenly upon a little group that arrested all ...
— Alice, or The Mysteries, Book IV • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... till the eggs mature, when by their irritation they cause localised inflammation with pustules or vesicles on the surface. Children are most commonly attacked, particularly about the toe-nails and on the scrotum. The treatment consists in picking out the insect with a blunt needle, special care being taken not to break it up. The puncture is then cauterised. The application of essential oils to the feet acts ...
— Manual of Surgery - Volume First: General Surgery. Sixth Edition. • Alexis Thomson and Alexander Miles
... conception, Baffles wholly and destroys it, Or unto completion brings it, Bringeth out its faults or virtues, Shewing where its merit lieth. Then shall every beast that liveth, Every bird and every reptile, Every fish and every insect, Raise their own peculiar voices— (Terrible, or sweet, or puny); And will testify their own way Of the powers of King Nimaera, Who their being's fire feedeth, Gives them space for life and glory, With that limit ends their being; For no hidden spirit ...
— A Leaf from the Old Forest • J. D. Cossar
... the grave. The Wallachians say that a murony—a sort of cross between a werwolf and a vampire, connected by name with our nightmare—can take the form of a dog, a cat, or a toad, and also of any blood-sucking insect. When he is exhumed, he is found to have long nails of recent growth on his hands and feet, and blood is streaming from his eyes, ...
— Russian Fairy Tales - A Choice Collection of Muscovite Folk-lore • W. R. S. Ralston
... affording far-reaching glimpses of woodland, in which deer might occasionally be seen gambolling. Elsewhere the river widened occasionally into something like a lake, with wooded islets on its calm surface, while everywhere the water, earth, and air teemed with animal life—fish, flesh, fowl, and insect. It was such a sight of God's beautiful earth as may still be witnessed by those who, leaving the civilised world behind, plunge into the vast wildernesses that exist to this day in ...
— The Norsemen in the West • R.M. Ballantyne
... goes about an old house it is well to be on the look out for signs of vermin, both animal and insect. With the former, traps and prepared bait will suffice. The latter require the services of an exterminator or some one skilled in the use of hydrocyanic acid gas. Such insects go deep into the ...
— If You're Going to Live in the Country • Thomas H. Ormsbee and Richmond Huntley
... plant diseases and insect pests increased, winds broke down many of the unpruned trees, frosts often blighted the entire crop of fruit, and the uncultivated, sod-choked trees produced fruit that was less in quantity and poorer ...
— Checking the Waste - A Study in Conservation • Mary Huston Gregory
... autobiography, describes his "insect-like" devotion to creed in the green infancy of ritualism. In his early teens at boarding-school he and his mates, with half sincerity, followed a classmate to compline, donned surplices, tossed censers, arranged altars in their studies, bought bits of painted glass for their windows ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... the castle of St. Elmo at Naples. In our walk we picked up a species of locust, the sauterelle of this country, of a pale, dirty brown, and somewhat more than three inches in length. Thanks to the great cleanliness of the Hotel de Beauveau, this was the first insect which we had as yet met with at Marseilles. In a climate, indeed, of a certain degree of heat, perpetual scouring and sweeping becomes absolutely necessary in all comfortable establishments, and these little evils are more completely eradicated than in those places where ...
— Itinerary of Provence and the Rhone - Made During the Year 1819 • John Hughes
... for a gibbous moon rode high in the sky and the guides refused to stir so long as it remained there. It was a still night; in the jungle no air was stirring, and darkness brought forth a torment of mosquitoes. As day died, the woods awoke to sounds of bird and insect life; strange, raucous calls pealed forth, some familiar, others strange and unaccustomed. There were thin whistlings, hoarse grunts and harsh cacklings, high-pitched elfin laughter. Moving bodies disturbed the leaves overhead; from all sides ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... surface grew, The tints of earth—the hues of sky— That in its limpid bosom lie. And groups of happy children played Around the verge of each cascade; Or gambol'd o'er the flowery lea In wanton mirth and joyous glee; Pursuing, o'er the sparkling lawn, The insect in its airy flight, Which still eludes, but tempting on From flower to flower, with plumage bright, The hand that woos to stay its flight— Till soaring high, on pinions wild It leaves the charm'd ...
