What is "progenitor"

Usage examples of "progenitor".

Species inheriting nearly the same constitution from a common parent and exposed to similar influences will naturally tend to present analogous variations, and these same species may occasionally revert to some of the characters of their ancient progenitors.

Progenitors of all that yet is great, Ascribe to your bright senate, O accept In your high ministrations, us, your sons-- Us first, and the more glorious yet to come!

I attribute to inheritance from a common progenitor, for it can rarely have happened that natural selection will have modified several species, fitted to more or less widely-different habits, in exactly the same manner: and as these so-called generic characters have been inherited from a remote period, since that period when the species first branched off from their common progenitor, and subsequently have not varied or come to differ in any degree, or only in a slight degree, it is not probable that they should vary at the present day.

As natural selection acts only by the accumulation of slight modifications of structure or instinct, each profitable to the individual under its conditions of life, it may reasonably be asked, how a long and graduated succession of modified architectural instincts, all tending towards the present perfect plan of construction, could have profited the progenitors of the hive-bee?

As these are formed, the species of the less vigorous groups, from their inferiority inherited from a common progenitor, tend to become extinct together, and to leave no modified offspring on the face of the earth.

As the embryonic state of each species and group of species partially shows us the structure of their less modified ancient progenitors, we can clearly see why ancient and extinct forms of life should resemble the embryos of their descendants,--our existing species.

Our physicians have discovered that the small and tender sides of an infant Polygon of the higher class can be fractured, and his whole frame re-set, with such exactness that a Polygon of two or three hundred sides sometimes--by no means always, for the process is attended with serious risk--but sometimes overleaps two or three hundred generations, and as it were double at a stroke, the number of his progenitors and the nobility of his descent.

Didir was progenitress of the mental powers, Gamesfather Tamor the progenitor of the material ones.

RMI is fully the equal of these progenitors, creating moody, shimmering soundscapes with moog, theremin, and more conventional instruments.

Hence the hosts of deformed, scrofulous, weazen, and idiotic children which curse the race, and testify to the sensuality of their progenitors.

She boggles at my vivid biotechnical garments, the garden filled with our wild experiments, my companion, startling in his likeness to his progenitor.

Now, although it is probable that with the Leguminosae the tendency to sleep may have been inherited from one or a few progenitors, and possibly so in the cohorts of the Malvales and Chenopodiales, yet it is manifest that the tendency must have been acquired by the several genera in the other families, quite independently of one another.

We may imagine that the early progenitor of the ostrich had habits like those of a bustard, and that as natural selection increased in successive generations the size and weight of its body, its legs were used more, and its wings less, until they became incapable of flight.

But what gained greatest attention, especially from ranchers in the west, was his discovery in subsequent years of handsome skeletons of four of the progenitors of the horse: eohippus, mesohippus, miohippus and the crucial, determinative merychippus.

It was a pantothere, one of the earliest mammals and progenitor of later types like the opossum, and it had scant protection in the swamp.