Here are the ones that the Nautilus's nets most frequently hauled on board: rays, including spotted rays that were oval in shape and brick red in color, their bodies strewn with erratic blue speckles and identifiable by their jagged double stings, silver–backed skates, common stingrays with stippled tails, butterfly rays that looked like huge two–meter cloaks flapping at middepth, toothless guitarfish that were a type of cartilaginous fish closer to the shark, trunkfish known as dromedaries that were one and a half feet long and had humps ending in backward–curving stings, serpentine moray eels with silver tails and bluish backs plus brown pectorals trimmed in gray piping, a species of butterfish called the fiatola decked out in thin gold stripes and the three colors of the French flag, Montague blennies four decimeters long, superb jacks handsomely embellished by seven black crosswise streaks with blue and yellow fins plus gold and silver scales, snooks, standard mullet with yellow heads, parrotfish, wrasse, triggerfish, gobies, etc., plus a thousand other fish common to the oceans we had already crossed.
— from Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas: An Underwater Tour of the World by Jules Verne

The said declaration and presentation were made in the presence of François Dorange, sheriff’s officer, aged twenty-five, residing in Fougères, and François Paunier, gardener, aged sixty-eight, residing in Lécousse.
— from Juliette Drouet's Love-Letters to Victor Hugo Edited with a Biography of Juliette Drouet by Louis Guimbaud

The hostile league against the Greeks, of Philip the Latin emperor, the king of the Two Sicilies, and the republic of Venice, was ripened into execution; and the election of Martin the Fourth, a French pope, gave a sanction to the cause.
— 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

In the centre, above the white and glittering table, was a Venetian lustre with flat plates, with all sorts of colored birds, blue, violet, red, and green, perched amid the candles; around the chandelier, girandoles, on the walls, sconces with triple and quintuple branches; mirrors, silverware, glassware, plate, porcelain, faïence, pottery, gold and silversmith’s work, all was sparkling and gay.
— from Les Misérables by Victor Hugo

But it is but a very small part of the annual produce of the land and labour of a country, which can ever be destined for purchasing gold and silver from their neighbours.
— from An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith

When the taste for physical gratifications amongst such a people has grown more rapidly than their education and their experience of free institutions, the time will come when men are carried away, and lose all self-restraint, at the sight of the new possessions they are about to lay hold upon.
— from Democracy in America — Volume 2 by Alexis de Tocqueville

He threw the flushed, panting girl a surprised glance, then picked up her cap that had fallen off during one of her bursts of eloquence.
— from Her Sailor: A Love Story by Marshall Saunders

In the mean time Orazio and his friends placed guards and sentinels around, and gave orders to sound the reveille at dawn.
— from Rule of the Monk; Or, Rome in the Nineteenth Century by Giuseppe Garibaldi

And then to take what modern rakes sometimes "a nightcap" call— That is, a friendly parting glass, a sort of "over-all."
— from Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 by Various

I’d give huge donations to governess’s Homes, and funds for poor gentlewomen, and send them flowers, and fruit, and game.
— from The Fortunes of the Farrells by Vaizey, George de Horne, Mrs.

Four "poor girls" are sitting on the steps of the Santa Maria.
— from Browning's Heroines by Ethel Colburn Mayne

Under the name of Indian red it is used for polishing glass and silver.
— from Webster's Unabridged Dictionary (1st 100 Pages) by Noah Webster

[Footnote: Phillips, "Georgia and State Rights," in Ibid., 1901, II. 140 (map).]
— from Rise of the New West, 1819-1829 by Frederick Jackson Turner

Just as the individual farmer needs some land for fields, some for pasture, and some for woodlots, so the nation needs some for cities, some for farms, some for pleasure grounds, and some for forests.
— from Wood and Forest by William Noyes

He had already set to work on the sacristy, which he had placed in the great recess behind the high-altar, and there the ornamentation of marble was already finished, and many pictures had been painted by the Florentine painter Giovanni Antonio Sogliani, the rest of which, together with the altar-pieces and the chapels that were wanting, were finished many years afterwards by order of M. Sebastiano della Seta, the Warden of the Duomo in those days.
— from Lives of the most Eminent Painters Sculptors and Architects, Vol. 06 (of 10) Fra Giocondo to Niccolo Soggi by Giorgio Vasari

We had numerous birds hovering round the ship; principally fulmars (Procellaria glacialis) and shearwaters (Procellaria puffinus) and not unfrequently saw shoals of grampusses sporting about, which the Greenland seamen term finners from their large dorsal fin.
— from The Journey to the Polar Sea by John Franklin