Word Finder - ancestors

definition

One from whom a person is descended, whether on the father's or mother's side, at any distance of time; a progenitor; a forefather.

definition

An earlier type; a progenitor

example

This fossil animal is regarded as the ancestor of the horse.

definition

One from whom an estate has descended;—the correlative of heir.

definition

One who had the same role or function in former times.

definition

A word or phrase which serves as the origin of a term in another language.

definition

To be an ancestor of.

If their ancestors had been carried out to sea once or twice by a flood and safely drifted as far as the Galapagos Islands" (Wallace), "they must have been numerous on the continent" (Rothschild and Hartert).

At the graves of national heroes or ancestors worship was paid.

It had ancestors in a flourishing condition during the Secondary epoch.

His ancestors, it is believed, came from Scotland, and settled at Bayonne when that region was occupied by the English.

Brauer, that the Thysanura represent more nearly than any other existing insects the ancestors of the class, has been accepted by the great majority of students.

You may find out something about your ancestors you did not know.

And the whore hung up before I could tell her what I thought of her and her ancestors back to Mrs. Adam!

Its earliest known ancestors were the Iberians.

And with a Frenchman's easy and naive frankness the captain told Pierre the story of his ancestors, his childhood, youth, and manhood, and all about his relations and his financial and family affairs, "ma pauvre mere" playing of course an important part in the story.

The Mowbray match had already brought to the Howards the representation of an elder line of the Fitzalan earls, who sat in the seats of their ancestors, the Aubignys and Warennes, great earls near akin to their sovereigns.

They have an ancient spear which they believe was brought from Samoa, and they actually name the valley from which their ancestors started.

Necessarily, according to the theory of natural selection, structures either are present because they are selected as useful or because they are still inherited from ancestors to whom they were useful, though no longer useful to the existing representatives of those ancestors.

Many ancient cultures have legends that their ancestors originated from the Pleiades.

If you know where your ancestors lived, you may be able to find his name on a statue.

The first post-Darwinian systematists naturally and without reflexion accepted of' the idea that existing simpler forms represent stages i n the gradual progress of development - are in fact survivors from past ages which have retained the exact grade of development which their ancestors had reached in past ages.

His own family was of great antiquity, his ancestors having been hereditary ministerials of the bishop of Worms since the time of Ekbert the chamberlain, who founded in i 119 the Augustinian monastery of Frankenthal and died in 1132.

If the Roman aristocracy of his time had lost much of the virtue and of the governing qualities of their ancestors, they showed in the last years before the establishment of monarchy a taste for intellectual culture which might have made Rome as great in literature as in arms and law.

McCall Theal states that the ancestors of the tribes living in what is now Natal and Zululand were acquainted with the regimental system and the method of attack in crescent shape formation in the 17th century.

His ancestors had been celebrated as physicians for several generations, and his son was afterwards held by the Arabians to be even more eminent in his profession than Avenzoar himself.

Under such conditions the deeply-rooted nature of the blood-sucking instinct is most remarkable; for insects whose ancestors for many generations may not have tasted blood will seek for it with the utmost keenness and pertinacity so soon as an opportunity presents itself.

The population (about 39,000) is divided into two classes- orang burger or citizens, and orang negri or villagers, the former being a class of native origin enjoying certain privileges conferred on their ancestors by the old Dutch East India Company.

For the history of the Hebrews the life of Abraham is of the same value as other stories of traditional ancestors.

His family came from Livonia, one of his ancestors having been burgomaster of Riga.

Of these two kinds of genetic and adaptive resemblance, homogeny is the warp composed of the vertical, hereditary strands, which connect animals with their ancestors and their successors, while analogy is the woof, composed of the horizontal strands which tie animals together by their superficial resemblances.

The Roman Catholic religion was enforced at the time of the conquest, but a large percentage of the natives may still be considered semi-pagan, the gods of their ancestors being worshipped in secret, and the forms and tenets of the dominant faith, which they but faintly comprehend, being largely adulterated with superstitions and practices of pagan origin.

Kandahar was occupied, and Shah Shuja reinstated on the throne of his ancestors.

