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Spawn   Listen
verb
Spawn  v. t.  (past & past part. spawned; pres. part. spawning)  
1.
To produce or deposit (eggs), as fishes or frogs do.
2.
To bring forth; to generate; used in contempt. "One edition (of books) spawneth another."






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Spawn" Quotes from Famous Books



... thinkest the price be fair,—thy brethren wait to sup, The hound is kin to the jackal-spawn,—howl, dog, and call them up! And if thou thinkest the price be high, in steer and gear and stack, Give me my father's mare again, and I'll ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling

... this nature previous to those made by the Fish Commission were by means of "parking," that is, holding in large naturally inclosed basins lobsters that had been injured, soft-shelled ones, and those below marketable size. Occasionally females with spawn were placed in the same inclosures. One of these parks was established in Massachusetts in 1872, but was afterwards abandoned; another was established on the coast of Maine about 1875. It was soon demonstrated, however, that the results from ...
— The Lobster Fishery of Maine - Bulletin of the United States Fish Commission, Vol. 19, Pages 241-265, 1899 • John N. Cobb

... great length, and bent into the form of a hook at the end. On the outer side was observed a fleshy streak, bordered by a close row of small paunches: these paunches, which were externally open, contained a great quantity of brown atoms, apparently spawn, and evidently in motion. With respect to the Rhizophysae, it has been discovered that they are of the same genus as the Physsophora, the hard part being torn away in the act of catching them; upon this ...
— A New Voyage Round the World, in the years 1823, 24, 25, and 26, Vol. 2 • Otto von Kotzebue

... Geneva, For the table or the altar, This spawn of a vote, He cares not a groat - For the PENCE he's your dog in a halter, Then ...
— Cavalier Songs and Ballads of England from 1642 to 1684 • Charles Mackay

... telling. I arose, I say, to a new heaven and a new earth: a heaven impossibly remote, an earth of sickly horror, an earth of serpents and worms, upon which I crawled and groped, the loathliest of their spawn. I surveyed myself in the glass, faced myself as I was—I the wrecker of homes, the betrayer of ladies, love's atheist! Pale, hollow-cheeked, with eyes distraught, there was good ground for believing that when Dr. Lanfranchi threw ...
— The Fool Errant • Maurice Hewlett

... once put these hands on your bloodstained carcass, and if the mother that bore ye will know her spawn again, my name's not Bill Gibbs! Ha! you miserable swab, with your soft words and white hands! when I get out of this hole I'll blow you and your infarnal hounds to ——! Give me fair play, and, even on one of my legs, I'll cut ...
— Captain Brand of the "Centipede" • H. A. (Henry Augustus) Wise

... knows them half as well will have no trouble in conceiving how these trade-calculations can consist with a great deal of true love. And what was Amilcare's trade? His trade was politics, the stock whereof was the people of Nona, the shifty, chattering, light-weight spawn of one of those little burnt-brick and white cities of the Lombard Plain—set deep in trees, domed, belfried, full of gardens and fountains and public places—which owed their independence to being too near a pair of rival states to be worth ...
— Little Novels of Italy • Maurice Henry Hewlett

... disease goes very deep. The virtue has gone out of me, old comrade. I no longer hate or love, and once I loved and hated extremely. I am become like a frail woman for tolerance. Spain has worsted me, but I bear her no ill will, though she has slain my son. Yet once I held all Spaniards the devil's spawn." ...
— The Path of the King • John Buchan

... Laybold a small plate of sandwiches, filled with a kind of fish-spawn, black and shining. The student took a huge bite of one of them, but a moment elapsed before he realized the taste of the interior of the sandwich; then, with the ugliest face a boy could assume, he rushed to ...
— Up The Baltic - Young America in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark • Oliver Optic

... or a cat. Being a woman of few phrases, she repeated these as often as she had occasion for speech, and divided the world simply into two classes: two or three individuals, including herself, were human beings; the rest of mankind she denounced, in a voice which shook the walls, as spawn. One does not like to ...
— The Chase Of Saint-Castin And Other Stories Of The French In The New World • Mary Hartwell Catherwood

... creation. To say nothing of other tribes, a census of the herring would find us far in the minority. And what life is to us,—sour or sweet,—so is it to them. Like us, they die, fighting death to the last; like us, they spawn and depart. We inhabit but a crust, rough surfaces, odds and ends of the isles; the abounding lagoon being its two-thirds, its grand feature from afar; ...
— Mardi: and A Voyage Thither, Vol. II (of 2) • Herman Melville

... come up at certain seasons of the year to spawn. There are only three places on the coast south of the Golden Gate where they run. For three or four nights now while the tide is high and the moon full they'll be swept up on this beach and left to lay their eggs in ...
— El Diablo • Brayton Norton

