One April afternoon, I lay dreaming in the smoking-room, just as I had lain two years before, and mechanically I looked among the tawny Eastern rugs for the wolf-skin.
— from The King in Yellow by Robert W. (Robert William) Chambers

If we could list all the traits, each representing some one characteristic of human nature, and measure the amount of each of them possessed by a man, we could represent his nature—read his character—in a great equation.
— from Introduction to the Science of Sociology by E. W. (Ernest Watson) Burgess

We know little as to the external relations of these Campanian Greeks.
— from The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) by Theodor Mommsen

Then each animal looked carefully through his medicine-box of herbs and healing roots, bark and magic leaves, and they tried every remedy that they knew.
— from The Curious Book of Birds by Abbie Farwell Brown

The Royal Academicians immediately assembled en masse ; and as they wisely imagined that it would be impolitic in them to let an opportunity slip of not being the very foremost in the direction of matters connected with royalty and their profession, offered, or rather thrust forward, their services to arrange the landscape according to the established rules of art laid down by this self-elected body of the professors of the beauties of nature.
— from Punch, or the London Charivari. Volume 1, July 31, 1841 by Various

They struck their chests and backs with their heads, as if they had had their neck broken, and with inconceivable rapidity; they twisted their arms at the joints of the shoulder, the elbow and the wrist two or three times round; lying on their stomachs they joined their palms of their hands to the soles of their feet; their faces became so frightful one could not bear to look at them; their eyes remained open without winking; their tongues issued suddenly from their mouths, horribly swollen, black, hard, and covered with pimples, and yet while in this state they spoke distinctly; they threw themselves back till their heads touched 44 their feet, and walked in this position with wonderful rapidity, and for a long time.
— from The History of the Devils of Loudun, Volumes I-III The Alleged Possession of the Ursuline Nuns, and the Trial and Execution of Urbain Grandier, Told by an Eye-witness by Des Niau

Father Anselm hath seen the earl, who was brought forth from the Tower by command of the king, being conducted publicly through the principal thoroughfares of the city, that the people should behold, and not in any wise be led astray through the evil reports and machinations of the king's enemies."
— from Traditions of Lancashire, Volume 2 by John Roby

—The commercial carbonate of lead (according to the exhaustive researches of Wigner and Harland
— from Poisons, Their Effects and Detection A Manual for the Use of Analytical Chemists and Experts by Alexander Wynter Blyth

But I had almost made up my mind to change my plan, and leave all to time— edax rerum —to illuminate or to consume .
— from Uncle Silas: A Tale of Bartram-Haugh by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu