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Invertebrate   Listen
noun
Invertebrate  n.  (Zool.) One of the Invertebrata.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Invertebrate" Quotes from Famous Books



... in length to Gigantorhynchus gigas, which measures from 10 to 65 cms. The adults live in great numbers in the alimentary canal of some vertebrate, usually fish, the larvae are as a rule encysted in the body cavity of some invertebrate, most often an insect or crustacean, more rarely a small fish. The body is divisible into a proboscis and a trunk with sometimes an intervening neck region. The proboscis bears rings of recurved hooks arranged in horizontal rows, ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... we are most unconscious of, and have least control over, our digestion, which we have in common even with our invertebrate ancestry, and which is a ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler

... British Government bungled one of their military enterprises more thoroughly than another, it was the Nile Expedition of 1884-5. What began as a forlorn hope ended in complete failure, and in three short months French experienced the miseries of retreat, of failure, and of work under an invertebrate War Office. ...
— Sir John French - An Authentic Biography • Cecil Chisholm

... Comparative Anatomy and Physiology of the Invertebrate Animals, delivered at the Royal College of Surgeons. Second Edition, ...
— First Impressions of the New World - On Two Travellers from the Old in the Autumn of 1858 • Isabella Strange Trotter

... to have arisen out of some such impatient craving for novelty, and it has been encouraged by an easy-going kind of suburban refinement, which neither knows nor cares very much what really goes to the making of a work of art. This new art has filled our shops and exhibitions with an invertebrate kind of ornament, which certainly has the doubtful merit of "never having been seen before." It has evidently taken its inspiration from the trailing and supine forms of floating seaweed, and revels ...
— Wood-Carving - Design and Workmanship • George Jack

... Trollope, would willingly give it that rank), it is unquestionably his greatest work in its particular kind, for its sequel, The Virginians, however admirable in detached passages, is desultory and invertebrate, while Denis Duval, of which the promise was "great, remains unfinished. With Vanity Fair, the author's masterpiece in another manner, Esmond cannot properly be compared, because an imitation of the past can never compete ...
— De Libris: Prose and Verse • Austin Dobson

... and others upon the development of Amphioxus and of the Tunicata prove, beyond a doubt, that the differences which were supposed to constitute a barrier between the two are non-existent. There is no longer any difficulty in understanding how the vertebrate type may have arisen from the invertebrate, though the full proof of the manner in which the transition was actually effected may still ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley

... most interest to us because the parasites that cause the malarial fevers and various other diseases belong here. These are dependent on two hosts for their existence, the sexual generation usually occuring in an insect or other invertebrate and the asexual generation in ...
— Insects and Diseases - A Popular Account of the Way in Which Insects may Spread - or Cause some of our Common Diseases • Rennie W. Doane

... vertebrata, to the co-existence of mammals and fish—among mammalia, to the co-existence of man and the ornithorhynchus—among fishes, to the co-existence of the shark and the lancelet (Amphioxus), which latter fish in the extreme simplicity of its structure approaches the invertebrate classes. But mammals and fish hardly come into competition with each other; the advancement of the whole class of mammals, or of certain members in this class, to the highest grade would not lead to their taking the place of fishes. Physiologists believe that the brain must be bathed by ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin

... these:—That if you go through the enormous thickness of the earth's crust and get down to the older rocks, the higher vertebrate animals—the quadrupeds, birds, and fishes—cease to be found; beneath them you find only the invertebrate animals; and in the deepest and lowest rocks those remains become scantier and scantier, not in any very gradual progression, however, until, at length, in what are supposed to be the oldest rocks, the animal remains which are found are almost always ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley

... During the succeeding weeks I watched trunk and branches swell and bud out new trunks, new branches, guided, controlled, by gravity, light, and warmth; and just beyond the reach of the tides, leaves sprouted, flowers opened and fruit ripened. Weeks after the last slow invertebrate plodder had made his escape shorewards, the taut liana strand was again crowded with a mass of passing life—a maze of vines and creepers, whose tendrils and suckers reached and curled and pressed onward, fighting for gangway ...
— Edge of the Jungle • William Beebe

... General Zoology Invertebrate Zoology — an advanced course which omits all consideration of insects, and all discussion of parasitic forms. Vertebrate Zoology — mainly a course in comparative morphology, which gives no field knowledge of California vertebrates, ...
— Adequate Preparation for the Teacher of Biological Sciences in Secondary Schools • James Daley McDonald