... there be divers fishes that cast their spawn on flags or stones, and then leave it uncovered, and exposed to become a prey and be devoured by vermin or other fishes. But other fishes, as namely the Barbel, take such care for the preservation of their seed, ...
— The Complete Angler • Izaak Walton

... went on: "Martin Ryder is finished, as I suppose you know. He left a spawn of two mongrels behind him. I haven't bothered with them, but I'm a little more interested in another son that has cropped up. He's sitting over there in your family party and his name is Pierre. In his own ...
— Riders of the Silences • Max Brand

... Jerry was to learn, was Lamai, and to Lamai's house Jerry was carried. It was not much of a house, even as cannibal grass- houses go. On an earthen floor, hard-packed of the filth of years, lived Lamai's father and mother and a spawn of four younger brothers and sisters. A thatched roof that leaked in every heavy shower leaned to a wabbly ridge-pole over the floor. The walls were even more pervious to a driving rain. In fact, the house of Lamai, who was the father of Lumai, ...
— Jerry of the Islands • Jack London

... commissioners of fisheries, whose duty is to take means to increase the number of food fish in lakes and rivers. To this end the board secures from the United States commissioner of fisheries the quota of spawn allotted from time to time to the state, and from other sources spawn of such fish as seem desirable, and has them placed in such lakes and rivers as they will be most ...
— Studies in Civics • James T. McCleary

... their being imprisoned, whipped, transported, neglected, cast out, qualified in all ways for the hangman, and growing up to be hanged. Put the case that pretty nigh all the children he saw in his daily business life he had reason to look upon as so much spawn, to develop into the fish that were to come to his net,—to be prosecuted, defended, ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens

... 'Insolent young spawn of ingratitude and guilt, how long must I submit to be trod upon thus; and yet why should I murmur—his day is even now declining—and if I live a year, I shall see the darkness cover him and his for ever. ...
— The Purcell Papers - Volume II. (of III.) • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu

... the swarm of orphan children down in the by-streets and outskirt alleys of the capital—children of whom no one has any account, and no one takes any account, who swarm down there only one floor higher, so to speak, than the spawn and small fry which are floating below in the sea among the quay piles, and which will one day become large ...
— One of Life's Slaves • Jonas Lauritz Idemil Lie

... One's spawn!" cried Sir Donny, rising in his place, and speaking under the influence of great excitement. "If you're for dealing with them, I'm riding! No Protestants! No black brood of Cromwell for me! I'd as soon never wear sword again as wear it in ...
— The Wild Geese • Stanley John Weyman

... say so's to give him what's comin' and still be legal?' 'Well,' says old Squire, rubbing his hands together, 'you've got to start easy, you know. You want to start easy, so's to make the climax worth something. Now, let's see! Well, suppose you walk up to him and say, "You spawn of the pike-eyed sneak that Herod hired to kill babies, you low-down, contemptible son of a body-snatcher, you was born a murderer, but lacked the courage and became a horse-thief!" There, Sol, start in easy like that and gradually work up to a climax, and you'll have him going—and all inside ...
— The Ramrodders - A Novel • Holman Day

... the south, and I reckoned that we were a degree to the westward of them both, and therefore did not see the land, which trends more to the northward. We found the sea here to be in many parts covered with a brown scum, such as sailors generally call spawn. When I first saw it, I was alarmed, fearing that we were among shoals; but upon sounding, we found the same depth of water as in other places. This scum was examined both by Mr Banks and Dr Solander, but they could not determine what it was: It was formed of innumerable small particles, not more ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Vol. 13 • Robert Kerr

... Rome to re-invade, I force to skulk behind their Alps afraid: By conquering my banishment's secur'd. Are sixty triumphs not to be endur'd? A German conquest reckon'd such a fault? By whom is glory such a monster thought? Or who the vile supporters of this war? A foreign spawn, a mobb in arms appear, At once Rome's scandal, and at once her care. No slavish soul shall bind this arm with chains, And unreveng'd triumph it o're the plains. Bold with success still to new conquests lead, Come, my companions, thus my cause I'le plead, ...
— The Satyricon • Petronius Arbiter

... have him! I have him! Curse your claws! Why do you fix them on me, you crab? You won't pick up the fiend-spawn so easily, I can tell you. Bring the light there, will you? (One runs out for the light.) A trap! a trap! and a stair, down in the wall! The hell-faggot's gone! After him, ...
— The Poetical Works of George MacDonald in Two Volumes, Volume I • George MacDonald

