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More "Primordial" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... is a natural accompaniment of the very highest originality. The perfect expression and orderly arrangement of ideas is a later process; but, when great thoughts are for the first time coming forth, there is a kind of primordial roughness about them, as if the earth out of which they are arising were still clinging to them: the polishing of the gold comes late and has to be preceded by the heaving of the ore out of the bowels of nature. Paul in ...
— The Life of St. Paul • James Stalker
... of the thought of shining kindly brown-skinned women, who smiled at him and wreathed his head with unfamiliar flowers. He had, too, a piece of a book about the lost palaces of Yucatan, those vast terraces buried in primordial forest, of whose makers there is now no human memory. With La Perouse he linked "The Island Nights Entertainments," and it never palled upon him that in the dusky stabbing of the "Island of Voices" something poured over the stabber's hands "like warm ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... became suddenly and unaccountably swollen with rage; she became primordial; she wanted to hurt, maim, kill. Childishly she stooped and picked up heavy stones which she hurled into the water. The instinct to live flamed so strongly in her that the crust of civilization fell away like mist before ...
— The Adventures of Kathlyn • Harold MacGrath
... control. Whence is this extraordinary human element, and what explanation can be given of the contradiction unless there be some higher synthesis into which the antinomy is taken up and resolved into unity? If out of the primordial nebula both the cosmos and man, with all that he is, have been evolved, then it would appear, plain as the writing on the wall, that some extraordinary transformation has come over the scene as soon as man appeared, and that an element ...
— Morality as a Religion - An exposition of some first principles • W. R. Washington Sullivan
... crush him, annihilate him, how horribly quick, and with such horrible indifference! I suppose it's civilisation in the making, the thing that isn't meant to be seen, as though it were too elemental, too—primordial; like the ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... than the mental state of the man far behind us in cultivation, as regards what we call par excellence 'morality.' It is not indecency; it is simply an animal absence of modesty. Acts which are undeniably quite natural, since they are the expression of a primordial need, essential to the duration of the species, but which a long ancestral and individual education has trained us to subject to a rigorous restraint, and to the accomplishment of which, consequently, ...
— The Negro Farmer • Carl Kelsey
... distinct imperatives for me, but I am quite prepared to admit there is no proving them imperative on any one else. One's political proceedings, one's moral acts are, I hold, just as much self-expression as one's poetry or painting or music. But since life has for its primordial elements assimilation and aggression, I try not only to obey my imperatives, but to put them persuasively and convincingly into other minds, to bring about my good and to resist and overcome my evil as though they were the universal Good and the universal Evil in which unthinking ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... useful things for mankind to knock its head against—invincible, unnegotiable, splendidly competent to teach humanity its place. You see we've grown not a little conceited—so at least it seems to me—on our evolutionary journey up from the primordial cell. We're too much inclined to forget we've developed soul quite comparatively recently, and, therefore, that there is probably just as long a journey ahead of us—before we reach the ultimate of intellectual and spiritual development—as there is behind ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... real, although it is differently manifested, and is indispensably necessary to account for the resulting products. Now, can it be reasonably asserted that the direct and immediate creation of such a being as Man would be more derogatory to the wisdom and power of God than the primordial production of "a universal Fire-Mist," or even of "electricity and albumen?" or, will it be pretended that immediate creation of molluscs as molluscs, of fishes as fishes, of reptiles as reptiles, would be less worthy ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... also the existence of life in the form of one or more primordial germs. He does not adopt the theory of spontaneous generation. What life is he does not attempt to explain, further than to quote (p. 326), with approbation, the definition of Herbert Spencer, who says, "Life depends on, or consists in, the incessant action and reaction of various ...
— What is Darwinism? • Charles Hodge
... in movement were sufficient to create beings, they would not be so varied. For in the beginning lands, water, men, and plants had no existence. What, then, is this primordial matter, which we have never seen, which is no portion of created things, and which yet has produced ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert
... and "molecules" for "works," and the application of the argument is obvious. The teleological and the mechanical views of nature are not, necessarily, mutually exclusive. On the contrary, the more purely a mechanist the speculator is, the more firmly does he assume a primordial molecular arrangement, of which all the phenomena of the universe are the consequences; and the more completely is he thereby at the mercy of the teleologist, who can always defy him to disprove that this primordial molecular arrangement was not intended to evolve the phenomena ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... revealed to us about the basis of the primordial law of love is comprised in the following axiom, which is at the same time the principle and ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part I. • Honore de Balzac
... because there are decencies to be observed by animals no less than men, he walked forward with his trunk outstretched into the primordial jungle and was ...
— O Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1919 • Various
... everlasting silence broods, with lips Of adamant, o'er earthquake-builded floors. Where forms, such as the Demon-World adores, Laborious water carves; whence echo ships Wild-tongued o'er pools where petrifaction strips Her breasts of crystal from which crystal pours.— Here where primordial fear, the Gorgon, sits Staring all life to stone in ghastly mirth, I seem to tread, with awe no tongue can tell,— Beneath vast domes, by torrent-tortured pits, 'Mid wrecks terrific of the ruined Earth,— An ancient causeway ...
— Weeds by the Wall - Verses • Madison J. Cawein
... life-in-death life, and hence the mistake. If gladness were not at the root, whence its opposite sorrow, against which we arise, from which we recoil, with which we fight? We recognise it as death—the contrary of life. There could be no sorrow but for a recognition of primordial bliss. This in us that fights must be life. It is of the nature of light, not of darkness; darkness is nothing until the light comes. This very childplay, as you call it, of Nature, is her assertion of the secret that life is the deepest, that life shall ...
— The Seaboard Parish Vol. 3 • George MacDonald
... bent almost double with the primordial instinct of concealment. He paused to listen so close to Evan that the latter, squatting under his bush, could have reached out and touched Charley's foot. Evan breathed from the top of his lungs, wondering that the beating of his heart did not betray ...
— The Deaves Affair • Hulbert Footner
... cluster, the Bristlers of Orc IV—created prosthetic devices for their convenience and, when they tired of their history, breathed their own life into them and died. On Earth the legend is still in process. Many of the lower forms of life familiar throughout the galaxy can be seen on Earth in the primordial character of an appliance. Man regards the highest forms of life (as we know it) as tools—because he made them. How can we deny the superiority of the Creator? How will it feel to know we are nothing ...
— The Demi-Urge • Thomas Michael Disch
... our heads upon nature's heart, and lay at night watching the cold stars shivering in their firmament." That was good! Mr. Sprudell wondered if it was original or had he read it somewhere? "By day, like primordial man, we crept around beetling crags and scaled inaccessible peaks in ...
— The Man from the Bitter Roots • Caroline Lockhart
... teachers held that the rival gods, Ahriman and Ormuzd, evolved themselves out of primordial matter and then through the long ages created their attendant hierarchies of angels. The philosophers of India anticipated in some respects our modern evolutionary theory. Brahma is thought of as self-existent and eternal. He gradually condenses himself into material objects, ...
— The Making of a Nation - The Beginnings of Israel's History • Charles Foster Kent and Jeremiah Whipple Jenks
... the full development and symmetry of Darwin's hypothesis strongly suggest the evolution of the human no less than the lower animal races out of some simple primordial animal—that all are equally "lineal descendants of some few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Silurian system was deposited." But, as the author speaks disrespectfully of spontaneous generation, and accepts a supernatural ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... affording thus an easy ascent to the rugged profile of this land of the Western Hemisphere. All this is of historic record in stony cypher of geology indelibly engraved by time on the rocky walls of deepest canyons, as traceable from the primordial archaean to our present era, the ...
— Tales of Aztlan • George Hartmann
... reform were laid in a report by Northcote and Sir Charles Trevelyan (November 1853), prepared for Mr. Gladstone at his request, recommending two propositions, so familiarised to us to-day as to seem like primordial elements of the British constitution. One was, that access to the public service should be through the door of a competitive examination; the other, that for conducting these examinations a central board should be constituted. The effect of such a change has been enormous not only on ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... adventure. The historic post of the old fur traders, the boundless, mysterious forest, and the romantic life of the trappers and dusky tribes which it sheltered, were pregnant with interest. But his wildest dreams could not have foretold the part Shad Trowbridge was destined to play in this primordial land and life before he should bid farewell to its ...
— The Gaunt Gray Wolf - A Tale of Adventure With Ungava Bob • Dillon Wallace
... the man's little twinkling animal eyes, his high cheek bones, his flat nose, his thick and slobbery lips, his straggling, fierce mustache and eyebrows, his grotesque long-tailed cutaway coat. So to him, too, this primitive man reaching dully from primordial chaos, the great moment ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... primordial being the sacrificed bull, Mithra, sprouts life and vegetation, so in the dream of Omicron, a tree grows out of the belly of the dead bear. In mythology many trees grow out of graves, that in some way reincarnate the creative or life principle of the dead. It is an interesting fact that ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... than half as large as the savage creatures with whom Stevens had fought in the mountain glade upon Ganymede, the hexans resembled those aborigines only as civilized men might resemble gigantic primordial savages of our own Earth. Brandon's gaze went from short, powerful legs up a round, red body to the enormous, freakish double pair of shoulders, with its peculiar universal jointing. From the double shoulders sprang four limbs, ...
— Spacehounds of IPC • Edward Elmer Smith
... spirits smiled, "The conversation," they added, "refers to the primordial scheme and cannot be divulged before the proper season; but, when the time comes, mind do not forget us two, and you will readily be able to escape ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... of our planet shows us first an incandescent nebula dispersed over vast infinitudes of space; later this condenses into a central sun surrounded by a family of glowing planets hardly yet consolidated from the plastic primordial matter; then succeed untold millenniums of slow geological formation; an earth peopled by the lowest forms of life, whether vegetable or animal; from which crude beginnings a majestic, unceasing, unhurried, forward movement brings things stage by stage to the condition in which we know them ...
— The Edinburgh Lectures on Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... backward billows fleet, Crest crossing crest ecstatic as they greet, Thrilling each vein, Exploring every chasm and cove Of the full heart with floods of honied love, And every principal street And obscure alley and lane Of the intricate brain With brimming rivers of light and breezes sweet Of the primordial heat; Till, unto view of me and thee, Lost the intense life be, Or ludicrously display'd, by force Of distance; as a soaring eagle, or a horse On far-off hillside shewn, May seem a gust-driv'n rag or a dead stone. Nor by such bonds alone— But more I leave to say, Fitly revering the Wild Ass's bray, ...
— The Unknown Eros • Coventry Patmore
... of those ancient times. Feudal customs are still maintained. Antiquaries find Druidic monuments still standing. The genius of modern civilization shrinks from forcing its way through those impenetrable primordial forests. An unheard-of ferociousness, a brutal obstinacy, but also a regard for the sanctity of an oath; a complete ignoring of our laws, our customs, our dress, our modern coins, our language, but withal a patriarchal ...
— The Chouans • Honore de Balzac
... midst of a controversy respecting the mode of government of the world, whether it be by incessant divine intervention, or by the operation of primordial and unchangeable law. The intellectual movement of Christendom has reached that point which Arabism had attained to in the tenth and eleventh centuries; and doctrines which were then discussed are ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... this truth, have endeavored to simplify matters to the level of our ignorance, by reducing all primordial elements to one, or at most two, simple elements, and all forces to the form of one universal and irrational law; but the progress of science utterly blasts the effort. No scientific man now dreams of one primordial element. ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume I, No. 7, July, 1880 • Various
... parties or individuals, get licked in the same way. They outrage some one's self-respect, and then the old primordial cyclone hits them. ...
— The Iron Puddler • James J. Davis
... leaving their memory to be perpetuated by the neighbouring "Monte Saraceno." The costume, on the other hand, may have come over from Greece; it is figured on Tanagra statuettes and worn by modern Greek shepherds. By Sardinians, too. ... It may well be a primordial form ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... India dispenses completely with gods, holding that the primordial stuff is eternal, but it also holds that souls have a separate existence and are eternal. Thus a species of dualism emerges. Buddhism goes a step further, ignoring the soul as well as gods. It is agnostic in that, ...
— Introduction to the History of Religions - Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV • Crawford Howell Toy
... tenuity to organized matter than we can readily admit" (p. 317); and in another place he claims that "we cannot but be convinced that the fetus or embryon is formed by apposition of new parts, and not by the distention of a primordial nest of germs included one within another like the cups of a conjurer" ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... as a necessary self-realisation of God. "God was not," he says, "before He made the universe." The Son is the Idea of the World; "be assured," he says, "that the Word is the nature of all things." The primordial causes or ideas—Goodness, Being, Life, etc., in themselves, which the Father made in the Son—are in a sense the creators of the world, for the order of all things is established according to ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... microscopes are made more perfect, and are more extensively and efficiently employed. In the midst of this immense variety, and this periodic transformation of animal and vegetable productions, we see incessantly revealed the primordial mystery of all organic development, that same great problem of 'metamorphosis' which Gthe has treated with more than common sagacity, and to the solution of which man is urged by his desire of reducing vital forms to the smallest number of fundamental ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... gentleman with a poetic beard, a barber by profession, was among the most eloquent. It was not a jail, it was a mad-house, he cried. Another declared that without bedding, doctor, or medicines, shut up here until the end of the war, probably, they must at least have food—that was a need "primordial!" ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl
... satirical spirit (Augustin had formidable powers of ridicule all through his life) were exercised upon the backs of his fellow-religionists. Provisionally, he had admitted as indisputable the basic principles of Manicheeism: first of all, the primordial antagonism of the two substances, the God of Light and the God of Darkness; then, this other dogma, that particles of that Divine Light, which had been carried away in a temporary victory of the army of Darkness, were immersed in certain plants and liquors. Hence, the distinction they made between ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... full of emphasis; his body grew less and less clumsy, more and more leonine. It has taken centuries and centuries to make the white man what he is to-day; yet, a single year of misfortune may throw him back into the primordial. For it is far easier to retrograde than to go forward, easier to let the world go by than to march along with it. Had he been less interested in Elsa and more concerned about his rehabilitation, self-analysis would have astonished Warrington. The ...
— Parrot & Co. • Harold MacGrath
... twelve billion years, and that it was now all over for another such interim, and everybody could sleep soundly with the consciousness of having assisted at a spectacle never before beheld except by a primordial protoplasmic cell. ...
— Police!!! • Robert W. Chambers
... "thrilling action romances," as his enthusiastic publishers and television directors said, "of ages past, when men were men. Red-blooded heroes responding vigorously to the stirring passions of primordial life!" ...
— The Cosmic Express • John Stewart Williamson
... maintained silence on a doctrine which, along with that of Karma, form the two main columns of the Hindu temple; for the Brahman as well as for the Buddhist—who is only a member of a powerful offshoot of Hinduism—these two laws rule throughout the whole Universe, from the primordial kingdoms up to the gods, including man; and the principal, nay, the only goal of human life is Moksha—salvation, in Christian terminology—liberation from the ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... hidden. The scuta, terga and carina, are much larger than the other valves: these five valves seem to differ essentially from the others in being at first developed under the form of the so-called primordial valves: the other valves commence by a small indistinct brown spot, very different from the hexagonal tissue of the primordial valves: I saw this very clearly in young specimens of S. vulgare. At first, the scuta, ...
— A Monograph on the Sub-class Cirripedia (Volume 1 of 2) - The Lepadidae; or, Pedunculated Cirripedes • Charles Darwin
... of the most ancient and popular of the numerous names of Vishnu. The word has been derived in several ways, and may mean he who moved on the (primordial) waters, or he who pervades or ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... the shock of mane, and the rough hair of the horse saved him. The gradient he was on lowered again, and then—"Whup!" said Ugh-lomi astonished, and the slant was the other way up. But Ugh-lomi was a thousand generations nearer the primordial than man: no monkey could have held on better. And the lion had been training the horse for countless generations against the tactics of rolling and rearing back. But he kicked like a master, and buck-jumped rather neatly. In five minutes Ugh-lomi lived ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... up, to drag the veil over her face with her free hand, and to thrust the weapon at the figure in the doorway was all simultaneous and instinctive acts in the expression of this primordial ...
— The Sleuth of St. James's Square • Melville Davisson Post
... will find footing on surer ground by following the process which exalts the dragon of the folk tale into the symbol of evil and primordial chaos. The Babylonian Creation Myth, for instance, can be shown to be a localized and glorified legend in which the hero and his tribe are displaced by the war god and his fellow deities whose welfare depends on his prowess. Merodach kills the dragon, Tiamat, as the heroes ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... looked upon before, cast a strange spell over Grosvenor. He too recognized, even at the distance, the power of St. Luc's personality, and Tandakora, looming, immense, in the firelight, was like some monster out of an earlier, primordial world. Warriors and soldiers asleep were scattered before the fires, and, at the edge of the forest, walked the sentinels. It was an alert and formidable camp, and the young Englishman felt that he and his comrades were grazing the ...
— The Lords of the Wild - A Story of the Old New York Border • Joseph A. Altsheler
... comparisons upon which she could draw were few and confusingly new, mixed with reality and the loose artistic conceptions of heroes in fiction. The young male, as she had actually seen him, had been of the sailor type, hard-bitten, primordial, ruthless. For the face under her gaze she could find but one expression—fine. The shape of the head, the height and breadth of the brow, the angle of the nose, the cut of the chin and jaws, all were fine, of a type she had never ...
— The Ragged Edge • Harold MacGrath
... to assume that the Liverpool Cabinet, in their ameliorating career, was directed by any desire to recur to the primordial tenets of the Tory party. That was not an epoch when statesmen cared to prosecute the investigation of principles. It was a period of happy and enlightened practice. A profounder policy is the offspring of a time like the present, when the ...
— Coningsby • Benjamin Disraeli
... commenced, then, at the age of three, and these early stories are the precursors of the novels of her maturity. They are optimistic, drawn out, and with long digressions. Something similar is told about Walter Scott. There is evidently a primordial instinct in those who are born story-tellers, and this urges them on to invent ...
— George Sand, Some Aspects of Her Life and Writings • Rene Doumic
... scientific observation leads equally, following back a sequence of events, to seemingly causeless beginnings. Modern science can explain the lightning, as it can explain a great number of the mysteries which the primeval intelligence could not penetrate. But the primordial man could not wait for the revelations of scientific investigation: he must vault at once to a final solution of all scientific problems. He found his solution by peopling the world with invisible forces, ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... last hours. He had been so wondrously happy. The world had been filled with a new magic, a wonderful, stately beauty which he had perceived for the first time. For long hours he had been wandering in another—a glamorous, primordial world. ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence
... We find the idea of the Makrokosm or great Ideal Man, permeating those writings termed, the Books of Hermes Trismegistos, which have reached our day, and which, with some more recent matter, contain much very old, Egyptian philosophy.[18] Statements as to the Ideal Prototype and the Primordial Man, are apparently, set forth in many of the Ancient ...
