United States or Mexico ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
It is not true, for example, that a fish is a reptile arrested in its development, or that a reptile was ever a fish: but it is true that the reptile embryo, at one stage of its development, is an organism which, if it had an independent existence, must be classified among fishes; and all the organs of the reptile pass, in the course of their development, through conditions which are closely analogous to those which are permanent in some fishes.
They have in certain lands of the tropics a game which the people are said to watch with absorbing interest. It is this: A scorpion is caught. With cruel eagerness the boys and girls of the street assemble and place the reptile on a board, surrounded with a rim of tow saturated with some inflammable spirit. This ignited, the torture of the scorpion begins.
He exploits the batrachian or the reptile with no less animation, he accepts without hesitation extraordinary finds, probably unknown to his race, as witness a certain Gold-fish, a red Chinese Carp, whose body, placed in one of my cages, was instantly considered an excellent tit-bit and buried according to the rules. Nor is butcher's meat despised.
Those holes, however, had a certain definite shape about them, and when I got a skilful workman to make castings of the interior of these holes, I found that they were the impressions of the joints of a backbone and of the armour of a great reptile, twelve or more feet long. This great beast had died and got buried in the sand; the sand had gradually hardened over the bones, but remained porous.
"I am dreadfully sorry, you fellows," he said apologetically, "that you should have been alarmed in this way, because I can assure you that my tame cobra, 'Maharaja, is quite harmless look at him now," and we saw that the horrid reptile had swung round the instant its master had entered, and was sliding towards his feet.
Placing her on a lower pedestal in her self-esteem, the philosophy of youth revived her; and if the abatement of her personal pride was dispiriting, she began to see an advantage in getting inward eyes. 'It's infinitely better I should know it, Emmy I'm a reptile! Pleasure here, pleasure there, I'm always thinking of pleasure. I shall give up thinking and take to drifting.
The next day, the 18th of February, was devoted to the exploration of all that wooded region forming the shore from Reptile End to Falls River. The colonists were able to search this forest thoroughly, for, as it was comprised between the two shores of the Serpentine Peninsula, it was only from three to four miles in breadth.
He stopped a moment. "Why, man, you sicken me!" he cried, and he slashed at me with his sword as if I were a reptile. I took my own sword, and laid it on the table. "I am a fool," I said, not for the first time that day. "But how will Frontenac look at your handing a white man over to torture?" Cadillac put up his sword. "My orders are plain," he said, tapping a sheaf of papers on his desk.
On the third day, we sent our men in the boats to net turtles in a larger pool about five miles further down the river, and on the fourth, returned to Ega. It will be well to mention here a few circumstances relative to the large Cayman, which, with the incident just narrated, afford illustrations of the cunning, cowardice, and ferocity of this reptile.
The next day they anchored in Smeerenberg Harbour, close to that island of which the westernmost point is called Hakluyt's Headland, in honour of the great promoter and compiler of our English voyages of discovery. Here they remained a few days, that the men might rest after their fatigue. No insect was to be seen in this dreary country, nor any species of reptile not even the common earth-worm.
Word Of The Day