— The Poets and Poetry of Cecil County, Maryland • Various
... their number of the active infectant in fever and ague. It has been found in the dust-like spores of a marsh plant—the Pamella. In Paris, at the same time, a woman of rank claims to have discovered the cause of cholera in a microscopic insect, developed in low and filthy localities. Her details were so minute, that the Academy of Science, which began by laughing at the introduction of the matter, has been compelled to listen, and the subject is now ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume II • Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage
... heard it, And I must hear that word again? 'Tis bitter; Importunate it comes upon me, like an insect That, driven once away, returns to buzz About my face.... The victory is in vain! The field is heaped with corpses; scattered wide, And broken, are the rest—a most flourishing Army, with which, if ...
— Modern Italian Poets • W. D. Howells
... travelled slowly, crept upon the greenish-brown water almost with the deliberation of some monstrous water-insect. For she journeyed against the tide, and as yet there was little wind, though what there was blew from the north. The crew had to work hard in the burning sun-rays, going naked upon the bank and straining at ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... species of the beetle, sometimes called the May bug, is a formidable enemy to the husbandman, and has been found to swarm in such numbers, as to devour every kind of vegetable production. The insect is first generated in the earth, from the eggs deposited by the fly in its perfect state. In about three months, the insects contained in these eggs break the shell, and crawl forth in the shape of a grub or maggot, which feeds upon the roots of vegetables, and continues ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... bruis'd insect on the waste, A sigh would heave her breast; And oft her careful hand replac'd ...
— Poems (1786), Volume I. • Helen Maria Williams
... me shriek and moan? Would you have me throw myself in convulsive ecstasy upon that ambiguous insect? You are not the first, Hera, who has gravely misunderstood my character. I am not, I have never been, a victim of the impulsive passions. The only serious misunderstandings which I have ever had with my illustrious mother have resulted from her lack of comprehension of this fact. ...
— Hypolympia - Or, The Gods in the Island, an Ironic Fantasy • Edmund Gosse
... concerning the best breeds of poultry and cattle. The bureau of plant industry ransacks the world for new crops suitable for our soils, and gives fruit-growers and farmers advice concerning plant parasites. Insect pests are the concern of the entomology division. Additional functions of the Department of Agriculture may be indicated by an enumeration of some of the more important of its remaining bureaus and divisions. These include the bureau of chemistry, the bureau of soils, the ...
— Problems in American Democracy • Thames Ross Williamson
... has the mainland," observed the captain, pointing to the chart. "It is fully twenty leagues long, and yet there does not appear to be a point where it is more than a league across from sea to sea. Those voes run up for a league or more, and make it appear like some huge insect. Then what innumerable islands of all shapes and sizes! The people should be amphibious, who live here, to enable them to visit their neighbours: in a southern clime what a delightful spot it might be! but in ...
— Ronald Morton, or the Fire Ships - A Story of the Last Naval War • W.H.G. Kingston
... antagonistic to our real life; I mean in images of repose? I feel at the moment as if I suddenly were made better, now that heaven and earth have suddenly become yet more tranquil. I am now conscious of a purer and sweeter moral than either I or you drew from the insect you have sheltered. I must come to the ...
— Kenelm Chillingly, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... midge, but the female is a wingless, footless, little sack, without eyes or other organs of special sense, which lies motionless under a flat, thin, circular, reddish scale composed of wax and two or three cast skins of the insect itself. The insect has a long, slender, flexible, sucking beak, which is thrust into the leaf or stem or fruit of the orange on which the "scale bug" lives, and through which the insect sucks the orange sap, which is its only food. It ...
— Composition-Rhetoric • Stratton D. Brooks
... be shown under Anatomy. But then there are aquatic animals which are of great variety; I will not try to convince the painter that there is any rule for them for they are of infinite variety, and so is the insect tribe. ...
— The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, Complete • Leonardo Da Vinci
... might be the haunt of large, water-loving serpents, or strange beasts which lurked in waiting for the unwary traveller; but we heard nothing but the cries of birds and the rustling and beating of wings, or the hum of insect life, save now and then when there was a splash from the river away to our right, or from a black pool hidden from ...
— Mass' George - A Boy's Adventures in the Old Savannah • George Manville Fenn
... driven to immediate and violent action on the false supposition that instant interference is called for. Insects, it is true, should be killed without delay by dropping into the ear sweet oil, castor, linseed, or machine oil or glycerin, or even water, if the others are not at hand, and then the insect should be removed in half an hour by syringing as recommended for wax (Vol. II, ...
