With respect to the second chief peculiarity, namely, the little mass of viscid matter attached to the end of the caudicle, a long series of gradations can be specified, each of plain service to the plant.
— from The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection Or, the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, 6th Edition by Charles Darwin

1. Of all the families now extant, the most ancient, doubtless, and the most illustrious, is the house of France, which has occupied the same throne above eight hundred years, and descends, in a clear and lineal series of males, from the middle of the ninth century.
— from The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Table of Contents with links in the HTML file to the two Project Gutenberg editions (12 volumes) by Edward Gibbon

Take, for example, the individual who, distressed by certain needs, wanders about in a strange city and reads the word " Closethaus " on a large sign on the first floor of a house.
— from A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud

The puff-adder ( Clotho arietans ) is remarkable in this respect; but I believe, after carefully watching these animals, that they do not act thus for the sake of increasing their apparent bulk, but simply for inhaling a large supply of air, so as to produce their surprisingly loud, harsh, and prolonged hissing sound.
— from The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals by Charles Darwin

“Because—” And pursing her lips she slowly drew a long stitch of grey thread.
— from Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

His ancestors were all wags before him, and he has inherited with the inn a large stock of songs and jokes, which go with it from generation to generation as heirlooms.
— from The Sketch-Book of Geoffrey Crayon by Washington Irving

From this the assumption was obvious that the god himself was the animal, and that he had evolved from the totem animal at a later stage of religious feeling.
— from Totem and Taboo Resemblances Between the Psychic Lives of Savages and Neurotics by Sigmund Freud

They recounted to him how the thing had passed, whereat King Guglielmo was sore incensed and seeing no way to deny them the justice they sought, caused take Gerbino; then himself,—albeit there was none of his barons but strove with prayers to move him from his purpose,—condemned him to death and let strike off his head in his presence, choosing rather to abide without posterity than to be held a faithless king.
— from The Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio by Giovanni Boccaccio

[126] hatred and sloth, like the waves that become polluted along one part of the shore and roll on one after another, each in succession depositing a larger sediment of filth.
— from The Reign of Greed by José Rizal

a large squad of our own deserters (over 300) surrounded with a cordon of arm'd guards, marching along Pennsylvania avenue.
— from Complete Prose Works Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy by Walt Whitman

“So you’ve found her!” said the blacksmith, with a low intensity of voice which made Cosmo respectful by its force and emotion; and when he had spoken he fell to upon his anvil with a rough and loud succession of blows which left no time for an answer.
— from The Laird of Norlaw; A Scottish Story by Mrs. (Margaret) Oliphant

Or you might have got a large sum of money."
— from The Mandarin's Fan by Fergus Hume

It was originally written for a string quartet, but the master added a fifth part for contrabass for a performance of it given in London in 1884 by a large string orchestra under the direction of his pupil, Walter Bache.
— from Franz Liszt by James Huneker

He accepted a gin rickey, but declined rather curtly the suggestion of a little spree over Sunday to a resort on the Cape which formerly he would have found enticing.
— from Project Gutenberg Complete Works of Winston Churchill by Winston Churchill

The meddlesome intrigues of Russian partisans, and a long series of political outrages culminating in the murder of M. Stambouloff, were gradually forming an Austro-German party in Bulgaria; while the wise and progressive administration of Bosnia and the Herzegovina by Herr von Kallay had encouraged a belief that some good thing might even yet come out of Austria, notwithstanding the famous expression of a belief to the contrary by Mr. Gladstone.
— from The Life of the Rt. Hon. Sir Charles W. Dilke, Volume 2 by Stephen Lucius Gwynn

The invention of smokeless powder was not one of a high order of brilliancy for the reason that it was the result of a long series of painstaking investigations and not of any luminous idea.
— from Invention: The Master-key to Progress by Bradley A. (Bradley Allen) Fiske

"Either he will be apologizing to me at the end of three months," said he to himself, "or I shall be apologizing to Whitney and shall owe Tecumseh a large sum of money."
— from The Second Generation by David Graham Phillips

They greet you with a kindly "Guten Tag" or "Guten Abend," and, in the case of a lady, seldom omit the pretty "Gnädige
— from A War-time Journal, Germany 1914 and German Travel Notes by Jephson, Harriet Julia Campbell, Lady

Her features had fined down and lost something of their materiality through stress of love and sorrow.
— from The Child of Pleasure by Gabriele D'Annunzio

But one day the Assisans, watching from their ramparts, saw a large squadron of soldiers hurrying from Perugia to the aid of the Baglioni, and they began to ring the city bells as a signal that the moment had come for the final stand.
— from The Story of Assisi by Lina Duff Gordon