A History of the Earth, and Animated Nature, Volume 5

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Wingrave and Collingwood, 1816

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Page 41 - The whale has no instrument of defence except the tail; with that it endeavours to strike the enemy, and a single blow taking place would effectually destroy its adversary: but the sword-fish is as active as the other is strong, and easily avoids the stroke; then bounding into the air, it falls upon its great subjacent enemy, and endeavours, not to pierce with its pointed beak, but to cut with its toothed edges.
Page 362 - ... he immediately felt a violent pain, both at the top of his thumb and up his arm, even before the viper was loosened from his hand; soon after he felt a pain, resembling that of burning, trickle up his arm ; in a few minutes his eyes began to look red and fiery, and to water much...
Page 140 - Gannets and others, which follow to prey on them : but when the main body approaches, its breadth and depth is such as to alter the very appearance of the ocean. It is divided into distinct columns of five or six miles in length and three or four in breadth, and they drive the water before them with a kind of rippling...
Page 171 - Violet crab somewhat resembles two hands cut through the middle and joined together ; for each side looks like four fingers, and the two nippers or claws resemble the thumbs. All the rest of the body is covered with a shell as large as a man's hand, and bunched in the middle, on the fore-part of which there are two long eyes of the size of a grain of barley, as transparent as crystal, and as hard as horn. A little below these is the mouth, covered with a sort of barbs, under which there are two broad...
Page 436 - As they have somewhat the form of the lobster, so they resemble that animal in casting their shell, or more properly their skin ; since it is softer by far than the covering of the lobster, and set with hairs, which grow from it in great abundance, particularly at the joinings. The young lie in the womb of the parent, each covered up in its own membrane, to the number of forty or fifty, and united to each other by an oblong thread, so as to exhibit altogether the form of a chaplet.
Page 53 - As to the ambergris which is sometimes found in this whale, it was long considered as a substance found floating on the surface of the sea ; but time, that reveals the secrets of the mercenary, has discovered that it chiefly belongs to this animal. The name, which has been improperly given to the former substance, seems more justly to belong to this ; for the ambergris is found in the place where the seminal vessels are usually situated in other animals. It is found in a bag of three or four feet...
Page 26 - As on land there are some orders of animals that seem formed to command the rest, with greater powers and more various instincts, so in the ocean there are fishes which seem formed upon a nobler plan than others, and that, to their fishy form, join the appetites and the conformation of quadrupeds. These are all of the cetaceous kind ; and so much raised above their fellows of the deep, in their appetites and instincts, that almost all our modern naturalists have fairly excluded them from the finny...
Page 372 - ... have rested themselves upon it, without experiment, in the face of all antiquity. But I will not hesitate to aver, that I have seen at Cairo (and this may be seen daily, without trouble or expense,) a man who came from above the catacombs, where the pits of the mummy...
Page 197 - When the turtle has done laying, she returns to the sea, and leaves her eggs to be hatched by the heat of the sun. At the end of fifteen days she lays about the same number of eggs again ; and at the end of another fifteen days she repeats the same ; three times in all, using the same precautions every time for safety.
Page 41 - ... enemy, and endeavours not to pierce with its pointed beak, but to cut with its toothed edges. The sea all about is soon dyed with blood, proceeding from the wounds of the Whale; while the enormous animal vainly endeavours to reach its invader, and strikes with its tail against the surface of the water, making a report at each blow louder than the noise of a cannon.

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