... eyes, which turn every way; about their big rough antennae and the smaller, smoother pair between; the great teeth, or mandibles; the carapace with its projecting rostrum, the jointed abdomen with the tail-fins at the end, and the little flaps below on which the female drops her spawn. In more or less detail these things are severally described, and the many limbs severally enumerated, in one kind after another. The descriptions of the lobster and the langouste are particularly minute, and the ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various

... animated. "Do you know how I picture God myself?" he said. "As an enormous, creative organ beyond our ken, who scatters millions of worlds into space, just as one single fish would deposit its spawn in the sea. He creates because it is His function as God to do so, but He does not know what He is doing and is stupidly prolific in His work and is ignorant of the combinations of all kinds which are produced by His scattered germs. The human mind is a ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant

... inlets were full of fish. They came out of the deeper water at night to spawn, and could be dragged ...
— The Black Phantom • Leo Edward Miller

... sudden re-appearance of full-grown fishes in places that a few days before had been encrusted with hardened clay, has not failed to attract attention; but the European residents have been content to explain it by hazarding conjectures, either that the spawn must have lain imbedded in the dried earth till released by the rains, or that the fish, so unexpectedly discovered, fall from the clouds during ...
— Sketches of the Natural History of Ceylon • J. Emerson Tennent

... the shad, if it must be so called; it is an excellent fish, and comes up the rivers in prodigious shoals, in the months of April and May, to spawn. The largest nets used in this fishery are on the Delaware, where that river is from one to two miles wide. These nets are from one hundred and fifty to three hundred yards long. The greatest hawl ever known was ...
— Travels in the United States of America • William Priest

... Comte made the discovery that this great product of man's spiritual nature is nothing but the spawn of his self-conceit: that it is purely gratuitous, groundless, superfluous, and therefore in the deepest possible sense lawless, Mr. Buckle follows his master, for such Comte really is. Proclaiming Law everywhere else, and, from ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various

... of many scandalous things, and yet all the parish, with the parson at their head, could not make him blush, so that at last he became a by-word—Here comes old shame-the-devil; this dog is the very spawn ...
— The Fall of British Tyranny - American Liberty Triumphant • John Leacock

... Coast salmon have been taken by net and trap, to the profit of the salmon packers and the satisfaction of those who cannot get fish save out of tin cans. The salmon swarmed in millions on their way to spawn in fresh-water streams. They were plentiful and cheap. But even before the war came to send the price of linen-mesh net beyond most fishermen's pocketbooks, men had discovered that salmon could be taken commercially by trolling lines. The ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair

... and fish milk and paps? A. Because paps would hinder the flight of birds. And although fish have neither paps nor milk, the females cast much spawn, which the male touches with a small gut, and causes their kind ...
— The Works of Aristotle the Famous Philosopher • Anonymous

... — N. posterity, progeny, breed, issue, offspring, brood, litter, seed, farrow, spawn, spat; family, grandchildren, heirs; great-grandchild. child, son, daughter; butcha^; bantling, scion; acrospire^, plumule^, shoot, sprout, olive-branch, sprit^, branch; off-shoot, off- set; ramification; descendant; heir, heiress; ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget

... very soon that animal life does exist of so transparent a texture that to all intents and purposes it is invisible. The spawn of frogs, the larvae of certain fresh-water insects, many marine animals, are of so clear a tissue that they are seen with difficulty. In the tropics a particular inhabitant of smooth seas is as invisible as a piece of glass, and can be detected ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 10 • Various

... bare office in his parish, for an honest man. The spawn of a decayed shopkeeper begets this fry; out of that dunghill is this serpent's egg hatched. It is a devil made sometime out of one of the twelve companies, and does but study the part and rehearse it on earth, to be perfect when ...
— Character Writings of the 17th Century • Various

... "Through slander, meanest spawn of hell,— And woman's slander is the worst,— And you, whom once I loved so well, Through you my life will be accursed." I spoke with heart and heat and force, I shook her breast with vague alarms— Like torrents from a mountain source We rushed ...
— The Home Book of Verse, Vol. 2 (of 4) • Various

... world is there an oceanic island more than a certain distance from a mainland in which any species of the large class of frogs, toads, and newts is to be found. Why is this? Simply because these animals, and their spawn, are quickly killed by contact with sea-water; and therefore frogs, toads, and newts have never been able to reach oceanic islands in a living state. Similarly in all oceanic islands situated more ...
— The Scientific Evidences of Organic Evolution • George John Romanes

... of herbs as before, and beaten almond, stamp them with the spawn of pike or carp and strain them with the crumb of a fine manchet, sugar, and rose-water, and fry it in ...
— The accomplisht cook - or, The art & mystery of cookery • Robert May