— Scarabs • Isaac Myer
... they had just discussed had been uncommon in all respects; Maitland's scheme of courses and his specification as to details had roused the admiration of the Primordial's chef and put him on his mettle. He had outdone himself in his efforts to do justice to Mr. Maitland's genius; and the Primordial in its deadly conservatism remains to this day one of the very few places ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... was itself the outcome of a long line of development from a far-away primordial plant-germ. From that original plant-germ have sprung all the ferns and grasses, the shrubs and trees and flowers, of the present day. So in that plant-germ must have resided the plant-spirit with an ...
— The Heart of Nature - or, The Quest for Natural Beauty • Francis Younghusband
... inherent to the existence of things, and, consequently, primitive and anterior to every other law: so that all those which man has received, are only imitations of it, and their perfection is ascertained by the resemblance they bear to this primordial model. ...
— The Ruins • C. F. [Constantin Francois de] Volney
... irrecognisable. By various influences, such as, for example, differences in food and climate, and domestication, a species may be split into varieties, or breeds, all of which, however, retain the more important characteristics of the primordial type. There appears to be no limit to the varieties of dogs, yet one can perceive by a glance that there is no specific difference between the huge Mont St. Bernard dog and the diminutive poodle, or between the sparse greyhound and the burly mastiff. All the ...
— The Stock-Feeder's Manual - the chemistry of food in relation to the breeding and - feeding of live stock • Charles Alexander Cameron
... mere strolling minstrel! POOH. Don't mention it. I am, in point of fact, a particularly haughty and exclusive person, of pre-Adamite ancestral descent. You will understand this when I tell you that I can trace my ancestry back to a protoplasmal primordial atomic globule. Consequently, my family pride is something inconceivable. I can't help it. I was born sneering. But I struggle hard to overcome this defect. I mortify my pride continually. When all the great officers of State resigned in a body because they ...
— The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan - The 14 Gilbert And Sullivan Plays • William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan
... wild and primordial. To an eye looking down it would have seemed that man had never come there, and that this was the dawn of time. The deep waters lapped the silent shore until a gentle sighing sound arose, a sound that may have gone ...
— The Border Watch - A Story of the Great Chief's Last Stand • Joseph A. Altsheler
... Chloe's glance rested upon her companions; Big Lena sat scowling murderously at Vermilion's broad back. Harriet Penny had fainted and lay with the back of her head awash in the shallow bilge water. A strange alter ego—elemental—primordial—had taken possession of Chloe. Her eyes glowed, and her heart thrilled at the sight of the tense, vigilant figure of Vermilion, and the sweating, straining scowmen. For the helpless form of Harriet Penny she felt only contempt—the savage, ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... so distorted most natural things that no one has been taught to understand them. Men were intended in the scheme of things to love women and to have children; women were meant to love men and to desire to be mothers. These instincts are primordial, the life of the world depends upon them. They have been distorted and abused into sins and vices and excesses and every evil by civilisation, so that now we rule them out of every calculation in judging of ...
— The Price of Things • Elinor Glyn
... There may be an adjacent Wild supplying wood, and perhaps controlled by a simple forestry. The law that holds this community together is largely traditional and customary and almost always as its primordial bond there is some sort of temple and some sort of priest. Typically, the temple is devoted to a local god or a localised saint, and its position indicates the central point of the locality, its assembly place and its market. Associated with the agriculture ...
— An Englishman Looks at the World • H. G. Wells
... abide and be honored, she was led by her votaries into the open, and there, beside the fragrant hedge, if you will, with the green sward for benches, and the canopy of heaven for dome, she was honored in Ireland, even as she had been honored ages before in Greece, in Palestine, and by our primordial Celtic ancestors themselves. The hedge-schoolmaster conducted the rites, and the air resounded with the sonorous hexameters of Virgil and the ...
— The Glories of Ireland • Edited by Joseph Dunn and P.J. Lennox
... gospel of St. John has been translated the beginning, and it may be said to have that meaning, but it also has other valid interpretations, vastly more significant of the idea John wished to convey. It means:—an elementary condition,—a chief source,—a first principle,—primordial matter. ...
— The Rosicrucian Mysteries • Max Heindel
... is among the most thrilling experiences of life. It is a primitive sport and as such it stirs up in the human breast the primordial emotions of men. The sense of danger, the bodily exhaustion, the ancestral blood lust, the harkening bay of the hounds, the awe of deep-shadowed forests, and the return to an almost hand-to-claw contest with ...
— Hunting with the Bow and Arrow • Saxton Pope
... that new species have been evolved. This hypothesis is called the "Theory of Development," {26} or "Evolution." We retain this name, although well aware of the fact that the authors do not agree in their use of the term "evolution." Professor Wigand, who adopts only the theory of a descent from one primordial cell to another, and who positively rejects the idea of a progress from one fully developed species to another, claims among other things that one value of his own theory is that he secures for the idea of evolution its full meaning. The expression still has a ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... its liquid contents are instantly separated, forming distended, high-pressure blobs at each end of the empty, flabby shrunken skin. Though it suffers this experiment placidly, being incapable of the feeblest resistance, it has the primordial gift of care of itself. Twists purposely made to test its degree of intelligence are artfullystraightened out, and the eagerness and hurry with which water is forced throughout empty parts show that life is both sweet and precious. And what is the value of life to an animal of such ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... reason demanded in a husband; but in the other was grace and charm, something wildly admirable. He allured as the warrior, intrepid and graceful, allured the maiden, as the forest calls the householder. Something primordial and splendid and very sweet was in her feeling toward him. There could be no peaceful wedlock there, no security of home, no comfort, only the exquisite thrill of perilous union, the madness of a few short weeks—perhaps only a few swift days of self-surrender, and then, ...
— They of the High Trails • Hamlin Garland
... beg leave to call the attention of philosophers to this observation of a naturalist who explains all petrification, and the consolidation of strata by aqueous infiltration. If he has here found reason to conclude that, in those primordial parts of the earth, there are a great number which, from their present configuration, must have been in a soft state and then hardened, and this by a quite different cause from that which he supposes had produced the consolidation ...
— Theory of the Earth, Volume 1 (of 4) • James Hutton
... of the night and circumstance affected Henry's own spirit. He was touched less by the present and reality than by his sense of another time and the primordial elements became strong within him. In effect he was transported far back into those dim ages, when man fought with the stone axe, and his five senses were so preternaturally acute to protect his life that he had a sixth and perhaps ...
— The Eyes of the Woods - A story of the Ancient Wilderness • Joseph A. Altsheler
... families, who live independently on their incomes—a sort of autochthonous nation who suffer no aliens to come among them. Possibly, after two hundred years of unbroken residence, and it may be an intermarriage or two with one of the primordial houses, a family from some neighboring district may be adopted, but in the eyes of the aboriginal race they are still ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... music that made the heart leap out against its walls, turned into a scene thus swept clean for it, a wave of olive drab, impeccable row after impeccable row of scissors-like legs advancing. Recruits, raw if you will, but already caparisoned, sniffing and scenting, as it were, for the great primordial ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... us back to the primordial: if man be but the supreme beast of prey, whence this consciousness of blood guilt in these unschooled children ...
— Pathfinders of the West • A. C. Laut
... quotation. "That's it—foam, and fleeting. All man's toil upon the planet was just so much foam. He domesticated the serviceable animals, destroyed the hostile ones, and cleared the land of its wild vegetation. And then he passed, and the flood of primordial life rolled back again, sweeping his handiwork away—the weeds and the forest inundated his fields, the beasts of prey swept over his flocks, and now there are wolves on the Cliff House beach." He was appalled by the thought. "Where four million people disported themselves, the ...
— The Scarlet Plague • Jack London
... difference sweet, Play glad with the breezes, Old playfellows meet; The journeying atoms, Primordial wholes, Firmly draw, firmly drive, By their ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... shock of long, black hair falling about his well-shaped head and bright, intelligent eyes—Tarzan of the apes, little primitive man, presented a picture filled, at once, with pathos and with promise—an allegorical figure of the primordial groping through the black night of ignorance toward the light ...
— Tarzan of the Apes • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... have all but disappeared. Whether their traces have been obliterated by heat and pressure, and chemical action, during long ages; or whether, in these lower beds, we are actually reaching that "Primordial Zone" conceived of by M. Barrande, namely, rocks which existed before living things had begun to people this planet, is a question not yet answered. I believe the former theory to be the true one. That there was life, in the sea at least, ...
— Town Geology • Charles Kingsley
... following the atomic theory of Democritus, conceived the first principle as rigid matter, and evolved the manifoldness of things out of this matter merely by mechanical variations; whereas Zeno, forming his views after the Ephesian Heraclitus, introduces even into his primordial matter a dynamic antagonism and a movement of fluctuation up and down. From this are derived the further distinctions—that in the Epicurean system the gods as it were did not exist or were at the ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... sketches, for us to fill out and complete; it was for our skill and our labor patiently to induce the nourishing pulp which was the earliest form of capital, whose interest is always increasing in the primordial bank of ...
— A Book of Exposition • Homer Heath Nugent
... the process of aggregation, more especially in dark red leaves, the contents of the cells often present a different appearance, as if the layer of protoplasm (primordial utricle) which lines the cells had separated itself and shrunk from the walls; an irregularly shaped purple bag being thus formed. Other fluids, besides a solution of the carbonate, for instance an infusion of raw meat, produce this same effect. But the appearance of the primordial utricle ...
— Insectivorous Plants • Charles Darwin
... Cannibalism is one of the primordial mores. It dates from the earliest known existence of man on earth. It may reasonably be believed to be a custom which all peoples have practiced.[1039] Only on the pastoral stage has it ceased, where ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner
... have been a contradiction of his whole career. She only angered him. And the hot anger that crept through his body seemed to smoke out of some inner recess of his being a hate that was as unreasonable as it was animal-like. All the instincts of existence, in that moment, reverted to life's one primordial problem, the problem of the fighting man to whom every other man must be an opponent, the problem of the feral being, as to whether it should kill or ...
— Never-Fail Blake • Arthur Stringer
... had often been pointed to as an example of almost primordial life, from which the evolutionary chain might have begun; and later controversialists, not acquainted with the precise limitations of the matter, seized upon the Bathybius recantation as a convenient stick with which to beat the Darwinian dog. ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley - A Character Sketch • Leonard Huxley
... evanescent compared with eternity. We have no more reason for rejecting the belief in a Creator because our earth or the solar system is found to have developed to its present condition from an embryonic primordial state, than we have had ever since men first found that animals and trees are developed from the germ. The region of development is larger, the period of development lasts longer, but neither the ...
— Myths and Marvels of Astronomy • Richard A. Proctor
... very plainly. If Frida could not love him there was nobody but himself to blame. He also saw the advantage she had given him. She had owned that she had loved him, and he had hardly realized the full force of the pluperfect. What had been might be again. She was a woman in whom the primordial passion, once ...
— The Return of the Prodigal • May Sinclair
... the riddle of man's origin, and go back along the line of his descent, I doubt if we can find the point, or the form, where the natural is supplanted by the supernatural as it is called, where causation ends and miracle begins. Even the first dawn of protozoic life in the primordial seas must have been natural, or it would not have occurred,—must have been potential in what went before it. In this universe, so far as we know it, one thing springs from another; the sequence of cause and ...
— Time and Change • John Burroughs
... aspects. Spinoza [24] starts with the idea of the Infinite, or the All-One, from which there is no logical deduction of the individual. And in Spinoza's system the individual does not exist except as a modality. But the existence of the individual is one of the primordial truths of the human mind, the foremost fact of consciousness. With this, therefore, Leibnitz begins, and arrives, by logical induction, to the Absolute and Supreme. Spinoza ends where he begins, in pantheism; the moral result of his system, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... the action of Rome upon England is fortified. Even those among them who are most bent upon maintaining the local laws and traditions, have constantly to refer to the ancient law-makers and commentators; Roman law is for them a sort of primordial and common treasure, open to all, and wherewith to fill the gaps of the native legislation. The first lessons had been given after the Conquest by foreigners: the Italian Vacarius, brought by Theobald, Archbishop of Canterbury, had professed law at Oxford in 1149.[302] Then Anglo-Normans ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... harmony? To fancy that the law of life is the same in the immensity of space and irradiates worlds as it irradiates cities and as it irradiates ant-hills. To fancy that each vibration in ourselves is the echo of another vibration. To fancy a sole principle, a primordial axiom, to think the universe envelops us as a mother clasps her child in her two arms; and say to one's self, "I belong to it and it to me; it would cease to be without me. I should not exist without it." ...
— Monsieur, Madame and Bebe, Complete • Gustave Droz
... animals and plants are descended from a single cell, they must be considered as cousins to one another, and as forming a single tree-like animal, every individual plant or animal of which is as truly one and the same person with the primordial cell as the oak a thousand years old is one and the same plant with the acorn out of which it has grown. This is easily understood, but will, I trust, be made ...
— God the Known and God the Unknown • Samuel Butler
... body. But the mere art (extracted from the juices and simples) which recruits the animal vigour and arrests the progress of decay, or that more noble secret, which I will only hint to thee at present, by which HEAT, or CALORIC, as ye call it, being, as Heraclitus wisely taught, the primordial principle of life, can be made its perpetual renovater,—these I say, would not suffice for safety. It is ours also to disarm and elude the wrath of men, to turn the swords of our foes against each ...
— Zanoni • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... by authority at all. They present the process as coming, not from the outside, from the teacher, but entirely from inside the boy. Education, they say, is the Latin for leading out or drawing out the dormant faculties of each person. Somewhere far down in the dim boyish soul is a primordial yearning to learn Greek accents or to wear clean collars; and the schoolmaster only gently and tenderly liberates this imprisoned purpose. Sealed up in the newborn babe are the intrinsic secrets of how to eat asparagus and what was the date of Bannockburn. The educator only draws out the child's ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... FOREIGN. "Primordial" zone of Bohemia in part, with trilobites of the genera Paradoxides, etc. (Chapter 27.) Alum schists of Sweden and Norway. (Chapter 27.) Potsdam sandstone, with ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell
... only influence on Theism would be that of supplying a scientific demonstration of the substantial identity of Force and Matter, and so of supplying a still more valid basis for the theory as to the natural genesis of matter from a single primordial substance, in the manner sketched out in Chapter IV. For the argument adduced by Professor Flint, that as the manner in which the vorticial motion of a ring is originated has not as yet been suggested, therefore ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... her; but she could not lie simply because she was afraid of speaking the truth. In every character there is one supreme vice or virtue which strikes the deepest root and blossoms most luxuriantly, and in the character of Gabriella this virtue was courage. At the crucial moments of life some primordial instinct prompted her to fight, not to yield. "I ought to have been evasive, I suppose," she thought regretfully. "But how could I have been?" There were instants, she had discovered, when wisdom surrendered to the ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... Prado, and that other, which, by some freak of Providence, has found its way to Philadelphia, have backgrounds which carry our imagination very far. Is this primordial ice, with its livid steel-blue shadows, the stuff out of which the gods make other planets than ours—dead planets, without either sun or star? Are these the sheer precipices of Chaos, against which ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... not only of our own planet, but other planets, of the stars, and the sun. New light is thrown on the source of the sun's heat; we can make more than guesses as to its probable age. The great question to-day is: is there one primordial substance from which all the varying forms of matter ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... words. It was an intimation that he was master—that missionaries were somewhat feeble-minded and had to do with weak people. I was not very well acquainted with the bunk-house at the time, but I outlined a plan of campaign the major part of which was the capture of this primordial man. Could I reach him? Could I influence and move him to a better life? If not, what was the use of trying my theological programme on others? So I abandoned myself to the task. I knew my friends and the officers of the missionary society would have considered it very ill-advised ...
— From the Bottom Up - The Life Story of Alexander Irvine • Alexander Irvine
... calls it, writing to Jordan; "a black eye;" and will avoid the like. Vienna got its two kettle-drums and flag; extremely glad to see them; and even sang TE-DEUM upon them, to general edification. [Orlich, i. 62-64.] This is the naked primordial substance out of which the above Myth grew to its present luxuriance in the popular imagination. Place, the little Village of Baumgarten; day, 27th February, 1741. Of Tobias Stusche or the Convent of ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. XII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... matter lies in a nutshell. Suppose that hundreds of millions of years ago there existed upon this earth a single primordial form of the very lowest life, or suppose that three or four such primordial forms existed. Change of climate, of food, of any of the circumstances which surrounded any member of this first and lowest class of life would tend to alter it in some slight manner, and the alteration would ...
— Samuel Butler's Canterbury Pieces • Samuel Butler
... chagrin. Never had he hated a man as he hated this great, overbearing brute before him—this man-beast, with his hairy chest and freckled hands that clutched at him like an ape's. Something hidden, a demon primordial and violent, rose up in him against this crude barbarian with his bristling beard and gloating pig eyes, and he forgot everything but his own ...
— Hidden Water • Dane Coolidge
... and the contractile substance and sarcode of the zoologist, must be, if not identical, yet in a high degree analogous substances. Hence, from this point of view, the difference between animals and plants consists in this; that, in the latter, the contractile substance, as a primordial utricle, is enclosed within an inert cellulose membrane, which permits it only to exhibit an internal motion, expressed by the phenomena of rotation and circulation, while, in the former, it is not so enclosed. The protoplasm in the form of the ...
— Critiques and Addresses • Thomas Henry Huxley
... If they express anything, it is pure "bosh," pure discontinuity, accident, and disturbance, with no law apparent but to interrupt, and no purpose but to baffle. They seem like stray vestiges of that primordial irrationality, from which all our rationalities have ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... At this primordial stage neither Time nor Space can be recognized, for both imply measurement of successive intervals, and in the primary movement of Mind upon itself the only consciousness must be that of Present Absolute Being, because no external points exist from which to measure extension either in time ...
— The Creative Process in the Individual • Thomas Troward
... shall infer from analogy that probably all the organic beings which have ever lived on this earth (man therefore of course included) have descended from some one primordial form into which life was first breathed ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... regarding the homogeneousness of matter, or the idea that the various elements are composed of primordial units which are themselves alike, mere duplicates of each other. If this should prove to be really the case, as seems to be quite likely in the light of the facts given above, would it not be a veritable triumph for materialism? By no ...
— Q. E. D., or New Light on the Doctrine of Creation • George McCready Price
... their lawyer Presidents, and the bellicose but equally small Nicaragua, Honduras, and Salvador, under their chieftains, military and juristic, was quite remarkable. Nevertheless another attempt at confederation was made. In 1895 the ruler of Honduras, declaring that reunion was a "primordial necessity," invited his fellow potentates of Nicaragua and Salvador to unite in creating the "Greater Republic of Central America" and asked Guatemala and Costa Rica to join. Delegates actually appeared from all five republics, ...