The gods of clans were probably the spirits of the ancestors in their own line.

He then proceeds to show that, though His lineage is traced through Joseph's ancestors, He was but the adopted son of Joseph, and he tells the story of the Virgin-birth.

Callender House, immediately to the S., was the seat of the earl and his ancestors.

The other confines it to what was known by our ancestors as the Revival of Learning.

Hyparthropoda (hypothetical forms connecting ancestors of Chaetopoda with those of Arthropoda).

The gens in turn was regarded as an expansion of the family, as was the state of the gens; and members of these larger units by worship of common ancestors - usually mythical - kept alive the feeling that they were a single organic whole animated by a common soul and joined in consanguinity.

Outcasts alone, the offspring of irregular unions, could be ignorant of the blood which ran in their veins, of the unseen ancestors to be fed and tended in family and gentile rites.'

The family have on the preceding days solemnly visited the grave, and offered to the shades gifts of water, wine, milk, honey, oil, and the blood of black victims; they have decked the tomb with flowers, have renewed the feast and farewell of the funeral, and have prayed to the ancestors to watch over their welfare.

The Church when it had once conquered the world allowed such precepts to lapse and fall into the background, and no one save monks or Manichaean heretics remembered them any more; indeed modern divines affect to believe that marriage rites and family ties were the peculiar concern of the Church from the very first; and few moderns will fail to sympathize with the misgivings of the barbarian chief who, having been converted and being about to receive Christian baptism, paused as he stepped down into the font, and asked the priests if in the heaven to which their rites admitted him he would meet and converse with his pagan ancestors.

But many primitive societies do not trace descent through males and yet may be said to worship ancestors.

The question has often been raised, what is the relation of private cults of ancestors to public religion?

Its historical ancestors were the counts of Kafernburg, from whom the counts of Schwarzburg sprang about the beginning of the 13th century.

In Athens such speeches were delivered at national festivals or games, with the object of rousing the citizens to emulate the glorious deeds of their ancestors.

On the other hand, there is no evidence that the forms which show no metamerism, such as the Gastropoda, are descended from metameric ancestors.

Name-songs, written at the birth of a chief, gave his genealogy and the deeds of his ancestors; dirges and love-songs were common.

The site of Ripon was purchased in 1838 by John Scott Horner (1802-1883), of Virginia, secretary and acting-governor of Michigan Territory in 1835, and the first secretary of Wisconsin Territory in 1836-37, who named the village when it was established in 1849 from the seat of his ancestors in Yorkshire.

These sudden appearances of vast bodies of lemmings, and their singular habit of persistently pursuing the same onward course of migration, have given rise to various speculations, from the ancient belief of the Norwegian peasants, shared by Olaus Magnus, that they fall down from the clouds, to the hypothesis that they are acting in obedience to an instinct inherited from ancient times, and still seeking the congenial home in the submerged Atlantis, to which their ancestors of the Miocene period were wont to resort when driven from their ordinary dwelling-places by crowding or scarcity of food.

In English documents also we find eponymous national ancestors grouped together in genealogical trees, and there is reason to believe that the common origin of the various Teutonic peoples was remembered to a certain extent until comparatively late in the middle ages.

Some of these eponymous ancestors may be regarded as heroes rather than gods, and classed with such persons, as Skioldr, the eponymous.

For it is to be expected a priori that, since albinoes were derived from pigmented progenitors and may at any time appear, side by side with pigmented brothers, in a litter from pigmented parents, they would be carrying the pattern determinants of some one or other of their pigmented ancestors.

Zeller thinks that his ancestors belonged to the Cadmean tribe in Boeotia, who were intermingled with the Ionians of Asia Minor, and thus reconciles the conflicting statements.

Sanquhar Castle, on a hill overlooking the Nith, once belonged to the Crichtons, ancestors of the marquess of Bute, but is now a ruin.

This appears to indicate that the Neomeniomorpha are descended from Chiton-like ancestors, and that they have lost their shell valves.

It is worthy of note that the dynasty claimed to be of the same origin as the royal house of Bernicia and that two of Cerdic's ancestors, Freawine and Wig, figure in the.