... a jaundiced hue, his soft brown eyes set slightly aslant. Although lame, he had an alertness and poise unusual in the sea's spawn of these beaches. In Tahitian, Marquesan, and French, with now and then an English word, he explained that he, a Tahitian marooned on Hiva-oa from a schooner because of a broken leg, wished to pass the tedium of his exile in an ...
— White Shadows in the South Seas • Frederick O'Brien

... wild deer sip thy springs, The wild duck haunt thy coves, And all the year the fisher fleets Bask o'er thine oyster groves; The strange new bass thy trout pursue. And where the herring spawn, The blue sky opens to let through ...
— Tales of the Chesapeake • George Alfred Townsend

... calumnious, vermin-infested wretches, spewed up from perdition, whose joy it is to write letters with fictitious signatures. Sometimes they take the shape of a valentine, the fourteenth of February being a great outlet for this obscene spawn. If your nose be long, or your limbs slender, or your waist thick around, they will be pictorially presented. Sometimes they take the form of a delicate threat that if you do not thus or so there will be a funeral at your house, yourself the chief object of interest. Sometimes they ...
— Around The Tea-Table • T. De Witt Talmage

... staff of life) ascend Frazer's River and its tributaries, from the Pacific in immense shoals, proceeding towards the sources of the streams until stopped by shallow water. Having deposited their spawn, their dead bodies are seen floating down the current in thousands; few of them ever return to the sea; and in consequence of the old fish perishing in this manner, they fail in this quarter every fourth year. The natives display a good deal of ingenuity in catching them. ...
— Service in the Hudson's Bay Territory • John M'lean

... the world is encircled in the coils of a vast serpent; and the name of the serpent is Gossip. Wherever man is, there may you hear its sibilant whisper, and its foul spawn squirm and sting and poison in nests of hidden noisomeness, myriad as the spores of corruption in a putrefying carcass, varying in size from some hydra-headed infamy endangering whole nations and even races with its deadly breath, to the microscopic ...
— Vanishing Roads and Other Essays • Richard Le Gallienne

... the prospect. She began to wonder whether the shelter of Flint's roof had not been, after all, the discreet thing. Was not her headlong flight in company with Stillman more open to criticism than the frank acceptance of her employer's hospitality? But these vagrant questions were the spawn of a colorless spirit of social expediency which fastens itself on weak natures, and in Claire's case they died still-born. She had been too well schooled in loneliness to lean heavily on the crooked stick of public opinion. Accustomed to standing alone, she had something of the spiritual arrogance ...
— The Blood Red Dawn • Charles Caldwell Dobie

... to explain the motives by which the early spring salmon are actuated in ascending rivers, seeing that they never spawn till autumn at the soonest. We must remember, at the same time, that they are fresh-water fishes, born and bred in our own translucent streams, and that they have an undoubted right to endeavour to ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine—Vol. 54, No. 333, July 1843 • Various

... larger than the little English oysters, that is to say, about the size of a crown-piece. They stick to the branches that hang in the water of a tree called Paretuvier. No doubt the seed of the oysters, which is shed in the tree when they spawn, cleaves to those branches, so that the oysters form themselves there, and grow bigger in process of time, and by their weight bend down the branches into the sea, and then are refreshed twice a day by the flux and reflux of it." Kircher speaks of a ...
— The Folk-lore of Plants • T. F. Thiselton-Dyer

... begetteth anger; blind desires from her begin; A right fruitful mother is she of a countless spawn of sin." ...
— Indian Poetry • Edwin Arnold

... forenoon more rocky islands were observed, with a few trees growing on the very top—their outline having the appearance of a cock's comb. It was noticed that the water here was streaked for many miles with a brown scum supposed to be fish-spawn. At evening one of the Cumberland Islands, named Pure Island, provided an anchorage for the three ships; possibly the Lady Nelson alone had been in these waters previously, and it will be remembered, that it was hereabouts she had parted with the Investigator ...
— The Logbooks of the Lady Nelson - With The Journal Of Her First Commander Lieutenant James Grant, R.N • Ida Lee

... a match, and descended two or three steps of the ladder, and then called out to me to follow. The air was not foul, but it was close, and there was a dampish smell upon it, and it was charged with a fishy odour like that of decaying spawn and dead marine vegetation. Light fell through the companion-way, and a sort of blurred dimness drained through ...
— The Honour of the Flag • W. Clark Russell

... river was rushing hoarsely along, clear and full, between his ruined temple-columns of basalt, as of old. "What a grand salmon-river this would be, Major!" said I; "what pools and stickles are here! Ah! if we only could get the salmon-spawn through the tropics without its germinating.—Can you tell me, Doctor, why these rocks should take the form of columns? Is there any particular reason for ...
— The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn • Henry Kingsley