— The Hispanic Nations of the New World - Volume 50 in The Chronicles Of America Series • William R. Shepherd
... English novels: but this claim would lose half its significance, did it not carry with it the implication that the book was also the origin of English novel writing. The importance, therefore, of Euphues is not so much that it was primary, as that it was primordial; and, to be such, it must have laid its spell in some way or other upon succeeding writers. Our first task is therefore to enquire what this spell was, and to discover whether the attraction of Euphues must be ascribed to Lyly's own invention ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... not know how we can tell which is superior. The primordial cell in differentiating out of homogeneity into heterogeneity developed different qualities in different beings, and of the organs integrated from the heterogeneous elements each has its use and many are essential to life. In ...
— The Inhumanity of Socialism • Edward F. Adams
... strongly suggests a further step in the same direction, while he protests that "analogy may be a deceitful guide," yet he follows its inexorable leading to the inference that "probably all the organic beings which have ever lived on this earth have descended from some one primordial form, into which ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... tenantless attic room that he's a Brahmin of the Brahmins, an aristocrat dead right, a goo-goo for your Klondyke galways, a Lady Vere de Vere in plug hat and "pants." He's the Ward McAllister of Kay-See, the model of the chappies, and traces his haughty lineage back in an unbroken line to the primordial anthropoid swinging by his prehensile tail to a limb of the Ash tree Ygdrasyl and playfully scratching the back of the hungry behemoth with the jawbone of an erstwhile ichthyosaurian. Walter S. Halliwell was born ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... This is a survival of primeval man, who must take every chance to get his dinner. So, when Penrod and Sam drove the hapless Whitey up the alley, they were really responding to an impulse thousands and thousands of years old—an impulse founded upon the primordial observation that whatever runs is likely to prove edible. Penrod and Sam were not "bad"; they were never that. They were something that was not ...
— Penrod and Sam • Booth Tarkington
... same thing as Truth. These three objects of the soul's pursuit have different natures, different laws, and fundamentally different origins. But the energies which express themselves in their pursuit—energies vital, primordial, and necessary even to man's physical survival—have all been evolved under the same stress of adaptation of the human creature to its surroundings; and have therefore, in their beginnings and in their ceaseless growth, been working perpetually in concert, meeting, crossing, and ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... of political wisdom from the sands wherever it was found; she cleft it from the rocks; she gleaned it among ruins. Out of all the discoveries of statesmen and sages, out of all the experience of past human life, she compiled a perennial political philosophy, the primordial principles of national ethics. The wise men of Europe sought the best government in a mixture of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy; America went behind these names to extract from them the vital elements of social forms, and blend them harmoniously in the free commonwealth, ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various
... the dug-out or the cave where in primordial condition he won his food by his own hands from the uncut forests and the unfarmed waters. As family policeman he had no incentive to accumulations of food, clothing, or luxuries. These involved added police responsibilities and enlarged the temptations of his neighbors, ...
— The Audacious War • Clarence W. Barron
... off his wind-goggles and looked again he felt by instinct for his six-shooter. But it was not on his hip. He had taken his pick instead, and for the first time he felt a thrill of fear—not fear for his life nor of anything tangible, but that old, primordial fear of the night that only a gun can banish. He picked up a rock and walked back down the trail; but nothing leapt forth at him—even the shadow was gone, and he threw the rock petulantly away. It was the wind, and the noises, and the ...
— Shadow Mountain • Dane Coolidge
... to interest at all, must cater to this longing for contention, which is one of the primordial instincts of the crowd. It must present its characters in some struggle of the wills, whether it be flippant, as in the case of Benedick and Beatrice; or delicate, as in that of Viola and Orsino; or terrible, with Macbeth; ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... instant the giant creature was almost over me. I remember looking up at it and thinking in a queer sort of a way—perhaps it was some ancestral memory—that I was a little ape-like child about to be slain by a primordial elephant, thrice as big as any that now inhabit the earth. Then something appeared to happen which I only repeat to show how at such moments absurd and impossible things seem real ...
— The Ivory Child • H. Rider Haggard
... the scientific world, very unequally, upon the origin of the existing diversity of the plants and animals which surround us. One assumes that the actual kinds are primordial; the other, that they are derivative. One, that all kinds originated supernaturally and directly as such, and have continued unchanged in the order of Nature; the other, that the present kinds appeared in some sort ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... several impressions of these pieces, we have to make an important proviso. Only the first two of them did he witness in the authentic version. Macbeth underwent in his day a most liberal transformation, which carried it far from its primordial purity. The impressions he finally formed of Othello and Hamlet are not consistent one with the other, but are eminently characteristic of the variable ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... peace commission with popcorn balls and a gentle-voiced parson to tell Shacknasty James and Old Stand-up-and-Sit-down that the white father at Washington loved them and wanted them all to come and spend the summer at his house, and also that by sin death came into the world, and that we were all primordial germs at first, and that we should look up, not down, look out, not in, look forward, not backward, and ...
— Comic History of the United States • Bill Nye
... these changes of animal form, and innumerable others, which may be collected from the books of natural history; we cannot but be convinced, that the fetus or embryon is formed by apposition of new parts, and not by the distention of a primordial nest of germs, included one within another, like the cups of ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... dwelling-place. Owing to its considerable volume, this globe has probably preserved its original heat, revolving in space as an obscure Sun, but perhaps still burning. In it we see what our own planet must have been in its primordial epoch, in the pristine ...
— Astronomy for Amateurs • Camille Flammarion
... The races thus originated in their initiative representatives by the creative power of God, thenceforth possess in themselves the power, each one, in the generative act, to put its typical dynamic stamp upon the primordial cells of its immediate descendants. Adam, then, was a wild man, cast in favoring conditions of climate, endowed with the same faculties as now, only not in so high a degree. For, by his peculiar power of forming habits, accumulating experience, transmitting ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... inherent in the weakness (which at times doubtless surprises even the strongest ...) of desiring to set up its sorrowful view of the world as a theory, and treat it as absolutely true and fundamentally valid for all. Sorrow, as such, is no more a diseased state than is joy; both are alike primordial, necessary, indispensable elements and halves of human life. Who would venture to assert that the day might dispense with the night? And does not the latter's glorious starry sky rival in majesty (though different in kind) the former's ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... I hasten to say that I know even less about my own garden than about anybody else's garden. I know nothing about roses, not even their names. I know only the name Rose; and Rose is (in every sense of the word) a Christian name. It is Christian in the one absolute and primordial sense of Christian—that it comes down from the age of pagans. The rose can be seen, and even smelt, in Greek, Latin, Provencal, Gothic, Renascence, and Puritan poems. Beyond this mere word Rose, which (like wine and other noble words) is the same in all ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... the general theory of evolution and in the smaller field of biology where it becomes the theory of descent—that the variety of phenomena flows from an original unity, the diversity of functions from a primitive identity, and the complexity of organization from a primordial simplicity. The conditions of existence for all individuals are, from their very birth, unequal. There must also be taken into consideration the inherited qualities and the innate tendencies which also vary more or less widely. In view of all this, how can the ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri
... four thousand miles in diameter, embracing alike in their tremendous sweep the fragrant savannas of the sun-lit South and the eternal solitudes of snow that mantle the ice-bound North. (Laughter.) How these circles were produced is perhaps one of those primordial mysteries that the most skillful paleologist will never be able to explain. (Renewed laughter.) But the fact is, sir, Duluth is preeminently a central place, for I am told by gentlemen who have been so reckless of their own personal safety as to venture away into those awful ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume VIII (of X) • Various
... lines swept down upon me and bore me back into the drift, I knew somewhat the fierce delight of berg and floe and that primordial dark about the poles, and springing from my trench, I flung myself single-handed and exultant against the double fronts of night and storm, mightier than they, till weak, but victorious, I dragged myself to the door ...
— The Hills of Hingham • Dallas Lore Sharp
... heart toward them—as first experiments in the gamut of human creation. Neither ethnology nor any other ology will pull out of my consciousness—let alone my active intellect—the belief that these were the oldest, the primordial races, or the descendants of such, and that the white Caucasian man, with his noble brain and heart, his matchless person, was an afterthought, the brightest since her birth-thought of the earth's creation. Look into the face of any upgrown ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 6, No 2, August, 1864 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... was something cosmic in such things, and there was something cosmic in him. He came to her breathing of large airs and great spaces. The blaze of tropic suns was in his face, and in his swelling, resilient muscles was the primordial vigor of life. He was marred and scarred by that mysterious world of rough men and rougher deeds, the outposts of which began beyond her horizon. He was untamed, wild, and in secret ways her vanity was touched by the fact that he came so mildly to her hand. Likewise ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... but as being a continuation of the personality of every ovum in the chain of its ancestry, which every ovum it actually is quite as truly as the octogenarian is the same identity with the ovum from which he has been developed. This process cannot stop short of the primordial cell, which again will probably turn out to be but a brief resting-place. We therefore prove each one of us to be actually the primordial cell which never died nor dies, but has differentiated itself ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... up in me for this lost egg, this dead end in the tree of life, George. One thinks of the humble but deserving amoeba, the primordial metazoon, the first fish, the remote reptile ancestor, the countless generations of forefathers that, so far as this egg went, have lived and learnt and suffered in vain. The torrent of life had split and rushed ...
— Select Conversations with an Uncle • H. G. Wells
... a diagram done in fire upon a long scroll of the abyss. And he (Redwood) was standing on a planet before a sort of black platform lecturing about the new sort of growth that was now possible, to the More than Royal Institution of Primordial Forces—forces which had always previously, even in the growth of races, empires, planetary systems, and ...
— The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth • H.G. Wells
... 'Having bowed down to the primordial being Isana, to whom multitudes make offerings, and who is adored by the multitude; who is the true incorruptible one, Brahma, perceptible, imperceptible, eternal; who is both a non-existing and an existing-non-existing ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa - Translated into English Prose - Adi Parva (First Parva, or First Book) • Kisari Mohan Ganguli (Translator)
... the Crystal Palace to meet the Horners, Lyells, and a party. So I want to know whether you will speak for me most strongly for Barrande. You know better than I do his admirable labours on the development of trilobites, and his most important work on his Lower or Primordial Zone. I enclose an old note of Lyell's to show what he thinks. With respect to Dana, whom I also proposed, you know well his merits. I can speak most highly of his classificatory work on crustacea and his Geographical Distribution. His Volcanic Geology is admirable, ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... Hall, the chief commissioner of furs for the Hudson's Bay Company. I wish I could give it in Mr. Hall's own words—in the slow quiet recital of the man who has spent his life amid the great silent verities, up next to primordial facts, not theorizing and professionalizing and discretionizing and generally darkening counsel by words without knowledge. He was a youth somewhere around his early twenties, and he was serving the company at Stuart Lake in British Columbia—a sort of ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut
... recommence. Adj. beginning &c. v.; initial, initiatory, initiative; inceptive, introductory, incipient; proemial[obs3], inaugural; inchoate, inchoative[obs3]; embryonic, rudimental; primogenial[obs3]; primeval, primitive, primordial &c. (old) 124; aboriginal; natal, nascent. first, foremost, leading; maiden. begun &c. v.; just begun &c. v. Adv. at the beginning, in the beginning, &c. n.; first, in the first place, imprimis[Lat], first and foremost; in limine[Lat]; in the bud, in embryo, in its infancy; from the ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... added, casting an embracing glance over the primordial landscape and listening for a moment to the woman's mournful notes. "Her man was clawed by a bear, and she's ...
— Children of the Frost • Jack London
... be confirmed, another good example will be furnished; for such portions of substance as bound these vacant spaces are subject to influences unlike those to which other portions of the substance are subject. If then we can most clearly trace this law of modification in these primordial processes, as well as in those more complex but analogous ones exhibited in the early changes of an ovum, we have strong reason for thinking ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... the sun-lit sky and of the billowy ice-field and of the colours of the lake below and of the luminous haze and the deep blue shade in the valley—how is that related to the beauty of the flowers? Truly enough, it is not a beauty called forth by natural selection. It is primordial; it is the beauty of great light itself. The response to its charm is felt by every living thing, even by the smallest green plant and the invisible animalcule, as it is by man himself. As I stand on the mountain-side we are all, from animalcule to man, sympathizing and uniting, ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... to notice that the oneness and the manyness are absolutely co-ordinate here. Neither is primordial or more essential or excellent than the other. Just as with space, whose separating of things seems exactly on a par with its uniting of them, but sometimes one function and sometimes the other is what come home to us most, so, in our general dealings with the world of influences, we now need conductors ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... germs of which are eternally implanted in it, to the Infinite Source from which it emanated. Another term of life must therefore be vouchsafed to those souls which have not fulfilled their destiny here below, and have not been sufficiently purified for the state of union with the Primordial Cause. Hence if the soul, on its first assumption of a human body and sojourn on earth, fails to acquire that experience for which it descended from heaven and becomes contaminated by that which is polluting, it must reinhabit a body till it is able to ascend in ...
— Reincarnation • Swami Abhedananda
... hishdory vitch few hafe oondershtand, Deutschers are, de jure, de owners of dis land, Und I brides mineslf oonshpeak-barly dat I foorst make be-known, De primordial cause dat Columbus ...
— The Breitmann Ballads • Charles G. Leland
... 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 cube, globe, pyramid, saucer and tuft of rays in the Japanese gravestones. It is said to attain the age of a thousand years, to be the noblest ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... a voice hardly more human than the grunts of horror from below, and he took the hand of another to help in the steep descent—while the tribe beneath them forgot their anticipated feast, forgot all but their primordial fear of the unknown, and, with startled cries, broke and ran for the ...
— Astounding Stories, May, 1931 • Various
... Burgundy by not drinking too much of them. We owed, also, an obedience to whatever made us. And last, and strangest, there had come into my mind a vague and vast impression that in some way all good was a remnant to be stored and held sacred out of some primordial ruin. Man had saved his good as Crusoe saved his goods: he had saved them from a wreck. All this I felt and the age gave me no encouragement to feel it. And all this time I had not ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... never be thy victim; may I never suffer collapse before thee. May the venom never enter my limbs, which are as those of the god Tmu. O let not the pains of death, which have reached thee; come upon me. I am the god Tmu, living in the foremost part of Tur [the sky]. I am the only one in the primordial water. I have many mysterious names, and provide myself a dwelling to endure millions of years. I was born of Tmu, and ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books, Volume XIII. - Religion and Philosophy • Various
... veto, may not be eventually contested and defeated? We know that in many of the states there are Bills of Rights, which are considered to have equal authority with their constitutions. Some, indeed, regard them as settling the principles of primordial law, which the constitution itself cannot countervail. These, then, may also be appealed to for the purpose of proving the unconstitutionality of a state law; and in the inferences which ingenuity, or even stupidity, may draw from such ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... slime primordial life began, and in it even in these latter days the far beginning of superior things may be discovered actively pursuing their craft and purpose in the order of the universe. Worms are abundant, and among them certain genera ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... was justified by subsequent knowledge. Thus the Silurian rocks of Bohemia were divided into certain stages (A to H)—the two lowermost, A and B without fossils (Azoic), succeeded by the third stage, C, which included the primordial zone, since recognized as part of the Cambrian of Sedgwick. The fourth stage (Etage D), the true lower Silurian, was described by Barrande as including isolated patches of strata with organic remains like those of the Upper ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... can play at being plus arabes que les arabes, and then, if the game goes against them, they invoke their rights of French citizenship in the grand manner. The Frenchman knows it all; he regrets that such creatures should be his own compatriots—regrets, maybe, that he is not possessed of the same primordial pushfulness and insensibility; and shrugs his shoulders in ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... spell their own speech; who can name you the winning athletes of the first Olympiad, but are unable to state the constituents of the gas that lights their page, and never dream, as the chemist does, that these "sunbeams absorbed by vegetation in the primordial ages of the earth, and buried in its depths as vegetable fossils through immeasurable eras of time, until system upon system of slowly formed rocks has been piled above, come forth at last, at the disenchanting touch of science, and turn the night ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 107, September, 1866 • Various
... for most of the process of moulding and subjugation that children must undergo. Human society is a new thing upon the earth, an invention of the last ten thousand years. Man is a creature as yet not freely and instinctively gregarious; in his more primordial state he must have been an animal of very small groups and limited associations, an animal rather self-centred and fierce, and he is still but imperfectly adapted either morally or physically to ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... told in effect that every thing goes by itself—that given some first cause, about which we know, and can know, nothing, directly primordial matter appears on the scene, and the laws of sequence and action which observed experience has formulated and is progressively formulating are given, then nothing else is required; no governance, no control, ...
— Creation and Its Records • B.H. Baden-Powell
... Development," {26} or "Evolution." We retain this name, although well aware of the fact that the authors do not agree in their use of the term "evolution." Professor Wigand, who adopts only the theory of a descent from one primordial cell to another, and who positively rejects the idea of a progress from one fully developed species to another, claims among other things that one value of his own theory is that he secures for the idea of evolution its full meaning. The expression ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... diagram done in fire upon a long scroll of the abyss. And he (Redwood) was standing on a planet before a sort of black platform lecturing about the new sort of growth that was now possible, to the More than Royal Institution of Primordial Forces—forces which had always previously, even in the growth of races, empires, planetary ...
— The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth • H.G. Wells
... falls away in which the hidden centre is wrapped. In that which fills the consciousness-soul, this hidden centre emerges unveiled into the temple of the soul. Yet it shows itself just here to be but a drop from the ocean of the all-pervading Primordial Essence; and it is here that man first has to grasp it,—this Primordial Essence. He must recognize it in himself before he is able to find ...
— An Outline of Occult Science • Rudolf Steiner
... just discussed had been uncommon in all respects; Maitland's scheme of courses and his specification as to details had roused the admiration of the Primordial's chef and put him on his mettle. He had outdone himself in his efforts to do justice to Mr. Maitland's genius; and the Primordial in its deadly conservatism remains to this day one of the very ...
— The Brass Bowl • Louis Joseph Vance
... a good deal of the cave man about him. The heavy, slouching shoulders, the glare of savagery, the long, hairy arms, all had their primordial suggestion. Given a club and a stone ax, he might have been set back thousands of years with ...