... this high degree of specialization works very well. How old bee-societies are we cannot say. We do know, at any rate, that bees are invertebrate animals, and therefore of immeasurable antiquity compared with man. No one can for a moment question the eminent success of the bee-hive; and that success depends upon the extreme specialization of the female, so as in effect to create a third sex. ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby

... a laboratory of invertebrate paleontology of Quaternary age, with a corps of paleontologists, Mr. Wm. H. ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 484, April 11, 1885 • Various

... manners or abolish My most distinct disinclination For calling on a rich relation! In her house—(bulwark built between The life man lives and visions seen)— The sunlight hiccups white as chalk, Grown drunk with emptiness of talk, And silence hisses like a snake— Invertebrate and rattling ache.... Then suddenly Eternity Drowns all the houses like a sea And down the street the Trump of Doom Blares madly—shakes the drawing-room Where raw-edged shadows sting forlorn As dank dark ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various

... the formations known as Silurian, from the fact that they were first thoroughly examined in South Wales (Siluria) by Sir E. Murchison. In these rocks many fresh varieties of invertebrate fossils are found, and the vertebrata make their first appearance, numerous remains of fishes having been discovered. The earliest specimen was found in the Lower Ludlow beds at Leintwardine, while ...
— The Story of Creation as told by Theology and by Science • T. S. Ackland

... one hundred thousand present. After this I had better be silent, for you will think me a Baron Munchausen amongst naturalists. Most assuredly I might collect a far greater number of specimens of Invertebrate animals if I took less time over each; but I have come to the conclusion that two animals with their original colour and shape noted down will be more valuable to naturalists than six with only dates and place. I hope you will send ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin

... can do any more for it. In dealing with the crystal, in short, we are dealing with the maximum beauty of the inorganic world. But in dealing with the shell, we are not dealing with the maximum achievement of the organic world. In itself it is one of the humblest forms of the invertebrate sub-kingdom of the organic world; and there are other forms within this kingdom so different from the shell in a hundred respects that to mistake them would simply ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond

... qualities the nomad possesses. Hence the union of these two elements, imperious pastor superimposed upon peaceful tiller, has made the only stable governments among savage and semi-civilized races.[1097] The politically invertebrate peoples of dark Africa have secured the back-bone to erect states only from nomad conquerors. The history of the Sudan cannot be understood apart from a knowledge of the Sahara and its peoples. All the Sudanese states were formed by invaders from ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple

... each species. An invisible thread unwinds itself throughout all time, across this immense diversity, and presents to us as a definite result, a continual progress in the development of which man is the term, of which the four classes of vertebrates are intermediate forms, and the totality of invertebrate animals the ...
— Louis Agassiz: His Life and Correspondence • Louis Agassiz

... at hand, I quote an extract from the Report on the Invertebrate Animals of Mass., given by Thoreau, Excursions, p. 69: "The distribution of the marine shells is well worthy of notice as a geological fact. Cape Cod, the right arm of the Commonwealth, reaches ...
— The Earth as Modified by Human Action • George P. Marsh

... papers (in their final phase) refused to talk about anything really important in Religion. They dared do nothing but repeat very discreetly the vaguest ethical platitudes. They hardly dared do even that. They took for granted a sort of invertebrate common opinion. They consented to be slightly coloured by the dominating religion of the country in which each paper happened to be printed—and there was ...
— The Free Press • Hilaire Belloc

... not. Let me see. Are you at all familiar with the laws pertaining to refraction of ... umah, no." He cleared his throat again, unhappily. "Have you ever seen a medusa, Mr. Crowley? The gelatinous umbrella-shaped free swimming form of marine invertebrate related to the coral polyp and the ...
— The Common Man • Guy McCord (AKA Dallas McCord Reynolds)

... thereto; when it grows larger and the shell becomes too tight, it sallies forth and takes up its abode in a larger one. This the creature does of its own accord, without a savant to measure it or a teacher to choose a new shell for it. But to us and to scientists, a child is inferior to this lowly invertebrate! ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori

... matter and manner into a poetical synthesis. The community of interest between his ideas and images is rather affiliated than cognate. He has a tremendous, though ill-assorted vocabulary. His prose is jolting, rambling, tumid, invertebrate. An "arrant artist," as Mr. Brownell calls him, he lacks formal sense and the diffuseness and vagueness of his supreme effort—the Lincoln burial hymn—serves as a nebulous buffer between sheer over-praise and serious criticism. He contrives ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker

... falces, as the jawlike organs are called, to kill a good big insect, such as a wasp or a bumble-bee. These channelled poison-glands, combined with their savage tigerlike claws, make the spiders as a group extremely formidable and dominant creatures, the analogues in their own smaller invertebrate world of the serpents and wolves in ...
— Science in Arcady • Grant Allen

... into the earth, whence they derive nourishing substances. In the lower order of animals, as in sponges, this function is performed by contiguous cells, in a manner almost as elementary as in plants. In none of the invertebrate animals is there any special absorbent system. Internal absorption is classified by some authors as follows: interstitial, recrementitial, and excrementitial; by others as accidental, venous, and cutaneous. The general cutaneous and mucous surfaces ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce

... parsimonious, professional walks; for I observed for the first time that she had acquired by contact something of the trick of the familiar, soft-sounding, almost infantile speech of the place. I judged that she had imbibed this invertebrate dialect from the natural way the names of things and people—mostly purely local—rose to her lips. If she knew little of what they represented she knew still less of anything else. Her aunt had drawn in—her failing interest in the table mats ...
— The Aspern Papers • Henry James

... invasion of England by the Norwegians and Danes was fully equal to the assassination, arson, and rapine of the Indians of North America. A king who would permit such cruel cuttings-up as these wicked animals were guilty of on the fair face of old England, should live in history only as an invertebrate, a royal failure, a decayed mollusk, and the dropsical head of a ...
— Comic History of England • Bill Nye

... with a backbone and animals without. Between these two groups the barrier of backbone stands impassable till it is explained how a butterfly could become a bird, or a snail a serpent, or a star fish acquire the skeleton of the shark. These two groups, the vertebrate animals and the invertebrate, must ...
— Evolution - An Investigation and a Critique • Theodore Graebner

... private ends, had taken up Kelly as a rival to Goldsmith; and the 'comedie serieuse' or 'larmoyante' of La Chaussee, Sedaine, and Diderot had already found votaries in England. 'False Delicacy', weak, washy, and invertebrate as it was, completed the transformation of 'genteel' into 'sentimental' comedy, and establishing that 'genre' for the next few years, effectually retarded the wholesome reaction towards humour and character which Goldsmith had tried to promote by 'The ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Goldsmith • Oliver Goldsmith

... I am going to reprint one of my own papers. The poor little piece is all tail-foremost. I have done my best to straighten its array, I have pruned it fearlessly, and it remains invertebrate and wordy. No self-respecting magazine would print the thing; and here you behold it in a bound volume, not for any worth of its own, but for the sake of the man whom it purports dimly to represent and some of whose ...
— Memories and Portraits • Robert Louis Stevenson

... This turning of the recipient ends away from the light is hardly what one would at first expect— it seems such a roundabout arrangement— but it obtains in all vertebrata, and it is a striking point of comparison with the ordinary invertebrate eye. ...
— Text Book of Biology, Part 1: Vertebrata • H. G. Wells

... little who the girl of the moment might be, she could not hope to or even seek to hold his perambulatory affections. "He's a single example of a great New York class," reflected Brock. "The futile, priggish rich! There are thousands like him in my dear New York—conscienceless, invertebrate, sybaritic sons of idleness, college-bred and under-bred little beasts who can buy and then cast off at their pleasure. They have no means of knowing how to fall in love with a good girl. They have not been trained to it. It is not for their scrambled intellects to discriminate between ...
— The Husbands of Edith • George Barr McCutcheon

... Court. The people in arms had attacked the Tuileries. Wildest rumours flew in all directions, and some of them found their way through the servants to the Hotel Plougastel, of that terrible fight for the palace which was to end in the purposeless massacre of all those whom the invertebrate monarch abandoned there, whilst placing himself and his family under the protection of the Assembly. Purposeless to the end, ever adopting the course pointed out to him by evil counsellors, he prepared for resistance only until the need for resistance really arose, whereupon he ordered ...
— Scaramouche - A Romance of the French Revolution • Rafael Sabatini