... his wife and the young philosopher at Keswick with the Wordsworths. They have contrived to spawn a new volume of lyrical ballads, which is to see the light in about a month, and causes no little excitement in the literary world. George Dyer too, that good-natured heathen, is more than nine ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Vol. 5 • Edited by E. V. Lucas

... do not all die," said Denny, "because they do not all spawn;" and I observed that the dead ones were all of one size and doubtless ...
— The Writings of John Burroughs • John Burroughs

... awhile at Queen's College in Cambridge, and there he lingered, struggling for health of body and mind, until he took his degree in '53. Restless still, and unsatisfied, he turned toward Africa, and for long years, amid the spawn of the slave-smugglers, sought a new heaven and a ...
— The Souls of Black Folk • W. E. B. Du Bois

... which is unattainable without immense application and fastidiousness. If patience be genius,—"La patience cherche et le genie trouve,"—and if execution be its chariot, what possible fame can there be for the slipshod writers of to-day, who spawn columns and volumes at so much a minute, regardless of the good name of their mother tongue, devoid of ideas, which are the product only of brains that have been ploughed up and sown with fruitful seed? An author's severest ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866 • Various

... your trade, Aquarius, This frosty night?' 'Complaints is many and various And my feet are cold,' says Aquarius, 'There's Venus objects to Dolphin-scales, And Mars to Crab-spawn found in my pails, And the pump has frozen tonight, And the pump has ...
— Georgian Poetry 1916-17 • Various

... they reclaimed the churl with civil rudeness some and shaked him with menace of blandishments others whiles they all chode with him, a murrain seize the dolt, what a devil he would be at, thou chuff, thou puny, thou got in peasestraw, thou losel, thou chitterling, thou spawn of a rebel, thou dykedropt, thou abortion thou, to shut up his drunken drool out of that like a curse of God ape, the good sir Leopold that had for his cognisance the flower of quiet, margerain gentle, advising also the time's occasion as most sacred ...
— Ulysses • James Joyce

... "You're a spawn of Aaron Burr!" he vociferated. "There's not a man here to stand by your infernal doctrines. You sneer at your own State, you sneer at your own country, you defile the sacred ground! What are you, by the Almighty, who attack your native land in ...
— The Two Vanrevels • Booth Tarkington

... two things—first, that you've never been a trader in the islands; second, that you cannot at all comprehend how—well, how stunning he was. Sitting there, a single fortnight removed from cotton pants and the beach, crime-stained, imperturbable, magnificent! Spawn of the White Lights! Emperor of an ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... needle-fish, gilt-heads, and eels; large oysters, mussels, [90] porcebes, crawfish, shrimp, sea-spiders, center-fish, and all kinds of cockles, shad, white fish, and in the Tajo River of Cagayan, [91] during their season, a great number of bobos, which come down to spawn at the bar. In the lake of Bonbon, a quantity of tunny-fish, not so large as those of Espana, but of the same shape, flesh, and taste, are caught. Many sea-fish are found in the sea, such as whales, sharks, caellas, marajos, bufeos, and other unknown species ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898: Volume XVI, 1609 • H.E. Blair

... Mashumbwe, as a youth passed before him without making obeisance. "Do you dare stand before me—before me! thou spawn of these man-eating jackals? Lo! lie prostrate forever." And with the words he half threw, half thrust his great spear into the unfortunate lad's body. The blood spurted forth in a great jet, and, staggering, the ...
— The Sign of the Spider • Bertram Mitford

... longer space, free this time finally for ever; and he married, and marriage set the seal on his security, and the heir was born, and the nebuly coat was safe. But now a new confuter had risen to balk him. Was he fighting with dragon's spawn? Were fresh enemies to spring up from the—The simile did not suit his mood, and he truncated it. Was this young architect, whose very food and wages in Cullerne were being paid for by the money that he, Lord Blandamer, saw fit to spend upon the church, indeed to be the avenger? Was his ...
— The Nebuly Coat • John Meade Falkner

... chief of sloth and idleness, stood up and spake thus: "I am the great prince of listlessness and sloth, who have great influence upon millions of all sorts and conditions of men; I am that stagnant pond where the spawn of every evil is bred, where the dregs of every corruption and baleful slime grows rank. What good wouldst thou be, Asmodai, or ye, chief damned evils, were I not? I, who keep the windows open and unguarded that ye may enter into the man when ye will, through his eyes, his ears and his ...
— The Visions of the Sleeping Bard • Ellis Wynne

... 'You spawn!' said I; 'you think that you are safe here, but your life may be as short as that of your absurd verses, and God knows that it could not be ...
— The Exploits Of Brigadier Gerard • Arthur Conan Doyle

... time; but, though the vast execution was necessary of the 25th of August, 1572, on the 25th of August, 1685, it was useless. Under the second son of Henri de Valois heresy had scarcely conceived an offspring; under the second son of Henri de Bourbon that teeming mother had cast her spawn over the whole universe. You accuse me of a crime, and you put up statues to the son of Anne of Austria! Nevertheless, he and I attempted the same thing; he succeeded, I failed; but Louis XIV. found the Protestants without arms, whereas in my reign they had powerful armies, statesmen, ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac

... There were Episcopalian books and Anabaptist books, arguments for Tithes and arguments against Tithes, Fifth Monarchy tracts, Quaker Tracts and Anti-Quaker Tracts, in extraordinary profusion. Prynne would publish one day The Quakers unmasked and clearly detected to be but the spawn of Romish frogs, Jesuits and Franciscan Friars, sent from Rome to seduce the intoxicated giddy-headed English nation, and George Fox would print the next day The Unmasking and Discovery of Antichrist, with ...
— The Life of John Milton, Volume 5 (of 7), 1654-1660 • David Masson

... lobster must have been too long kept. When boiled, the tail preserves its elasticity if fresh, but loses it as soon as it becomes stale. The heaviest lobsters are the best; when light they are watery and poor. Hen lobsters may generally be known by the spawn, or by the breadth of ...
— Enquire Within Upon Everything - The Great Victorian Domestic Standby • Anonymous

... attracted to far different subjects from the woes or wrongs of the English nation. The Crusades had begun. Peter the Hermit had moved all Christendom by his fiery eloquence, and sent them to avenge the wrongs the pilgrims of the cross had sustained from Turkish hands, and to free the holy soil from the spawn ...
— The Rival Heirs being the Third and Last Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake

... unprovided where to dwell, Conforms itself to weave a cell; Then curious hands this texture take, And for themselves fine garments make. Meantime a pair of awkward things Grow to his back instead of wings; He flutters when he thinks he flies, Then sheds about his spawn and dies. Just such an insect of the age Is he that scribbles for the stage; His birth he does from Phoebus raise, And feeds upon imagin'd bays; Throws all his wit and hours away In twisting up an ill spun Play: This gives him lodging and provides A stock of ...
— The Poems of Jonathan Swift, D.D., Volume I (of 2) • Jonathan Swift

... I the battle, Whence springs only pain and murder, Forth to peaceful homesteads carry? Let a message so accursed In the ocean-depths be sunken, There to sleep in endless slumber, Lost among the spawn of fishes, There to rest in deepest caverns, Rather than that I should take it, Till it spreads among the hamlets. Thereupon I took the mandate Which I carried in my wallet, And amid the depths I sunk it, Underneath the waves of ocean, Till the waves to foam had torn it, And to mud had quite reduced ...
— The Hero of Esthonia and Other Studies in the Romantic Literature of That Country • William Forsell Kirby

... middle is also a sliding door, and with trellice work at the sides, so that between the two [dams] there is a square pool, into which the fish aforesaid come swimming in such shoals, in order to get up above, where they deposit their spawn, that at one tide there are 10,000 to 12,000 fish in it, which they shut off in the rear at the ebb, and close up the trellices above, so that no more water comes in; then the water runs out through the lower trellices, and they draw out the fish with ...
— Narratives of New Netherland, 1609-1664 • Various

... the life of this Demetrios, this arch-foe of our Redeemer, this spawn of Satan, who has sacked more of my towns than I have fingers on this wasted hand! Now, now that God has singularly favoured me—!" Theodoret snarled and gibbered like a frenzied ape, and had no longer the ...
— Domnei • James Branch Cabell et al

... stars, doth scarce begin From its impulses within— Nature's stern necessity, To be schooled in cruelty,— Monster, waging ruthless war:— And with instincts better far Must I have less liberty? Fish are born, the spawn that breeds Where the oozy sea-weeds float, Scarce perceives itself a boat, Scaled and plated for its needs, When from wave to wave it speeds, Measuring all the mighty sea, Testing its profundity To its depths so dark and chill:— And with so much freer will, Must I have less liberty? Streams ...
— Life Is A Dream • Pedro Calderon de la Barca

... insects, larvae, and worms, and will not attack other fishes or their spawn. It is easy to raise, and, provided certain general rules are followed, ...
— Three Acres and Liberty • Bolton Hall

... sure as a gun, For old Peter Patch is departed; And Eyres and Delaune, And the rest of that spawn, ...
— Poems (Volume II.) • Jonathan Swift