— Mavericks • William MacLeod Raine
... bowed down to the primordial being Isana, to whom multitudes make offerings, and who is adored by the multitude; who is the true incorruptible one, Brahma, perceptible, imperceptible, eternal; who is both a non-existing and an existing-non-existing ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa - Translated into English Prose - Adi Parva (First Parva, or First Book) • Kisari Mohan Ganguli (Translator)
... himself, that loving awe in the presence of noble womanhood, which is perhaps something like the worship paid of old to a great nature-goddess, who was not all-knowing, but whose life and power were something deeper and more primordial than knowledge. They had never been alone together, and he could frame to himself no probable image of love-scenes between them: he could only fancy and wish wildly—what he knew was impossible—that Romola would some day tell him that she ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... had taken that rare and extraordinary form. The mirage of their own caravan, rising, was reflected, mirrored, by some freak of the desert sun and air, upon the fine sand blown in the air at a distance from the train. It was, indeed, themselves they saw, not knowing it, in a vast primordial mirror of the desert gods. Nor did the discovery of the truth lessen the feeling of discomfort, of apprehension. The laughter was at best uneasy until at last a turn in the trail, a shift in the wizardry of the heat waves, broke up the ghostly caravan and sent it, ...
— The Covered Wagon • Emerson Hough
... process as coming, not from the outside, from the teacher, but entirely from inside the boy. Education, they say, is the Latin for leading out or drawing out the dormant faculties of each person. Somewhere far down in the dim boyish soul is a primordial yearning to learn Greek accents or to wear clean collars; and the schoolmaster only gently and tenderly liberates this imprisoned purpose. Sealed up in the newborn babe are the intrinsic secrets of how to eat asparagus and what was the date of Bannockburn. The educator only draws out ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... water, until his head was full of the thought of shining kindly brown-skinned women, who smiled at him and wreathed his head with unfamiliar flowers. He had, too, a piece of a book about the lost palaces of Yucatan, those vast terraces buried in primordial forest, of whose makers there is now no human memory. With La Perouse he linked "The Island Nights Entertainments," and it never palled upon him that in the dusky stabbing of the "Island of Voices" something poured over the stabber's hands "like warm tea." Queer incommunicable joy it is, the ...
— The History of Mr. Polly • H. G. Wells
... are necessary here regarding the homogeneousness of matter, or the idea that the various elements are composed of primordial units which are themselves alike, mere duplicates of each other. If this should prove to be really the case, as seems to be quite likely in the light of the facts given above, would it not be a veritable triumph for materialism? By no means. ...
— Q. E. D., or New Light on the Doctrine of Creation • George McCready Price
... of the ages fades, And starless night now sinks upon the world— An age of iron, cruel, dark and cold. On Asia first this outer darkness fell, Once seat of paradise, primordial peace, Perennial harmony and perfect love. A despot's will was then a nation's law; An idol's car crushed out poor human lives, And human blood polluted many shrines. Then human speculation made of God A shoreless ocean, distant, waveless, vast, Of truth ...
— The Dawn and the Day • Henry Thayer Niles
... and camel bells. But they turned northward to pass through the famed Circassian Gates, whereas we followed the plain that paralleled the mountain range—our mules' feet hidden by eight inches of primordial ooze. ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... same thing, in loving them to that degree which is their due in view of their greater or less perfection. If, in the last analysis, all cognition is knowledge of God, so all volition is loving God; there is implanted in every creature a direction toward the Creator. God is not only the primordial, unlimited being, he is also the highest good, the final end of all striving. As the ideas of things are imperfect participations in, or determinations of universal being, the absolute perfection of God, so the particular desires, directed ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... him gently he was made Of nicely tempered mud, That man no lengthened part had played Anterior to the Flood. 'Twas all in vain; he heeded not, Referring plant and worm, Fish, reptile, ape, and Hottentot, To one primordial germ. ...
— The Book of Humorous Verse • Various
... One of the most ancient and popular of the numerous names of Vishnu. The word has been derived in several ways, and may mean he who moved on the (primordial) waters, or he who pervades or influences men ...
— The Ramayana • VALMIKI
... the duration of past ages, though that duration is an essential element of his calculations. The spontaneous variations of plants and animals are the very mainspring of his machine; but he tells us he knows nothing of the laws governing them; nor has he any information about the creation of the primordial forms, nor about the date of beginning, or rate of progress.[15] All which are necessary to be known in order to the formation of a correct theory. Again and again, when confronted with facts which his theory can not explain, he takes refuge in confessions of ignorance. When he meets facts which ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... a man known to every fur buyer of St. Louis and Chicago and St. Paul—Mr. Hall, the chief commissioner of furs for the Hudson's Bay Company. I wish I could give it in Mr. Hall's own words—in the slow quiet recital of the man who has spent his life amid the great silent verities, up next to primordial facts, not theorizing and professionalizing and discretionizing and generally darkening counsel by words without knowledge. He was a youth somewhere around his early twenties, and he was serving the company at Stuart Lake in British Columbia—a sort of ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut
... of Evolution briefly stated, is as follows: That in some infinitely remote period in the past, how or from whence science does not affirm, there appeared matter and force; that within matter and in association with force there also appeared a primordial cell, how or from whence no man knoweth, in which there was a spark of life; and that from this cell all things animate have emerged, being controlled by certain laws variously stated by various evolutionists; that these laws in connection with the modifying influences ...
— Evolution - An Investigation and a Critique • Theodore Graebner
... that perhaps such a description represents only or principally our life of feeling. Reason and thought share the same characteristic, as soon as we penetrate their living depth, whether it be a question of creative invention or of those primordial judgments which direct our activity. If they evidence greater stability, it is in permanence of direction, because our past ...
— A New Philosophy: Henri Bergson • Edouard le Roy
... physicians; and they are making noble efforts to spread this understanding among the people. Their efforts are gravely hindered by two obstacles; one the professional tradition known as "the medical secret," the other the universal prevalence of that primordial superstition—the sex tabu. ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... the weakness (which at times doubtless surprises even the strongest ...) of desiring to set up its sorrowful view of the world as a theory, and treat it as absolutely true and fundamentally valid for all. Sorrow, as such, is no more a diseased state than is joy; both are alike primordial, necessary, indispensable elements and halves of human life. Who would venture to assert that the day might dispense with the night? And does not the latter's glorious starry sky rival in majesty (though different in kind) the ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... within her as she caught that phrase. That knot also would be cut. Modern, indeed! She was going to be as primordial as chipped flint. ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... organized matter than we can readily admit" (p. 317); and in another place he claims that "we cannot but be convinced that the fetus or embryon is formed by apposition of new parts, and not by the distention of a primordial nest of germs included one within another like the cups of a conjurer" ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... are outwardly wayward and fitful. If they express anything, it is pure "bosh," pure discontinuity, accident, and disturbance, with no law apparent but to interrupt, and no purpose but to baffle. They seem like stray vestiges of that primordial irrationality, from which all our rationalities ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... gentle-voiced parson to tell Shacknasty James and Old Stand-up-and-Sit-down that the white father at Washington loved them and wanted them all to come and spend the summer at his house, and also that by sin death came into the world, and that we were all primordial germs at first, and that we should look up, not down, look out, not in, look forward, not backward, and lend ...
— Comic History of the United States • Bill Nye
... beautiful young girl who, Gladwin strove to acknowledge, was the helpless pawn of circumstances. But the refinements of blood rob the physical man of his savage resources and impose a serious hamper upon his primordial impulses. ...
— Officer 666 • Barton W. Currie
... is as clear as Science can make it. In the words of Mr. Herbert Spencer, "It is a corollary from that primordial truth which, as we have seen, underlies all other truths, that whatever amount of power an organism expends in any shape is the correlate and equivalent of a power that was taken into it from without,"[82] We are dealing here with a simple question ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... while seeking for places to deposit their eggs; but that both sexes should not have inherited the change in form and colour when it would have been beneficial to both can only be explained, I think, on the supposition that the females had a choice of mates and preferred those that retained the primordial appearance of the group. This view is supported by the fact that many of the males of the mimetic Leptalides have the upper half of the lower wing of a pure white, whilst all the rest of the wings is barred and spotted with black, red, and yellow, ...
— The Naturalist in Nicaragua • Thomas Belt
... either in its pure essence or in the forms of sun-worship and fire-worship, because the sun and the fire were causes of light, was among the earliest and most universal superstitions of the world. Light was considered as the primordial source of all that was holy and intelligent; and darkness, as its opposite, was viewed as but another name for evil and ignorance. Dr. Beard, in an article on this subject, in Kitto's Cyclopaedia of Biblical Literature, attributes this ...
— The Symbolism of Freemasonry • Albert G. Mackey
... him the Panamint hills were already but blue hummocks on the horizon. Before him and upon either side, to the north and to the east and to the south, stretched primordial desolation. League upon league the infinite reaches of dazzling white alkali laid themselves out like an immeasurable scroll unrolled from horizon to horizon; not a bush, not a twig relieved that horrible monotony. Even the sand ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... changes of animal form, and innumerable others, which may be collected from the books of natural history; we cannot but be convinced, that the fetus or embryon is formed by apposition of new parts, and not by the distention of a primordial nest of germs, included one within another, like the cups ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. I - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... "on this Path to whatever place one would go that place one's self becomes!" The last word of this wisdom is unity. Underneath all phenomena and surviving all changes, a great principle endures for ever. At the great white dawn of existence, from this principle stream spirit and primordial matter; as they flow away further from their divine source, they become broken up, the one life into countless lives, matter into countless forms, which enshrine these lives; spirit involves itself into matter and matter evolves, acted ...
— AE in the Irish Theosophist • George William Russell
... [24] starts with the idea of the Infinite, or the All-One, from which there is no logical deduction of the individual. And in Spinoza's system the individual does not exist except as a modality. But the existence of the individual is one of the primordial truths of the human mind, the foremost fact of consciousness. With this, therefore, Leibnitz begins, and arrives, by logical induction, to the Absolute and Supreme. Spinoza ends where he begins, in pantheism; the moral result of his system, Godward, is fatalism,—manward, indifferentism ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... broods, with lips Of adamant, o'er earthquake-builded floors. Where forms, such as the Demon-World adores, Laborious water carves; whence echo ships Wild-tongued o'er pools where petrifaction strips Her breasts of crystal from which crystal pours.— Here where primordial fear, the Gorgon, sits Staring all life to stone in ghastly mirth, I seem to tread, with awe no tongue can tell,— Beneath vast domes, by torrent-tortured pits, 'Mid wrecks terrific of the ruined Earth,— An ancient causeway of ...
— Weeds by the Wall - Verses • Madison J. Cawein
... unaccountably swollen with rage; she became primordial; she wanted to hurt, maim, kill. Childishly she stooped and picked up heavy stones which she hurled into the water. The instinct to live flamed so strongly in her that the crust of civilization fell away like mist ...
— The Adventures of Kathlyn • Harold MacGrath
... often been pointed to as an example of almost primordial life, from which the evolutionary chain might have begun; and later controversialists, not acquainted with the precise limitations of the matter, seized upon the Bathybius recantation as a convenient stick with which to beat the Darwinian dog. To the most noteworthy case of this, ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley - A Character Sketch • Leonard Huxley
... taught Reincarnation to his inner circle of students and adherents, at least so many authorities claim. He taught that there existed a fundamental principle called "Tao," which is held to have been identical with the "primordial reason," a manifestation of which was the "Teh," or the creative activity of the universe. From the union and action of the "Tao" and the "Teh" proceeded the universe, including the human soul, which he taught was ...
— Reincarnation and the Law of Karma - A Study of the Old-New World-Doctrine of Rebirth, and Spiritual Cause and Effect • William Walker Atkinson
... outpost of eternity? Lo! what am I to Love, the lord of all? One murmuring shell he gathers from the sand,— One little heart-flame sheltered in his hand. Yet through thine eyes he grants me clearest call And veriest touch of powers primordial That any hour-girt life ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various
... "There is for me but one miracle, that of infinite existence, and but one mystery, the manner in which the finite proceeds from the infinite. So soon as we recognize this incomprehensible act as the general and primordial miracle, of which our reason perceives the necessity, but the manner of which our intelligence cannot grasp, so soon as we contemplate the nature known to us by experience in this light, there is for us no other impenetrable ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... nebulous superheated form capable of condensation by the loss of heat, but in particular capable of growth and development by the fall of surrounding matter upon the forming globe. We must remember that in the primordial state the elements of a planet, as for instance our earth, were mixed together and held in a state of tenuity ranging all the way from solid to highly vaporized forms, and that these elements subsequently and by slow adjustment got themselves into ...
— Notable Events of the Nineteenth Century - Great Deeds of Men and Nations and the Progress of the World • Various
... off the highlands of the interior and precipitated itself into the cove below. These were the two things in Nature he had demanded to make his work possible. For the rest, the rugged immensity of scenery, the mighty contours of the aged land about him, the vastness of the harsh primordial world, so inhospitable, so forbidding under the fierce climate which Nature had imposed, made no appeal. It served, and so it was sufficient. The lights and shades under the summer sunlight were full of splendour. No artist eye could have gazed upon it all and missed its appeal. But these men lived ...
— The Man in the Twilight • Ridgwell Cullum
... intuitive, and, so to speak, super-social, scarcely or not at all perceptible in persons, but which hovers over humanity like an inspiring genius, is the primordial fact ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... distorted most natural things that no one has been taught to understand them. Men were intended in the scheme of things to love women and to have children; women were meant to love men and to desire to be mothers. These instincts are primordial, the life of the world depends upon them. They have been distorted and abused into sins and vices and excesses and every evil by civilisation, so that now we rule them out of every calculation in judging of a circumstance; if we are 'nice' people they are taboo. ...
— The Price of Things • Elinor Glyn
... have experienced this primordial tristia post coitus; but this great moral pain, very serious in its significance and depth, passes very rapidly, remaining, however, with the majority for a long time—sometimes for all life—in the form of wearisomeness and awkwardness after certain moments. In a short while Kolya became accustomed ...
— Yama (The Pit) • Alexandra Kuprin
... far-flung lines swept down upon me and bore me back into the drift, I knew somewhat the fierce delight of berg and floe and that primordial dark about the poles, and springing from my trench, I flung myself single-handed and exultant against the double fronts of night and storm, mightier than they, till weak, but victorious, I dragged myself to the door of a neighboring farmhouse, the voice of the storm a mighty ...
— The Hills of Hingham • Dallas Lore Sharp
... thing as Goodness, any more than beauty (despite Keats' famous assertion) is the same thing as Truth. These three objects of the soul's pursuit have different natures, different laws, and fundamentally different origins. But the energies which express themselves in their pursuit—energies vital, primordial, and necessary even to man's physical survival—have all been evolved under the same stress of adaptation of the human creature to its surroundings; and have therefore, in their beginnings and in their ceaseless growth, been working perpetually in concert, meeting, crossing, and strengthening ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... contested and defeated? We know that in many of the states there are Bills of Rights, which are considered to have equal authority with their constitutions. Some, indeed, regard them as settling the principles of primordial law, which the constitution itself cannot countervail. These, then, may also be appealed to for the purpose of proving the unconstitutionality of a state law; and in the inferences which ingenuity, or even stupidity, ...
— The American Quarterly Review, No. 17, March 1831 • Various
... touched the spot. I can't possibly tell Norris myself. My natural pride is too enormous. Descended from a primordial atomic globule, you know, like Pooh Bah. And I shook hands with a duke once. The man Norris and I, I regret to say, had something of a row on the subject last term. We parted with mutual expressions of hate, and haven't spoken since. ...
— A Prefect's Uncle • P. G. Wodehouse
... Group, and its Equivalent in Bohemia. Upper Cambrian Rocks. Tremadoc Slates and their Fossils. Lingula Flags. Lower Cambrian Rocks. Menevian Beds. Longmynd Group. Harlech Grits with large Trilobites. Llanberis Slates. Cambrian Rocks of Bohemia. Primordial Zone of Barrande. Metamorphosis of Trilobites. Cambrian Rocks of Sweden and Norway. Cambrian Rocks of the United States and Canada. Potsdam Sandstone. Huronian Series. Laurentian Group, upper and lower. Eozoon Canadense, oldest known ...
— The Student's Elements of Geology • Sir Charles Lyell
... been traversed from west to east and they had crossed the fierce bosom of Unaga's plateau. The reality of it was no better and only little worse than had been anticipated. It had been a journey of hills, everlasting hills, and interminable primordial forests, with dreary breaks of open plains. Each season had brought its own troubles, with always lying ahead the deadly anticipation of the winter yet ...
— The Heart of Unaga • Ridgwell Cullum
... whole matter lies in a nutshell. Suppose that hundreds of millions of years ago there existed upon this earth a single primordial form of the very lowest life, or suppose that three or four such primordial forms existed. Change of climate, of food, of any of the circumstances which surrounded any member of this first and lowest class of life would tend to alter ...
— Samuel Butler's Canterbury Pieces • Samuel Butler
... of the dog tribe are irrecognisable. By various influences, such as, for example, differences in food and climate, and domestication, a species may be split into varieties, or breeds, all of which, however, retain the more important characteristics of the primordial type. There appears to be no limit to the varieties of dogs, yet one can perceive by a glance that there is no specific difference between the huge Mont St. Bernard dog and the diminutive poodle, or between the sparse ...
— The Stock-Feeder's Manual - the chemistry of food in relation to the breeding and - feeding of live stock • Charles Alexander Cameron
... furnish and twenty-five enfeebled acres to resuscitate, one must not mind. Advanced scientists assure us of life, motion, even intelligence, appetite, and affection in the most primitive primordial atoms. So, after a little study, I found that the inhabitants of Gooseville and its outlying hamlets were neither dead nor sleeping. It was only by contrast that ...
— Adopting An Abandoned Farm • Kate Sanborn
... at the age of three, and these early stories are the precursors of the novels of her maturity. They are optimistic, drawn out, and with long digressions. Something similar is told about Walter Scott. There is evidently a primordial instinct in those who are born story-tellers, and this urges them on to invent ...
— George Sand, Some Aspects of Her Life and Writings • Rene Doumic
... displeasure. But every other line of scientific observation leads equally, following back a sequence of events, to seemingly causeless beginnings. Modern science can explain the lightning, as it can explain a great number of the mysteries which the primeval intelligence could not penetrate. But the primordial man could not wait for the revelations of scientific investigation: he must vault at once to a final solution of all scientific problems. He found his solution by peopling the world with invisible forces, anthropomorphic in their conception, ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... have seemed bold enough; but they are far surpassed by the inference which our authors draw from the vortex theory as they interpret it. Our authors exhibit various reasons, more or less sound, for attributing to the primordial fluid some slight amount of friction; and in support of this view they adduce Le Sage's explanation of gravitation as a differential result of pressure, and Struve's theory of the partial absorption of light-rays by the ether,—questions ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... and symmetry of Darwin's hypothesis strongly suggest the evolution of the human no less than the lower animal races out of some simple primordial animal—that all are equally "lineal descendants of some few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Silurian system was deposited." But, as the author speaks disrespectfully of spontaneous generation, and accepts a supernatural beginning of life on ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... sweet, Play glad with the breezes, Old playfellows meet; The journeying atoms, Primordial wholes, Firmly draw, firmly ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... of an infinite harmony? To fancy that the law of life is the same in the immensity of space and irradiates worlds as it irradiates cities and as it irradiates ant-hills. To fancy that each vibration in ourselves is the echo of another vibration. To fancy a sole principle, a primordial axiom, to think the universe envelops us as a mother clasps her child in her two arms; and say to one's self, "I belong to it and it to me; it would cease to be without me. I should not exist without it." To see, in short, only the divine unity of laws, which could not be nonexistent, ...