... We had been flattering ourselves that we had discovered a new "outlook," and we came a bad cropper. The simian antics of an impossible bell boy, in an impossible hotel, and his maneuvers in the arena of finance, were the "motive" of this extremely invertebrate contribution. There was an "Arizona Copper King"; there was his daughter; there was a gentleman from "Tombstone, Ariz.," and there were some tourists drawn after the Clyde Fitch style, but with none of his ...
— Ainslee's, Vol. 15, No. 6, July 1905 • Various

... Universities from the ignorant and sacrilegious commanders who would have demolished all places and persons that pretended to learning"; another indication among many that the "obliging" Dr Wilkins was not invertebrate. ...
— The Life and Times of John Wilkins • Patrick A. Wright-Henderson

... is even more pronounced in 'Le Prophete' than in 'Les Huguenots.' The coronation scene has nothing of the large simplicity necessary for the proper manipulation of a mass of sound. The canvas is crowded with insignificant and confusing detail, and the general effect is finicking and invertebrate rather than ...
— The Opera - A Sketch of the Development of Opera. With full Descriptions - of all Works in the Modern Repertory • R.A. Streatfeild

... sapphire composition. We call them all sapphires, however, regardless of their little impurities which are present to enhance their charm and beauty. Likewise, all animal life begins with one cell, and though the one cell in one case develops into a vertebrate, and in another case into an invertebrate the cells persist and so all animal life has cellular structure in common. Yet, each animal branch has predominant traits that distinguish it from all other branches. This same thing ...
— Negro Folk Rhymes - Wise and Otherwise: With a Study • Thomas W. Talley

... of suffocating emotion swept over her, full of ugly swimming and crawling reptiles, and invertebrate horrors, the inevitable scavengers of the sea ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley

... swung, the ghosts and the skeletons, side by side. You remember that slinking black satin snakelike sheath that Gita Morini wore in "Little Eyolf"? There it dangles, limp, invertebrate, yet how eloquent! No other woman in the world could have worn that gown, with its unbroken line from throat to hem, its smooth, high, black satin collar, its writhing tail that went slip-slip-slipping after her. In it she had looked like a sleek and wicked python that had fasted ...
— Cheerful—By Request • Edna Ferber

... though alive, was evidently in a molluscous, invertebrate condition. He could not sustain himself. She still held him up, a little more at arm's-length, and all at once the reaction from extreme anxiety brought a gush ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various

... The Vicar's wife obviously lacked sufficient backbone to quarrel on the subject. She was wont to say that she detested invertebrate women. ...
— The Bars of Iron • Ethel May Dell

... 4. Centiped. A segmented invertebrate animal of the class nyrapod (Greek for many feet), so called because it has a great many (indefinitely ...
— Orthography - As Outlined in the State Course of Study for Illinois • Elmer W. Cavins

... Shelley or Swinburne, that the logical sequence of thought is loose and indeterminate, and that this is concealed from one by the reverberating beat of metre, which gives a false sense of structure to a mood that is really invertebrate? ...
— The Silent Isle • Arthur Christopher Benson

... covered by this monopoly, which hitherto has made but halting and feeble efforts to keep pace with the requirements of the public. Dealing as it does with the imports of the whole country, which now amount in value to L10,000,000, the figures we have given must serve merely to illustrate its invertebrate methods of handling traffic, as well as its grasping greed in enforcing the rates fixed by the terms of its concession. Its forty miles of Rand steam tram-line and thirty-five miles of railway from the Vaal River, with some little ...
— The Transvaal from Within - A Private Record of Public Affairs • J. P. Fitzpatrick

... and that thus the class of similar forms is finally narrowed to the species of which it is a member. For example, the human germ, primarily similar to all others, first differentiates from vegetal germs, then from invertebrate germs, and subsequently assumes the mammalian, placental unguiculate, ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various

... University, and president of the Royal Society. Among his books are, "Evidences as to Man's Place in Nature," "Comparative Anatomy," "Lay Sermons," "Critiques and Addresses," "Physiography," "The Crayfish," "Science and Culture," "Evolution and Ethics," "The Anatomy of Invertebrate Animals," etc. ...
— A Book of Natural History - Young Folks' Library Volume XIV. • Various

... him back continually to the thought that he himself, and not Bianca, had better go away. He was extremely bitter and contemptuous towards himself that he had not done so long ago. He made use of the names Martin had given him. "Hamlet," "Amateur," "Invertebrate." They ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... pulpit grown in spiritual power since those days? Have the churches thriven whose pastors have become more invertebrate in their theology? ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler

... "Treasure Island" appeared, the public was gasping for the oxygen that a story with outdoor movement and action could supply: there was enough and to spare of invertebrate subtleties, strained metaphysics and coarse naturalistic studies. A sublimated dime novel like "Treasure Island" came at the psychologic moment; the year before "The New Arabian Nights" had offered the same ...
— Masters of the English Novel - A Study Of Principles And Personalities • Richard Burton

... line of least resistance, the husband dead and the babe in her womb, and entering the shelter offered by the amorous Turk. And I can picture her during the fourteen years of her imprisoned life, the disillusion, the heart-break, the despair. No wonder the invertebrate soul could do no more for her daughter than teach her monosyllabic English and the rudiments of reading and writing. Doubtless she babbled of western life with its freedom and joyousness for women; but four years have elapsed since ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke

... the other shut, and the tongue lolls out. His arms are outstretched in the form of a cross: the hands open, the fingers separated. The right leg is straight. The left, whence flowed the hemorrhage that made him die, has been broken by a shell; it is twisted into a circle, dislocated, slack, invertebrate. A mournful irony has invested the last writhe of his agony with the ...
— Under Fire - The Story of a Squad • Henri Barbusse

... this "Progonotaxis hominis," which has no support from fossil evidence, comprises three groups: (i) Protista (unicellular organisms, 1-5: (ii) Invertebrate Metazoa (Coelenteria 6-8, Vermalia 9-11): (iii) Monorrhine Vertebrates (Acrania 12-13, Cyclostoma 14-15). The second half, which is based on fossil records, also comprises three groups: (iv) Palaeozoic ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others

... military point of view, as Napoleon found to his cost in 1812. She has no vital parts, such as France has in Paris or Germany has in Silesia or Westphalia, upon which the life of the whole State organism depends; she is like some vast multi-cellular invertebrate animal which it is possible to wound but not to destroy. Russia has much to gain from a great European war and hardly anything ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,

... every woman likes a man who stands up for his own. It is only your invertebrate husband whose wife drifts into the divorce court. I mean to keep and hold the prize I have won. When is it ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon

... backing for their notes. In other words, the note-issuing business would once more have to be regulated on banking principles and controlled by the price asked, for advances, instead of expressing the helplessness and improvidence of an impecunious and invertebrate Government. In this manner the new departure might be a convenient halfway-house on the way from chaos back to sanity. But probably it is too revolutionary and goes too straight in the teeth of the Bank of England's privilege ...
— War-Time Financial Problems • Hartley Withers

... Pogson? She's never interested me. She's too invertebrate; but I believe she took care of Pogson ...
— The Best British Short Stories of 1922 • Edward J. O'Brien and John Cournos, editors

... said to possess a brain, vertebral column, or heart, etc.; so that it was classed by the older naturalists amongst the worms. Many years ago Prof. Goodsir perceived that the lancelet presented some affinities with the Ascidians, which are invertebrate, hermaphrodite, marine creatures permanently attached to a support. They hardly appear like animals, and consist of a simple, tough, leathery sack, with two small projecting orifices. They belong ...
— The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex • Charles Darwin

... like an automaton. Such passivity was worse than undignified, it was galling; I knew that well. I resented it with secret rage. But in that room, in that presence, I was invertebrate. ...
— The Beetle - A Mystery • Richard Marsh

... the course of creation, as exhibited in the animal kingdom, and the classification of the greatest zoologist of modern times, is perhaps still more remarkable. Cuvier divides all animals into vertebrate and invertebrate; the invertebrates consisting, according to his arrangement, of three great divisions,—mollusca, articulata, and radiata; and the vertebrates, of four great classes,—the mammals, the birds, the reptiles, and the fishes. From the lowest zone at ...
— The Testimony of the Rocks - or, Geology in Its Bearings on the Two Theologies, Natural and Revealed • Hugh Miller



Words linked to "Invertebrate" :   beast, invertebrate foot, zoology, echinoderm, comb jelly, moss animal, fauna, shellfish, mollusk, phoronid, peanut worm, borer, vertebrate, rotifer, ctenophore, brachiopod, sponge, peristome, mollusc, exoskeleton, poriferan, spineless, lampshell, Symbion pandora, lamp shell, polyzoan, brute, sipunculid, cnidarian, foot, parazoan, sea moss, sea mat, animal, animate being, creature, coelenterate, arthropod



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