— The Home Medical Library, Volume I (of VI) • Various
... the other had observed, collected, and drawn specimens with the enthusiasm of a Londoner for the country, till she had a valuable little museum of her own gathering, and was a handbook for the county curiosities. Star, bird, flower, and insect, were more than resources, they were the friends of her lonely life, and awoke many a keen feeling of interest, many an aspiration of admiring adoration that carried her through her dreary hours. And though Miss Fennimore thought her science puerile, her credulity extensive, and her observations ...
— Hopes and Fears - scenes from the life of a spinster • Charlotte M. Yonge
... one. No sound was heard save an occasional ejaculation between a sigh and a smothered groan from the wretched felon. The candle burned dimly; and as I turned I saw, though I scarcely noticed it at the moment, a dim insect of the moth species, fluttering hurriedly round it, the sound of whose wings mournfully filled up the pauses of myself and my companion. When the nerves are strained to their uttermost, by such ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 13, No. 374 • Various
... roof of the cabin in which he lay; and his eye was attracted by a spider, which, hanging at the end of a long thread of its own spinning, was endeavouring to swing itself from one beam in the roof to another, for the purpose of fixing the line on which it meant to stretch its web. The insect made the attempt again and again without success; at length Bruce counted that it had tried to carry its point six times, and been as often unable to do so. It came into his head that he had himself ...
— Heroes Every Child Should Know • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... bars of gold and light vibrated over the tawny waters, and darkness fell like a black sword, cutting the day from the night. The voices of the birds from the tree-tops, here and there died down, and as if to enhance the silence, insect voices came from under the grass. I got on my elephant's back and sat there quietly, for as the evening Silence goes by, each man must make his prayer. As the Silence walked on, I could see the grass waving in zig-zag curves across ...
— Kari the Elephant • Dhan Gopal Mukerji
... said quietly, "one soul expressed completely in a single person, I mean, is exceedingly rare. Not often is a physical instrument found perfect enough to provide it with adequate expression. In the lower ranges of humanity—certainly in animal and insect life—one soul is shared by many. Behind a tribe of savages stands one Savage. A flock of birds is a single Bird, scattered through the consciousness of all. They wheel in mid-air, they migrate, they obey the deep intelligence called instinct—all as one. The life of any one ...
— Four Weird Tales • Algernon Blackwood
... we are told that they presented themselves in various forms to the person engaged in laying them, and that ultimately they foolishly came transformed into some innocuous insect or animal, which he was able to overcome. The simplicity of the Ghosts is ridiculous, and can only be understood by supposing that the various steps in the contest for the mastery are not forthcoming, that ...
— Welsh Folk-Lore - a Collection of the Folk-Tales and Legends of North Wales • Elias Owen
... about him, passing close to him as though to beat him back with its delicate, diaphanous wings. The pale yellowish buds everywhere were changing to a lusty verdant. Air and grass were filled with questing insect life thrilling upward with little voices. The snows were slipping, slipping from the mountainsides, the waters rising in river and lake. The sap was astir in shrub and tree, bursting upward joyously. ...
— Wolf Breed • Jackson Gregory
... gimlet was in full twist—"I would make an affidavit to that effect before any notary." He began loosening his coat with his skinny fingers, fumbling in his inside pocket, thrusting deep his hand, as if searching for an elusive insect in the vicinity of his arm-pit, his talk continuing: "Yes, sir, before any notary, you are so exactly like your father. Not that I've seen your father, sir, VERY MANY TIMES"—the elusive had evidently ...
— Kennedy Square • F. Hopkinson Smith
... same time an angry cow, rendered furious by the sting of some insect, plunged frantically into the wedding circle, bellowing, tossing her head, and flourishing her tail in a terrific and antinuptial manner. The Rev. Mr. Sifter was the first one to leave, and, being very spare, he passed swiftly through the trees and bushes, never looking behind him till ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... immortality of the soul. In denying the first, you sap the foundations of religion; you cut off at one blow the merit of our faith, the comfort of our hope, and the motives of our charity. In denying the immortality of the soul, you degrade human nature, and confound man with the vile and perishable insect. In denying both, you overturn the whole system of religion, whether natural or revealed; and in denying religion, you deprive the poor of the only comfort which supports them under their distresses and afflictions; you wrest ...