— Monsieur, Madame and Bebe, Complete • Gustave Droz
... in the midst of a controversy respecting the mode of government of the world, whether it be by incessant divine intervention, or by the operation of primordial and unchangeable law. The intellectual movement of Christendom has reached that point which Arabism had attained to in the tenth and eleventh centuries; and doctrines which were then discussed are presenting themselves ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... degeneration from the horse—then there is no farther limit to be set to the power of Nature, and we should not be wrong in supposing that with sufficient time she could have evolved all other organised forms from one primordial type." So with use and disuse and transmission of acquired characteristics generally—once show that a single structure or instinct is due to habit in preceding generations, and we can impose no limit on the results ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... of the understanding, add the psychologists, these fundamental types, by which all our judgments and ideas are inevitably shaped, and which our sensations serve only to illuminate, are known in the schools as CATEGORIES. Their primordial existence in the mind is to-day demonstrated; they need only to be systematized and catalogued. Aristotle recognized ten; Kant increased the number to fifteen; M. Cousin has reduced it to three, to two, to one; and the indisputable glory of this professor will ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon
... Nevertheless, you must not for a moment suppose, because no such transitional forms are known, that the members of the sub-kingdoms are disconnected from, or independent of, one another. On the contrary, in their earliest condition they are all alike, and the primordial germs of a man, a dog, a bird, a fish, a beetle, a snail, and a polype are, in no ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... great servant, And rose before the day, From some primordial slumber torn; But all we living later born Sleep on, and rise after the morn, And ...
— The Ballad of the White Horse • G.K. Chesterton
... convenience and, when they tired of their history, breathed their own life into them and died. On Earth the legend is still in process. Many of the lower forms of life familiar throughout the galaxy can be seen on Earth in the primordial character of an appliance. Man regards the highest forms of life (as we know it) as tools—because he made them. How can we deny the superiority of the Creator? How will it feel to know ...
— The Demi-Urge • Thomas Michael Disch
... drama, to interest at all, must cater to this longing for contention, which is one of the primordial instincts of the crowd. It must present its characters in some struggle of the wills, whether it be flippant, as in the case of Benedick and Beatrice; or delicate, as in that of Viola and Orsino; or terrible, with Macbeth; or piteous, with Lear. The crowd ...
— The Theory of the Theatre • Clayton Hamilton
... that arrived. Life depended on it. One had been, from the first, dragged hither and thither like a French poodle on a string, following always the strongest pull, between one form of unity or centralization and another. The proof that one had acted wisely because of obeying the primordial habit of nature flattered one's self-esteem. Steady, uniform, unbroken evolution from lower to higher seemed easy. So, one day when Sir Charles came to the Legation to inquire about getting his "Principles" properly noticed in America, young ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... established that it is possible to determine degrees of development, or averages of internal development, by means of which individual variations may be studied. In the primordial type the characteristics are disorderly conduct, and incapacity to concentrate attention; in such a case there is no real line of work, and the main part of the diagram remains below the line of quiescence. For the type in which the phenomenon of permanent concentration of attention ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... stripped off his wind-goggles and looked again he felt by instinct for his six-shooter. But it was not on his hip. He had taken his pick instead, and for the first time he felt a thrill of fear—not fear for his life nor of anything tangible, but that old, primordial fear of the night that only a gun can banish. He picked up a rock and walked back down the trail; but nothing leapt forth at him—even the shadow was gone, and he threw the rock petulantly away. It was ...
— Shadow Mountain • Dane Coolidge
... the god, as it were, greets each one who approaches him, with the words, 'Know thyself,' which is surely no worse than the ordinary greeting, 'Welcome.' Then we answer the divinity in the words, 'Thou art,' and thus we affirm that the true, primordial, and only adequate greeting for him is to declare that he is. In that existence we really have no part here, for every mortal being, situated between birth and destruction, merely manifests an appearance, a feeble and uncertain image of itself. If we try to grasp it with ...
— Christianity As A Mystical Fact - And The Mysteries of Antiquity • Rudolf Steiner
... Giraud rode among the Andean peaks, enveloped in their greatness and sublimity. The mightiest cousins, furthest removed, in nature's great family become conscious of the tie. Among those huge piles of primordial upheaval, amid those gigantic silences and elongated fields of distance the littlenesses of men are precipitated as one chemical throws down a sediment from another. They moved reverently, as in a temple. Their souls were uplifted ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... an old belief that in the embers Of all things, their primordial form exists; And cunning Alchemists could recreate The rose, with all its members, From its own ashes—but without the bloom, Without the least perfume. Ah me! what wonder-working, occult science Can from the ashes of our hearts Once more the rose of youth restore? What craft of alchemy ...
— The World As I Have Found It - Sequel to Incidents in the Life of a Blind Girl • Mary L. Day Arms
... advance of modern science beyond the results of ancient invention seems to consist. With all our nineteenth-century chorus of 'self-praising, self-admiring,' where should we be if certain—for the most part, uncertain and forgotten—men of genius had not invented the primordial processes which made art and civilisation possible? The workshop came first, and was the real marvel in the case of every great industry. To talk of the 'invention' of the steam-engine, for example, is an absurdity. The 'invention' ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... planet shows us first an incandescent nebula dispersed over vast infinitudes of space; later this condenses into a central sun surrounded by a family of glowing planets hardly yet consolidated from the plastic primordial matter; then succeed untold millenniums of slow geological formation; an earth peopled by the lowest forms of life, whether vegetable or animal; from which crude beginnings a majestic, unceasing, unhurried, forward movement brings things stage ...
— The Edinburgh Lectures on Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... is still possible, and even probable, that the primordial cause of both phenomena is the same. Heape (Transactions Obstetrical Society of London, 1898, vol. xl, p. 161) argues that both menstruation and ovulation are closely connected with and influenced by congestion, and that in ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... Louisiana coast whose aspect seems not of the present, but of the immemorial past—of that epoch when low flat reaches of primordial continent first rose into form above a Silurian Sea. To indulge this geologic dream, any fervid and breezeless day there, it is only necessary to ignore the evolutional protests of a few blue asters or a few composite flowers of the coryopsis sort, which contrive to display ...
— Chita: A Memory of Last Island • Lafcadio Hearn
... held that the rival gods, Ahriman and Ormuzd, evolved themselves out of primordial matter and then through the long ages created their attendant hierarchies of angels. The philosophers of India anticipated in some respects our modern evolutionary theory. Brahma is thought of as self-existent and eternal. He gradually ...
— The Making of a Nation - The Beginnings of Israel's History • Charles Foster Kent and Jeremiah Whipple Jenks
... believe that which I hold to be the correct explanation, viz. that He has given to a certain fundamental and primordial medium, certain qualities and properties, by, and through which are originated and perpetuated, all the motions of the heavenly bodies already existent in the universe, or that are ever likely to be existent throughout ...
— Aether and Gravitation • William George Hooper
... creature without inspiration, Gross of form and feature, dull of inclination? Or was his primordial self a something higher? Fresh from test ...
— The New Penelope and Other Stories and Poems • Frances Fuller Victor
... dirtier, sadder and harder, at least in our opinion and to our imagination: you judge us as overexcited and disordered; if so, it is your fault. For this reason, we curse and scoff at your world and reject your pretended truths which, for us, are lies, including those elementary and primordial verities which you declare are evident to common sense, and on which you base your laws, your institutions, your society, your philosophy, ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... few of the most important. In Scandinavia occurs a well-developed series of Cambrian deposits, representing both the lower and upper parts of the formation. In Bohemia, the Upper Cambrian, in particular, is largely developed, and constitutes the so-called "Primordial zone" of Barrande. Lastly, in North America, whilst the Lower Cambrian is only imperfectly developed, or is represented by the Huronian, the Upper Cambrian formation has a wide extension, containing fossils similar in character to the analogous strata in Europe, and known as the "Potsdam Sandstone." ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... ass was but a degeneration from the horse—then there is no further limit to be set to the power of nature, and we should not be wrong in supposing that with sufficient time she could have evolved all other organized forms from one primordial type (et l'on n'auroit pas tort de supposer, que d'un seul etre elle a su tirer avec le temps tous les autres ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... would seem as if the position of the Daltonian atom as a primordial bit of matter, indestructible and non-transmutable, had been put to the test by the chemistry of our century, and not found wanting. Since those early days of the century when the electric battery performed ...
— A History of Science, Volume 4(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... from the dug-out or the cave where in primordial condition he won his food by his own hands from the uncut forests and the unfarmed waters. As family policeman he had no incentive to accumulations of food, clothing, or luxuries. These involved added police responsibilities and enlarged the temptations of his neighbors, ...
— The Audacious War • Clarence W. Barron
... doctrine which, along with that of Karma, form the two main columns of the Hindu temple; for the Brahman as well as for the Buddhist—who is only a member of a powerful offshoot of Hinduism—these two laws rule throughout the whole Universe, from the primordial kingdoms up to the gods, including man; and the principal, nay, the only goal of human life is Moksha—salvation, in Christian terminology—liberation ...
— Reincarnation - A Study in Human Evolution • Th. Pascal
... argument is obvious. The teleological and the mechanical views of nature are not, necessarily, mutually exclusive. On the contrary, the more purely a mechanist the speculator is, the more firmly does he assume a primordial molecular arrangement, of which all the phenomena of the universe are the consequences; and the more completely is he thereby at the mercy of the teleologist, who can always defy him to disprove that this ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... fear, and by their very fear accelerating their development, these early ancestors of ours, suffering hunger-pangs very like the ones we experience to-day, drifted on, hunting and being hunted, eating and being eaten, wandering through thousand-year- long odysseys of screaming primordial savagery, until they left their skeletons in glacial gravels, some of them, and their bone-scratchings ...
— The Human Drift • Jack London
... success. This was the principle of fertilisation, which arose in this way from what would almost seem the chance union of two cells, at first alike, but afterwards more and more highly differentiated, and from whose primordial mating have proceeded by a natural series of ascending steps all the ...
— The Truth About Woman • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... savage, sprang upon their fallen mate. The two men struck and kicked, all to no purpose; the dogs turned upon them snarling and snapping. They, too, demanded to live; they, too, wanted to be fed. It was a hideous business. There in that half-night of the polar circle, lost and forgotten on a primordial shore, back into the stone age once more, men and animals fought one another for the privilege of ...
— A Man's Woman • Frank Norris
... their ire, Their hearts turned to flowers through holy desire, For their darling and star you were crowned, And their raging demons were bound. You rode on the back of the yellow-streaked king, His loose neck was wreathed with a mistletoe ring. Primordial elephants loomed by your side, And our clay-painted children danced by your path, Chanting the death of the kingdoms of wrath. You wrought until night with us all. The fierce brutes fawned at your call, Then slipped to their lairs, song-chained. And thus you sang sweetly, and reigned: "Immortal ...
— Chinese Nightingale • Vachel Lindsay
... applied to the theory of the beginnings of mundane life) is a theory which the evolutionist must accept, and which can frighten none aware of the evidence of chemistry that matter itself is in evolution. The real theory (not the theory of organized life beginning in bottled infusions, but of the life primordial arising upon a planetary surface) has enormous—nay, infinite—spiritual significance. It requires the belief that all potentialities of life and thought and emotion pass from nebula to universe, from system to system, from star to planet or moon, and again back to cyclonic ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... him only the rest of a spinning top. Its unrelated continuities of appeal, its incessant coquetries of attire, its panoramic beauty of mountain and cape and sea-front, its parade of corporeal and egotistic pleasures, its primordial and undisguised appeal to the carnival spirit, its frank, exotic festivity, its volatile and almost too vital atmosphere, and, above all, its glowing and over-odorous gardens and flowerbeds, its overcrowded and grimly Dionysian Promenade, its murmurous and alluring restaurants on ...
— Phantom Wires - A Novel • Arthur Stringer
... perfections, the germs of which are eternally implanted in it, to the Infinite Source from which it emanated. Another term of life must therefore be vouchsafed to those souls which have not fulfilled their destiny here below, and have not been sufficiently purified for the state of union with the Primordial Cause. Hence if the soul, on its first assumption of a human body and sojourn on earth, fails to acquire that experience for which it descended from heaven and becomes contaminated by that which is polluting, it must reinhabit a body till it ...
— Reincarnation • Swami Abhedananda
... sketched form is primordial, original, the simplest of all; it is a nascent moment or first attempt. It appears first of all in dreaming—an embryonic, unstable and uncoordinated manifestation of the creative imagination—a transition-stage between ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... preserved; nor can we expect that organisms so ancient should exhibit any very close resemblance to the plants which darken the half-tide rocks and skerries of our coasts at the present time. We do detect, however, in some of these primordial fossils, at least a noticeable likeness to families familiar to the modern algaeologist. The cord-like plant, Chorda filum, known to our children as "dead men's ropes," from its proving fatal at ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller
... beer and Burgundy by not drinking too much of them. We owed, also, an obedience to whatever made us. And last, and strangest, there had come into my mind a vague and vast impression that in some way all good was a remnant to be stored and held sacred out of some primordial ruin. Man had saved his good as Crusoe saved his goods; he had saved them from a wreck. All this I felt and the age gave me no encouragement to feel it. And all the time I had not even ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... over Nature man sometimes forgets his danger, oversteps the narrow margin of safety he has left between himself and the baffled forces of his ancient tyrants, Fire and Water, Earth and Air. Then indeed, in his moments of weakness, the primordial forces turn upon him and he becomes subject to tragic and terrific punishment. Of such character was the most prominent disaster of these years, the sinking of the ocean steamer Titanic. The best talent of England and America had united to produce this ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... a primordial talent that is rather rare in these physically degenerate days. He said nothing, but stood quietly in the middle of the road. The eyes of the crowd on either side of the road began to bulge, the lips of all opened with wonder, and a simultaneous burst of laughter rose around the Hon. Samuel ...
— A Knight of the Cumberland • John Fox Jr.
... are at the same time divested of their strangeness. I refer to the beliefs in, and worship of, compound monsters—impossible hybrid animals, and forms that are half human, half brutal. The theory of a primordial Fetichism, supposing it otherwise adequate, yields no feasible solutions of these. Grant the alleged original tendency to think of all natural agencies as in some way personal. Grant, too, that hence ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... fro for two hours and returned in the very last stage of complete exhaustion to report "All Clear." Simple, is it not, to go on patrol from a line you cannot see towards another line you also cannot see ... sometimes you lost touch with the others and gazed round into the blackness with that primordial fear of the unknown inspired by the night. Lost! God, it nearly unmans you. With fast-thumping heart you hear the approach of guttural Hun voices ... DOWN and QUIET. At last calm thinking points out that yon burning house is in your own lines. Make for it and all is well. Aye. Scouts, does the ...
— Norman Ten Hundred - A Record of the 1st (Service) Bn. Royal Guernsey Light Infantry • A. Stanley Blicq
... took them for primary slates, my attention being attracted to them by a regular cleavage as distinct as that of the most ancient clay slates. And yet at Tonantins, on the banks of the Solimoens, in a locality where their exposed surfaces had this primordial appearance, I found in these very beds a considerable amount of well-preserved leaves, the character of which proves their recent origin. These leaves do not even indicate as ancient a period as the Tertiaries, but resemble so closely the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 105, July 1866 • Various
... That yields your outline to the air's embrace, Half-softened by a halo's pearly gloom: Down to the crisp imperious steel, so sure To cut its one confided thought clean out Of all the world. But marble!—'neath my tools More pliable than jelly—as it were Some clear primordial creature dug from depths In the earth's heart, where itself breeds itself. And whence all baser substance may be worked; Refine it off to air, you may—condense it Down to the diamond;—is not metal there, When ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... Despite what sceptics say; for sound it is Will summon us before that final bar To give account of deeds done in the flesh. The spirit cannot thus be summoned, Since entity it hath not sound can strike. Let sceptics rave! I see no difficulty That He, who from primordial atoms formed A human frame, can from the dust awake it Once again, marshal the scattered molecules And make immortal, as was Adam. This body lives! Or else no deep delight Of quiring angels harping golden strings; No voice of Him who calls His children home; No glorious joining in the immortal song ...
— Laura Secord, the heroine of 1812. - A Drama. And Other Poems. • Sarah Anne Curzon
... political wisdom from the sands wherever it was found; she cleft it from the rocks; she gleaned it among ruins. Out of all the discoveries of statesmen and sages, out of all the experience of past human life, she compiled a perennial political philosophy, the primordial principles of national ethics. The wise men of Europe sought the best government in a mixture of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy; America went behind these names to extract from them the vital elements of social forms, and blend them harmoniously in the free commonwealth, ...
— Memorial Address on the Life and Character of Abraham Lincoln - Delivered at the request of both Houses of Congress of America • George Bancroft
... of a, I suppose, is combined with several particles of b, it seems to me that this molecule ought to be divided into as many particles; but, if it is divided, it ceases to be unity, the primordial molecule. In short, ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert
... puzzled study of the wonderful problem. For an instant he seemed to grasp the whole of a true explanation, and then, just as success was within his grasp, the picture faded into a jungle scene where a naked, white youth danced in company with a band of hairy, primordial ape-things. ...
— Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... make man under such conditions? Or at least how are we to reconcile His having done so with His attribute of goodness? To this question there are many replies but no answer, the former being merely attempts to explain the chronic effects of the primordial ethical ...
— The Sceptics of the Old Testament: Job - Koheleth - Agur • Emile Joseph Dillon
... Everybody is not only informed that the Jackats defeated the Magnats on the banks of the Kaiger on the last day of last week, but this news is conveyed to them in connection with a series of revelations about the relations of said fact to the universe. The primordial germ is not poetical, but dissertational. It tends to no organic creation, but to any abnormal and multitudinous display of suggestions, hypotheses, and prophecies. The item is shaped as it passes, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 83, September, 1864 • Various
... sir," came the professor's voice, in mild expostulation, "are you aware that you have built your barn on the top of a splendid specimen of primordial rock?" ...
— The Boy Inventors' Radio Telephone • Richard Bonner
... I rejoined. "You have the native American passion,—the passion for the picturesque. With us, I think it is primordial,—antecedent to experience. Experience comes and only shows us something ...
