The nectar may be stored in variously shaped receptacles, with the stamens and pistils modified in many ways, sometimes forming trap-like contrivances, and sometimes capable of neatly adapted movements through irritability or elasticity.
— 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

To one not inclined to drink, and gifted with a more serious turn of mind, such a bubbling, chattering, glittering chamber must ever seem an anomaly, a strange commentary on nature and life.
— from Sister Carrie: A Novel by Theodore Dreiser

They told Mrs. Trollope that the alligators—or crocodiles, as she calls them—were terrible creatures; and backed up the statement with a blood-curdling account of how one of these slandered reptiles crept into a squatter cabin one night, and ate up a woman and five children.
— from Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain

But as these exercises, however laudable, have little in them of grace or gracefulness, a man should be sure, before he ventures so to grace them, that while he is pretending his devotions otherwhere, he is not secretly kissing his hand to some great fish—his Dagon—with a special consecration of no ark but the fat tureen before him.
— from The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb — Volume 2 Elia and The Last Essays of Elia by Charles Lamb

Conversely, the leaves and sap-vessels in a tree, and those organs which in an animal similarly carry on nutrition and circulation, as well as those which generate and direct muscular motion, must be considered as dynamical in their actions.
— from The Principles of Biology, Volume 1 (of 2) by Herbert Spencer

April 26, 1315, Enguerrand was brought before a selected council of nobles at Vincennes and was condemned to be hanged, a sentence which was carried out on the 30th; the sorcerer was hanged with him and the sorceress was burned, the images being exhibited to the people from the gallows at Montfaucon, which Enguerrand himself had built, while the Dame de Marigny and her sister, the Dame de Chantelou, were condemned to imprisonment.
— from A History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages; volume III by Henry Charles Lea

The attack may not return, or it may recur for two or three successive nights, though in general with lessened severity, the child during the daytime seeming to suffer only from a slight cold, or now and then, and so rarely that I have not known it to occur above once or twice in all my experience, it may end in real inflammation of the windpipe; but not in diphtheria.
— from The Mother's Manual of Children's Diseases by Charles West

And if, amid the solemn silence which attended a moral discourse from the master on the evils of gluttony, a sudden cataract of nuts, apples, turnips, and jam sandwiches on to the floor should drown the good man’s voice, Charlie would be one of the ill-starred wights who owned to a partnership in the bag of good things which had thus miserably burst, and would proceed with shame first to crawl and grope on the dusty floor to collect his contraband possessions, and then solemnly to deposit the same jam, turnips, and all, on the desk of the offended dominie as a confiscated forfeit.
— from The Adventures of a Three-Guinea Watch by Talbot Baines Reed

The sixth number, describing their engagement in presence of [208] the nymphs, and concluding with a stirring chorus of nymphs and hunters, closes the first part.
— from The Standard Cantatas: Their Stories, Their Music, and Their Composers A Handbook by George P. (George Putnam) Upton

This meal may be served at a seaside cottage, or near a lake or even a river, or it may be used on board a yacht.
— from Gala-Day Luncheons: A Little Book of Suggestions by Caroline French Benton

By removing the partitions and beds, and blocking up one door, the building at once assumed the appearance of a stately church, of nave and side aisles, separated by huge square pillars of pine-wood.
— from The Lives of the Saints, Volume 02 (of 16): February by S. (Sabine) Baring-Gould