preadamite

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"Did it not belong to some preadamite warrior?"

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Definitions (5)

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  1. One who lived before Adam; an inhabitant of the earth before the date assigned to Adam. He is of great antiquity, perhaps before the creation, at least a præadamite; for Lucifer was the first of his family. Butler, Remains (ed. 1759), II. 408. In the preadamite she [Nature] bred valor only, by-and-by she gets on to man, and adds tenderness, and thus raises virtue piecemeal. Emerson, N. A. Rev., CXXVI. 406. The black races, then, are preadamites; and there is no objection to allowing all the time requisite for their divergence from some common stock. Pop. Sci. Mo., XIII. 499.
  2. One who holds that there were men in existence upon the earth before Adam.
  3. Existing or being prior to Adam. Some feign that he is Enoch; others dream He was pre-Adamite, and has survived Cycles of generation and of ruin. Shelley, Hellas. The Ginn are said to be of præadamite origin, an intermediate class of beings between angels and men. E. W. Lane, Modern Egyptians, I. 283.
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Examples (13)

  • "Did it not belong to some preadamite warrior?" —  A Journey to the Interior of the Earth
  • Did eyes preadamite first see the bloom, —  The Little Tea Book
  • As far as the eye could range forward were columns of steam in the air, misshapen lumps of lime, mist-like preadamite monsters, still pools of turquoise-blue stretches of blue corn-flowers, a river that coiled on itself twenty times, pointed bowlders of strange colors, and ridges of glaring, staring white. —  American Notes
  • Farther back, through a dusty cloud, I beheld dimly the seventy-two preadamite kings, with their seventy-two peoples, forever passed away. —  Masterpieces of Mystery In Four Volumes Mystic-Humorous Stories
  • In fact they had to live seriously through the stages which to subsequent races were to become comedy, as those amiable-looking preadamite amphibia which Professor Owen has restored for us in effigy at Sydenham, took perfectly _au sérieux_ the grotesque physiognomies of their kindred. —  The Essays of "George Eliot" Complete
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Etymologies (1)

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  1. from New Latin præadamita, from Latin præ, before, + Late Latin Adam, Adam: see Adamite.
 

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