... fair—the tight little island has produced men. To evolve these few good men she may have produced many millions of the spawn of earth, but let the fact stand—England has produced men. Here was a beardless youth, slight in form, silent by habit, but so well thought of by his Government that he was given charge of a ship, five officers, two surgeons and forty-one picked ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard

... was the discomfort of the morrow. To-day had its own spawn. One morning she was called to the telephone by the merciless Sallie Swezey with a new infliction. There was something almost ghoulish in Mrs. Swezey's cackling glee as she ...
— Mrs. Budlong's Chrismas Presents • Rupert Hughes

... warmer: and to note, that his manner of breeding is thus, a He and a She Pike will usually go together out of a River into some ditch or creek, and that there the Spawner casts her eggs, and the Melter hovers over her all that time that she is casting her Spawn, but touches her not. I might say more of this, but it might be thought curiosity or worse, and shall therefore forbear it, and take up so much of your attention as to tell you that the best of Pikes are noted to be in Rivers, then those in great Ponds or Meres, ...
— The Complete Angler 1653 • Isaak Walton

... with it a somewhat corresponding range in the assumption of the first signal change, and the consequent movement to the sea. They return under the greatly enlarged form of grilse, as already stated, and these grilse spawn that same season in common with the salmon, and then both the one and the other re-descend into the sea in the course of the winter or ensuing spring. They all return again to the rivers sooner or later, in accordance, as we believe, with the time ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 53, No. 331, May, 1843 • Various

... is a small high island, with two round peaks, and two detached rocks lying off to the northward. When abreast of this island, we had soundings of fifteen fathoms. During this and the preceding day, we saw great quantities of a reddish-coloured scum or spawn, floating on the water, in ...
— A General History and Collection of Voyages and Travels, Volume 17 • Robert Kerr

... no mean books. Shun the spawn of the press on the gossip of the hour. Do not read what you shall learn without asking, in the street and the train. Dr. Johnson said, "he always went into stately shops;" and good travelers stop at the best hotels; ...
— Choice Specimens of American Literature, And Literary Reader - Being Selections from the Chief American Writers • Benj. N. Martin

... to the caution. "It don't need time. Anyway time's not calculated to make it easier. It's all right before me now, set out as only the fiend-spawn of Bell River can set it out." His tone deepened and he spoke more rapidly. "We got that call in the evening. An hour after I was hot foot down the river with an outfit of thirty neches, armed with an arsenal of weapons." His tone grew. His eyes shone fiercely, and ...
— The Triumph of John Kars - A Story of the Yukon • Ridgwell Cullum

... bay raced like a steeplechaser tight on the heels of the hounds, leadin' even the master, for Lory could no more hold him than his own glee at the grand way they were takin' gates and walls. But suddenly that bay divil's-spawn swerves from the course, dashes up and stops bang broadside against a barn; and there, with ears laid back tight to his head and muzzle half upturned, for four mortal hours the bay held Lory's off leg jammed so tight against the barn that, rowel and crop-cut ...
— The Red-Blooded Heroes of the Frontier • Edgar Beecher Bronson

... was idle just then, but I still desired to see it. Passing Leman Street, we cut off to the left into Spitalfields, and dived into Frying-pan Alley. A spawn of children cluttered the slimy pavement, for all the world like tadpoles just turned frogs on the bottom of a dry pond. In a narrow doorway, so narrow that perforce we stepped over her, sat a woman with a young babe, nursing at breasts grossly naked and libelling all the ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London

... differs from the fetus in the womb, as there is in the egg no circulating maternal blood for the insertion of the extremities of its respiratory vessels, and in this also I suspect that the eggs of birds differ from the spawn of fish; which latter is immersed in water, and which has probably the extremities of its respiratory organ inserted into the soft membrane which covers it, and is in contact with ...
— The Temple of Nature; or, the Origin of Society - A Poem, with Philosophical Notes • Erasmus Darwin

... invaded in 1979, but was forced to withdraw 10 years later by anti-Communist mujahidin forces. The Communist regime in Kabul collapsed in 1992. Fighting that subsequently erupted among the various mujahidin factions eventually helped to spawn the Taliban, a hardline Pakistani-sponsored movement that fought to end the warlordism and civil war which gripped the country. The Taliban seized Kabul in 1996 and were able to capture most of the country outside of Northern Alliance srongholds primarily ...
— The 2004 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency

... fester and multiply like maggots. They meant nothing—nothing, my dear, nothing. No more than your work people mean here, whose crowning stupidity is their continuing to beget more stupid spawn for ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London