— Irish Wit and Humor - Anecdote Biography of Swift, Curran, O'Leary and O'Connell • Anonymous
... child, left at liberty to exercise his activities, ought to find in his surroundings something organized in direct relation to his internal organization which is developing itself by natural laws, just as the free insect finds in the form and qualities of flowers a direct correspondence between form and sustenance. The insect is undoubtedly free when, seeking the nectar which nourishes it, it is in reality helping the reproduction of the ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... that Billie learned little, save that the place fairly swarmed with men in livery. Once in Mona's room, however, Billie discovered that metallic furniture was the rule; that the windows were without screens, [Footnote: The Capellans seem to have utterly stamped out all forms of insect life except those directly beneficial to man.] and that the bed was set down very close to the floor. Otherwise, the room was much like any ...
— The Devolutionist and The Emancipatrix • Homer Eon Flint
... of nature—one who knew more about his mother than any other child she had. Yet he was not a Calvinist. He did not get his inspiration from any book, but from every star in the heavens, from the insect in the sunbeam, from the flowers in the meadows, and ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... Deems that Time soon may sanctify his claim Among the sons of song to dwell apart.— Time passes—passes! The aspiring flame Of Hope shrinks down; the white flower Poesy Breaks on its stalk, and from its earth-turned eye Drop sleepy tears instead of that sweet dew Rich with inspiring odours, insect wings Drew from its leaves with every changing sky, While its young innocent petals unsunn'd grew. No more in pride to other ears he sings, But with a dying charm himself unto:— For a sad season: then, to active ...
— The Germ - Thoughts towards Nature in Poetry, Literature and Art • Various
... complement it; namely, that those men and women, who do not even approximately fulfil the conditions of their elevated rank, who will not endeavour after the great human-divine idea, striving to ascend, are sent away back down to that stage of development, say of fish or insect or reptile, beyond which their moral nature has refused to advance. Who has not seen or known men who appeared not to have passed, or indeed in some things to have approached the development of the more human of the lower animals! Let those take care ...
— Hope of the Gospel • George MacDonald
... information, which it would take you years to find out, can be secured with certainty, and generally in a few days. We know what to do, and where to go, and that's the point. If it's a new bug, or a microscope insect we put it into the hands of a man who knows just what high scientific authority to apply to; if it's the middle name of your next door neighbor we'll give it to you from his baptismal record. I'm getting up a pamphlet-circular which will be ...
— The Late Mrs. Null • Frank Richard Stockton
... sleep; to others it means what it means to many fortunate human beings—travels in warm climes; to still others, who again have their human prototypes, it means a struggle, more or less fierce, to keep soul and body together; while to many insect forms it ...
— The Wit of a Duck and Other Papers • John Burroughs
... sweet Francos: did not God design That e'en the insect should his life enjoy? Indeed, his joyous song of gratitude Doth only cease that he may puncture make To meet requirements which God hath ordained. Hence it were well to nature's laws obey, For e'en this insect, as it wings its way, Hath fond desire, ...
— 'A Comedy of Errors' in Seven Acts • Spokeshave (AKA Old Fogy)
... conversation, but the thoughts of both were upon their surroundings, and they answered questions with an effort. The prison-like appearance of the valley, and the utter absence of sound, both of bird and insect life, had a ...
— The White Waterfall • James Francis Dwyer
... violating one of nature's great laws. Even the lower forms of life afford example of this supreme law. Solomon startles the sluggard with his sharp admonition to betake himself to the ant. And Sir John Lubbock points men to the insect world to learn ...
— A Fleece of Gold - Five Lessons from the Fable of Jason and the Golden Fleece • Charles Stewart Given
... golden-wing leaned far out of his oaken walls, and called from morning to night. Hard-working parents rushed hither and thither, snatching, digging, or dragging their prey from every imaginable hiding-place. It was woful times in the insect world, so many new hungry mouths to be filled. All this life seemed to stir the young kings: they grew restless; they were late. Their three little heads, growing darker every day, bobbed this way ...
— Little Brothers of the Air • Olive Thorne Miller
... snow, the hail, and possibly the rain, which has beaten upon them through unnumbered years. It is no wonder that this is a lifeless solitude; there is nothing here capable of sustaining the life of even the meanest insect. Let us return to the ship, my friends, and hasten over this part of our journey; we shall meet with nothing worthy of interest until we reach the Pole, which itself will probably prove to be merely an undistinguishable spot in just such a ...
— The Log of the Flying Fish - A Story of Aerial and Submarine Peril and Adventure • Harry Collingwood
... interest and importance to the ranger is the study of insect infestation. Many trees are killed annually by certain insects, and these must be ...
— The Lake of the Sky • George Wharton James
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