— Four Meetings • Henry James
... continent are not propitious to the Caesars who make their glory consist in the sinister brilliancy of battles and in the increase of their territorial domains. These same institutions give voice and vote in the direction of public affairs to the multitudes, whose primordial interest is ever peace, the sparing of their own blood, so unfruitfully shed in the great catastrophes ...
— Latin America and the United States - Addresses by Elihu Root • Elihu Root
... of us the strain of primordial sexual emotion in our loves is very strong. Many men can love only women, many women only men, and some can scarcely love at all without bodily desire. But the love of fellowship is a strong one also, and for many, love is most possible and easy when the thought ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells
... scale! Then, under banks of fog and cloud, the victorious advance will pause and grow peeringly watchful and nervous, and mud-stained desperate men will go splashing forward into an elemental blackness, rain or snow like a benediction on their faces, blessing the primordial savagery of nature that can still set aside the wisest devices of men, and give the unthrifty one last desperate chance to get their own again ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... higher we rise in the scale of being—material, intellectual, and moral—the more certainly we quit the region of the brilliant eccentricities and dazzling contrasts which belong to a vulgar greatness. Order and proportion characterize the primordial constitution of the terrestrial system; ineffable harmony rules the heavens. All the great eternal forces act in solemn silence. The brawling torrent that dries up in summer deafens you with its roaring whirlpools in March; while ...
— Public Speaking • Clarence Stratton
... into the minds of the psychotics who had been damaged by the Dragons, but they found nothing there beyond vivid spouting columns of fiery terror bursting from the primordial id itself, the volcanic source ...
— The Game of Rat and Dragon • Cordwainer Smith
... in the blackness to her right, eliciting delicious thrills that crept along her spine. The hair at the back of her head seemed to stand erect—yet she was unafraid. The muscles bequeathed her by some primordial ancestor reacted instinctively to the presence of an ancient enemy—that was all. The woman moved slowly and deliberately toward the wood. Again the lion moaned; this time nearer. She sought a low-hanging branch and finding it swung easily ...
— Tarzan the Terrible • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... footing on surer ground by following the process which exalts the dragon of the folk tale into the symbol of evil and primordial chaos. The Babylonian Creation Myth, for instance, can be shown to be a localized and glorified legend in which the hero and his tribe are displaced by the war god and his fellow deities whose welfare depends on his prowess. Merodach kills ...
— Myths of Babylonia and Assyria • Donald A. Mackenzie
... pagan, primitive—primordial, whatever it is now the fashion to call it, reverted to type, and ...
— Mistress Anne • Temple Bailey
... persons, not by coercion, but under free stipulation with the governed. Now, the rights of a Government, in circumstances thus peculiar, obviously depend neither upon the unrestricted theory of paternal principles, nor upon any primordial or fictitious contract of indefinite powers, but upon an express and known treaty, matter of positive agreement, not ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 2 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... of winter the Blue Mesa reclaimed its primordial solitude. Mount Baldy's smooth, glittering roundness topped a world that swept down in long waves of dark blue frosted with silver; the serried minarets of spruce and pine bulked close and sprinkled with snow. Blanketed in white, the upland ...
— Jim Waring of Sonora-Town - Tang of Life • Knibbs, Henry Herbert
... by a few bars, of the nine. It was completed in about four months from the date of its inception. Here as in the Seventh, the dance element is in the ascendant, commanding, swaying everything, thus coming back to first principles, almost to the origin of the art, as an art. The dance is the primordial, autochthonic form of music; its foundation so to speak. The song had its origin in the dance as indicated by its name "ballad." It is a comparatively simple matter to trace its upward course in instrumental music, as such. It is conceivable that people from remote times on, had the faculty of originating ...
— Beethoven • George Alexander Fischer
... into existence by their condensation. But we have thereby achieved only a single step. The primitive movement of rotation of the nebula is not connected with the simple attraction of the particles. This movement seems to imply the action of a primordial impulsive force. ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... an instant Chloe's glance rested upon her companions; Big Lena sat scowling murderously at Vermilion's broad back. Harriet Penny had fainted and lay with the back of her head awash in the shallow bilge water. A strange alter ego—elemental—primordial—had taken possession of Chloe. Her eyes glowed, and her heart thrilled at the sight of the tense, vigilant figure of Vermilion, and the sweating, straining scowmen. For the helpless form of Harriet Penny she felt only contempt—the savage, intolerant contempt of the strong ...
— The Gun-Brand • James B. Hendryx
... slender hands, and his great shock of long, black hair falling about his well-shaped head and bright, intelligent eyes—Tarzan of the apes, little primitive man, presented a picture filled, at once, with pathos and with promise—an allegorical figure of the primordial groping through the black night of ignorance ...
— Tarzan of the Apes • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... about him. Her "day" was a dread of mine; I could seldom remember which day it was, and when I did she had a way of shifting it so that I was fatally sure to run into it—to my misery, for, beginning with those primordial indignities suffered in youth, when I was scrubbed with a handkerchief outside the parlour door as a preliminary to polite usages, my childhood's, manhood's prayer has been: From all such days, ...
— The Guest of Quesnay • Booth Tarkington
... to look at the nurses and babies; they imparted to the scene a kind of primordial, pastoral simplicity. "Yes," he said at last, "I suppose I am." And then, in answer to his companion's inquiries, he related briefly his history since their last meeting. It was an intensely Western story, and it dealt with enterprises which ...
— The American • Henry James
... field of biology where it becomes the theory of descent—that the variety of phenomena flows from an original unity, the diversity of functions from a primitive identity, and the complexity of organization from a primordial simplicity. The conditions of existence for all individuals are, from their very birth, unequal. There must also be taken into consideration the inherited qualities and the innate tendencies which also vary more ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri
... incredible that, from some such low and intermediate form, both animals and plants may have been developed; and, if we admit this, we must likewise admit that all the organic beings which have ever lived on this earth may be descended from some one primordial form. But this inference is chiefly grounded on analogy, and it is immaterial whether or not it is accepted. No doubt it is possible, as Mr. G. H. Lewes has urged, that at the first commencement of life many different forms ...
— Little Masterpieces of Science: - The Naturalist as Interpreter and Seer • Various
... protests against confounding distinct orders of ideas, and insists that man as a physical being is clearly of the same order as the gorilla and ape; and he does not shrink from accepting the possibility that they all may have sprung by successive stages or 'leaps' from the same primordial form. His concluding words are, that 'so far from having a materialistic tendency, the supposed introduction into the earth at successive periods of life—sensation, instinct, the intelligence of the higher mammalia, bordering on ...
— Continental Monthly, Volume 5, Issue 4 • Various
... contents are instantly separated, forming distended, high-pressure blobs at each end of the empty, flabby shrunken skin. Though it suffers this experiment placidly, being incapable of the feeblest resistance, it has the primordial gift of care of itself. Twists purposely made to test its degree of intelligence are artfullystraightened out, and the eagerness and hurry with which water is forced throughout empty parts show that life is both sweet and precious. And what is the value of life to an animal of such homely ...
— The Confessions of a Beachcomber • E J Banfield
... Nit, the heifer born from the midst of the primordial waters, had two crocodiles as her children, which are sometimes represented on the monuments as hanging from her bosom. Both the part played by these animals, and the reason for connecting them with the ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero
... touches only the accumulative power of natural selection, which I look at as by far the most important element in the production of new forms. The laws governing the incipient or primordial variation (unimportant except as the groundwork for selection to act on, in which respect it is all important), I shall discuss under several heads, but I can come, as you may well believe, only to very ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... the character than that gesture with which Quilp punches his own face with his own fist. It is indeed a perfect symbol; for Quilp is always fighting himself for want of anybody else. He is energy, and energy by itself is always suicidal; he is that primordial energy which tears and ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... contracted, their noses more pointed, their size inferior, and their limbs more slender. This remarkable tendency to rapid deterioration in European dogs subjected to the climate of India, may perhaps partly be accounted for by the tendency to reversion to a primordial condition which many animals exhibit, as we shall see in a future chapter, when exposed to new ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Vol. I. • Charles Darwin
... something formidable and noble in the way he drove all light and casual loves, the usual recreations of men of literary talent, away from his threshold. Like some primordial Prometheus, making men out of mud and fire, he kept the perilous worshippers of Aphrodite far-distant from the smoke of his smithy, and refused to interrupt his cosmic labour for ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... in the woods down by the river. The spot was about a mile below the wagon bridge, where the pines grew black and ragged—a touch of the primordial in the midst of a younger growth. It was noon; a time when the plainsman knew he would find the wood-cutter at leisure, taking his midday meal, or lazing over a pipe. Nor were ...
— The Watchers of the Plains - A Tale of the Western Prairies • Ridgewell Cullum
... air, at one with nature in unconscious sympathy. Then across the dim and dreary plain, where the narrow path was lost to sight after the first few yards, a railway lamp flashed like the large red eye of some unimaginable monster of the primordial marsh. ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... who turns his back upon the comforts of an elder civilization, to face the savage youth, the primordial simplicity of the North, may estimate success at an inverse ratio to the quantity and quality of his hopelessly fixed habits. He will soon discover, if he be a fit candidate, that the material habits are the less important. The exchange of such things as a dainty menu ...
— The Son of the Wolf • Jack London
... them again the action of Rome upon England is fortified. Even those among them who are most bent upon maintaining the local laws and traditions, have constantly to refer to the ancient law-makers and commentators; Roman law is for them a sort of primordial and common treasure, open to all, and wherewith to fill the gaps of the native legislation. The first lessons had been given after the Conquest by foreigners: the Italian Vacarius, brought by Theobald, Archbishop of Canterbury, had professed law at Oxford in 1149.[302] Then ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... and mother, When I became, My creator created me; But of nine-formed faculties, Of the Fruit of fruits, Of the fruit of primordial God; Of primroses and mountain flowers, Of the blooms of trees and shrubs, Of Earth, of an earthly course, When I became,— Of the blooms of the nettle, Of the foam of the Ninth Wave. I was enchanted by Math Before I became immortal. I was enchanted by Gwydion, The ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... Verity, the primordial Essence. But how shall we know this as a fact? How shall we prove it as ...
— The Right Knock - A Story • Helen Van-Anderson
... we see that the crossing of the several equine species tends in a marked manner to cause stripes to appear on various parts of the body, especially on the legs. As we do not know whether the primordial parent of the genus was striped, the appearance of the stripes can only hypothetically be attributed to reversion. But most persons, after considering the many undoubted cases of variously coloured marks reappearing by reversion in crossed pigeons, fowls, ducks, &c., will come to ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... with much hesitation, the frequent cases of polydactylism in men and various animals to reversion. I was partly led to this through Prof. Owen's statement, that some of the Ichthyopterygia possess more than five digits, and therefore, as I supposed, had retained a primordial condition; but Prof. Gegenbaur ('Jenaischen Zeitschrift,' B. v. Heft 3, s. 341), disputes Owen's conclusion. On the other hand, according to the opinion lately advanced by Dr. Gunther, on the paddle of Ceratodus, which is provided with articulated bony rays ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin
... how horribly quick it would crush him, annihilate him, how horribly quick, and with such horrible indifference! I suppose it's civilisation in the making, the thing that isn't meant to be seen, as though it were too elemental, too—primordial; like the first ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... odds were with the defensive. Moreover, Parker, having an athlete's confidence in his fists, suddenly responded to the instincts of primordial man. He leaped lightly to one side, caught the rushing giant's foot across his instep, and as Connick's moccasined feet went out from under him, the young engineer struck him behind the ear. He fell with a dismal thump of his ...
— The Rainy Day Railroad War • Holman Day
... now in the midst of a controversy respecting the mode of government of the world, whether it be by incessant divine intervention, or by the operation of primordial and unchangeable law. The intellectual movement of Christendom has reached that point which Arabism had attained to in the tenth and eleventh centuries; and doctrines which were then discussed are presenting themselves ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper
... rate by old burgher, families, who live independently on their incomes—a sort of autochthonous nation who suffer no aliens to come among them. Possibly, after two hundred years of unbroken residence, and it may be an intermarriage or two with one of the primordial houses, a family from some neighboring district may be adopted, but in the eyes of the aboriginal race they are still newcomers ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac
... the rival gods, Ahriman and Ormuzd, evolved themselves out of primordial matter and then through the long ages created their attendant hierarchies of angels. The philosophers of India anticipated in some respects our modern evolutionary theory. Brahma is thought of as self-existent and eternal. ...
— The Making of a Nation - The Beginnings of Israel's History • Charles Foster Kent and Jeremiah Whipple Jenks
... shuddered at the bright-ribbed lightning. There was something cosmic in such things, and there was something cosmic in him. He came to her breathing of large airs and great spaces. The blaze of tropic suns was in his face, and in his swelling, resilient muscles was the primordial vigor of life. He was marred and scarred by that mysterious world of rough men and rougher deeds, the outposts of which began beyond her horizon. He was untamed, wild, and in secret ways her vanity was touched by the fact that he came so ...
— Martin Eden • Jack London
... "The conversation," they added, "refers to the primordial scheme and cannot be divulged before the proper season; but, when the time comes, mind do not forget us two, and you will readily be able to ...
— Hung Lou Meng, Book I • Cao Xueqin
... for Bernard Saisset they were exactly the primordial question; he was obstinate in disentangling that knot of snakes; or rather, like a little Fury, he brandished the snakes above his head. A frail boy, distinguished looking, impassioned, too many nerves, burning with a too lively ...
— Pierre and Luce • Romain Rolland
... microcosmus just as it occurred to me that Chesterton would heartily approve of my approximation of Sirius and Stentor, of Capella and Cothurnia—the universe balanced. My attention was drawn from the atom Gonium—whose brave little spirit was striving to keep his foursome one—a primordial struggle toward unity of self and division of labor; my consciousness climbed the microscope tube and came to rest upon a slim glass of amber liquid on my laboratory table: a servant had brought a cocktail, for it was New Year's Eve. (Now the thought came that there were a number of worthy ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe
... possessed a primordial talent that is rather rare in these physically degenerate days. He said nothing, but stood quietly in the middle of the road. The eyes of the crowd on either side of the road began to bulge, the lips of all opened with wonder, and a simultaneous burst of laughter rose ...
— A Knight of the Cumberland • John Fox Jr.
... there are, I find, very distinct imperatives for me, but I am quite prepared to admit there is no proving them imperative on any one else. One's political proceedings, one's moral acts are, I hold, just as much self-expression as one's poetry or painting or music. But since life has for its primordial elements assimilation and aggression, I try not only to obey my imperatives, but to put them persuasively and convincingly into other minds, to bring about my good and to resist and overcome my evil as though they were the universal Good and the ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... language of Burdach: "There is for me but one miracle, that of infinite existence, and but one mystery, the manner in which the finite proceeds from the infinite. So soon as we recognize this incomprehensible act as the general and primordial miracle, of which our reason perceives the necessity, but the manner of which our intelligence cannot grasp, so soon as we contemplate the nature known to us by experience in this light, there is for us no other impenetrable ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... In difference sweet, Play glad with the breezes, Old playfellows meet; The journeying atoms, Primordial wholes, Firmly draw, firmly ...
— Poems - Household Edition • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... extraordinary form. The mirage of their own caravan, rising, was reflected, mirrored, by some freak of the desert sun and air, upon the fine sand blown in the air at a distance from the train. It was, indeed, themselves they saw, not knowing it, in a vast primordial mirror of the desert gods. Nor did the discovery of the truth lessen the feeling of discomfort, of apprehension. The laughter was at best uneasy until at last a turn in the trail, a shift in the wizardry of the heat waves, broke up the ghostly caravan and ...
— The Covered Wagon • Emerson Hough
... of the scientific truth regarding man's native instincts will be found in the adoption of a post-bellum international programme. Obviously, we must take into account the primordial substructure and arrange for the upholding of culture by methods which will stand the acid test of stress and conflicting ambitions. In disillusioned diplomacy, ample armament, and universal military training alone will be found the solution of the world's ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... my whelpage. I was twenty, and she a mad, wanton creature, wonderful and unmoral and filled with life to the brim. My blood pounds hot even now as I conjure her up. The ungarmented beast, my dear Dane, the great primordial ungarmented beast, mighty to procreate, indomitable in battle, invincible in love. Love? Do I not know it? Can I not understand how that splendid fighting animal, Antony, quartered the globe with his sword and pillowed ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... scientific world, very unequally, upon the origin of the existing diversity of the plants and animals which surround us. One assumes that the actual kinds are primordial; the other, that they are derivative. One, that all kinds originated supernaturally and directly as such, and have continued unchanged in the order of Nature; the other, that the present kinds appeared in some sort of genealogical connection with other and earlier kinds, that ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. VI.,October, 1860.—No. XXXVI. - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... plants from an equal or lesser number.... Analogy would lead me one step further, namely, to the belief that all animals and plants are descended from one prototype.... All the organic beings, which have ever lived on the earth, may be descended from some one primordial form." Darwin, because of his great scholarship, fairness, and candor, won for his theory more favor than it inherently deserves. Darwin taught that, "The lower impulses of vegetable life pass, by insensible gradations, into the instinct ...
— The Evolution Of Man Scientifically Disproved • William A. Williams
... observation leads equally, following back a sequence of events, to seemingly causeless beginnings. Modern science can explain the lightning, as it can explain a great number of the mysteries which the primeval intelligence could not penetrate. But the primordial man could not wait for the revelations of scientific investigation: he must vault at once to a final solution of all scientific problems. He found his solution by peopling the world with invisible forces, anthropomorphic in their conception, like himself in their ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... point of fact, they are rights which are practically valid for you only in the will of the sovereign. Whether they are in their nature primordial or prescriptive rights, makes no difference as to this point. The will of the sovereign is the only effectual guarantee of the natural rights of individuals, and the only source of their political rights. The sovereign recognizes the former, confers the latter, and secures ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various
... variation teaches—both in the general theory of evolution and in the smaller field of biology where it becomes the theory of descent—that the variety of phenomena flows from an original unity, the diversity of functions from a primitive identity, and the complexity of organization from a primordial simplicity. The conditions of existence for all individuals are, from their very birth, unequal. There must also be taken into consideration the inherited qualities and the innate tendencies which also vary more or less widely. ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri
... inconsistent with the patriarchal theory. Bachofen here suggests a pre-matriarchal period in which the elementary family-group was founded on and held together by a common subjection to the oldest and strongest male. This is the primordial patriarchal family. ...
— The Position of Woman in Primitive Society - A Study of the Matriarchy • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... the nurses and babies; they imparted to the scene a kind of primordial, pastoral simplicity. "Yes," he said at last, "I suppose I am." And then, in answer to his companion's inquiries, he related briefly his history since their last meeting. It was an intensely Western story, and it dealt with enterprises which ...