... life of the river filled him with speechless delight. Sometimes he saw the waters break and gleam at the leap of a mighty salmon—the king fish of the North on his spring rush to the headwaters where he would spawn and die—and often the canoe sent flocks of waterfowl into flight. Ben dimly felt that on the tree-clad shores larger, more glorious living creatures were standing, hiding, watching the canoe glide past. ...
— The Sky Line of Spruce • Edison Marshall

... had not yet been brought in from the flyer. But, from what I overheard, it seemed that the radiumized ingots of the ill-fated Spawn and Perona were to be stored for a year at least, here in this cave. I could see the strong-room cubby. It was hewn from the rock of the cave wall, its sealed-grid door-oval set with ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various

... preferred to remain children of the rivers and the sea of their fathers, and so it is that few of Gallic blood were "spawned," to use Lescarbot's metaphor, in that chill continent, though the venturing or missionary spirit of such as Cartier and Champlain, Poutrincourt and De Monts gave spawn of such heroism and unselfish sacrifice as have made millions in America whom we now call "children of the west," geographical offspring of ...
— The French in the Heart of America • John Finley

... established, and a system of life and beauty produced, as it were out of chaos and death; proving the infinite power, wisdom, and goodness, of the GREAT CAUSE OF ALL BEING!" Here we cannot trace any co-mixture of science and scepticism, and in vain shall we look for the spawn of infidel doctrine. The same excellent feeling breathes throughout Salmonia, one of the most delightful labours of leisure we have ever seen. Not a few of the most beautiful phenomena of Nature are here lucidly explained, yet the pages have none of the varnish ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction—Volume 13 - Index to Vol. 13 • Various

... could we resist them? The poor old gleemen expressed their readiness to fight for the old hall, and so did even the boys; but these accursed pagans are the very spawn of the evil one, and fight like fiends, whom they equal in skill, so that I saw at once there was no ...
— Alfgar the Dane or the Second Chronicle of Aescendune • A. D. Crake

... on scores of small islands, formed originally by uprooted trees, and under the water, there were yet innumerable creatures. It was certainly grand hunting for all. There were flies and gnats for the frogs, tadpoles and the spawn of frogs for the little fishes, little fishes were preyed on by the ducks and the big fishes, while the birds and the big fishes in turn provided breakfast, dinner, and supper for the crocodiles. Apparently the crocodiles were too tough, too musky, and ...
— In Search of the Okapi - A Story of Adventure in Central Africa • Ernest Glanville

... the people, Your multiplying spawn how can he flatter,— That's thousand to one good one,—when you now see He had rather venture all his limbs for honour Than one on's ears ...
— The Tragedy of Coriolanus • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]

... he said, "so there ye stand, scared like the cowardly spawn ye are. We took ye, and kept ye, and fed ye. What's more, we was friends to ye, eh mates? An' how do ye treat yer friends? Leave 'em to starve or drown on a sinkin' ship! Sneak off like a dog an' a son of a cowardly dog!" Jeremy went white with anger. ...
— The Black Buccaneer • Stephen W. Meader

... little rascal did was to write a withering leader denouncing Mr. Scandril as a "demagogue, the degradation of whose political opinions was only equaled by the disgustfulness of the family connections of which those opinions were the spawn!" ...
— The Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce, Volume 8 - Epigrams, On With the Dance, Negligible Tales • Ambrose Bierce

... that the West knows nothing of! If those thrice-misbegotten Takers of Tenths had not seen us, we would have reached our goal a little after midday. As it is, they have certainly signaled to another party of Gungadhura's spawn somewhere ahead of us, who will be coming this way with eyes open and a lesson in mind for those who disregard their comrades' challenge to halt and be looted! When I am maharanee there shall be a new system of protecting desert roads! But I dare not try conclusions now. We must take ...
— Guns of the Gods • Talbot Mundy

... himself for his usual noon nap. My! only fifteen minutes before how the black, mangy, nine-tenths naked, ten-tenths filthy, ignorant, bigoted, besotted, hungry, lazy, malignant, screeching, crowding, struggling, wailing, begging, cursing, hateful spawn of the original Witch had swarmed out of the caves in the rocks and the holes and crevices in the earth, and blocked our horses' way, besieged us, threw themselves in the animals' path, clung to their manes, saddle-furniture, and tails, asking, beseeching, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... but the great quantity of squid spawn, the peculiar mollusca upon which the sperm whale feeds, made it ominous, according to the opinion of Captain Locke, that a great new sperm whale fishery had been discovered, the spawn being seen during several days' sail before and after ...
— Official Report of the Niger Valley Exploring Party • Martin Robinson Delany



Words linked to "Spawn" :   roe, breed, cause, spat, engender



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