United States or San Marino ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
True, there was a certain element of risk and danger in the project, for there were a thousand miles or more to be traversed through a roadless, savage country, of which little or nothing was then known except that it was infested by several of the most ferocious species of animals and reptiles, as well as millions of even more ferocious natives.
This organ, in the mammalia, consists of four cavities, but in the reptiles of only three, and in fishes of two only, while in the articulated animals it is merely a prolonged tube. Now in the mammal foetus, at a certain early stage, the organ has the form of a prolonged tube; and a human being may be said to have then the heart of an insect.
If Australia is exempt from wild beasts, the number of venomous reptiles with which it is cursed make it as dangerous to the traveller as other tropical countries in which ferocious animals abound. Hardly a tree or a shrub can be found that does not contain or conceal some stinging abomination.
Cuthbert, in the Hiberno-Saxon style of the seventh century, which was borrowed originally from the Romans, and afterward diffused throughout Europe by the itinerant-Saxon Benedictines. This style is formed by an ingenious disposition of interweaving threads or ribbons of different colors, varied by the introduction of extremely attenuated lizard-like reptiles, birds, and other animals.
While noting these things, it was for the first time learned that the peacock is a most destructive enemy of the snake tribe, to which reptiles he has an inveterate antipathy, why or wherefore, no one knows. He pecks out the snake's eyes, in spite of his fangs.
But with the fresh upheaval and climatic disturbance at the end of the Jurassic, and during the Cretaceous, they spread northward, and replaced the dying reptiles, as the Angiosperms replaced the dying cycads. When they met the spread of the Angiosperm vegetation they would receive another great stimulus to development. They appear in Europe and North America in the earliest Cretaceous.
His wife and daughters not having the advantage to share his enlightened curiosity regarding the works and ways of our ill-starred fellow-creatures, were with needless austerity excluded from what he called the Snakery and doomed to companionship with their own kind, though to soften the rigors of their lot he had permitted them out of his great wealth to outdo the reptiles in the gorgeousness of their surroundings and to shine with a superior splendor.
Each of the rifles could send out nine bullets, fixed ammunition, contained in cartridges, nine of which was the capacity of the magazine. Those on deck watched the group of saurians; but Louis fired the first shot, and immediately there was a sensation among the reptiles. One of them made a spring, and came over on his back. "Mr. Belgrave fired that shot," said Achang to the hunter's mother.
They are not so dangerous as they look, and seldom attack a man unless frightened into the encounter. A few miles from Ballarat is a colony of the same kind of reptiles, and it's something of a curiosity to see the monsters squirming about during a pleasant forenoon." "Have you seen them often?" asked Fred. "O, yes, I have seen them a dozen times, perhaps."
"It has been noticed," writes our great zoologist, "that certain types, which are frequently prominent among the representatives of past ages, combine in their structure peculiarities which at later periods are only observed separately in different, distinct types. Sauroid fishes before reptiles, Pterodactyles before birds, Ichthyosauri before dolphins, etc.
Word Of The Day