— The American • Henry James
... here regarding the homogeneousness of matter, or the idea that the various elements are composed of primordial units which are themselves alike, mere duplicates of each other. If this should prove to be really the case, as seems to be quite likely in the light of the facts given above, would it not be a veritable triumph for materialism? By no means. On the contrary, I think I can show in a very few words ...
— Q. E. D., or New Light on the Doctrine of Creation • George McCready Price
... a magnificent view spread out before us in the raw light. The chain of rocks, clearly visible in their barren desolation which stretched to the very summit, lay stretched out like some great heap of gigantic, unformed things left by some primordial race of Titans to stupefy human beings. ...
— Atlantida • Pierre Benoit
... that of supplying a scientific demonstration of the substantial identity of Force and Matter, and so of supplying a still more valid basis for the theory as to the natural genesis of matter from a single primordial substance, in the manner sketched out in Chapter IV. For the argument adduced by Professor Flint, that as the manner in which the vorticial motion of a ring is originated has not as yet been suggested, therefore its origination must have ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... morbid hyperborean gloom—the capacity for honest contempt: contempt of that scarecrow of a theory which would have us neglect what is earthly, tangible. What is life well lived but a blithe discarding of primordial husks, of those comfortable intangibilities that lurk about us, ...
— Old Calabria • Norman Douglas
... is primordial, original, the simplest of all; it is a nascent moment or first attempt. It appears first of all in dreaming—an embryonic, unstable and uncoordinated manifestation of the creative imagination—a transition-stage between passive reproduction and ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... header, a small knife, a hunting spear, a special arrow for hunting, a fish spear, and perhaps a few fishhooks, serve all the purposes of his primitive life. With one or the other of these he fells the mighty trees of the primordial forest, performs all the operations of agriculture, of hunting and fishing, builds himself a house, in certain districts hews out shapely canoes, whittles out handsome bolo sheaths, and makes a variety of other necessary and often artistic articles. They are the sum total ...
— The Manbos of Mindano - Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIII, First Memoir • John M. Garvan
... dialectic and his satirical spirit (Augustin had formidable powers of ridicule all through his life) were exercised upon the backs of his fellow-religionists. Provisionally, he had admitted as indisputable the basic principles of Manicheeism: first of all, the primordial antagonism of the two substances, the God of Light and the God of Darkness; then, this other dogma, that particles of that Divine Light, which had been carried away in a temporary victory of the army of Darkness, were immersed in certain ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... like foam,'" he mumbled what was evidently a quotation. "That's it—foam, and fleeting. All man's toil upon the planet was just so much foam. He domesticated the serviceable animals, destroyed the hostile ones, and cleared the land of its wild vegetation. And then he passed, and the flood of primordial life rolled back again, sweeping his handiwork away—the weeds and the forest inundated his fields, the beasts of prey swept over his flocks, and now there are wolves on the Cliff House beach." He was appalled by the thought. "Where four million people disported ...
— The Scarlet Plague • Jack London
... rested on my back upon the cradling waves, watching the streaks of feathery clouds that stretched across the sky—streamers, flying far behind the tempest. And then, with tingling blood, I would flip my body and swim down, down for more shells. I was King of the great out-of-doors; a reincarnated primordial monster, holding high carnival ...
— Wings of the Wind • Credo Harris
... last, stared at his companion. He noted the man's little twinkling animal eyes, his high cheek bones, his flat nose, his thick and slobbery lips, his straggling, fierce mustache and eyebrows, his grotesque long-tailed cutaway coat. So to him, too, this primitive man reaching dully from primordial chaos, the great moment had yielded ...
— The Blazed Trail • Stewart Edward White
... complete exhaustion to report "All Clear." Simple, is it not, to go on patrol from a line you cannot see towards another line you also cannot see ... sometimes you lost touch with the others and gazed round into the blackness with that primordial fear of the unknown inspired by the night. Lost! God, it nearly unmans you. With fast-thumping heart you hear the approach of guttural Hun voices ... DOWN and QUIET. At last calm thinking points out that yon burning house is in your own lines. Make ...
— Norman Ten Hundred - A Record of the 1st (Service) Bn. Royal Guernsey Light Infantry • A. Stanley Blicq
... River fell off the highlands of the interior and precipitated itself into the cove below. These were the two things in Nature he had demanded to make his work possible. For the rest, the rugged immensity of scenery, the mighty contours of the aged land about him, the vastness of the harsh primordial world, so inhospitable, so forbidding under the fierce climate which Nature had imposed, made no appeal. It served, and so it was sufficient. The lights and shades under the summer sunlight were full of splendour. No ...
— The Man in the Twilight • Ridgwell Cullum
... woman into new fields of labour, though bringing her increased freedom and economic independence, and necessitating increased mental training and wider knowledge, could not extinguish the primordial physical instinct which draws sex to sex throughout all the orders of sentient life; and still less could it annihilate that subtler mental need, which, as humanity develops, draws sex to sex for emotional fellowship and close intercourse; but, it might, and undoubtedly would, powerfully react ...
— Woman and Labour • Olive Schreiner
... pointed to as an example of almost primordial life, from which the evolutionary chain might have begun; and later controversialists, not acquainted with the precise limitations of the matter, seized upon the Bathybius recantation as a convenient stick with which to beat the Darwinian ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley - A Character Sketch • Leonard Huxley
... itself behind us in a long string, jingling and clanging with horse and camel bells. But they turned northward to pass through the famed Circassian Gates, whereas we followed the plain that paralleled the mountain range—our mules' feet hidden by eight inches of primordial ooze. ...
— The Eye of Zeitoon • Talbot Mundy
... there would be no rational basis for preference. Such, however, is not the case. Comparative valuation is possible; all secondary goods and evils arise, all morality, all art and religion and science have their wellspring in this brute fact, this primordial parting of the ways between the more and the less desirable phases of possible conscious life. Morality of an elementary type would exist on this level even without the further complications of ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... review the last hours. He had been so wondrously happy. The world had been filled with a new magic, a wonderful, stately beauty which he had perceived for the first time. For long hours he had been wandering in another—a glamorous, primordial world. ...
— The Trespasser • D.H. Lawrence
... that it is possible to determine degrees of development, or averages of internal development, by means of which individual variations may be studied. In the primordial type the characteristics are disorderly conduct, and incapacity to concentrate attention; in such a case there is no real line of work, and the main part of the diagram remains below the line of quiescence. For ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... classic, taught Reincarnation to his inner circle of students and adherents, at least so many authorities claim. He taught that there existed a fundamental principle called "Tao," which is held to have been identical with the "primordial reason," a manifestation of which was the "Teh," or the creative activity of the universe. From the union and action of the "Tao" and the "Teh" proceeded the universe, including the human soul, which he taught was composed of several ...
— Reincarnation and the Law of Karma - A Study of the Old-New World-Doctrine of Rebirth, and Spiritual Cause and Effect • William Walker Atkinson
... this celestial giant has not yet arrived at the stable condition of our dwelling-place. Owing to its considerable volume, this globe has probably preserved its original heat, revolving in space as an obscure Sun, but perhaps still burning. In it we see what our own planet must have been in its primordial epoch, in the ...
— Astronomy for Amateurs • Camille Flammarion
... function did not disappear till a very much later time. The question, "Who will be my judge?" has no meaning now, since the State has appropriated for its bureaucracy the organization of justice; but it was of primordial importance in medieval times, the more so as self-jurisdiction meant self-administration. It must also be remarked that the translation of the Saxon and Danish "guild-bretheren," or "brodre," by the Latin convivii must also have contributed to the ...
— Mutual Aid • P. Kropotkin
... Jim and the Indians heard the wild cry from the mesa top and the shouts and threats were stilled as if by magic. There was a moment of restless silence. That cry was a primordial thing, as well understood by every man in the mob as if he had heard it always. It was the cry of the hunted and the hunter. It was the night cry of forests. It was war with naked ...
— Still Jim • Honore Willsie Morrow
... development, these early ancestors of ours, suffering hunger-pangs very like the ones we experience to-day, drifted on, hunting and being hunted, eating and being eaten, wandering through thousand-year- long odysseys of screaming primordial savagery, until they left their skeletons in glacial gravels, some of them, and their ...
— The Human Drift • Jack London
... strong slender hands, and his great shock of long, black hair falling about his well-shaped head and bright, intelligent eyes—Tarzan of the apes, little primitive man, presented a picture filled, at once, with pathos and with promise—an allegorical figure of the primordial groping through the black night of ignorance toward the light ...
— Tarzan of the Apes • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... infer from analogy that probably all the organic beings which have ever lived on this earth (man therefore of course included) have descended from some one primordial form into which life was first breathed by ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... all ways, the whole universe is the expression of the Divine, but "man is the highest and most perfect earthly being in whom the primordial force is spiritualised so that man feels, understands and knows his own power." Conscious development of one's own power is the triumph of spirit over matter, therefore human development is spiritual development. So while man is the most perfect earthly being, yet, with regard to spiritual ...
— The Child Under Eight • E.R. Murray and Henrietta Brown Smith
... they express anything, it is pure "bosh," pure discontinuity, accident, and disturbance, with no law apparent but to interrupt, and no purpose but to baffle. They seem like stray vestiges of that primordial irrationality, from which all ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... paralysed on account of the natural resistance of the organs. The bee must therefore be killed outright instead of being paralysed, otherwise the honey could not be removed. Instantaneous death can be assured only by a lesion of the primordial centre of life. The sting must therefore pierce the cervical ganglions; the centre of innervation upon which the rest of the organism is dependent. This can only be reached in one way: through the neck. Here it is that the sting will be inserted; and here it is inserted in a ...
— Social Life in the Insect World • J. H. Fabre
... exclaimed, "I can see it all. The desert, the mountains, all wild, primordial, untamed. How I should have loved to have been with you. Then, perhaps, I should have got hold ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris
... The situation was primordial. The Man beneath prevailed for a moment over the civilised superstructure, the Draper. He pushed at the pedals with archaic violence. So Palaeolithic man may have ridden his simple bicycle of chipped flint in pursuit of his exogamous affinity. She vanished round the ...
— The Wheels of Chance - A Bicycling Idyll • H. G. Wells
... to us in the state of imperfect sketches, for us to fill out and complete; it was for our skill and our labor patiently to induce the nourishing pulp which was the earliest form of capital, whose interest is always increasing in the primordial bank of the ...
— A Book of Exposition • Homer Heath Nugent
... Keats' famous assertion) is the same thing as Truth. These three objects of the soul's pursuit have different natures, different laws, and fundamentally different origins. But the energies which express themselves in their pursuit—energies vital, primordial, and necessary even to man's physical survival—have all been evolved under the same stress of adaptation of the human creature to its surroundings; and have therefore, in their beginnings and in their ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee
... once more this Eden, that we may study with Yoritomo the manner of acquiring this art—somewhat unattractive perhaps but essentially primordial—called ...
— Common Sense - - Subtitle: How To Exercise It • Yoritomo-Tashi
... people and the more strongly marked is the national character. This is exemplified in the people of mountain lands like Switzerland, Abyssinia, and Nepal; of peninsulas like Korea, Spain, and Scandinavia; and of islands like England and Japan. Today we stand amazed at that strong primordial brand of the Japanese character which nothing ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... the ear of justice. I am not here to enter upon curious metaphysical questions as to the origin of this or that—questions to which there would be no end were their introduction once tolerated, and which would result in throwing the only guilt on the primordial cell, or perhaps even on the elementary gases. There is no question of how you came to be wicked, but only this—namely, are you wicked or not? This has been decided in the affirmative, neither can I hesitate for a single moment to say that it has been ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... detail in the scene. There was nothing but the great reach of the ocean floor, the unbroken plane of blue sky, and the bare green slope of land—three immensities, gigantic, vast, primordial. It was no place for trivial ideas and thoughts of little things. The mind harked back unconsciously to the broad, simpler, basic emotions, the fundamental instincts of the race. The huge spaces of earth and air and water carried with ...
— Blix • Frank Norris
... her memory by her notes, "you should begin by 'hating and despising the ideals of the average man'! You should create your own Truth—your own Morality. Obey only your primordial instincts—the ...
— In Brief Authority • F. Anstey
... atomic theory of Democritus, conceived the first principle as rigid matter, and evolved the manifoldness of things out of this matter merely by mechanical variations; whereas Zeno, forming his views after the Ephesian Heraclitus, introduces even into his primordial matter a dynamic antagonism and a movement of fluctuation up and down. From this are derived the further distinctions—that in the Epicurean system the gods as it were did not exist or were at the most a dream of dreams, while ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... beard, a barber by profession, was among the most eloquent. It was not a jail, it was a mad-house, he cried. Another declared that without bedding, doctor, or medicines, shut up here until the end of the war, probably, they must at least have food—that was a need "primordial!" ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl
... demanded in a husband; but in the other was grace and charm, something wildly admirable. He allured as the warrior, intrepid and graceful, allured the maiden, as the forest calls the householder. Something primordial and splendid and very sweet was in her feeling toward him. There could be no peaceful wedlock there, no security of home, no comfort, only the exquisite thrill of perilous union, the madness of a few short weeks—perhaps only a few swift days of self-surrender, and then, surely, ...
— They of the High Trails • Hamlin Garland
... must content themselves with stingy little parks. It's the love of Nature that takes them to the parks, and compared with this they have a poor substitute. This is the world as God made it, with all its primordial beauty. We're fortunate that circumstances placed us here, Thomas, and we should be ...
— Troop One of the Labrador • Dillon Wallace
... cultivation or with very little. It is the place where the natural man must conquer his appetites, and long for, and finally seek for, a realm of order. Calypso is the concealer, she who conceals spirit in the jungle of nature. Here, then, occurs the primordial breach between the physical and spiritual, out of which ...
— Homer's Odyssey - A Commentary • Denton J. Snider
... Where everlasting silence broods, with lips Of adamant, o'er earthquake-builded floors. Where forms, such as the Demon-World adores, Laborious water carves; whence echo ships Wild-tongued o'er pools where petrifaction strips Her breasts of crystal from which crystal pours.— Here where primordial fear, the Gorgon, sits Staring all life to stone in ghastly mirth, I seem to tread, with awe no tongue can tell,— Beneath vast domes, by torrent-tortured pits, 'Mid wrecks terrific of the ruined Earth,— An ancient causeway of ...
— Weeds by the Wall - Verses • Madison J. Cawein
... tell us about the origin and phenomena, not only of our own planet, but other planets, of the stars, and the sun. New light is thrown on the source of the sun's heat; we can make more than guesses as to its probable age. The great question to-day is: is there one primordial substance from which all the varying forms of matter have ...
— The Outline of Science, Vol. 1 (of 4) - A Plain Story Simply Told • J. Arthur Thomson
... has just ended. And the outstanding impression which one gets from most of these essays in high politics—whether French, Italian, or British—is that we have been and are witnessing part of a great world movement, the setting in motion of Titanic forces "deep-set in primordial needs ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Vol. 21 - The Recent Days (1910-1914) • Charles F. Horne, Editor
... up to the present, only considered that form of segmentation and gastrulation which, for many and weighty reasons, we may regard as the original, primordial, or palingenetic form. We might call it "equal" or homogeneous segmentation, because the divided cells retain a resemblance to each other at first (and often until the formation of the blastoderm). We give the ...
— The Evolution of Man, V.1. • Ernst Haeckel
... change, perhaps even more rapidly than words, and the changes may go on to such an extent that primitive methods are entirely lost, there being no radical grammatic elements to be preserved. Grammatic structure is but a phase or accident of growth, and not a primordial element of language. The roots of a language are its most permanent characteristics, and while the words which are formed from them may change so as to obscure their elements or in some cases even to lose them, ...
— Indian Linguistic Families Of America, North Of Mexico • John Wesley Powell
... not quite so learned, to convey an idea of the generation of colors, and the decomposition of the solar ray. Instead of examining them in a prism of glass, we shall consider them in the heavens, and there we shall behold the five primordial colours unfold themselves in the ...
— Lectures on Language - As Particularly Connected with English Grammar. • William S. Balch
... of the most important. In Scandinavia occurs a well-developed series of Cambrian deposits, representing both the lower and upper parts of the formation. In Bohemia, the Upper Cambrian, in particular, is largely developed, and constitutes the so-called "Primordial zone" of Barrande. Lastly, in North America, whilst the Lower Cambrian is only imperfectly developed, or is represented by the Huronian, the Upper Cambrian formation has a wide extension, containing fossils similar in character to the analogous ...
— The Ancient Life History of the Earth • Henry Alleyne Nicholson
... full development and symmetry of Darwin's hypothesis strongly suggest the evolution of the human no less than the lower animal races out of some simple primordial animal—that all are equally "lineal descendants of some few beings which lived long before the first bed of the Silurian system was deposited." But, as the author speaks disrespectfully of spontaneous generation, and accepts a supernatural beginning ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... descending scale! Then, under banks of fog and cloud, the victorious advance will pause and grow peeringly watchful and nervous, and mud-stained desperate men will go splashing forward into an elemental blackness, rain or snow like a benediction on their faces, blessing the primordial savagery of nature that can still set aside the wisest devices of men, and give the unthrifty one last desperate chance to get ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... stated, is as follows: That in some infinitely remote period in the past, how or from whence science does not affirm, there appeared matter and force; that within matter and in association with force there also appeared a primordial cell, how or from whence no man knoweth, in which there was a spark of life; and that from this cell all things animate have emerged, being controlled by certain laws variously stated by various ...
— Evolution - An Investigation and a Critique • Theodore Graebner
... in me for this lost egg, this dead end in the tree of life, George. One thinks of the humble but deserving amoeba, the primordial metazoon, the first fish, the remote reptile ancestor, the countless generations of forefathers that, so far as this egg went, have lived and learnt and suffered in vain. The torrent of life had split and rushed by on either side ...
— Select Conversations with an Uncle • H. G. Wells
... of primordial slime subtly intruded upon the sensory nerves of the visitor. The place breathed out decay; the decay of humanity, of cleanliness, of the honest decencies of life turned foul. Something lethal exhaled from that ...
— The Clarion • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... of the instinct of workmanship, a variant, relatively late and ephemeral in spite of its great absolute antiquity. The emulative predatory impulse—or the instinct of sportsmanship, as it might well be called—is essentially unstable in comparison with the primordial instinct of workmanship out of which it has been developed and differentiated. Tested by this ulterior norm of life, predatory emulation, and therefore the life ...
— The Theory of the Leisure Class • Thorstein Veblen
... attempts to trace the system of things back to its first principle or primordial element ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... The spontaneous variations of plants and animals are the very mainspring of his machine; but he tells us he knows nothing of the laws governing them; nor has he any information about the creation of the primordial forms, nor about the date of beginning, or rate of progress.[15] All which are necessary to be known in order to the formation of a correct theory. Again and again, when confronted with facts which his theory can not explain, ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... from which it emanated. Another term of life must therefore be vouchsafed to those souls which have not fulfilled their destiny here below, and have not been sufficiently purified for the state of union with the Primordial Cause. Hence if the soul, on its first assumption of a human body and sojourn on earth, fails to acquire that experience for which it descended from heaven and becomes contaminated by that which is polluting, it must reinhabit a body till it is able to ascend in a purified state through ...
— Reincarnation • Swami Abhedananda
... process of aggregation, more especially in dark red leaves, the contents of the cells often present a different appearance, as if the layer of protoplasm (primordial utricle) which lines the cells had separated itself and shrunk from the walls; an irregularly shaped purple bag being thus formed. Other fluids, besides a solution of the carbonate, for instance an infusion of raw meat, produce this same ...
— Insectivorous Plants • Charles Darwin
... suspected me quickly disabused their minds, and in a short time I acquired the unmistakable airs and ear-marks of the blowed-in-the-glass profesh. And be it known, here and now, that the profesh are the aristocracy of The Road. They are the lords and masters, the aggressive men, the primordial noblemen, the blond beasts so beloved ...
— The Road • Jack London
... have to make an important proviso. Only the first two of them did he witness in the authentic version. Macbeth underwent in his day a most liberal transformation, which carried it far from its primordial purity. The impressions he finally formed of Othello and Hamlet are not consistent one with the other, but are eminently characteristic of the variable moods ...
— Shakespeare and the Modern Stage - with Other Essays • Sir Sidney Lee
... back upon the comforts of an elder civilization, to face the savage youth, the primordial simplicity of the North, may estimate success at an inverse ratio to the quantity and quality of his hopelessly fixed habits. He will soon discover, if he be a fit candidate, that the material habits are the less important. The exchange of such things as a dainty ...
— The Son of the Wolf • Jack London
... said he; "problems utterly insoluble. Do not let us enter upon them. Let us only admit the insufficiency of the primordial attraction; and then by the inequality of the two motions of rotation and revolution, the days and nights could have succeeded each other on the moon as they succeed each other on the earth. Besides, even without ...
— Jules Verne's Classic Books • Jules Verne
... rode among the Andean peaks, enveloped in their greatness and sublimity. The mightiest cousins, furthest removed, in nature's great family become conscious of the tie. Among those huge piles of primordial upheaval, amid those gigantic silences and elongated fields of distance the littlenesses of men are precipitated as one chemical throws down a sediment from another. They moved reverently, as in a temple. Their souls were uplifted in unison ...
— Whirligigs • O. Henry
... he was master—that missionaries were somewhat feeble-minded and had to do with weak people. I was not very well acquainted with the bunk-house at the time, but I outlined a plan of campaign the major part of which was the capture of this primordial man. Could I reach him? Could I influence and move him to a better life? If not, what was the use of trying my theological programme on others? So I abandoned myself to the task. I knew my friends and the ...
— From the Bottom Up - The Life Story of Alexander Irvine • Alexander Irvine
... gives him a key to the understanding and therefore, in one sense, to the acceptance of many a dogma. Christian dogmas were not pieces of wanton information fallen from heaven; they were imaginative views, expressing now some primordial instinct in all men, now the national hopes and struggles of Israel, now the moral or dialectical philosophy of the later Jews and Greeks. Such a derivation does not, of itself, render these dogmas necessarily mythical. ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... In most, no," said Yoritomo. "Look: Suppose one of these primordial Nipes runs across a tiger—or whatever large carnivore passes for a tiger on their home planet. This Nipe, let us say, has never seen a tiger before, so he does not observe that this particular tiger is old, ill, and weak. It is, as a matter of fact, on its last legs. ...
— Anything You Can Do ... • Gordon Randall Garrett
... understood by physicians; and they are making noble efforts to spread this understanding among the people. Their efforts are gravely hindered by two obstacles; one the professional tradition known as "the medical secret," the other the universal prevalence of that primordial superstition—the ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... abstract touches only the accumulative power of natural selection, which I look at as by far the most important element in the production of new forms. The laws governing the incipient or primordial variation (unimportant except as the groundwork for selection to act on, in which respect it is all important), I shall discuss under several heads, but I can come, as you may well believe, only to ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... eyes under lowering and bushy brows, flat-nosed, thick-lipped, sullen-mouthed. He was heavy-jawed, bull-necked, and the short, straight hair of the head seemed to her frightened eyes the stiff bristles on a hog's back. Here were coarseness and brutishness—a thing savage, primordial, ferocious. He was swarthy to blackness, and his body was covered with a hairy growth that matted like a dog's on his chest and shoulders. He was deep-chested, thick-legged, large-muscled, but unshapely. His muscles ...
— The Game • Jack London
... scheme of individual lives. Only in phases of illumination do we realize the creative powers that lie ready to man's hand. Personal affections, immediate obligations, ambitions, self-seeking, these are among the natural and essential things of our individual lives, as intimate almost as our primordial lusts and needs; God, the true God, is a later revelation, a newer, less natural thing in us; a knowledge still remote, uncertain, and confused with superstition; an apprehension as yet entangled with barbaric traditions of fear and with ceremonial surgeries, ...
— Soul of a Bishop • H. G. Wells
... inherited the change in form and colour when it would have been beneficial to both can only be explained, I think, on the supposition that the females had a choice of mates and preferred those that retained the primordial appearance of the group. This view is supported by the fact that many of the males of the mimetic Leptalides have the upper half of the lower wing of a pure white, whilst all the rest of the wings is barred and spotted with black, red, and yellow, like the species they mimic. The females ...
— The Naturalist in Nicaragua • Thomas Belt
... continuation of the personality of every ovum in the chain of its ancestry, which every ovum it actually is quite as truly as the octogenarian is the same identity with the ovum from which he has been developed. This process cannot stop short of the primordial cell, which again will probably turn out to be but a brief resting-place. We therefore prove each one of us to be actually the primordial cell which never died nor dies, but has differentiated itself into the life of the world, all living ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... as we are, than the mental state of the man far behind us in cultivation, as regards what we call par excellence 'morality.' It is not indecency; it is simply an animal absence of modesty. Acts which are undeniably quite natural, since they are the expression of a primordial need, essential to the duration of the species, but which a long ancestral and individual education has trained us to subject to a rigorous restraint, and to the accomplishment of which, consequently, we can not help attaching ...
— The Negro Farmer • Carl Kelsey
... it appears that Dr. Freke, in 1851 ("Dublin Medical Press", page 322), propounded the doctrine that all organic beings have descended from one primordial form. His grounds of belief and treatment of the subject are wholly different from mine; but as Dr. Freke has now (1861) published his Essay on the "Origin of Species by means of Organic Affinity", the difficult attempt to give any idea of his views would be superfluous ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... indefinable and in its essence unknowable, is "the fountain-head of all beings, and the norm of all actions. But it is not only the formative principle of the universe; it also seems to be primordial matter: chaotic in its composition, born prior to Heaven and earth, noiseless, formless, standing alone in its solitude, and not changing, universal in its activity, and unrelaxing, without being exhausted, it is capable of becoming the mother ...
— Myths and Legends of China • E. T. C. Werner
... the chief commissioner of furs for the Hudson's Bay Company. I wish I could give it in Mr. Hall's own words—in the slow quiet recital of the man who has spent his life amid the great silent verities, up next to primordial facts, not theorizing and professionalizing and discretionizing and generally darkening counsel by words without knowledge. He was a youth somewhere around his early twenties, and he was serving the company at Stuart Lake in ...
— The Canadian Commonwealth • Agnes C. Laut
... romances," as his enthusiastic publishers and television directors said, "of ages past, when men were men. Red-blooded heroes responding vigorously to the stirring passions of primordial life!" ...
— The Cosmic Express • John Stewart Williamson
... example, it could be once shown that the ass was but a degeneration from the horse—then there is no farther limit to be set to the power of Nature, and we should not be wrong in supposing that with sufficient time she could have evolved all other organised forms from one primordial type." So with use and disuse and transmission of acquired characteristics generally—once show that a single structure or instinct is due to habit in preceding generations, and we can impose no limit ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... have found certain definite facts,—that all known matter is formed out of one primordial Universal Substance,—that the ether spreading throughout limitless space is a Universal Medium, through which it is possible to convey force by means of vibrations,—and that vibrations can be started by the power of Sound. These we have found ...
— The Law and the Word • Thomas Troward
... in unconscious sympathy. Then across the dim and dreary plain, where the narrow path was lost to sight after the first few yards, a railway lamp flashed like the large red eye of some unimaginable monster of the primordial marsh. ...
— Two Summers in Guyenne • Edward Harrison Barker
... unsupported by any analogy we are acquainted with, ascribes a greater tenuity to organized matter than we can readily admit" (p. 317); and in another place he claims that "we cannot but be convinced that the fetus or embryon is formed by apposition of new parts, and not by the distention of a primordial nest of germs included one within another like the cups of ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... it has hitherto been found impossible to reduce them into others, wherefore they are presumed to be the primary bases of all matters. It has, indeed, been surmised that these so-called elements are only modifications of a primordial form of matter, brought about under certain conditions; but if this should prove to be the case, it would little affect the view which we are taking of cosmical arrangements. Analogy would lead us to conclude that the combinations ...
— Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation • Robert Chambers
... knows, transferred to Canada by Imperial sanction at the same time. It is not the author's intention, therefore, to cumber his pages with trite or irrelevant matter; yet certain transactions which preceded this primordial and greatest treaty of all not unfittingly may be set forth, though in the briefest way, as a pardonable introduction to the ...
— Through the Mackenzie Basin - A Narrative of the Athabasca and Peace River Treaty Expedition of 1899 • Charles Mair
... supports the progressive-evolution theory, which, briefly stated, is—that articulate language is the result of an elaboration in the long procession of ages in which there occurred three stages—the cry, vocalisation, and articulation. The cry is the primordial, pure animal language; it is a simple vocal aspiration without articulation; it is either a reflex expressing needs and emotions, or at a higher stage intentional (to call, warn, menace, etc.). Vocalisation (emission of vowels) is a natural production of the vocal instrument, ...
— The Brain and the Voice in Speech and Song • F. W. Mott
... accept, and which can frighten none aware of the evidence of chemistry that matter itself is in evolution. The real theory (not the theory of organized life beginning in bottled infusions, but of the life primordial arising upon a planetary surface) has enormous—nay, infinite—spiritual significance. It requires the belief that all potentialities of life and thought and emotion pass from nebula to universe, from system to system, from star to planet or moon, and again back ...
— Kokoro - Japanese Inner Life Hints • Lafcadio Hearn
... Incredible power. All the power to control worlds, to carve worlds from primordial slime, almost, for yourself. Here was far more power than any man in the galaxy had ever been offered. ...
— A World Called Crimson • Darius John Granger
... to reach into the minds of the psychotics who had been damaged by the Dragons, but they found nothing there beyond vivid spouting columns of fiery terror bursting from the primordial id itself, the ...
— The Game of Rat and Dragon • Cordwainer Smith
... element they died, but left their mold, to harden in the air they could not breathe, and to amaze the less fortunate people who could not see them in their own estate. The seaweeds grew among them, green or brown, more primordial than the corals, with less of organic life, vegetables and not animals, but eager, too, for expression in their motions, their increase in size, and their continuance through posterity. All these were the display of the kindness of the same spirit who rode the thunder, who permitted a million babes ...
— Mystic Isles of the South Seas. • Frederick O'Brien
... length this twilight of the ages fades, And starless night now sinks upon the world— An age of iron, cruel, dark and cold. On Asia first this outer darkness fell, Once seat of paradise, primordial peace, Perennial harmony and perfect love. A despot's will was then a nation's law; An idol's car crushed out poor human lives, And human blood polluted many shrines. Then human speculation made of ...
— The Dawn and the Day • Henry Thayer Niles
... approaching him; "For the god, as it were, greets each one who approaches him, with the words, 'Know thyself,' which is surely no worse than the ordinary greeting, 'Welcome.' Then we answer the divinity in the words, 'Thou art,' and thus we affirm that the true, primordial, and only adequate greeting for him is to declare that he is. In that existence we really have no part here, for every mortal being, situated between birth and destruction, merely manifests an appearance, a feeble and uncertain image ...
— Christianity As A Mystical Fact - And The Mysteries of Antiquity • Rudolf Steiner
... rejoined. "You have the native American passion,—the passion for the picturesque. With us, I think it is primordial,—antecedent to experience. Experience comes and only shows us something ...
— Four Meetings • Henry James
... its primordial simplicity it may be small, the whole world dares not deal with (one embodying) it as a minister. If a feudal prince or the king could guard and hold it, all would ...
— Tao Teh King • Lao-Tze
... called for revision, and the foundations for reform were laid in a report by Northcote and Sir Charles Trevelyan (November 1853), prepared for Mr. Gladstone at his request, recommending two propositions, so familiarised to us to-day as to seem like primordial elements of the British constitution. One was, that access to the public service should be through the door of a competitive examination; the other, that for conducting these examinations a central board should be constituted. ...
— The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol. 1 (of 3) - 1809-1859 • John Morley
... of the Argonautic expedition, (he observes in the Preliminary Disquisition to the latter work), has been questioned; but if the primordial history of every nation but one is tinctured with the fabulous, and if from among the rest a choice is necessary to be made, it must be allowed that the traditions of Greece are less inconsistent than those of the more distant regions of ...
— Robert Kerr's General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 18 • William Stevenson
... myth of the Creation. Man devised it so that he might be able to say, "in the beginning." But a new difficulty met him at the threshold—as change must be in existence, "we cannot think of a change from non-existence to existence." His only refuge was to select some apparently primordial, simple, homogeneous substance from which, by the exertion of volition, things came into being. The one which most naturally suggested itself was water.[167-1] This does in fact cover and hide the ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... ultimate outpost of eternity? Lo! what am I to Love, the lord of all? One murmuring shell he gathers from the sand,— One little heart-flame sheltered in his hand. Yet through thine eyes he grants me clearest call And veriest touch of powers primordial That ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various
... extent. He bore no weapon save the huge knife swinging at his belt. Fastened to the same girdle was a hide bag or pouch, half full of parched corn, rudely pounded. Expressionless, mute, untiring, the colossal figure strode along, like some primordial creature in whom a human soul had not yet found home. Yet, with an intelligence and confidence which was more than human, he ran without hesitation the trail of the unshod horse across this wide, hard plain, where even the eye of the cowboy could rarely discern it. Now and then the ...
— The Girl at the Halfway House • Emerson Hough
... is in man a primordial and overruling phenomenon which defies analysis. Man may be dissected completely; the elements of Will and Mind may perhaps be found; but there still will remain beyond apprehension the x against which I once used to struggle. That x ...
— Louis Lambert • Honore de Balzac
... necessaries as ammunition, clothing, tobacco and tea. Unlike their brothers on the southern slope, they have not accustomed themselves to the use of flour, sugar and others of the simplest luxuries of civilization, and their food is almost wholly flesh, fish and berries. They live in the crude, primordial fashion of their forefathers. To aid them in their hunt they have adopted the breech-loading rifle and muzzle-loading shotgun, but the bow and arrow has still its place with them and they were depending wholly ...
— The Long Labrador Trail • Dillon Wallace
... will tell us he is very much troubled with indigestion, and he thinks tobacco relieves the difficulty; though, in truth, tobacco is the very worst drug he could use to relieve that disease, and is among the primordial causes of inducing it. Another will tell us that he is afflicted with the rising of his food after eating, and he thinks tobacco gives immediate relief; not suspecting, perhaps, that this rising of the food is occasioned by over eating. ...
— A Disquisition on the Evils of Using Tobacco - and the Necessity of Immediate and Entire Reformation • Orin Fowler
... nations, under their lawyer Presidents, and the bellicose but equally small Nicaragua, Honduras, and Salvador, under their chieftains, military and juristic, was quite remarkable. Nevertheless another attempt at confederation was made. In 1895 the ruler of Honduras, declaring that reunion was a "primordial necessity," invited his fellow potentates of Nicaragua and Salvador to unite in creating the "Greater Republic of Central America" and asked Guatemala and Costa Rica to join. Delegates actually appeared from all five republics, attended fiestas, gave expression to ...
— The Hispanic Nations of the New World - Volume 50 in The Chronicles Of America Series • William R. Shepherd
... come up from the dug-out or the cave where in primordial condition he won his food by his own hands from the uncut forests and the unfarmed waters. As family policeman he had no incentive to accumulations of food, clothing, or luxuries. These involved added police responsibilities and enlarged the ...
— The Audacious War • Clarence W. Barron
... times doubtless surprises even the strongest ...) of desiring to set up its sorrowful view of the world as a theory, and treat it as absolutely true and fundamentally valid for all. Sorrow, as such, is no more a diseased state than is joy; both are alike primordial, necessary, indispensable elements and halves of human life. Who would venture to assert that the day might dispense with the night? And does not the latter's glorious starry sky rival in majesty (though different in kind) the former's ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... of moulding and subjugation that children must undergo. Human society is a new thing upon the earth, an invention of the last ten thousand years. Man is a creature as yet not freely and instinctively gregarious; in his more primordial state he must have been an animal of very small groups and limited associations, an animal rather self-centred and fierce, and he is still but imperfectly adapted either morally or physically to the wider social life his crowding interactions force ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... weird primordial scream, as the first man might have screamed in the face of the first saber-tooth, he hurled his axe among them and sprang forward, flashing the cold, gray blade of ...
— The Promise - A Tale of the Great Northwest • James B. Hendryx
... who from time to time descend to the river, to draw water also, but in their case in the vases of potters' clay which they carry—this fetching and carrying of the life-giving water is the one primordial occupation in this Egypt, which has no rain, nor any living spring, and subsists only by its river—these women walk and posture with an inimitable grace, draped in black veils, which even the poorest allow to trail behind them, like the train of a court dress. In this bright land, with its ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti
... Repetition, Alternation, Symmetry, Progression, and Balanced Confusion; or else to one of their secondary causes, consonance, contrast, radiation, gradation, and complication; or lastly, to a combination of these different elements, which all finally lose themselves in a primordial cause—the origin of the movements ...
— Needlework As Art • Marian Alford
... young girl who, Gladwin strove to acknowledge, was the helpless pawn of circumstances. But the refinements of blood rob the physical man of his savage resources and impose a serious hamper upon his primordial impulses. ...
— Officer 666 • Barton W. Currie
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